Living in the clubroom

by Lily Baldwin

The clubroom was home to me in the early 1940s. It was a large room over the top of the tap room and bar of the Six Bells public house at Witham-on-the Hill, near Bourne, which my maternal grandparents kept at the time.

I was sickly child and the doctors had prescribed country air. This meant leaving a comfortable semi-detached with all the mod cons of the time, in Ashby on the outskirts of Scunthorpe, where dad drove a bus for Enterprise and Silver Dawn. What a change in circumstances!

The club room was partitioned into rooms with curtains. We had a living room and bedroom and a kitchen. No running water, just two buckets, one with soft rain water and one with hard drinking water, carried in from separate pumps, one downstairs in the garden and one in the washhouse which also doubled as a bathroom with the copper lit for the hot water and the tin bath poised between garden tools and the corn for the chickens. On bath nights, I got the first bath in the clean water, then came mum and dad last of all. Just topped up each time with more hot water.

Mum was an excellent cook, believing that to stay well you ate well. She created banquets out of the meagre ingredients that were available at that time, all cooked on two paraffin stoves and a Valor paraffin oven. At Christmas time, the baking went on for weeks. The puddings padded out with breadcrumbs and carrots, a recipe that I still use today and a better flavour would be hard to find.

During the long winter evenings, I remember the radio programmes with Uncle Mac on Children's Hour, Ronnie Waldman's puzzle corner and the spooky voice of Valentine Dyall, the latter with my head firmly under the covers when I was supposed to be asleep.

Inevitably, I got nits! What a catastrophe that was. The district nurse brought the Derbac soap and advised rinsing with paraffin in the water, and that I should wear a bonnet while asleep to help the treatment work. Unfortunately mum misheard the nurse and rinsed my hair in neat paraffin; the resulting burn along the nape of my neck was a sight to behold. That then had to be treated with boracic powder. Miraculously, I had no scar and neither did I get the dreaded nits again.

The toilet was, of course, outside and what a trek that was, down through the tap room and round the back of the house. A wide wooden seat with a frightening black hole and a bucket underneath greeted you. This before the days of the Lavender Cart [council vehicle for emptying earth toilets], so the bucket's contents were emptied into a hole in the garden each week. What good vegetables we had! You could always have a good read in that toilet too, with the Radio Times crossword a favourite. Just occasionally we had oranges and the tissue from them was a luxury we looked forward to.

NOTE: Reproduced from The Lincolnshire Poacher magazine, Autumn issue, 2000.