Number 64: end of an era. Tool Shed

Mum and Teedee used to lock the tool shed door with a padlock. The day before I was going to start on clearing it out Rye commented to Teedee that its not being locked was what we wanted because if anyone stole anything from it (after climbing over Fort Knox barriers to get into the back garden anyway) this would be a good result! Unfortunately, the long screw just keeping the door shut proved enough of a deterrent and all the "depth of life" (see Roger Scruton quote at the end) accumulations within were still there next morning. The next four photos are what I was faced with.

You can see from the walls that this had been the coal shed. The green plastic sack that you might be able to pick out in one of the photos contained coal. So did a couple of others. I presume they had been there for fifty-two years. This has me wondering if any of the rusted tools had been there when our parents bought the house too or just accumulated over those years, perhaps from our grandparents' tool sheds. I laid out on the lawn what I found, thinking more than once that I wished I could donate the rusty metal to an artist like Harriet Mead. After checking with Teedee that Nigel the gardener brings his own tools, these were destined for metal recycling at the council tip.

I was tempted to claim the sticks and old broom poles to be used as plant markers on the Boggy Brae but didn't in the end – practising letting MBUs go! I did claim the retractable rake (far left of middle pic) and have used it. Teedee gave the red handled fork (huge and heavy!) to the retired Poulton College gardener who has been gardening for Mum – still climbing the old apple tree into his seventies! and pruning it – for fifteen years.

Rye took one of the two old shell cases to store knitting needles. She'll have to clean out the soot first.

By the time I got to finding the hinges and cog of the old garage door, some which had run along a curved rail, I was thinking, again, WHY!? Why didn't they throw anything out? The bog standard up and over replacement garage door has been in situ for decades. Sometimes the "why feeling" got a bit overwhelming, like when I found a bowl of rubble in the garage 😩. My inherited tidy-mindedness gene is telling me how nice that it was kept tidily. My for goodness' sake chuck it out gene is screaming! 😂

All I put back in the tool coal shed were the bags of coal and a lot of boxes of firewood that the garden had generated over many years. Toad and I brought home a couple of boxes from the garage as it wouldn't all fit in the 'coil oil' (Yorkshire for coal hole). If whoever buys Number 64 doesn't want free coal and firewood (there are still two fireplaces), I guess Teedee will have to order another skip.

A couple more pics of old tools:

I found this Roger Scruton quote this morning. It seems apposite and is a little comforting. We five had good parents who were full of life. Their lives had depth.

Number 64: end of an era. The Pantry

Parents of we five

The pantry

What Smudge had started in the pantry, Rye finished, but first a description. It is a walk-in pantry with built in shelves along two sides. The second shelf up is on the same level as a concrete slab that makes the ceiling of the outside loo, not an end of the garden outside loo in a wee shed of its own, but one under the house roof entered from outside–down the steps into the garden from the back door–with a wooden seat, an overhead cistern and a chain flush pull. We think Number 64 was built by a builder for his family and a live-in maid. The maid's loo, then.

The concrete slab, leading to a small north-facing window, was the fridge before fridges existed. Mum used it to store chocolate, eggs, butter and the like plus Dad's bottles of brandy that he used to win playing snooker but which he wasn't allowed to drink after an operation to remove a cyst in his brain in case the alcohol disagreed with his medication. I think my teenage younger brothers found the bottles and prevented their contents from being wasted.

Rye and I found the chocolate and sustained our cleaning and sorting operations with it and mugs of tea. On at least one day we went from breakfast to the evening meal without eating anything 'sensible', but the unsensible things we ate did the job of keeping our energy levels up.

The eye-level concrete shelf

 

 

On other days Teedee, who dealt with all the death-related paperwork and phone calls (thank goodness!), would supply us with soup and bread. The choice was always between cream of chicken, tomato or mushroom except the day I decided the pile of carrots at the bottom of the fridge needed using up and made some carrot and tahini soup without the tahini because the local Lidl, where Teedee usually shopped, didn't have any. I think I bunged a potato in the pot instead. Teedee did find the ground cumin and turmeric that my recipe required.


Before Rye got the pantry shelves in this order it had been difficult to find anything, they were so jam-packed with possibly edible MBUs ("might be useful" items) and what was, bluntly, junk, like the pile of plastic dessert tubs that were washed out and kept. We used the out of date olive oil and Teedee presented each of us with a jar of marmalade. The packets of breakfast cereal and teabags had been stored in the box room upstairs (the cereal in a wardrobe!) because there was no room in the pantry for them. Rye pretty much kept to Mum's habitual pantry placements. Mum was very efficient at feeding seven people but she didn't do any cooking, or even much making of tea, for the last few years of her life.

From the pile of baking tins you can see at the bottom of one photo, I adopted the proper Yorkshire pudding tins that had belong to my maternal grandma. They are 'proper' because of their size which is similar to that of a cereal bowl. Traditionally Yorkshire pudding was eaten, drenched in also 'proper' gravy (made from meat juices without commercial gravy seasoning because that's not needed if you make gravy 'properly'), as a separate course before the meat and veg course. Old tablespoon for scale.

The contents of a bottle of Baileys that Rye found had separated into solid gunk at the bottom and some curdled liquid. The plastic lids in the shoe box were for putting on one's mug of tea. Keeping a few makes sense; hoarding far more than you'll ever need less so. Spare teapot lid, anyone?

Not that I can talk 😂

It looks as if more posts will be needed to cover Jig's owl pellets and a few other things.

Number 64: the end of an era

This blog post came about after the final days and death of our mother. The "we five" referred to are her children. For the purposes of this blog I've devised pseudonyms using, initially, initials, if you see what I mean. They are Jed, Hum (me), Smudge (a very friendly Smudge; her initials are SMJ), Jig & Teedee. Sibs, if you read this and wish to have your blog name changed, let me know.

We five in age and height order in 1965

 We five in the same order in 2019

We five being a little disorderly

Part one: a bit of background

We moved into Number 64 the day before my twelfth birthday. We had lived in an old farmhouse, rented, for two years before that when we first moved from Yorkshire to Lancashire. Dad had started his new Lancs job in the summer term but had not found anywhere for us to live. After having to cope with five kids by herself from Sunday evening to Friday evening for that term, Mum told Dad to get a tent because we were all coming with him by the beginning of the autumn term. He found a house to rent.

It was great. There was an old orchard, overgrown with rosebay willowherb and nettles, and a roofless barn and pigsty for us to play in. Beyond the orchard were cow fields with ponds and, slightly up what was called a hill in those parts, a wood. Across the lane at the front there was a field containing horses, and between the lane and the field was a ditch that we often played in. We learned about water surface tension in that ditch and the field ponds. The idea was to wade in slowly until it was only surface tension stopping the water cascading into your wellies.

By the time she died Mum was in her fifty-second year of living at Number 64, the house our parents bought after two years in the old farmhouse. Dad had died half way through those years and both our widowed grandmas before him. There were accumulations of stuff from both grandmas' houses. As each of we five kids grew up and left home there was more and more room to hoard everything from safety pins and old keys to candles, kettles and rusty tools that no-one used. Both our parents were adolescent when WW2 started so they were well trained in saving anything that might be useful (MBUs). 

Anything. Like old rope off the beach. Dad collected this and stowed it and a massive rope fender or two in the garage and what we called the boiler room. The farmhouse had coke fired central heating from a stove in the dining-room. The first winter at Number 64 was a shock after two years with warmth so the old wash-house of Number 64 was used for the gas fired central heating boiler my parents had installed during our second summer.

One day someone whose car had broken down knocked at the door to ask if Mum had, by any chance, some old rope so he could be towed. "As it happens," she said, "yes, I have." It was sad that Dad had not lived to see this day but the story afforded the rest of us much amusement. 

Part two: funeral and wake

After Mum died my sister, 'Smudge'–and when Smudge left to return to Norfolk, my eldest daughter, 'Rye'–and I decided to stick around for Teedee's sake. Teedee, the youngest of we five, had been Mum's carer for six years. I had felt for a long time that Mum's death would hit him hardest because of this. His relationship with her was different from those of the rest of us in any case because he had nearly died twice, once with peritonitis when he was ten, and then again in his twenties after a devastating road accident.

Since Mum died on Maundy Thursday and since a coroner's inquest was required because nobody had witnessed the fall that ultimately caused her death, there was some delay in the death certificate being issued. I say ultimately because she seemed over two weeks in hospital to be progressing satisfactorily from the broken ribs she sustained when she fell on the stairs at home, but the day before we expected her to be discharged she suffered a serious brain bleed and died just over forty-eight hours later unconscious and unresponsive and provided with end of life care. The hospital staff were wonderful.

We also wanted to delay her funeral until Jig, middle brother, and his wife could fly over from upstate New York. Jig is an academic and early May is a very busy end of term time for him. These 'creases' having been ironed out, the funeral and wake took place four weeks after Mum died. There were tears during the funeral service, laughter during the wake, much reminiscing, and many hugs.

A few pics from the wake:

We five plus what Teedee calls "relevant others"
including six of Mum's fourteen grandchildren

Wake fun with one of Mum's seven (so far) great grandchildren.
Two others came but left before this because they'd had a long, exhausting
wait on the motorway the night before while an accident ahead of them was cleared up

More "relevant others" including Mum's last remaining sibling,
only uncle to we five, on the right.

I had been given some days of compassionate leave when the message came about Mum's serious brain bleed (traumatic subdural haemorrhage) but I had also already booked off the following week. DerbyshireDaughter (new pseudonym based, inititally, on her initials, is Rye) and my grandsons were going to come up to the Boggy Brae for a few days. In the circumstances that was cancelled and my grandsons' other grandparents stepped into the breach so that Rye could join me at Number 64.

Part three: candles, keys and kettles

Before that though, Smudge and I began some decluttering. As Mum's blindness (macular degeneration and glaucoma) and later dementia increased, so did clutter though perhaps growing up during WW2 had made her more of a saver of Things That Might Be Useful One Day (MBUs) than she might have been otherwise.

Smudge began with the cupboard that had been our parents' entire kitchen furniture other than a sink and a cooker when they were first married. She hauled it out of the pantry, scrubbed away the decade or three's worth of gunk and cobwebs from behind and under it, binned, among other things, a tall tower of apple rice pudding tubs, and generally made that low space in the pantry neat and tidy. One noticeable consequence of this was that it was possible to use the bread bin as a bread bin again rather than as a storage place for plastic bags and other non-bready detritus. 

I started on the large chest of drawers in Mum's bedroom and found, among other things, the "Flags of the Allies" (UK, France, Russia) tablecloth for which my paternal grandmother had made the filet crochet edging. She was twenty-two when WW1 began.

As the clearing out of cupboards and drawers progressed it became clear that we would need to make some piles, sacks or boxes of stuff and to designate them for the dump, the council recycling centre or charity shops. Things that we found everywhere included clean tissues and toffees (Mum never went anywhere without these), candles (many saved from the power cut times of the1970s and even before!), keys and kettles. The final count of kettles was eleven. I think three of them worked without leaking but I don't think we'll ever work out why the eight others needed to be kept. Safety pins also turned up everywhere. We kept some things we wanted for ourselves too.

Old keys not used for anything

Bric-a-brac being collected for a charity shop

A few of the kettles

Most, but by no means all, of the candles.

Part four: from the sewing box

I took the threads; Rye took the buttons. There were several table napkins used as needle cases, as well as four actual needle cases, including a very old leather one that hadn't been around during my childhood. Of the seven thimbles, one of the brass ones fitted my finger and one fitted Rye's.

Some of the candles we found I was sure had come from our grandparents' houses. Perhaps some of the kettles had too. At one point, the shredder Rye was using overheated. She sighed and said, jokingly, "Oh well, there'll be another one somewhere." And there was!






There will be another post on this end of Number 64 era, not least because the tale of Jig's owl pelets (sic) has still to be told!

Clyde ride

Another lovely day for a ride by the Clyde. Summerlike but nippy enough early morning and in the shade to justify gloves and a fleece headband (which, in fleece terms, is an antique but still good). I don't go in for cycling 'kit' clothing because I'm happiest in natural fibres like cotton and wool. Cycling tops with pockets at the bottom of the back are a good design but even the ones advertised as being made of merino wool are only about 37% wool; the rest, putting it bluntly, is plastic. Clothing manufacturers can blether on about the breathability of modern fabrics as much as they like but in my experience nothing beats wool. Having clothing skin tight, which competitive or fitness conscious cyclists want for the streamlining effect, also reduces breathability. For me cycling is just another form of strolling so my guernsey or another wool sweater with a bum bag if required will work just fine. Toad took some pics of me at the end of our ride.

When we got home we strung my bike up to a woodshed beam to do some fine gear adjusting. I also adjusted the angle of the brake levers in relation to the handlebar grips—it takes a while to get to know a bike properly—and I bought a gel saddle cover. I just tied a cushion onto the saddle of my last bike but I wouldn't want to embarass Toad too much! Oddly, in my youth I never had an uncomfortable saddle and I 'went through' several bikes. I'm beginning to wonder if, despite all the high tech designing that goes into them nowadays, somehow old saddles were usually a better fit for human anatomy.