Shopping The Hard Way.

   Another of my tasks, after my brothers had left school and were working, was to fetch a barrow load of wood each week from Kitching Timber Merchants on Stockwell Road. On Saturday mornings they sold small cut-offs and ends of timber for sixpence a load.

D Kitching and Sons Ltd in their old premises at Hambleton Grove – this office and machine shop building would have existed at the time of WW2tion

  Children from all around town turned up with an assortment of home made vehicles. Orange boxes and suchlike with handles and wheels precariously knocked together. Bogies with cardboard cartons tied on. It took two to navigate them, one to pull the bogie and one to try and keep the load from falling off. There were rickety old prams and pushchairs. [Incidentally; old pram wheels were much sort after as essential components in the construction of wheelbarrows and bogies]. Dad made a wheelbarrow for us. It was good and sturdy, no fear of the wheels falling off half way home.
  We formed a long queue and waited our turn. Kitching's employed an elderly man to dole out the wood from an enormous pile. It was a slow, laborious business and a certain amount of pushing and shoving and name calling went on; which helped to relieve the boredom somewhat.
  Fortunately for me I lived only about five minutes walk away from the timber yard. Most of the way was on the flat until I reached the stock well on Park Row and came to a steep bit up to our house. We could see the well from our back door. Mum kept a look out for me and came down to meet me.

Stone trough circa 1995

Together we pushed our barrow load of wood up the hill and I unloaded it into a corner of our back yard. I did not enjoy these shopping trips at all. Especially on an icy cold day when the pavements were slippery.
  However, I was one of the lucky ones. I had a coat, a knitted woolly pixie hat, scarf and gloves. Many of the poorer boys just wore hand-me-down, thin suit jackets, some too big some too small with short trousers. Little girls had big woollen shawls wrapped around them, fastened with safety pins. Their hands and knees were blue with cold. The boys constantly wiped their runny noses on their sleeves, leaving shiny silver snail tracks. Their family incomes didn't run to such luxuries as handkerchiefs. They stamped their feet and tucked their hands under their armpits to try and keep warm.
  These were the hungry thirties, the years of the great depression. As a painter and decorator my dad was out of work every winter. There was no outside work due to the harsh weather. It snowed heavily for weeks at a time. Dad walked four miles to Harrogate and four miles back each week after waiting in a long queue to collect his ten shillings a week dole money.
  In spite of this we appeared to be better off than some of our neighbours as my mother was a marvellous manager and home-maker. When dad was in work she stocked up as much as she could afford on non-perishable goods. Flour, sugar, dried peas and beans, rice and dried fruit so that she had something on hand for the coming winter. We had a big garden and mum grew seasonal vegetables and soft fruit. She made delicious, hearty stews using the cheapest cuts of meat and lots of veggies. Rabbits were plentiful. A man came round the houses regularly with freshly caught rabbits. He couldn't sound his R's and he would call out; " Yorkshire twapped wabbits for sale, sixpence apiece". Mum always bought a couple for dinner that night.
  They had already been gutted and cleaned leaving the liver and kidneys but still had their fur on. I stood at the kitchen table and watched mum skin and cut them up ready for the pot. She casseroled them in the oven with sage and onions and root vegetables, thickening the gravy with a paste of flour and water. A little gravy browning gave an appetising colour. The smell of them cooking was divine and the taste even better.
  We had liver with onion gravy, mashed potatoes and vegetables, savoury stuffed heart, neck of mutton and stewing beef. There were big fat suet dumplings in the herby stews, thick suet crust on meat and potato pies and piles of light and fluffy Yorkshire puddings; far more delicious than what passes for Yorkshire puddings these days.
  Local fruit was plentiful so we had pies and stewed fruit with custard: figs and prunes replaced fresh fruit in winter. Treacle or jam suet puddings with custard and rice puds with spicy nutmeg grated on top and baked in the oven helped to fill us up. There was often a fight for a share of the nutmeggy skin which we all loved.
  Mum baked all our bread using a stone of flour at a time. This made about ten loaves. The smell and taste of newly baked bread was sublime. We could hardly wait for it to cool before cutting into it.
  Sometimes neighbours came to the door to ask mum if she could spare a few spoonful of tea, half a cup of sugar maybe or a bit of rice or a cup of flour. She never turned anyone away empty handed unless she herself had run out.
 The meals mum cooked had to go round nine of us and sometimes we could have eaten more but we never went hungry no matter what else we had to do without.