|
Gaynor Steer recalls her childhood growing up in Slough.
I know! Whenever someone hears the name Slough, they think of a dirty smelly old Trading Estate. But let me transport you back nearly 50 years to just after the war when Slough was a small, up and coming little place but very prosperous.
I was born just outside Slough in a nursing home called Colinswood near Farnham Royal. My mum, Margaret Ann Williams nee Bowen was 31 and my dad, William Thomas Burdett was 32.
Dad was already married with a daughter still in Welshpool and Mum was still
married to John Meredith Williams. I think the war had taken it toll on both marriages as it had on many relationships after the war.
Mum had a divorce but dad never did and so they could not get married. Of course this was kept very quiet because of the stigma involved at the time, which as I grew up also affected me.
My house was home to my mothers' mother and father who also played a great part in my upbringing. My grandmother was affectionately called 'Mamo' for some reason.
Grandmother and grandfather came to England from New Tredegar, Phillips Town, Gwent, South Wales. They came in the period between the wars when, as they use to say in Wales, 'the hooters were blowing'. This would mean that the miners were out on strike again.
My Grandmother would do anything to bring in money, she soled shoes at 2d a pair, papered posh people's houses, kept pigs and chickens for food, took in laundry and as she would say 'made something of nothing'.
Grandfather had been injured in a pit fall many years before with no compensation, and could only do the most menial of tasks.
Mother went into service in London when she was 14 years old, not into a big
house, but in to private service where she was the only maid to look after the household.
She had not accomplished very much at school as she had the misfortune to have Narcolepsy, this being an illness where the person had no control over their sleep patterns, she slept most of the day at her desk and was woken up to go home.
But her willingness and determination that she tackled everything with saw her through. She earned enough money to send some home to her parents and to buy herself some new cloths.
Mum came to Slough because she had heard about all the jobs there and eventually
brought her two brothers and her mother and father to Slough too. The whole family worked at St Helen Cable and Rubber Company on the Trading Estate. Mum and her mother were production line workers, dad was a foreman, her brothers were in the engineering shop and poor old granddad was a sweeper up.
The war was over, Slough was booming and I had just been born, life was good for my parents. We were very well off; we had a car when I was 5 and a TV before I was 5 to watch the coronation no less. The story goes that she kept finding me on tiptoe looking through a neighbour's window to look at the TV so she went out and bought one for us.
My mother went to work full time, so my grandmother was at home with me for the first 5 years of my life. I can remember her taking me down to the Cattle Market in Slough, just so that she could tell the farmers off for being nasty to the animals.
I can see her now leaning over the fence poking the stick bearing assistant and telling him to treat the animals with more respect. At the time I would like to have died if at all possible with the embarrassment, but now I thank her every day because my attitude to animals is a very caring one, possibly too caring sometimes for my own good.
I remember growing up in a house full of flowers, home made toffee apples and singing. We had days out to the Baylis Lido and Windsor River and fruit picking trips to the fields around the Farnham Road area, now called the Britwell Estate. At Christmas we always went to Oxford Street to see Father Christmas. I remember holidays in the South of France with my first bikini.
Mother made all my cloths and hers, dads and Grandmothers, what she didn't have academically she made up for creatively.
Granddad died when I was about 6 years old but grandmother stayed with us until I was about 8 years old when she married George Bew who lived in Wokingham, she said she wanted to go back to the country.
Mum and Dad had never married and he moved on to another woman when I was 9 years old, about 1957. Life changed, we were poor and alone, mum was having a nervous breakdown and I had to look after her.
She never stopped going to work and she refused to take 'charity' from the government so we took in lodgers. Life was different. The lodgers were always Irish and like brothers to me, it was great having them around. Mum charged them £5 per week for full board and all their washing,
In the 70s in Slough we went to see the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cliff Richard, The Rolling Stones, Joe Brown and lots more. Dancing was done in the Carlton ballroom or the Adelphi cinema.
Mum remarried, to Gerry Dunne when I was about 12 or 13, he was one of her
Irish lodgers. Gerry was the greatest person to have entered my life, next to my grandmother, he was just like the old man in Steptoe and Son on TV. He was so funny and well liked by everyone who met him.
Slough was becoming the town we see today, dirty and over crowded by the time I was 20. It was going through a recession the same as many towns in the 70's but seemed to be able to get it's self out again few years later. My stepfather died suddenly in 1980, the year I married Brian Steer, the third person to enter my life and make a big impression on me.
Mother never got over the death of Gerry she went down hill fast. By 1990 she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and I was looking after her full time. Mum went into a nursing home in 1995, where she died in 1999.
To look at her you would not have thought that she could have had such a colourful past, but she was a very determined and forceful character, some of which rubbed off onto me over the years. I loved my mother, but my grandmother was my best friend that I miss very much even today.
My husband and I still live in the house I grew up in, but we are now thinking of moving out of Slough it is not the town it once was.
Gaynor Steer, Slough, 2001
| |
