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Transcript Title	Crane, Mercie (O2001.6)
Interviewee	Mercie Crane (MC)
Interviewer	Peter Ruffles (PR)
Date	02/03/2001
Transcriber by	Jean Riddell (Purkis)

Transcript

Hertford Oral History Group

Recording: O2001.6

Interviewee: Mercie Crane (MC)

Date: 2 March 2001

Venue: 6 Carde Close Herford

Interviewer: Peter Ruffles (PR)

Transcribed by: Jean Riddell (Purkis)

Typed by: Freda Joshua

************** = unclear recording

Italics = Transcriber’s notes

[discussion] = untranscribed material

This is Peter Ruffles, mid-afternoon of the 2nd March 2001, and I’m at the home of Mercie Crane at 6 Carde Close, and we’re going to talk about Mercie really, where she’s been and what she’s done, but also the earlier years and memories that she may have and we can come back another time to fill in some detail. First of all, Mercie, where were you born?

MC: No.6 Council Cottages, Bramfield.

PR: And where are you in relation to the Post Office and the church?

MC: When you get into Bramfield and you think you’re going towards Tewin, you go down that part and it’s the first council houses that were built after the Great War.

PR: That’s Winding Shott – do they call it?

MC: Opposite, down the other end of the village. You come from Hertford and a road meets you.

PR: You’re saying Tewin and I’m thinking Datchworth.

MC: Well, back down that road there’s some houses both sides, Hollygrove Road.

PR: And who were you born to and what was the family?

MC: Edith Chambers, and that was where she lived because she was looking after her father. He’d lost his wife in1927 and there were 2 girls, mother and her sister Alice and there were 5 boys and the youngest was only 5 when grandmother died and mother, when she got married, she still lived at home, looking after her father and the 5 boys that were still at home. Then I was born on 23rd March (1930) and a week later mum was taken to Addenbrooks Hospital, Cambridge with blood poisoning and they didn’t expect her to come back and so my father took me to one of his foster-father’s relatives, I think it was St Margaret’s Road, Hoddesdon and she looked after me until they sent mum out of hospital on her birthday, 3rd May. But she’d lost such a lot of weight, I think she was 5 stone when she came out of hospital, she obviously couldn’t look after 5 boys and her father anymore, she could hardly look after herself.

So my father found rooms, the last house the top of Stanstead Road, opposite the Isolation Hospital. I think the lady downstairs wasn’t very nice to mother – when she went down into the kitchen to do things the sink would all be piled up and in a mess, I think there was something wrong with the lady. So Dad said, ‘we can’t stop here’, so he heard of the house at Hertingfordbury, 1 Church Walk. It belonged to someone in London and Mr and Mrs Hunt at the Prince of Wales dealt with it, so every Saturday Dad used to pay the rent at the Prince of Wales. It was a 2-up, 2-down, we had a lean-to scullery, then there was the coal shed and as you came out of the scullery and into the coal shed the toilet was right in the corner, and that was the ordinary bucket affair, and Mr Bland in the village used to charge 6d a week to take it and do the necessary – it reminds me of that book about Herts privies.

PR: So where was Church Walk?

MC: That was Church Walk, because we had a well under the house which supplied us with water, it had to supply 3 houses with water.

PR: Well, I haven’t quite got the, because there’s no Church Walk today.

MC: No, it’s St Mary’s Lane now. It was changed just before the war, I think. And just before the war we had cold water and sewers put on, because before that we’d got the pump in the scullery pumping up the water from the well under the stairs, and during the war my mother was petrified. ‘If we have a bomb’, she said, ‘we shall all go down the well’.

PR: So, it is today called St Mary’s Lane?

MC: That’s right. And that was next door to Mr Spratt’s shop. And, of course, Mrs Spratt, being next door, she said to my mother, when it was time for me to start school, ‘why don’t you go to St Andrew’s school where Miss Turnbull is’ being as they were related. Alan Stratton was already going, because he was a year older than me. He was at No.15, but they had, before they lived at 15, they had been in rooms at Mrs Spratt’s, over the shop, and that’s how Alan got to St Andrew’s school.

PR: Now, is this Winnie Spratt?

MC: Yes, I remember old Mr Spratt.

PR: Her father-in-law [a tailor].

MC: He was a lovely old gentleman, with his little beard and his hat and he’d always got little Larry the dog, little terrier. All the men used to sit cross-legged on the board at the back of the shop, that was joined to us. I suppose the shop where Mr Spratt saw customers was at the front of the shop because it was only 4 rooms, that’s all, it wasn’t as big as ours. Then upstairs there were the show rooms where people fitted on their whatever, chose their materials. Back room downstairs they all sat cross-legged on the board, I think there were 4 or 5 men, and you’d suddenly hear them drop the pressing iron.

But one of the gentlemen, Mr Smith, I don’t know whether he did it properly or whether Larry, the dog, didn’t like him, but every time he went down the garden to get his bicycle, Larry would hang on the back of his shoe and bark his head off. Whether he teased the dog to do it I don’t know, but we always knew when Mr Smith was going home, we could hear Larry hanging onto the back of his shoe and growling. He was a lovely old gentleman, Mr Spratt senior.

PR: I’ve seen pictures of him but I don’t think I remember him. When would he have died?

MC: Was it before the war or during the war?

PR: I remember the son of course, Winnie’s husband, only him being there in the shop. I can’t remember any other people working there.

MC: Once, when we were at Mrs Spratt’s, when they’d more or less given up the business and they were living, they had some extension done, and they were living at the shop and they’d let the other house and Mrs Spratt showed me a lovely photograph, I don’t know if it was Mr Spratt’s father, grandfather, but they were coachmen to the royal family and he was all in his lovely livery (pause).

PR: So you walked into Hertford?

MC: Alan and I walked into school, come out at 12 o’clock, walk home, have our lunch, walk back after dinner and walk home at night.

PR: 12 to half-past 1, was it, lunch?

MC: We were very lucky sometimes because at Tophams Farm, what is Mill Farm, there was Mr Ted Boulter, Mr Tony Hart, who used to drive the milk cart, a horse and cart with the churns in and about the time we used to be coming home from school, he’d come back to the farm so usually, just as we were going up what was called Wood Hill, the cart would come along and they’d slow it down, Alan would run and jump in the cart, it was open at the back, they had to grab hold of me, and so we’d have a ride down to the farm then we were both almost home.

PR: So Ted Boulter lived ...?

MC: He lived in those cottages up near Mayflower Place.

PR: Yes, the very end one with a lovely view down over, I remember Mrs Alice Boulter living there. I thought he worked on the estate, in Panshanger proper, but he -----

MC: Was on the milk round with Tony Hart.

PR: And was Tony Hart from Water Lane in Hertford?

MC: That’s right. We used to be very lucky sometimes because, what was the name of the chauffeur at Mrs Leslie?

PR: Mr Thorpe.

MC: Yes, I remember him bringing that lovely blue Vauxhall car along the road sometimes with Mrs Leslie, sometimes not, he’s stop, give us a lift and then old Mrs Addis in her red Lanchester car, she would give us a lift. We did very well. People would see us struggling along the road. Alan went to Hertford Grammar the year before I did, but then June Carter was coming to St Andrew’s then, so I walked with her. Then, of course, once I got the 11+ it was going into Hertford on the bus to the car park and then getting a bus to Ware.

PR: Did you always walk or cycle when you were older?

MC: Hadn’t got a bike, no money. Mum and Dad had got bikes but I hadn’t. Got used to walking, I enjoy walking.

PR: There was a footpath all the way?

MC: Oh yes, and there was old Mr Wilsher, and who was the other old, white-faced man, that we used to see regularly, tall man. But little Mr Wilsher with the lovely moustache, that was their pitch along the Hertingfordbury Road through Hertingfordbury to just up by the, by the Post Office, I think and keep that tidy [road sweepers].

PR: And the Post Office, where were the premises to the Post Office?

MC: In the garden of the house, you see.

PR: Yes, and that was up the back.

MC: Of the first cottage of those estate cottages.

[Overtalking so unclear what was trying to be explained]

PR: With the front door facing.

MC: It was just 1 room, like a shed would be really. The Post Office sold sweets. Then we had Mr Copps in the village to do the shoes.

PR: Yes, near to the mill?

MC: Yes, and then there was Rayments, and Mr Spratt and all the gentry from around the area used to come. We had Sir Piers Legh come one day to leave stuff with Mr Spratt’s wife, a perfect gentleman.

PR: His daughter’s memorial service is next week. It’s a London service I’m going up to.

MC: Sir Piers Legh and his wife died very close together didn’t they?

PR: Same day.

MC: One was unconscious and didn’t know the other had passed on, so Mrs Turnbull told us. He came to the house and delivered something.

PR: Nora’s sister Gert worked for them so she obviously said I know a good tailor. I wonder how he arrived, train or car.

MC: Car.

PR: He was King George VI’s ----

MC: Master of the Household. Had quite a long name, he was Lieutenant/Colonel Sir, and I don’t know which was put in order. He was a very nice gentleman, tall and slim.

PR: I’ve got his pullover indoors, and it’s a bit tight for me, so I know his size. One, I suppose, Aunt Gert gave me after he’d died. I was a teenager then and it would have fitted me more than it does now .

MC: During the war, Mrs Leslie of Epcombs, always had a lovely garden fete in her garden in the summer time for the Red Cross and during the war you couldn’t get clothes and material and what have you, we used to go into her big sitting room, everyone used to bring what they could find, put it all round the floor and we’d decide what we were going to make. I think I made a pair of pyjamas, somebody found some nice winceyette, somebody else did something else and we made enough to make a stall up to sell.

And there were punt rides on the river. And opposite us in Hertingfordbury, the house on the hill where Mr Hogg lived, there was a nice lady, the cook there, and where she worked previously the lady had left her a bulldog and he’d got a face, you know how they are, and the lady’s face was like that too. She brought him to the Red Cross fete, she covered his body with the Union Jack and she put a collection box on him and walked him round and everybody was putting money in his box – I mean bulldog and Mr Churchill [overtalking].

PR: I’m wondering where the house on the hill is, paint the picture for me, Mercie.

MC: You know the White Horse, go up the hill towards the Prince of Wales and there was a nice white brick wall and then the first house you come to, it’s on 2 or 3 levels, there is a lot at the front then the rest of the house is up.

PR: I think the Rideouts live there now?

MC: That’s right.

PR: We have to think of people listening to this in 50 years’ time.

MC: Of course the house in the triangle, that was Mr Gregory.

PR: Oh, was it, Amores as they call it.

MC: And Dad used to go there on a Saturday afternoon gardening. And they kept bees in there and my father used to get cross, the very afternoon he’d go in there, the bees swarm and sting him somewhere, so he’d always come home with a jar of honey as a consolation prize and I used to be ever so pleased.

PR: Who lives in the village now from earlier years, none of your contemporaries?

MC: Well, Alan’s passed on, Leslie Frith and his brothers, the twins, they’re round about somewhere, Monica Flunder has died, George Flunder is still about somewhere, they were all of my age group when I was at school.

PR: Flunders at the railway station?

MC: That’s right, George and Monica.

PR: Children, and their father was the station master?

MC: No, but he worked on the railway somewhere but they lived at the house.

PR: Yes, but they didn’t have a station master proper there.

MC: Well I have been on that train line.

PR: Where would you have gone, to Hatfield?

MC: To Welwyn Garden City.

PR: You’d never have taken it to Hertford because you walked.

MC: No, we’d go to Hertford.

PR: Did you use it for holidays or something like that?

MC: Never had holidays because once the war started I was 9. I mean, you didn’t go anywhere in the war. Dad was Air Raid Warden, but the day, or the night, or the morning that that rocket dropped behind those 2 houses, there was Mr McAlister, the gardener for Epcombs, and there was Mr Thorpe, the chauffeur, and where they’ve built those houses now, in the field that goes up behind those 2 cottages, the rocket dropped there.

PR: Yes, I tried to show Jean Riddell where it came down. I thought it was nearer to Thieves Lane, it was behind those 2 cottages and off to the…

MC: It was my father’s turn to turn out as ARW, took it in turns, you see, and he heard this terrible crump and all the glass went tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. I was in bed at the time, it’d gone 9 o’clock, Saturday evening I think, I could feel bits falling on me, but when I got to the stairs with legs like jelly my father had been sitting in the kitchen listening to his little radio, one of those accumulator things, we didn’t have electricity, you had to put your accumulator in [to a shop] and get it charged up, you know.

And we’d got one big curtain to stop the light, and they were just sash windows, there was one piece of glass, it hadn’t come through the curtain, but it was pushing towards right where my father was sitting listening to his radio. So, of course, he had to put on his ARP and go out you see. I don’t know if it was Harry Edwards who wrote that story about -

PR: Sticklebacks and -

MC: Or whether it was the boy Frith, I’m not sure who it was, but they had to go and find wherever this had dropped. So they were looking all ‘round the village and they went to Epcombs gardens and I think it was a moon-light night, and whoever was with my father thought it was a path and stepped in the river, the light shining on the water, you see. They eventually found it, up behind those houses.

PR: It’s a wonder the Thorpes didn’t come out – well, they might have done.

MC: They used to have to meet – the Air Raid Wardens – at Sir Henry Richards.

PR: Yes, Dell Cottage.

MC: But I know when we had the string of incendiaries they were just behind the new rectory, across those fields. I suppose they thought that was the railway line into Hertford, but they’d got the wrong one, because it was the other on, wasn’t it. And one incendiary went through the roof of the garage of the rectory and it started to blaze, so Dad had to, an old mattress they’d got stuffed in there and there was a dead chicken in there that they didn’t know was there and when Dad came in, and he smelled of burning mattress! But they had to do that on their Sunday nights then they had to go to work as usual during the day whether you’d had any sleep or not.

PR: Hard times.

MC: And Dad was a glove cutter like his father. My father was born in London, Mays Pond Road, the youngest. There was an older brother, a sister and my father. Well, I can’t remember how old he was when his mother died, 3/4/5, something like that. I don’t know whether his father was in the leather industry in London but he came down to work at Hornsmill. I think he used to cut gloves, the same as my father did so he lodged at a house in West Street with a couple who had no family of their own, Mr and Mrs Hine.

I can’t remember how many years they were there when my father’s father collapsed and died in Pegs Lane. Dad was 8 or 9 at the time. So Mr and Mrs Hine looked after those boys well, the oldest son Bill, he never did leave home. He married, had no family and he stayed with the old people. As it was, he died first, he had a heart condition.

PR: Whereabouts were they living in West Street?

MC: No.23.

PR: Up some steps and –

MC: No, on the level before you get to those terraces.

PR: Yes, I thought there were a couple of steps up to the front door.

MC: Might have been, and a little thing over the top.

PR: Yes, a little porch. The Neale family lived there.

MC: That’s right.

PR: Then there was a school at No.25, a private school.

MC: Dad stayed there until he married and his brother married – of course, he went in the Great War, Dad didn’t go in the last war.

PR: So no Hertford connection with your Crane name?

MC: None at all. There’s no-one left unless there’s some distant cousins of my father.

PR: I thought there would be a connection with the Crane family from Hertford?

MC: No, none whatsoever. We’re the London Cranes. When we went up to London to the flower festival at Southwark Cathedral, I went to have a look to see if I could find Mays Pond Road, but it’s one big London hospital now, I forget which one, near Southwark Cathedral.

[There is a leather market near St Thomas’s].

PR: Going back to St Andrews School and the Spratts recommending, where would other village children have gone?

MC: They all went up to, apart from Alan and, they all went to Birch Green, but Audrey Cutts, Anne Harvey from the Post Office and Jean Harvey went to the Catholic school .

PR: Was St Andrews in any way a better school, would you say. I know having the connection is quite useful.

MC: I doubt it.

PR: Quite a good reputation, the village school.

MC: Always has been, yes. In the end Mother thought that it wouldn’t be so far because if we were walking to Birch Green, that’s quite a step. We were nearer to Hertford in that sense.

PR: It’s a mile from my house to the mill exactly, so top up both ends a bit, so a mile and a half.

MC: It would have been nearer than going away to Birch Green, so that’s probably what Mother thought and it would be safer.

PR: Yes, decent road and proper footpath all the time. Along by the wall from Epcombs and then over the Wood Hill.

MC: We had Miss Hornby for the juniors, then we had Miss Rowe, Miss Wood, Miss Smith, a slim one who lived up North Road Avenue, and then there was Miss Turnbull until the last year, and then Miss Smith from St Albans as Headmistress, We used to have coal fires in the fireplaces.

Side B

PR: Yes, I looked at some of the governors’ managers’ minutes. It seemed that they were having, a bit before your time, trouble with the stove in the infants room, and I can remember the coal fire in Miss Hornby’s room being diagonally across the corner. In the other rooms it was set in the middle of the wall. They gave up with the stove and put a normal domestic fireplace instead, I guess, but you went straight into Miss Hornby’s class?

MR: I was a late arrival because I didn’t start school until the January of 1936 when I would have been 6 in the March, because I had to have my adenoids and tonsils out first. The doctor said before I started school I had to have these out so I missed a bit of schooling. I should have gone in the September, you see, so I was a year out.

PR: What was your impression of Edie Hornby as a –

MC: Lovely, lovely. I shed a few tears when Mum left me and went away. I loved school from that very minute and I never regretted any day at school from that time until I left at sixteen-and –a-half. You couldn’t keep me away from it.

PR: Edie got you off to a comfortable start?

MC: Oh yes. However many generations did she start off, she’d got such a lovely way with her, the old bicycle, lovely.

PR: Well, that’s the kind of comment, because you only, in the managers books, get the basic facts of when someone joins. There was a time when she was sent off to learn the modern methods of teaching in the middle of her career, in the ‘30s before you came, because I think she must have been a pupil teacher that stayed on, she never qualified with a certificate.

MC: But they still managed to drum it into our heads just the same and that’s the idea of being a teacher, to get it into someone’s head.

PR: Especially if you can do it and have the child wanting to learn more.

MC: It must have been Miss Smith in the last class there who was taking us on a journey in geography around the world and when I went for my oral at Ware Grammar School, Miss Woodhead mistakenly said to me, ‘what are you driving at’, the moment I went off into this great long screed around the world and I think she was, as you’d say now, gobsmacked.

PR: Tell me something about the other teachers and the children and the classrooms. You went through an adjoining door into Miss Rowe’s.

MC: I’ve got a feeling that there were 2 classes in there and that we stayed in there, but we couldn’t have done in 5 years could we?

PR: Well, there were a large number of children in a small space so they could have divided them up in slightly different ways.

MC: Because the other room, there was a curtain divided off between Miss Woods and Miss Smith.

PR: Oh, was there, that’s Kathleen Smith, North Road.

MC: Is she still around?

PR: Yes, 85.

MC: I used to see her walking about, haven’t seen her for years.

PR: No, she’s moved away to live near her brother in Surrey. Yes, she writes every now and again. Yes, that room was sometimes divided.

MC: And the Reverend Gardner used to come once a week and give us a talk and I remember when I’d passed the scholarship, he called me out and I’m not a person to get in front of anything or say anything or stand up and speak, I’m not that sort of person and he called me out in front of the class and said, ‘now, tell everybody what you’ve done’ and I wished the floor had, I hate anything like that. At WI, when they say to me, ‘will you stand up and give a vote of thanks’ I say, ‘I’m ever so sorry but I cannot’ my nerves just won’t let me do it.

PR: Horses for courses, plenty of strengths.

MC: That’s it. I’ll do anything, I’ll wash up, I’ll make tea as I’ve got to do this next time, but being the centre of attention, I can’t do it, it’s not me.

PR: Were you actually taught by Miss Turnbull or –

MC: By the time I got into that last room it was Miss Smith from St Albans, Miss Turnbull had left by then. But I knew Miss Turnbull anyway because I used to keep dropping notes in from the Spratts.

PR: You used to come in and see her in her retirement.

MC: Mother used to call on a Thursday or a Tuesday when she went up to see her aunt, Mum used to call in every week and do something for her and then she’d say to Mum ‘I’ve got a few jobs, will you send Mercie down’.

PR: And that was mainly needlework. Yes, she was very good at organising a support team.

MC: That’s right, well your mother was very good to her, wasn’t she, going in and making her a cup of tea every morning. She was such a sweet person, you wouldn’t mind what you did for her.

PR: Her hearing was perfect right into the nineties, just the vision and the hand that had had TB, which caused the fingers to go, but they were removed quite early in her –

MC: Yes, because she always had a bandage on, even in school.

PR: Yes, some people thought she ought not to be teaching because of the tubercular illness that caused that, I don’t quite know how [was this the historic scrofula or King’s evil?] I don’t think it was an infectious thing. She had it as a girl to begin with.

MC: I never remember any of us ever being away with any illnesses. I don’t remember any of us catching anything at school. I remember the nurse coming and poke about with the em, in the Dettol water, you know. I had 2 plaits and I had to undo one and she had to do it all up again and put the ribbon on.

PR: But you must have been a prize student. I know Nora referred to you with pride as being someone that passed through her hands at school, as it were..

MC: As I said, I used to love it.

PR: Yes, but she, you were one that she would talk about as a distinguished old girl. There was only you that year [that passed], 1941. Somebody else had the Newton Scholarship in that same year. I thought that was an academic scholarship, but I think it qualified for clothing allowance by showing some promise but not (inaudible).

MC: We were hard up like everyone else in those years. People didn’t earn salaries, it was a pittance really. You didn’t have big money as they have today.

PR: (looking in the log book) 1939 Marian Ellwood went to Ware Grammar School on a County Council scholarship, Bernard Pettit and Kenneth Millsom to Hertford Grammar School. The lavatories are going to be whitewashed in the holidays. Bill by Scales for digging the trenches needed to evacuate the school in the war, that was 1939.

MC: We never went anywhere, we still went to school in the war.

PR: The trenches had to be there for you to go to.

MC: Don’t remember ever going in.

PR: Don’t suppose you did. Then the staff and children of Cowbridge School used the building in double shifts,1939, but on October 23rd Cowbridge School returned and life resumed, so that was a short-lived experiment, I suppose.

New school curtains made by Messrs Fentiman, black-out curtains, I suppose that means. Scales wire-netted all the insides of the school windows. Miss Turnbull wanted Herts County Council to extend the probation teachers’ time until the end of the year. Miss Eileen Marian Bishop. An additional doorway to the large room was created.

MC: Down the bottom end.

PR: Near the entrance. I didn’t know that until I read that, that it wasn’t original. It must have been a fire-escape thing, it was a very big room and the only door would have been in from the porch, the lobby. Then in 1940 Miss Turnbull had an accident the previous evening, doesn’t say what it was, 18 April 1940. Then there’s the resignation of Miss E Smith, now I don’t know which one that was.

MC: That would be the young one and the other came from St Albans.

PR: And Miss Dewberry?

MC: Oh yes, I remember her.

PR: She was a temporary replacement. Then Miss Fox-Edwards became a permanent teacher until the compulsory retirement of Miss Lilian Rowe on September 10th on a pension. So she had to go, Lil. But the County Council wouldn’t authorise the managers to appoint a replacement for Miss Rowe. Miss Turnbull’s retirement date is likely to be the 1st May the following year. Then on 15th April the following year after 41 years the resignation of the Headmistress was received and she was entitled to a pension, 41-and-a-half years. Then there were 24 applications for the job, 4 came from the County and the choice fell on Miss Hilda Annie Smith of Flamstead End School where she was Headmistress already. She’d been at St Andrews in Hertford earlier as an ordinary teacher. She was called into the meeting and appointed. The playground was repaired, the main gate was reconstructed by Messrs John Cooper.

Mr Harms is now repairing school slates in 1940. Miss Turnbull attended her last meeting of the managers. Air Raid precautions were discussed. Miss Woods resigned, 1941, then there was a rota of fire-watchers, 3 every night¸ and a small gate was created from the playground into the lane, Warehams Lane, I suppose. Fire-watching thanks to Mr Bailey.

MC: Was he the caretaker?

PR: Yes, might have been. He became the window cleaner. The children were provided with outdoor entertainments. £4 profit for hymn books. Mercie Crane to Ware Grammar School, Ronald Grimwood, a Newton Scholar. August that year the school was open for evacuees, staff had 3 weeks holiday duty, summer holiday teaching evacuees. So Nora got out just in time. Then there’s the death of the rector in 1942. So, bits and pieces, they’re not the actual minutes, they’re just notes [taken by JR if I remember rightly].

MC: And it’s all history now, the school’s not there.

PR: The playground’s there, 3 lime trees are there.

MC: I take my car to MRH to have it, that’s where I was going the other day, to fetch it back, I think, now is this part of the school playground?

PR: The trees are still there. Apparently 2 of them are not much longer for this world, they’ve got a kind of rot at the base, but the one nearest the main road is (sound)?

MC: Yes, I was at Addis 43-and-a-half years. I stick at things, you see. I left school in the July and I waited for the School Certificate results and I didn’t start at Addis ‘til the 30th September. And I went for the interview for the job. Mum had got a bike and I hadn’t so that afternoon Mum went and bought herself a new bike at Mr Wackett’s, gave me the old one and took me down the lane towards the bottom of St Albans Road, you know, that flat bit after you go over the hump, learning to ride a bicycle along there Friday and Saturday, ready to cycle into Addises on Monday morning because there weren’t anythings as by-passes or whatever. You went into Hertford and round the memorial then along Fore Street and up to Addis, but I got there in one piece.

PR: That same bit of road is the first where I sat at the wheel of a car years later. My brother sat beside me and told me which pedals to do and I used the same stretch as you did for bike .

MC: Well, I could fall off on that piece of grass at the side if I couldn’t manage it. So I had Mum’s bicycle and she had a new one. She always went in the town and she went to her aunt at Tewin and that kind of thing.

PR: Why did you choose Addis?

MC: Well, I went to the Labour Exchange when I’d got my results and they said either you could be a telephonist and there was a job at Gunners doing office work and then they said they want an office junior at Addis. And Mother said, ‘oh, that’s a good firm and we know the Addis family, we’ll go along there for the interview’. So they rang up and I went to see Mr Perry. Mr Addis sat in the 2 offices in the main office building, there weren’t many offices, they were all there in that one.

So I went and had my interview, I think Mum went home and left me there, I’d got to get home as best I could. So he said you start on Monday morning. You had to do last week’s whatever it was, total everything up and I thought, in my ignorance, that you sat in an office and you did it all, there she put this old adding machine where you had to – easy meat, you know! So there I was for 43-and-a-half years.

PR: Did the Addis family have much sway on the premises?

MC: Yes, old Mrs Addis was in the office as well. She lived in the house just out the back of the office, you went through the back door and lived in 36 Ware Road, you see she’d been giving me lifts to St Andrews school hadn’t she, and being as I lived there they were right behind us weren’t they, where they lived in the Old Rectory, it was over the wall from Mrs Spratt’s house, wasn’t it. So we knew them very well, and Mother said that’s better to work with someone you know. I retired in 1990, my last day was on the Friday. When I’d done 40 years they gave me a party and took me out to the the Feathers and gave me a present. I already had a gold watch for 25 years, then during the week of my last time there they took me to the Feathers and on the last day there, when I got in the office there it was, all decorated out, cards, presents, you never seen the like, on the desk.

There were people coming in looking at what I’d got, the cards, the girl who was my assistant was handing everyone food and drink every time anyone came in [was this in the early morning?!!] And then after half-past-4, quarter-to-5, there was a party put on in the canteen for me and I could invite, well, I invited 50 or 60 people [so not a surprise party!] I’d known since I’d been there really. Then they brought in a beautiful birthday cake and the lovely flower arrangement that was on the buffet table they gave me to take up to the hospital because Mum had been in hospital 5 years, you see. So I took it up and put it on the table over the bed, it was the length of one of those tables and I took some food up there for her and some of the nurses.

PR: Where was she at that time?

MC: Gallows Hill, because she’d had a pacemaker, because she’d had total arrest. I came home to the house at Fordwich Rise and saw her feet on the floor, toes up and I thought, so she went to to QEII and they were all running and I didn’t know what they were running for and she’d had a total arrest. And a chappie said to me ‘your mother will have to have a pacemaker’ and I thought that was it, that’ll kill her, that operation, not realising how they do these things. So they said she’ll have to go to North (inaudible) Park Hospital, and I thought wherever’s that, I hadn’t heard of it then you see. So we went in the ambulance with her wired up. That’s terrible watching the green light going up and down.

PR: You don’t really understand.

MC: Because she’d been in intensive care at QEII, so when we got there I spent sometime talking to Mr (inaudible) who was going to do the op and the ambulance that had taken us had gone – how do I get home? Because I’m not a very good traveller and I don’t go on buses much. So I thought the best thing to do is to find a station and get into London then I know, so that’s what I did and she was in there 10 days or so.

She came out, I think it was a bank holiday, by private car and she was never really much good after that. Instead of picking up she didn’t. When I went to renew the tablets the chap in the chemist’s said to me ‘does your mother take all these? So I said ‘I’ve got the bottles with the type-written labels on from Northwick Park Hospital. ‘Oh’ he said, ‘It’s far too many’. I had whatever it said and we still carried on with it, I don’t know whether she collapsed or what happened, I had to get the doctor in a hurry and it had caused a breakdown of the bone structure, far too many, they had to wean her off them. Of course, her bones were no good and she had 2 legs in plaster right up to here and so she was in QEII and after a while they couldn’t get her going anymore, she walked with a frame but that was all so they shunted her off to Gallows Hill and that’s when she died.

PR: So how old was she when that first collapse happened then?

MC: 1979, she was born in 1906, 73. Always on her cycle, never looked old, I don’t think she was as white as I was before she died.

PR: Yes, she used to lean the bike up against the wall (when she went to see Nora). No, you were certainly a favourite of Nora’s.

MC: A favourite of Mrs Spratt and Mr Spratt too. Very often she would tap the wall of our scullery because they hadn’t got anything joined on, their 2-up 2-down finished at our kitchen. Our scullery was like a single bit down their garden. So she’d come and knock on the wall, go right round to the hedge at the bottom, here’s something for Mercie’s tea. It would be something in a little dish or plate, you know. Very kind. Still keep the grave tidy at Christmas, Easter and other times.

PR: I think the Turnbull family weren’t sure that this was the right match for Frank. I don’t think Frank had any questions about it but, although father Turnbull came from Dublin (Aunt Nora’s father.

MC: Mr Spratt was in the army when he met Mrs, wasn’t he? He met her when she was working at Crawford’s Biscuit factory – that’s Belfast. She was the business lady of the pair. Mr Spratt wouldn’t ask anyone for money. Well, the old chap was a business man and some of the lovely furniture they had in the showroom upstairs, if people owed him money and they didn’t pay he’d say ‘well, I’ll have this or this’ [furniture in lieu of payment] old Mr Spratt, but Mr Frank Spratt wouldn’t. People would owe money galore but Mrs Spratt was the one who said ‘well, come on. We’ve done all that painstaking work, we deserve some pay for it’. But Mr Spratt was very quiet and retiring. Every Sunday morning, just before 8, you’d hear the gate click and he’d go up for communion. Every Sunday without fail. Because his brother died, I think it was before the war, he had a brother, Alf, I think it was. I think they’re all in Hertingfordbury churchyard.

PR: I must do some work on that family tree. I’ve got bits of it in my head.

MC: Where is Jean Turnbull?

PR: Well, she lives in Sevenoaks.

MC: Now, her parents, didn’t they live next door to Miss Turnbull?

PR: Yes, they did for a bit and then they moved up Balfour.

MC: Was that Miss Turnbull’s brother’s daughter?

PR: Yes.

MC: That was the one that went into the church, Tony?

PR: Nearly, Anthony and Philip lived next door.

MC: Oh, Philip, that’s the one. One went to Switzerland didn’t they, Nestles?

PR: Yes, that was Anthony, for a long time.

MC: Because his mother-in-law lived next door to Mr (overtalking, name lost).

PR: His mother, she was a Brown, Aunt Edie, Anthony and Philip and Jean’s mother and father lived in Fanshawe Street in Bengeo.

MC: I think Miss Turnbull gave me something of Jean’s when I went to WVS, a badge or a hat or something.

PR: They had their golden wedding, and not long after the husband died. But I can actually remember the wedding as a little boy, which is 50 years ago.

MC: I can always remember Miss Turnbull referring to you as the Mudlark because there was a film about Queen Victoria and Andrew Ray, Ted Ray’s son, played this little sweet boy and when we went she used to say that little boy next door, he’s just like that little mudlark! Were you the youngest?

PR: Oldest.

MC: You’re the oldest of 3?

PR: Yes, I was the one that paid most attention to next door, the others did but she used to say I was her boyfriend.

End of Tape