Aprons and Silver Spoons: The heartwarming memoirs of a 1930s scullery maid (4 page)

What did she know? I was twelve, I knew
better.

But a mother’s wisdom should
always be observed, as I was about to find out, to my great peril …

Tips from a 1930s Kitchen
…
MOLLIE’S FAMOUS SAUSAGE ROLLS

I used to run wild through the Norfolk countryside as a child, but nothing had me haring for home faster than the smell of my mother’s home-baked sausage rolls drifting out over the fields. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to bake them.

8 oz (225 g) self-raising flour

4 oz (110 g) butter

8 oz (225 g) sausage meat

1 egg for glazing

Rub the flour and butter together, adding a few drops of water, until it forms the consistency of a firm dough. Roll it out on a floured pastry board until it’s a quarter of an inch (6 mm) thick. Cut the pastry into four-inch (10 cm) squares. Wet them round the edges with a dab of water. Add a teaspoon of sausage meat in the middle and then fold the pastry over the top and nip the edges to close it together. Brush the tops with beaten egg and bake for half an hour at 180 degrees or until golden brown.

HOUSEHOLD TIP

If your fridge or kitchen is full of overpowering cooking smells, simply slice an onion, pop it in a bowl of water and leave it on the table or in the fridge, and all nasty niffs vanish.

Every woman is a rebel.

Oscar Wilde

‘Dare you to jump in from
there,’ said Jack, pointing to the highest bank of the sluice. A slippery wall
of crumbly soil was all that stood between me and the dark swirling waters below.

‘All right then,’ I
said, rising to the challenge.

Everyone that knew me knew I
couldn’t resist a dare. Too competitive by half, that was my problem. Even
blacking out after choking on a hot-cross bun during the hot-cross bun races at school
sports day hadn’t curbed my ferociously competitive edge.

‘It’s pootrud, yer
knows,’ he added, wrinkling his nose. ‘There’s cowshit and
everything in that bit, so there is.’

What did I care? The dare had been issued. I
could no more back out now than I could walk to the moon. ‘So what?’
I said, boldly ripping off my dress and stripping down to my knickers and vest.

Here goes nothing
. Taking a deep
breath, I launched
myself into the unknown.
‘Woohooo!’ I hollered. A rush of sheer adrenalin filled my body. I
was flying! I was actually flying!

You could have heard the smacking noise of
my belly hitting the water five villages along.

Struggling to breathe, I floundered about
until I managed to grab on to a soggy clod of mud by the bank. Cow poo and mud was
plastered over my knickers and face as I hauled myself, sopping wet and gasping for air,
on to the bank. Shaking myself like a wet dog, I scrabbled back up the slippery bank. At
the top I paused to wipe my snotty nose on my dripping vest.

‘Now your tur …’ I said,
my voice trailing off to nothing.

For who should be ready to greet me? Not the
impressed audience I was hoping for, but PC Risebrough!

His beefy hand reached down to grab my
sopping wet vest.

Uh-oh.

‘Mollie Browne!’ he
yelled, his face growing as red as a tomato as I legged it to my bike and frantically
started to peddle. ‘You want your arse leathering.’

By the time I reached home I’d
decided not to say a word to Mother.

‘Mollie,’ she gasped.
‘You’re soaked through.’

‘I fell off my bike,’ I
lied. ‘Right into a ditch.’

‘Best sit by the fire and warm
up,’ she said, pressing a mug of steaming hot tea into my hand.

Sniffing the air, I realized it was Friday,
the best day of the week, for it was Mother’s baking day. The kitchen was
filled with the smell of warm, rich baking. On the side lay rack upon rack of jam tarts,
flaky sausage rolls, cottage
pies, bread and butter puddings, boiled
suet pudding with apples or jam, all piled up and cooling on the countertop.

‘I might feel better if I have
something to eat,’ I said, shivering for dramatic effect.

‘Get away with you,’ she
chuckled. ‘Put this in your trap.’ With that, she slipped me a
baking-hot sausage roll.

‘Fanks,’ I mumbled
through mouthfuls of buttery, light pastry. I closed my eyes and munched. Pure heaven.
Food never tastes as good to anyone as to a hungry child.

That’s me on the far
right, aged ten, being awarded first prize at school sports day in 1926. I was the
fastest runner and the highest jumper in the whole area – I always thought I was better
than anyone else back then!

I sniggered to myself as I pictured
PC Risebrough’s flaming red face as he’d puffed after me. Daresay
he’d love one of Mum’s home-cooked sausage rolls after his energetic
morning.

Once I’d dried off we headed into
Downham, for Friday afternoons were market day, another highlight of the week.

Men would stand around chatting outside pubs
while women shopped, haggled and nattered with neighbours and friends. It was the social
highlight of the week and gave women a break from the endless drudgery of keeping house.
Gossip was a currency to be exchanged just as much as shillings and pence. Not that it
mattered, mind, as everyone pretty much knew everyone else’s business. It was
a close-knit community and a stranger’s face always stuck out.

I used to love trawling the market with
Mother. Everywhere you looked there were stallholders shouting their wares.

‘Thirteen herrings for a
shilling,’ drawled the coster to a crowd of housewives. ‘Pound a
prawns, fished straight out the sea this morning while you were still abed. Nice and
fresh and lovely.’

Before the war this had been the site of a
famous horse market where many thousands of horses were shipped off to France. Now it
was full of housewives battling to get their pick of the best fish. My mother could get
in there with the best of ’em and we always had fish for tea on a Friday.
Carts were piled high with glistening kippers and Yarmouth bloaters and her eyes darted
this way and that as she sized up the best of the lot to serve up to my father that
evening.

‘Let’s be having
you,’ shouted the fishmonger, his mutton-chop whiskers quivering.
‘What about this ’ere plaice?’ he said to Mother, holding
up a fish as big as my head. ‘Come on then. Hoooge it is, a proper
booty.’

‘It’s a great ole fish
yew’ve got there, bor,’ she laughed. ‘But I’ll
settle for some herring.’

‘All right,’ he said,
chucking the fish down with a slap. ‘Get yer hand off yer
ha’penny.’

While he wrapped up the fish in brown paper
Mother slipped me a penny for some sweets. Hours I could spend drooling through the
sweet-shop window in the market, carefully working out what to spend my money on. Every
temptation you can imagine danced in front of my eyes: pineapple chunks, lollipops,
liquorice bootlaces, gobstoppers, peanut brittle, toffees, walnut whips, cherry lips,
coconut mushrooms and Uncle Joe’s mint balls. I settled for a gobstopper and
sucked it happily all the way back to the cottage as Mother strode beside me, swinging
her bag of fish and humming to herself.

Friday had to be the best day of the week,
easy. Home baking, the market, sweets and freshly cooked fish for tea. But it was also
time for our weekly bath. After tea, Mother would drag an old tin bath in from outside
and place it in front of the roaring fire. It’d take an age to fill up with
pails of water from the copper. Finally, when it was ready, my brother and I would jump
in. Helpless laughter filled the smoky kitchen as we flicked soapy suds in the
flickering firelight and Mother tried to stop the cats and dogs from leaping in with
us.

Father would sit by the fireside watching
us, a gentle smile playing on his weary face. I often wonder if he envied us our
carefree lives after everything he’d witnessed. Our heads were filled with
nothing but the pursuit of fun in them days, while who knows what demons chased through
his mind.

Soon the water would be thick with dirt.

‘Reckon you’ve brought half
the countryside in with yer, Mollie,’ exclaimed Mother.

Poor Mother and Father. They had to bathe in
that water after us, not that you ever heard a mutter of complaint pass their lips, mind
you.

While I was enjoying a glorious childhood
full of mud-spattered adventures, just ten miles away from my house a little girl was
visiting a slightly more impressive house than our own rundown cottage.

The royal residence of Sandringham was not
far from Downham and had been home to royalty since 1862. In 1928, as I was dragging
myself out of sluices and falling out of trees, Princess Elizabeth, just two years old,
was paying a visit there to her grandparents, King George V and Queen Mary, for a no
doubt rather different childhood experience.

The sight of the royal family travelling to
Sandringham was always a remarkable one. Remarkable in how many people seemed to know
when it would happen and also in how little security they had. The Lynn Road in Downham
Market would buzz with news that the royals were on their way. Even as young as five or
six I remember clutching Mother’s hand and watching as a big stately car slid
by, carrying a funny-looking elderly lady gazing imperiously ahead.
‘That’s Queen Alexandra,’ Mother whispered reverently.
‘On her way to Sandringham. Calls it the big house, she does.’ At
such a young age I didn’t understand who she was, but I picked up on the
ripple of excitement that passed through the small crowd.

After her death in 1925, King George V and
Queen
Mary continued to live in the much smaller York Cottage on the
estate whenever they visited. You can’t keep much from Norfolk folk and thanks
to the bush telegraph we were always there waiting with a friendly smile and a wave to
greet them home to Norfolk.

I remember one day in particular,
can’t have been long after the sluice incident, when someone rapped on the
door.

‘King and queen’s on
their way,’ rang out a voice.

‘Hop to it, Mollie,’
said Mother and soon we had joined the assembled crowd on the grass verge.

Presently their black car came into
view.

Straining my neck, I could just make out
King George V’s bushy moustache and, sitting next to him, ramrod straight with
a funny little hat perched on her head, was his wife, Queen Mary. I was so close I could
have reached out and touched their car window. There were no security outreach riders
like they have nowadays. I waved furiously and smiled. I was desperate for the king to
glance sideways and reward me with just a little smile or even a nod. Not so much as a
flicker passed his poker-straight steely face. The queen didn’t acknowledge
our greetings either; they both just stared straight ahead. It was a little ironic that
at a time when the king had been adopting a more democratic stance, attempting to bring
himself closer to the working-class public, he and the queen could not spare a glance
for any of us in the watching crowd.

Oh well. It didn’t dent our
affection for them and they were held in high esteem. The king had done himself no end
of good by visiting the front line, factories and hospitals during the war, and people
felt genuine loyalty to him.

‘There,’ declared Mother,
uncrossing her arms. ‘That was a little thrill. Back to work now.’
With that, she went off to scrub the kitchen floor and the crowd dispersed.

As I watched their car vanish off up the
Lynn Road, I found myself gripped with a funny little excited feeling that I’d
not felt since that time I’d clung to the top of the tallest oak tree in the
village. I could only imagine what world they inhabited, the lives they led in
comparison to ours.

More emotions bubbled to the surface.
Jealousy? No. Intrigue and excitement? Perhaps. But it was a defining moment. Seeing our
king and queen up close and personal like that made me realize there was more to life
than Downham Market. More to life than Norfolk. But the big question was – what? I could
virtually taste the freedom I so much wanted to have. But options to girls my age were
limited: shop work, apprenticeship or marriage. None of these were particularly
appealing to my young mind.