Sunday mornings, however, preceded Sunday afternoons, and my younger brother Angus and I (the “wee boys” as we were known to all and sundry) would begin our day racing down the six flights of stairs, (we lads slept in the attics) one hand on the bannister-rail and the other on the wall-paper, sliding and leaping the top three flights, then reasonably sedately down the next two which were adjacent to our parent’s bedroom and then the final abandoned rush down the last long stairway; past the basement passage to turn right in front of the big toy cupboard and into the cheerful glow of the kitchen range which, no matter at what time we arrived, always appeared to have already been stoked by our mother.

The basement was in part I suppose, a rather forbidding place, a long dark passage leading to the cellar door and full of hats, coats, golf-clubs, cricket bats, hockey sticks, folding chairs, boots, shoes etc., (providing plenty of cover for all sorts of imagined terrors just waiting to jump out and grab you!). A big, deep cupboard one could walk in, crammed with model farmyards, Meccano sets, train sets, jigsaws by the dozen, chemistry sets, toy soldiers in hundreds, dolls, teddy-bears, billiard and bagatelle tables, etc. etc. and high up on the passage wall, a row of bells of different sizes that were set in motion by steel wires wound round pulleys and threaded through tubes going to little handles by the side of the fireplaces in the various rooms, (shades of the days of servants) and the whole scene lit by very dim gaslight (we had no electricity at the time). The sight of that array of bells never failed to give me a slightly uneasy thrill as I always expected them to start to swing of their own volition – a thought no doubt engendered by Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” where Scrooge, supping his gruel, suddenly sees the bells on the wall of his room commence to swing prior to the appearance of Marley’s ghost.

Maybe, just maybe, two small lads unwittingly waited in bed until some faint stirrings from far below reassured their infant minds that the fears of the basement did not have to be braved without some grown-up comfort. I know that I, certainly, would not have been happy to risk going downstairs in the small hours on my own. I don’t think the wee boys would have admitted it at the time but seventy- odd years on — who cares!

The kitchen range was a wondrous Victorian cast- iron affair, with two ovens, a cast-iron tank for hot water complete with a rather ornate drawing-off tap, a selection of boiling places to suit different sizes of pans, a hob and dampers or baffles to send the hot gases to heat the ovens when needed. These also controlled the fire from a nearly dead, banked-up state to a positive blast-furnace like glow which produced the most delicious toast, practically instantaneously, on the end of a long brass fork. Far, far different from the attention-less, dried-out, variety made by today’s electronically controlled, four-slice, soul-less marvels.

As I grew older, the powerful natural draught of the long kitchen chimney was utilised on numerous occasions to melt brass, zinc or lead in small crucibles for some obscure purpose — I think that the operation of smelting was, in itself, a sufficiently enjoyable reason for the performance.

Undoubtedly many a brave lead soldier met his undignified end in the red-hot crucibles wielded by yours truly on the kitchen range!

To dress in front of the glowing range on a cold winter morning was sheer Heaven (we had no central-heating) and we young lads hastened out of the cold bedroom as quickly as possible. Each bedroom sported a little cast-iron fireplace (much sought after by today’s interior decorators, so I’m told!), but they would not often be lit unless the weather was exceptionally inclement or one of us was confined to bed, when it would become the catalyst for stories and games from my sisters and probably contributed more to a swift recovery than all the medicines put together.

The kitchen was really very spacious considering that seven children, my mother and father, my aunt and very often a cousin or friend would be sitting down together for quite a lot of meals that were not taken in the dining-room. At one period I even had, as an overspill from the workshop, a large, treadle-driven, metal-turning lathe in the kitchen — but more of that anon.

The centre piece was a very big scrubbed pine table usually covered with a sheet of American cloth (no pretty plastic fabrics yet). Along one wall was a large built-in dresser resplendent with rows of cups, jugs, saucers, plates and everyday type china and deep cupboards underneath serving as a home for all the dinner-plates, tureens, sauce-boats, bowls, etc. which could not be accommodated on the dresser shelves. Three spacious drawers for cutlery and kitchen tools completed the lower portion.

On each side of the range and built into the thickness of the wall, was a floor to ceiling cupboard providing storage for the dozens of pots of marmalade, jams, chutneys, pickled gherkins and walnuts, pickled eggs and the like and tins of cakes, scones, sponges, biscuits etc, all home-made of course, that were waiting to be consumed by an always hungry family.

The topmost shelf of the left-hand cupboard (well out of the way of we youngsters) held all the medicines and remedies such as, Scott’s Emulsion (looked and tasted like Brylcreem hair-cream), Cod-liver oil and malt, Parrishes Chemical food, (tasted like nothing on earth and usually drunk through a straw to stop the teeth from getting stained!), Ammoniated Tincture of Quinine, Veno’s Cough syrup, Friar’s Balsam, smelling salts, Veganin tablets, Flowers of Sulphur, Beecham’s pills, Krushen Salts, Carter’s Liver pills, Calamine lotion, Iodine, Germolene, castor oil, Epsom salts, senna pods had to keep the bowels open you know!), the inevitable aspirin of course, and many more – quite a chemist’s shop in fact. In the medicine cupboard also was a little tin lamp arrangement consisting of a tin saucer which held a nightlight, and a sort of chimney with vents cut-out and surmounted by another saucer into which was poured a teaspoonful or so of Cresolene (some sort of coal-tar product), which when heated by the nightlight produced vapours to help one breathe in the event of a bad cold. It did work but certainly gave me hallucinations from breathing the fumes.¹

Leading off the kitchen, in one corner, was a sizeable recess lined with shoe shelves on one side, and opposite a big walk-in pantry equipped with stone shelves and ventilated by a small zinc-gauze covered window. A door to a very dark storage space under the stairs, useful for the garden tent, extra deck-chairs and suit cases, completed the scene.

The scullery also led off the kitchen and looked on to the garden. It had a sink and a wood-fired copper (a type of wash-boiler also very useful for steaming large Christmas puddings), a large gas-stove with an oven capable of cooking a 30lb turkey and a mangle complete with a fold-away mechanism to allow a handy worktop to fall into place. There were cupboards and shelves for saucepans, sieves, colanders and mincers etc., and a knife-polisher. Table knives were not often made from stainless steel as they are today. They were usually forged from carbon steel which held an edge very well but had a tendency to rust and stain. Enter the knife-polisher, which consisted of two felt pressure discs loaded with emery or crocus powder and driven round by a handle. The knives were thrust between the discs through slots in the machine casing, the handle was whirled away and in no time at all, brightly polished blades appeared – quite a covetted Sunday morning job and far nicer than, say, cleaning all the silvered spoons and forks with whitening and then having to polish it all off with a cloth.

Of course, weekend tasks varied according to age and competence – shelling peas (one-handed ejection of the peas from the shucks) became second nature after a while. Peeling potatoes and preparing vegetables meant using a very sharp knife, so small lads usually managed to be excluded from that operation. Chopping mint leaves on a board with a sort of hand-held guillotine – great fun after one got the hang of it. Laying the dining-room table for at least ten people entailed putting extra leaves in the table and laying out all the gear on a huge white, starched, crocheted table-cloth(one of many made by my maiden aunt).

My mother, sisters and aunt carried out most of the Sunday work. If they could be caught then the wee boys would also help, but my elder brothers never seemed to be about — they were not the earliest of risers after, presumably, Saturday-night revels.

Reading this, Heather’s reminded of her mother telling her that as a very little girl she managed to climb up to the top shelf and imbibe some coal tar product, which burnt her lungs and put her in hospital for a few months.

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