A Snatch Of A Gateshead Childhood

A Memory of Gateshead.

My memory relates to the years 1946-ish to 1960 but I couldn't get all that in at the top!

I was born in 1943 at 148 Somerset Street, an 'upstairs house' which we would now call a maisonette, the home of my paternal grandmother Mary Alice Peacock. This 'house' consisted of a 'kitchen', scullery, bedroom and outside toilet in a tiny back yard.

Sadly my mother died when I was 10 months, so I have no memoriy of her. My earliest memories are of living with 'my Daddy's Mammy' whom I knew simply as 'Mammy' although she used to tell me stories of the things Daddy did when he was a little boy, and I always knew she was Daddy's Mammy as well as mine! - a tiny child accepts without profound questioning.

Daddy was still away in the Army, and I was very shy of him when he came home on leave sometimes. So my earliest memories are of just Mammy and I living in the kitchen, which was actually the main and only living-room containing a large black-leaded fireplace with oven and hob to one side, poker and brass fire-irons in the hearth and brass fender around the hearth. But Mammy was too up-to-date to use the kitchen range much, for she owned a 'modern' gas cooker! It stood in the corner next to the fireplace and the gas was controlled by brass taps which hung down while they were turned off and needed to be held up while turning on the gas (an early child-resistant device? - probably not!). It had no such thing as a thermostat of course!

In the scullery was a deep square stone sink and the one and only tap in the house (cold water straight from the mains of course but we were better off than my best friend who lived just off the Sunderland Road. Her family had to share a tap with other families in the communal yard.) There was a wooden draining board (which I seem to remember ended before it could actually drain into the sink!), and a copper boiler in the corner, for heating the water on washing days. Mammy would put the clothes into a tub of bubbly water (which grew less bubbly and more grey as time went on!) then she used a poss-stick, i.e. a sort of long wooden pole with T-shaped handles at the top and shorter bits of wood attached to the bottom. These came in various designs - I had seen different ones in others' homes, even one that was brass at the business end! Mammy would turn this back and forth, swishing the clothes and also pounding them with it.

When I was six my father re-married, and he and my 'new Mammy' took me to live with them a few houses up the street, at 128 - exactly the same kind of 'upstairs house' but a mirror image. Sounds daft now to say I didn't know what was happening. I did. As a five year old does! They married two weeks after my 6th birthday. I understood the events - the wedding, moving house - and I helped carry things to the 'new' house up the street. But I hadn't taken in the full implications.

I shall never forget the day they began to dawn! It dawned on me that I was never ever going to go home again, not ever going back home to Mammy again. It felt exactly like my mooring rope had been cut and I was drifting in the universe. (Of course that description came to me years later, but the feeling I shall never forget.) No, they didn't keep me prisoner! I know I would have been allowed to 'go back home' if I'd asked. Why didn't I ask? Why did I stay and suffer so much? I've often asked that myself and this site is not the place for discussing possible answers.
It's the place to say that I went to Sunderland Road (Primary) School - anyone else out there?

When I was nine or ten, like so many others who contribute to this site, we too moved to Springwell estate to a new council house in 101 Aycliffe Avenue, and like a previous contributer I too used to have to walk to Ford's shop.

There is more I would like to add but I must go now. If I can I will write more another time.
Ann