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Earliest memories are at about aged two or three when we were living in a terrace in Victoria Road in Stoke, right beside the Victoria football ground of Stoke City, we used to sneak under the gates at half time and watch the match. Outside we would pester the fans, “Watch your car for a penny mister?.” Our dentist was next door upstairs, I remember the rubber mask and the gas!.
We later moved to a rented house in King Street, Fenton, Stoke on Trent., a great big terraced Victorian house, huge rooms and high ceilings, a coal burning range in the kitchen , which had an oven for baking and also heated the water and a smaller coal fired washing boiler in the out house. There was no central heating, but when times were good we had fires burning in all the downstairs rooms, we had no garden, but a large yard , complete with outside loo and coal house which opened onto a back alley overlooking a sawmill.
Michael and I slept in a double bed in a cold bedroom, which was next to the one toilet and bathroom in the house, we later moved up into the attic as mum took in three lodgers to help pay the bills. Lorna and Vivienne had an attic room next to ours on the top floor, we had to go through their room to get downstairs. Then next floor down were the lodgers in two rooms and then mum and dads room and the bathroom, then down again to the ground floor, front parlour (mums best room), the living room, which doubled as the lodgers dining room and then down two steps into the kitchen which was where we ate our meals and spent most of our time.
Dad was working in the pits, at that time it was all privately owned and he worked for a firm called John Browns and also Tunnies, he had come over from Roscommon in Ireland on a cattle boat with a mate called Martin Keaveney when he was fourteen, to make his fortune! They worked as navies on the canals until Martin went off to Birmingham to try for a different job and dad went down the pits. He always came home with coal dust around his eyes, no matter how many showers, he still had the dust in his eyes and blue lined scratches and cuts on his hands and arms. I remember sitting on his lap in the early evening as he ate his dinner, kept warm on a plate over a boiling pan, long after the rest of the family had eaten.
He became quite good in his job and travelled around the country trouble shooting difficult mines or seams, he was adept at explosives and often worked on contracts, which meant we sometimes had loads of money and sometimes very little, but we young ones didn’t know anything about that . Men of all nationalities used to knock on our front door, huge, rough looking men asking in pigeon English for ‘jack Ganley’, looking for work in the pits, Dad would go to the door and sometimes hire them, lending them money for a room and food.
We had a van!, the first in the street! An old ford van, dad drove it all over the country, later to be replaced by a ford v8 pilot!, owned by the company of course.
Because of his work in the mines we had coal delivered to the house by the ton, a great big lorry would tip tons of it in the back alley and we kids had to shift it into the coal house, real coal, some pieces so big we had to break them with hammers in order to lift it.!
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