Born on a Black Friday
by Susan Fewster, 2009
‘Push, now Mrs Tonge... push!’
‘No, it can’t be born today!’ She exclaimed breathlessly. ‘Not today...’ A scream tore through the tiny back room as nature failed to hear her plaintive plea, ‘Please, not on Friday the thirteenth.’
‘I can see the baby’s head...’, it had been a long labour of three days and the doctor was as tired as his patient, ‘one more push should do it. Hrrumph! You shouldn’t be so suspicious - let’s just concentrate now.’
Another loud scream ripped through the tired room, as the rest of me eventually swooshed into the world. It was one o’clock in the morning, on Friday 13th April, 1956. I often wonder what the impact on my life might have been if I hadn’t had it drilled into me that I had been ‘born unlucky’. I constantly referred to my date of birth as the reason behind the many tragedies that eventually dogged my young life. But, before they began appearing, my earliest memories are very happy, they are of the relationships I had with my siblings.
My early years were as idyllic as life in a working class Salford slum could be. I was born in my paternal grandmother’s tiny, back to back terraced house on Sunnyside Street. Sunnyside Street, how ironic, the sun was constantly blocked out by the black fumes pouring out of the nearby rubber works: Greengate & Irwell. The factory produced general rubber goods including rubber belts, rubber footwear and materials used to make rubber tyres and it was the place where my father and grandmother spent most of their working lives. I too would carry on the family tradition, spending a couple of years working there on leaving school.
Gran’s house only had one living room and a scullery – a very tiny kitchen – downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. The street ran parallel to Ordsall Lane, just a couple of streets away from the very dirty, very smelly River Irwell that serviced the large number of local factories.
By the time my younger brother Steve came along, 16 months later, we had moved to a slightly cleaner slum. Bigger than gran’s, our new house was bought and paid for. It cost £500.00, savings my dad had sweated for at the rubber works. It had a long, narrow lobby (hallway) and a front parlour, a room I never recall entering. It was a special room, with the best furniture, kept meticulously neat and only aired when we had visitors. We never dared to enter the sanctity that was the parlour. We lived in the back room and the small back kitchen was where my mum baked all our bread and cooked her ‘meat and two veg.’ dinners every night. The washing was done whenever the rain would allow, in the back yard with its mangle and wash tub.
The house was close to where the old infantry barracks was sited during the war. By the time I was born it had been converted into a into a memorial garden that the locals fondly referred to as the ‘Little Park’, to distinguish it from the local, slightly larger, Ordsall Park. It was a spot of green in the centre of a crowd of blackened houses, far enough away from dad’s work to avoid the factory fumes. We often went for a picnic there if the weather was fine. I remember it mainly as the place I learned to make daisy chains; I used to drape myself with the flowers and dance around the grass - a little flower fairy. All the buildings around me were transformed as I lost myself in my imagination and transported myself to another more magical world.
But the trips to the park were rare treats. Mostly, I recall playing alone on the cobbled street when my brother was at school, warily watching the witch’s house at the end of the street. If she came out I would run inside the house, the door was always left open, and scream for my mam. When a little older, and a lot braver, I used to follow her as she made her way to the shop. She had an unusual walk and I decided it was a good walk and so I started to walk like her all the time. This led my mam to take me to the doctor’s because I was developing ‘knock knees’.
I had great fun in the physiotherapy sessions: I used to have to pick marbles up with my toes and walk along a wooden beam on the floor. All the attention was great and I was very sad when my secret was discovered; mam caught me following the witch, copying her every move. I was sorry to leave the physiotherapy sessions.
The street, Darley Street, was a very safe place to be, with only an occasional vehicle trundling down it very slowly. Regular intruders were the old horse and cart belonging to the rag and bone man and the lorry that delivered the coal to the little holes in front of each house. The rag and bone man was a treat – we used to take him old clothes and collect a balloon, if we were lucky, or a donkey stone, a soft scouring stone, used to clean and colour the steps, windowsills and a small patch of the pavement surrounding the steps. It was a declaration of pride in your house to stone the steps; a way of letting your neighbours know that your house was well kept. Any housewife who didn’t keep their little patch neat and tidy could be ostracised by the whole street, possibly one of the reasons the ‘dirty witch’ got her label.
The coal man, our other regular visitor, would arrive, literally covered in coal dust and once he’d prised off the cast iron lid from the hole he would swing a sack of coal onto his back and then pour the coal down the hole into the coal cellar. These small holes were just too small for a normal sized adult to get down, but a very tempting squeeze for an adventurous young soul such as me. I was fascinated by the shiny black stuff and, I am told, when I was about three years old I caused a major panic, hiding myself in the coal cellar. It took a while before they thought to look down there because the steps were really steep and it was very dark. I was discovered sitting on top of the pile of coal, sucking a small piece of it. How it must have upset my immaculately dressed mother when she saw my impish black face exposing its blackened teeth through an impish grin at the end of my adventure.
I feel sorry for my mother; I was such a great disappointment as a daughter. Once she recovered from the shock of having me on ‘Black Friday’, she was really pleased I was a girl. A machinist by trade, with her own Singer sewing machine at home, she delighted in dressing me up in beautiful, handmade dresses and little hand knitted boleros or cardigans. She would twine my hair around rollers and spend an age making me look as immaculate as her. But, in a matter of minutes, I’d be filthy, all tattered and torn and my beautifully coiffed hair would become an abandoned bird’s nest. I was a dirt magnet; nothing like the daughter she expected. Sadly, I continually failed to conform to her ideal of a daughter throughout my life. I was lucky when my baby sister, Sandra, came along and fulfilled her expectations of what her daughter should be. I took after my dad.
I desperately wanted to be a boy, like our Dave and copied everything he did. I remember one occasion when Dave and his friends were desperate to lose my company. They were off exploring the back entries, tiny alleyways that ran along the backs of the houses. These cobbled entries were about three feet wide, with a drain channel running down the middle. The walls were about five feet high. It was a dangerous game but I don’t ever remember anyone coming to any harm: we used to climb on the tops of the back walls and run along them, jumping over the uncovered doorways.
This particular time the lads had decided to get away from the pain that slowed them down and, instead of jumping over a doorway, they leapt over the alleyway itself landing on the opposite wall. They were all taller and older than me and probably believed that I would never attempt the jump. Ever the one to rebel against expectations, impulsively I bent my knees and launched myself across the three foot gap. My little legs were too short to make it across, but I did manage to grab the top of the wall as my small body smacked into it with a loud slap. Blood was running into my eyes but I was determined not to cry. And then joy of joys, as Dave yanked me up onto the ledge, he turned to his mates saying: ‘That’s my sister!’ It didn’t last of course, the next day they were trying new ways to dump me, but for a few hours I bathed in the glory of my brother’s pride.
Dave finally lost his limpet when Steve, our younger brother, was old enough to start following me around. The three year gulf between my older brother and me eventually led to our drifting apart, rarely playing together. A mere fifteen months had passed between that fateful Friday I was born and the glorious sunny day in July when Steve arrived. We grew very close as we shared the same later experiences throughout a very troubled period of our lives and we remained close until his tragic death at the age of twenty - but that’s a story for another day.
