The Salford Girl 3

A Memory of Salford.

My maternal grandmother, born in 1885 in Salford, as a girl worked in the mills. Up to the time of her death in Ladywell hospital, at the age of 93, she always wore long clothes to her ankles and a woollen, thick shawl. When gran married grandad in the early 1900s, they lived on Arlington Brew. Salford 3, I believe. One of their five children, Lizzie, died of a twisted bowel at the age of eight. In her recollections, Gran told me that all the pupils at St Ann’s infant school came out to show their love and respect for Lizzie by watching the funeral procession pass by. As a result of grandad’s death, gran and the children moved into a small house on nearby Cannon Street, and she earned her living as a knocker-up. She arose at 5 a.m. and one morning she was walking along the street on an icy cold day in the darkness when she slipped and fell. She suffered a severe injury to her knee. In those days, there was no National Health Service.
By 1957, Gran, with her son my uncle Frank had moved to Errington St, a terraced house in Lower Broughton Salford 7, next street to us. One day when she was packing comfrey leaves around the injured knee for the awful pain it caused her, I got to see it. The knee was the size of a small football and bulged out to the side of her leg, awful. However, despite her hard life gran was always cheerful; pottering about the house, she’d change the newspaper sheets on the dining table, the news sheets spread over the blanket she used as an under-cloth, then perhaps stop to take her small folding magnifying eyeglass from her pinny pocket to read an article she’d just spotted when leaning over the table.
She would send me on errands, she’d say. ‘Go to the butchers on Lower Broughton road for a quarter pound of stewing steak cut up in small cubes.’ Then she’d count out the shillings in my hand. I would duly go, wait in the queue, buy it and head back. Then after checking the change, she’d hand me an old shopping bag and say, ‘Now go to Mc Everly’s for three pounds of potatoes, a carrot and an onion.’ Mc Everly’s was a greengrocers next door to the butchers. All the veg and fruit one bought was put straight from the weighing scales into a shopper’s bag; people kept an old bag just for this purpose as potatoes were not washed or bagged up prior to being sold as most are nowadays.
If it was dinner time, ‘Go to Tyson’s and bring back two meat pies—and watch the cart road,’ she’d call after me as I went out the door to cross busy Sussex Street to buy Tysons dreadful tasting pies.
Gran would make herself sugar butties—a slice of white thin sliced bread with margarine and a generous sprinkle of sugar, which might explain why she had no teeth left. She once told me she had worked out all her teeth herself many years before. Gran would kneel on her one good knee in front of the coke fire to toast a round of bread for me, pour us each a small glass of Lucozade, and boil water on the hearth to make tea with a tot of rum in the cups for both of us. Her cooking was done on the old cooker in the kitchen or the range, though I don’t recall ever seeing her cook—maybe she did it while I was at school. If a group of lads were making a racket outside, kicking a football or throwing things at her window, she’d grab her walking stick, hobble to the front door, which was always left on the latch, as was just about everybody’s front door, and shout, ‘Sod off, you little buggers, or I’ll cut your water off!’ Waving her stick, she usually got them to move away. There was a small, bustling chip shop on Duke Street, directly across the road from Thompson Street. It was run by two cheerful sisters with rosy cheeks, neatly permed salt-and-pepper hair, and a spotlessly clean shop. Dressed in freshly laundered white overalls and aprons, they served mouthwatering fish and chips with a welcoming smile. With both my parents working long hours in factories, my mother, exhausted from her day, would hand me a ten-shilling note to fetch our family’s fish and chip tea. Along the way, I’d stop by Gran’s to collect money and a pot bowl for Uncle Frank’s usual order of a fish and nine pennies’ worth of peas.
I’d also buy the Chron (Chronicle) an evening newspaper from Cockers newsagents, located at the corner of Sussex and Duke Streets.

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