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So many older people writing their memories seem to live on the South Coast (Worthing, Brighton, Hove), wrote Noreen Brown of Brighton, I thought I would have a go. I was really impressed by the memories of the lady aged 93.
I have had a busy eventful life: born in a workhouse, travelled in a trunk with my Mother while she travelled as an actress, spent a few years in a `home` and emigrated to England aged sixteen.
I was born in Leitrim, Ireland in a Workhouse because my mother was a travelling actress. I lived my first few months in a trunk behind the stage. This may account for my restless life, which has included living in London, New Zealand, Ireland and Australia.
We left Dublin when I was sixteen and travelled by ship, steerage. I remember being taken to a cheap shop and wearing my first ever not second hand coat. My mother had left Dublin first to find a job and accommodation.
She worked in a hotel and found a flat in Clapham North. In Dublin we had lived in a council house in Inchicore, Dublin. There I had attended a Catholic School but when one day I told my mother the nuns had pinned brown paper to my dress because it was too short she took me away.
We had no money. (My father had left and we lived with my Grandmother who was always angry because my mother had never married and so the only money we had was from taking in children, four at a time, for which we received seven and six per week each.
So when I had my own family I was very unphased. My childhood had always been accompanied by babies. So suddenly living in a flat with other people in the house was strange for us.
I felt very superior because somehow my mother had managed to take me from the rough Catholic school and put me in Marlborough Street School in Dublin that was very middle class and seemed so `posh` then. I lost my very Irish accent there.
I am writing this after reading a memory from Joan Bryant who lived probably next door to me in Clapham, London during the last war.
Unknowing we nightly scrambled down to our air raid shelters with our small children. I can still smell the damp and feel the clammy cold and hear the ack ack guns rumbling along the railway at Clapham Junction.
One morning after a raid I went out to find bits of clothing and who knows what festooning a tree a few streets away. And a gap where there had been a house. They were beautiful houses which had been not very cleverly turned into flats.
I remember the tally man calling for his shilling a week on his bycycle. and the struggle I had to find that shilling. My husband was in the fire service (and was involved in the dock fires) and only earned £3.00 per week.
Eventually we were evacuated to Turners Hill where we first saw a cow close up. At night we watched the doodle bugs like fireworks dropping on London where my Mother refused to leave and kept on working as a Nippy at Lyons in London.
Noreen Constance Markievitz Macready Brown, Brighton 2001
(The name has another story as you can guess.)
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