In one of my earliest memories, I’m standing in the living room, carefully placing freshly washed and dried cutlery into the top drawer of the sideboard. The sideboard is teak, and I understand that it was expensive and must be treated with care, as should the dining table and chairs that go with it. All are reassuringly solid, a glowing reddish-brown colour and (with hindsight I can see) very well made.
The sideboard had four drawers (or perhaps three) in the middle; the top two were quite shallow and the bottom ones were deeper. Cutlery was in the top drawer, and another drawer contained table cloths and place mats. On either side of the central drawers was a cupboard door. One side was full of drink, bottles of alcohol arranged, no doubt, with those most-used nearest the front, within easy reach. The other side contained an array of glasses, some of which were quite old and beautiful. Both cupboards smelt of alcohol and wood, a smell that wafted out each time a door was opened. The cupboard doors opened quite easily, and closed with a satisfying click.
I must have been about four years old. Mum and dad were in the kitchen, and I could see them through the open door between the two rooms, dad at the sink washing up, and mum with a tea towel in her hand, drying. I was putting away, trying to help. It must have been after Sunday lunch, as dad didn’t help in the kitchen at any other time.
That living room was, I suppose, a fairly typical room of its time. Sparsely furnished, but what we had was good quality, built to last. There was a television in the corner between the fireplace and the window. On the other side of the fireplace was a chest of drawers painted bright yellow. Next to that was a little two-seat settee, upholstered in a dark red and with wooden arms. That was a later arrival, new when I was around five years old. All this was against a background of busy patterned wallpaper with grapes and decanters.
The fireplace had a metal guard in front of it and every morning in winter there would be a fire going long before we children were downstairs. Later I learned that mum got up at 5 every morning in order to get everything done. By the time we got up, she would have laid and lit a fire, vacuumed (we always said “hoovered”), and got our clothes ready – 4 sets of clothes all ironed and laid neatly over the backs of two chairs which were turned towards the fire so that they weren’t freezing cold when we came down to get dressed.
There would be a warm drink for each of us, in plastic cups set on the brick fireplace surround. We ate breakfast: ReadyBrek in winter, Cornflakes, Shredded Wheat, or Rice Krispies in warmer weather. We children had our evening meal at around five o’clock, and there was a small rotation of menus, so limited that even now I associate particular meals with TV programmes. Oxtail soup was Scooby-Doo, while fish fingers and chips was Crackerjack (It’s Friday, it’s five to five, and it’s….Crackerjack!). With only two channels on TV (I don’t think there was even BBC2 when I was tiny), and children’s programming limited to a couple of hours each afternoon, this part of our day became utterly predictable. For family meals, I’m sure we weren’t allowed to have the television on, but at tea time the four of us would sit around the table in such a way that we could all see the TV. Even earlier than this, I watched Bill and Ben, and Andy Pandy, on Watch with Mother in the early afternoon, and still recall the words of the Andy Pandy theme music!
Fading Memories 