The memoirs of Cissie Ewen

Eddy was like a father to us younger ones, and how he used to take an interest in what we did. He would even watch us take part in the school sports and cheer us on when we were taking part. He would kneel on the floor at home, wrestle with us, and play games with us. Alex and I used to go for long walks in the evening, at the time when Eddy was a friend of John Ewen, who lived two doors higher up the street. Our cousin Jimmy Reynolds who lived further down the street used to come to our place and play his mouth organ; he was very good at it too. All the young lads and lasses around us used to dance on the footpath outside our front door. It was very sad when he died of T.B. (tuberculosis) aged twenty-one years.

When Maggie was fourteen years old, she left school; she was not sorry, she never did like school. She got a job as a domestic and had quite a long walk. I was fourteen in January 1926 but had to go to school until the end of the term, which was the end of March, before I could leave. I was lucky to get a job almost right away at the market garden. Although it was early in the season for him setting on staff, Mr Fagan gave me a job at weeding for seven shillings and six pence a week and I worked from 7.30am to 5pm; on Saturdays I finished at midday like most workers did then. It was a good job on warm, sunny days but no good in damp, cold weather. I had worked at potato picking during school holidays like the rest of us, but weeding was different, especially when you weren't sure what were weeds and what were plants. Mam gave me one shilling from my wages and I had to do wonders with that. Joe seemed to be doing all Mrs Armstrong's messages, so it was not often I could add to my shilling from that quarter.

Mam tried to keep us tidy by buying second hand clothes, and by having some of her old coats made into coats for us by a dressmaker in the next street. I remember one such coat, a beautiful blue; it must have been when they had the pinched-in waist. The dressmaker made it into a beautiful coat for me. I always thought I was the 'bee's knees' in it, and when the kids at church said 'Have you been getting a new coat?' I'd say, 'This is my best one.' I guess it made me a bit conceited.

My boss, Mr Fagan was a bachelor and he and his old mother lived in a four-roomed little cottage at the bottom of Silkey's Lonnen, just inside the gate of one of his three big market gardens. His mother was a dear old soul and was very good to me. If I happened to be working in one of the two gardens close to the house, she would come out during the morning to the garden gate and call me to her. Then she would take me inside the house and sit me in front of her fire with a cup of tea and something nice to go with it. Once or twice when she went away on holiday to London or somewhere else, she would bring me something back, maybe beads or suchlike. She would sometimes have me go a message for her, to the bookie or for a wee drop of whisky from Shields, but I was not to let on to John.