2
Madge was already nineteen and beginning to feel like a seasoned veteran at Rowntree’s when, in 1937, another nervous fourteen-year-old followed in her footsteps through the main gates of the factory. Florence Clark was born in 1923 and grew up in Layerthorpe, just to the east of the city centre, in a two-up, two-down terraced house with a front door that opened straight onto Bilton Street. There were ten of them all together: Florence’s mum, Barbara, and dad, Harry, and her four brothers and three sisters, with Florence the youngest of them all by five years. The house was tiny and, like Madge’s family, the children slept three and even four to a bed, with two at the top and two at the bottom. ‘You were lucky to get a blanket,’ she says, ‘and we had to use overcoats for blankets on cold winter nights, though if it was really cold, my mum would give us the shelf out of the fireside oven, wrapped in a piece of cloth, as a hot-water bottle. She’d put it right in the middle of the bed where all four of us could get our feet on it.’
There was no bathroom and no hot water in the house, just a tap for cold water that was shared with the neighbouring houses. There was an outside toilet – a wooden seat perched on top of a bucket – but it was more than a little precarious and Florence was always a bit frightened to sit on it when she was young in case it overbalanced. She was lucky she didn’t have to use the outside toilet at night, because there was a ‘gazunder’ – a chamber pot, so-called because it goes under the bed – in the bedroom she shared. They did not have luxuries like toilet paper, just bits of newspaper, and as the youngest, one of Florence’s jobs when her dad and mum had finished reading the paper was to tear it into squares, make a hole in the corner of them, slot a string through, and then hang them up in the outside toilet.
They had a wash house in the yard as well, a lean-to built onto the back wall of the house containing a concrete and steel boiler with a fireplace underneath and a galvanized pipe poking out through the roof to serve as a chimney. Once a week, on Fridays after school, they used to light the fire under the boiler to heat up the water for their weekly bath – the tin tub they used as a bath hung on the back wall in the yard because there wasn’t room for it in the house. They would all share the same water, so by the time the last of them got in – and as the youngest and smallest, Florence was in no position to argue about the pecking order – the water was tepid at best, and so grey and with so much soap scum on the surface that it was questionable whether they were any cleaner when they got out than when they got in.
Inside the house were hard floors of bricks laid on edge directly onto the earth beneath them, with oilcloth like a thin linoleum placed on top of them, and a scrubbed pine table and a few mismatched hard chairs in the kitchen. They used sheets of newspaper instead of tablecloths – it did at least give them something to read while they ate – and there were not enough seats for all the family to sit down together; since they all ate at the same time, the younger children had to eat standing up. With so many mouths to feed, there was never any food to spare. ‘I always remember,’ Florence says with a rueful smile, ‘that my dad had two boiled eggs for his breakfast and all I ever used to get were the tops of the eggs when he’d cut them off.’
Florence and the other local children all played in the street; they had to do so because there was nowhere else to play except for a bit of rough ground called Ropery Walk a few streets away. The girls played skipping with a long rope tied at one end to a lamppost or a house wall, hopscotch or a curious game called ‘peggy stick’ that was a bit like the old Yorkshire game of ‘knurl and spell’. It was played with a big stick and a wooden peg, shaped at both ends. You had to hit one end of the peg with the stick to flick it up into the air, and then before it dropped to the ground you had to swing back the stick and hit the peg again, knocking it as far as you could. In a narrow street lined on both sides with houses opening directly onto the pavement, misdirected hits of the peg sometimes led to the ominous sound of breaking glass. The girls also had ‘whipping tops’ that spun with the flick of a bit of string or cord, and Florence and her friends would spend ages decorating them with paints or drawing pins pushed into the top and polishing them until they shone, so that they would catch the light and sparkle like gold. In summer the boys would run down to the river at the end of the next street and go splashing and swimming in it, but Florence and the other girls never went down there.
Although there weren’t any cars in the street – no one could afford to run one, let alone buy one, in that impoverished district – over the course of the day there was a steady trickle of horses and carts with people buying and selling goods. Some only came once or twice a year, like the swarthy knife grinder with a thick moustache and eyes so dark they looked black even in bright daylight, who always wore a red-spotted handkerchief like a scarf around his neck, fastened with a gold clasp. He had an enclosed cart like a small showman’s wagon and a Heath Robinson contraption on the back: a rickety-looking metal frame, like a bicycle, with a grindstone precariously balanced where the handlebars should have been. Having drawn up his cart, the knife grinder would shout his rallying cry to alert the women of the street, and then sit on the bicycle seat. The women would bring out kitchen knives, carving knives, scissors, scythes or garden shears – no one had a garden, but some had allotments – anything with an edge in need of sharpening. He’d pocket a few coppers from his first customer and then begin to pedal his ‘bike’. The grindstone spun faster and faster, and as he drew the edge of each knife or tool across it, a shower of sparks flew upwards, drawing squeaks of excitement from Florence and the crowd of other children who had gathered to watch.
The chimney sweep would also make his rounds by horse and cart, with his brushes and sacks of soot stacked on the back. His skin was permanently ingrained with soot, and wisps of his incongruously fair hair peeped out from under a flat cap that was as black as the chimneys he swept. Sweeps were thought – by the superstitious at least – to bring good luck, and brides-to-be would position themselves so that he had to cross their path. Some even invited him to their wedding for luck, and having pocketed his fee, he would kiss the bride and make a black smudge on her cheek that she would leave untouched as a token of her future good fortune.
When the coalman came down the street with his big, powerful horse dragging the high cart piled with sacks of coal and coke, the boys used to rush out and use the back of the cart as a swing as it bumped along over the cobbles. When the rag and bone man was on his rounds, like the other kids, Florence would run inside and see if she could find any old rags or pester her mum for the bones from the Sunday roast. In those hard times and mean streets, very little was thrown away, but apart from his two staples, the rag and bone man would also take scrap metal, such as aluminium pans with holes burned through the bottom, empty tins, broken toys, cracked china, scrap wood, worn-out shoes, and almost anything else that might have a scrap value, no matter how slight. In theory, if the children brought him enough, the rag and bone man would give them a goldfish, but in fact the goldfish in its little glass bowl appeared to be only for show, or perhaps the rags they brought were of too poor a quality, as the most that Florence or any of the other kids in the street ever seemed to receive was a balloon.
An ice-cream van also used to come round once a week, and the driver, Mac, did a brisk trade in halfpenny cornets. On winter evenings there was the ‘hot pea man’, and when she heard his call, Florence’s mother would sometimes send her out with a halfpenny and an empty cup. The pea man would ladle the hot, mushy marrowfat peas into the cup and put a spoonful of mint sauce on top. Florence would carry it back inside, the cup so hot it almost burned her hands, and then she and her sisters would sit in front of the fire with it and take turns to eat small spoonfuls of the peas, trying to make them last as long as possible.
On Friday nights a man came round with a little roundabout on the back of a horse and cart. He would tether the horse to a lamppost, swing out the roundabout on its steel support, and then hand-crank a handle to turn it. It was very basic, there was no music and it only had four hard metal seats, but the little kids loved to ride on it. Even though he charged just a halfpenny a ride, it was often more than