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PART V
Memories by the late Nora Hillman. This article was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on 27 March 1997
'As the youngest in a family of seven, many of my clothes were handed down from older members of the family, or made over from something else.'
That phrase sounds familiar for that's the way it was for most people earlier this century, for the vast majority of the population who were labelled working class. They were actually the words of the late Nora Hillman who was born in Steyning in 1910 and brought up there. She continued:
'We always had 'best' clothes for Sunday, or for special occasions. Underneath we wore far more than people would now. Something like combs, liberty bodices, and mostly a cotton and a flannelette petticoat. I had serge bloomers with white strings in winter and we wore thick black socks or stockings, mostly hand knitted; boots for winter, laced or buttoned. You might have white socks for Sunday in summer and always a hat out of doors.'
'We had cotton dresses in Summer and a dress of thicker material in winter. In my later school days a hand-knitted jumper worn with a pleated serge skirt became usual. Boys wore thick tweed suits with waistcoat in winter and grey flannel suits or shirt and shorts in summer; no long trousers. Sometimes in winter they wore a plain jersey in a dark colour, they would have scorned a patterned one!'
'If it rained you wore a coat, for mackintoshes were not common and wellingtons unknown. Pinafores for school were more or less out, but we wore them for meals and chores at home.'
'My older sister remembered, as a very small child, being lifted up to see over the hedge on the Bostal Road where a team of oxen was ploughing, and being told to remember as she would probably never see such a thing again. This would have been in about 1900 - 1901.'
'Pigs were always kept in the styes in the corner of the mill yard and the day they were killed, on site, was a great attraction to small boys.'
'In those days there were two working forges, the wheelwrights, the gas works and in my very early days, the brewery.'
'My memories of World War One are rather hazy, though I recall being taken out to see a Zeppelin caught in the searchlights, and on to the Downs to hear the guns over in France; of a modified 'Black Out' and of people queuing for hours to buy a little margarine or butter.'
'Of course, the place was busy too, with the weekly market, the odorous tanyard, Duke's timber yard, the mill working until the time I went away, although only grinding chicken food at the last.'
It was in 1925 that Nora Hillman left Steyning to embark on a career of nursing the young, starting with blind babies at Sunshine House, Leamington Spa.
'Visitors would come to see them and say 'How can you bear to look after them, it must be so sad?' We however thought if you only knew the mischief some of them got up to, you would feel differently about it.'
'I expect most people who have never had anything to do with nursing think of it as rather harrowing but after all the years I spent on the job I think my chief recollections are of the fun, especially during the years of training, and of how interesting it all was.'
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