Biscuit Girls Read online

  When completed, the Raffles estate contained 2,352 houses. New council estates were still being built in Carlisle after the war and by the 1950s, over 60 per cent of Carlisle’s population lived in council houses, a high proportion but in line with most other towns in the UK. Ivy’s council house in Raffles, where she grew up, was in Dalton Avenue, named after Raffles’s architect.

  At the age of five, Ivy started at the local primary school, Ashley Street. For some reason, her mother had not signed all the appropriate forms, so on the first day, when she took little Ivy along, she was immediately called into the office, leaving Ivy all alone, telling her to sit still and not cause any trouble.

  ‘I did want to cry, with my mother rushing off so quickly and leaving me, but I managed to hold it back. I was sitting in exactly the same spot when she came back. But that was me. Never any trouble. I went through my whole school career causing no trouble, doing exactly what the teachers said, hardly saying much. Made up for later, like. Now I never stop talking.

  ‘I tried my best, but I wasn’t clever, never have been. I don’t know anything, really. When the teacher asked a question and we all put our hands, I would dread her asking me. So if she walked down the aisles and looked as if she was going to ask me, I would slowly put my hand down again, pretending it was a mistake.’

  Ivy loved reading the Dandy and Beano. Her father got the News of the World and the Empire News, but Ivy didn’t read them. Just the Sunday Post for ‘Our Wullie’ and the cartoons. The Sunday Post was and is a Scottish paper. Ivy did not come from a Scottish family, but Carlisle has strong Scottish connections, being only ten miles from the border, hence its title the ‘Border City’. Many Carlisle families at the time got the Sunday Post, a homely, old-fashioned family newspaper.

  ‘I remember one day collecting for the May Queen. It was just really a party held in our street, in our close, where one girl dresses up as the May Queen in old curtains and all the boys are dressed as chimney sweeps. I was going round the local streets collecting, asking for contributions. You usually got halfpennies or pennies, if you were lucky. But this time I stopped a man and he gave me half a crown! He was American. Don’t know where he had come from. Perhaps he was a soldier, as the war was on. We had a really good children’s party that year. Albert, who lived opposite, his sister worked at Carr’s and she got us a big tin of biscuits with the money we had collected.’

  At eleven, Ivy sat the Eleven Plus, known in Carlisle as the ‘Merit’. This was the exam that tested all the country’s children, dividing and sorting them, not just educationally but socially and economically for the rest of their lives.

  The chosen few, and in every part of the country it was only a minority, went on to a grammar school, a path that could lead the chosen ones on to university, the professions, a proper white-collar job with a career structure. The majority went on to a secondary modern or, in many cases, just stayed where they were, in the same school they had started at five. The Eleven Plus exam came in under the Butler Education Act of 1944, which also raised the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen, though this did not come into operation till 1947.

  In Carlisle, there was a three-tier system, which was what the government had planned, but most local councils ignored it, creating only two tiers, the grammar and the secondary modern. In Carlisle, the top 12.5 per cent went on to either the Carlisle Grammar School for Boys or the Carlisle and County High School for Girls. The next 12.5 per cent went to two secondary technical schools, the Creighton for Boys and the Margaret Sewell for Girls, where some of the top class could stay on till sixteen and take O levels, but neither had a sixth form. This left the 75 per cent who had failed the Eleven Plus at the bottom rung of the educational pecking order, such as Ivy’s school, Ashley Street.

  All over the nation, for the rest of their lives, the millions of children who sat the compulsory Eleven Plus during the thirty or so post-war years when it was in operation remember the exam hanging over them, followed by the elation of passing, or, more commonly, the disappointment of failing, feeling they were doomed, having fallen at life’s first hurdle.

  However, in Ivy’s case, the effect was minimal. In fact she can’t really remember sitting it.

  ‘It was about six weeks afterwards, when someone in the house happened to be talking to me mam about the Eleven Plus. I piped up and said, “Oh, I sat that.”

  ‘My mother said I hadn’t told her, which was probably true. It was nothing really. All I can really remember is just one question: “How many sides has a pyramid?” I looked over to see what the girl next to me had written. She had put six. So I wrote six as well. Turns out it’s, eh, actually I’m still not sure, three I think.

  ‘The Merit didn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t want to go anywhere else anyway. I loved Ashley Street so much and never wanted to leave. I knew my parents could not have afforded the uniform for the high school, so that was in my mind. But really, I had no ambition in life. Never said I wanted to do this or that. Just accepted.

  ‘I know some teachers said to some of the girls that if you don’t stick in you’ll end up as a cracker packer at Carr’s. That didn’t seem too bad to me. In our playground at Ashley Street, we could smell the sweet smell of the biscuits and chocolate and see the streams of Carr’s workers going down the hill to the factory each day. We used to climb on the railings and shout at them. Oh just silly things, make remarks about their hair, or shout, “Got any broken biscuits, missus?” I thought they looked good in their overalls, very smart.’

  Ivy can only remember one girl in her class who passed the Eleven Plus and went to high school, a girl who lived near her on the Raffles estate.

  ‘Didn’t do her much good. She was hardly there, always playing truant. The school inspector was forever at her house. I don’t know what happened to her in the end.’

  So Ivy stayed on at Ashley Street until 1948, when she was fifteen. This meant that the bulk of her school days were spent during the war years. But for a schoolgirl in Carlisle this meant little, as the city was a relatively safe place to be. Carlisle wasn’t a major target for the Luftwaffe, if they knew of its existence at all. Being a remote, isolated town in the middle of a rural area in the far north-west of England with a population of 65,000 in 1948 and far away from the industrial heartlands of Lancashire, Carlisle can hardly have registered on the German radar, either metaphorically or geographically.fn1

  Now and again the odd bomb did fall on Carlisle, or was rumoured to have fallen, and sometimes a plane did crash, but it was usually a German plane that had got lost on its way to or from Liverpool or Glasgow, industrial centres, which really got a pasting.

  But of course the war did have a huge effect on life generally in Carlisle, as it did everywhere in the UK, with rationing, blackouts and air-raid shelters.

  ‘We all had a gas mask which came in a cardboard box. My mam made me a sort of black bag for it, so I could carry it over my shoulder.

  ‘At Ashley Street, we had regular air-raid drills. We all put on our gas masks and were marched through the streets to the air-raid shelters. I hated them, they were smelly and dark and filthy. We all had to crouch down inside, then we all marched back to school again. That was it.’

  Ivy didn’t have a shelter at home, but now and again her father made her crouch down under the kitchen table, if there was a bomb scare, such as German bombers being spotted high up in the sky, heading for the munitions’ factories at Gretna.

  ‘My mother filled the bath with water one night and got the stirrup pump ready. The idea was that she would use it to put out any fires in the house. My dad was away that night. Anyway, having filled the bath, me mam got nervous, so she grabbed my hand and we ran to Mrs Wallace’s, but she wasn’t in. So we ran down the street to another neighbour’s and stayed there all evening with her family. My mother felt much safer with other people.’

  Ivy was very excited when her grandmother started taking in evacuees, many of them around her own age, so
she had new children to play with. Evacuation began right at the beginning of the Second World War. On 1 September 1939 Operation Pied Piper sprang into action and in three days 800,000 school-age children from across England were on the move. Their schools had sent parents a letter telling them to pack clean clothes for their children, plus washing material, strong walking shoes and their favourite book. At the railway stations, they were given a gas mask and food and had a label stuck on with their name, school, home address and destination. And off they went. Some were back in a few weeks. Others remained evacuated – usually somewhere in the countryside – for the duration of the war. There were other waves of evacuees during 1940, when it was thought England was going to be invaded on the south coast and during the London Blitz. In all, well over three million children were evacuated.

  As a relatively safe place, Carlisle and the surrounding area was ideal for evacuees and many households took them in, if they had the space. Most of the evacuees came over from the industrial north-east but some arrived from much further away. During the war, Roedean girls’ school moved up from the south and took up residence in Keswick, using the railway station and the station hotel for lessons.

  Ivy is proud of how her grandmother did her bit, taking in evacuees despite having such a small house. On her bedroom wall today, Ivy has a framed certificate given to her grandmother, signed by the King, thanking her for her war effort in taking in evacuees. She is convinced it is his real signature, signed personally for her grandmother.

  Carlisle had ration books, like everybody else, so new clothes were in short supply, with little choice, but like most little northern girls of the time, Ivy usually got ‘dressed for Easter’, meaning that was the time of the year when her mother somehow managed to buy or acquire some new clothes.

  ‘Once I got a coat at Studholme’s for Easter, which was thought a very smart shop, but that was unusual. A lot of my clothes were homemade. My grandmother made me a tartan kilt and waistcoat one Easter which I loved.’

  Food rationing meant that people had to get used to making do with dried milk and dried eggs instead of the real thing. Children believed that bananas were a mythical fruit, which they were unlikely to see or taste in their lifetime.

  ‘In a cookery lesson at school one day, I saw this tin of dried milk. I dipped my finger in it and licked it. I felt ever so guilty afterwards.

  ‘But there was one really serious incident. Some girl had stolen a bar of soap from the cookery room. Soap was, of course, rationed during the war. The head had us all lined up in the hall and lectured us about this terrible thing some girl had done. It was a criminal offence, and she should really report it to the police, but it would bring such shame on the school that she had decided not to do that. So would the girl own up? There was silence.

  ‘The head then had all the suspects come to her room, one by one. Eventually one split on the other one. We all knew her name. No, I’m not mentioning it. She’s dead now, but I often see her sister up the street. And of course I never mention it.’

  ‘Mother always cooked proper teas at 5.30 each evening when my father came home from work. And she always used fresh meat and fresh vegetables and we always had a pudding. Mostly it was tapioca. On Sunday we would have a roast and then leftovers on Monday. She would also make stews and broths. Each week, she would have the same sort of meal on the same day, so you would know what was coming.

  ‘When I came home from school each day she would always give me homemade currant squares or ginger squares, just to keep me going.

  ‘My mother shopped in the Red Stamp shop in St Nicholas and her groceries were delivered to the door. We never had drink in the house. My father would not allow it, so we had none at all, even at Christmas.

  ‘My father had an allotment at the bottom of the garden. We always ate all our own vegetables. He also grew raspberries and strawberries and rhubarb, but mainly his allotment was full of potatoes, carrots, onions and cabbage. I disliked onions as a child, hated them – but I liked everything else.’

  Being on the whole a very good girl, and well-behaved pupil, by the time Ivy was in the top form she was chosen for the school’s netball team and had been given various positions of responsibility, such as milk monitor, handing out the little bottles of milk which all children got during the war. Often the contents had turned sour by the time it was drunk, especially in winter if the bottles had arrived frozen and been put on the radiators to thaw.

  Ivy’s most important job was going to the post office with the savings money. Children at all schools were encouraged to save money during the war with the National Savings certificates system, all to help the war effort. Mothers would give money to their child to take to school, usually half a crown, which would buy a savings stamp and in due course a savings certificate.

  ‘I had to take all the money to the post office each week. I never knew how much. It was in a bag. But must have been a queer lot. Good job I didn’t know. I might have been scared I’d be robbed.’

  In 1948, coming up for fifteen, it was time for Ivy to leave school. She had no idea what she wanted to do, and still no ambitions of any sort.

  ‘I was still eezy ozzy, not bothered really. I would never have dreamed of asking for anything. Girls these days are asking all the time, mainly for themselves, of course, wanting this and wanting that. We would never have dreamed of asking for anything. You waited to be asked.

  ‘There was one job I vaguely fancied at one time – and that was working in a shoe shop. That quite appealed to me. But my dad said, “You wouldn’t like it if I came in to try on a pair of shoes with my sweaty feet.” So I went off that.’

  Carlisle is an ancient city, not perhaps as famous as some other northern cities such as York, but it has an ancient cathedral, founded in 1122, and a castle even older, begun in 1093. Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned in Carlisle Castle in 1568, and from its battlements she is reported to have watched the locals playing football, or a form of football, one of the earliest known sightings of the glorious game.

  In 1745, Bonny Prince Charlie marched on Carlisle, on his way south from Scotland to claim the English throne, taking over the city. He only got as far as Derby, on his march to London, returning through Carlisle on his ignominious retreat home.

  Apart from these two famous historic incidents, Carlisle over the centuries has not featured largely in English history or in English mythology, the sort which gets passed on through the generations. In more recent decades, there are just two things most ordinary Brits tend to know about Carlisle, if, of course, they know the name, know roughly where it is, and that it is not in Wales or Scotland.

  Firstly, that their little football team, Carlisle United, got into the top division of the English football league, and for a brief moment in time – 24 August 1974, to be precise – they were top of the league, having won their first three games. Then they got demoted.

  The other thing they might know about it is biscuits. Not just in the UK but around the globe, many people today still know that Carr’s of Carlisle produces table water biscuits. All thanks to a man called Jonathan Dodgson Carr.

  In 1948 Carlisle, despite its modest size and rural isolation, was a hive of industry, as it had been throughout most of the nineteenth century, with many factories located around the middle of the town or in Caldewgate.

  There was Hudson Scott, which had started out as a printing firm in 1799 but at the end of the war was a factory that produced tins. Cowans Sheldon had made cranes since 1846. Dixons, Bucks, Morton Sundour and Fergusons, equally long established, were textile factories which employed a lot of women and girls, as did Teasdales making sweets and Carr’s making biscuits.

  In the centre of the town, then and now, was the ancient pink-bricked sweet little eighteenth-century town hall, but in the immediate post-war years, it always seemed clouded in a haze of industrial smoke and soot from all the chimneys. One of them, Dixon’s chimney, 320 feet high, was said to be the tallest in the land whe
n Peter Dixon opened his textile factory in 1836.

  Surrounded by the noise and bustle of a busy industrial town, it was easy to forget, or at least not be aware, how ancient and historic Carlisle was, with its medieval castle and cathedral and other ancient buildings, all clustered round the heart of what was once a walled city.

  Opposite the pretty town hall the council had plonked down some public lavatories, so all day people were coming in and out, while around the ancient Market Cross, beside the old town hall, where once there had been market stalls and fairs, the old cobbled square had become the town’s bus terminus, with buses arriving and departing and crowds queuing up. Most people caught their bus home from work outside the old town hall. So when the main shifts ended, at two in the afternoon, six in the evening or ten at night, the workers flooded straight from the factory gates, desperate to catch their own bus home, creating huge queues that wound their way across the cobbles. Nearby were some ancient, narrow medieval lanes, known as The Lanes, which were being allowed to fall into disrepair, supposedly to be knocked down one day to make way for a new shopping precinct – which did eventually happen. It was as if the town was in disguise, clothed in shabby, dirty, workaday grime and grit, waiting for someone to rip away the façade and say, goodness, underneath you really are pretty and attractive. But this was not to happen for another few decades.

  Opposite the town hall and the Market Cross was the Crown and Mitre Hotel, still Carlisle’s grandest and poshest hotel, in a prime position, passed most days by most of the working or shopping population. For centuries it had been Carlisle’s main coaching inn, with travellers from elsewhere in England resting before the last stage of their stage coach journey to Scotland, up to Glasgow or Edinburgh, some hundred miles or so further on.

  In 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie and his main supporters had stayed there, the landlord of the time being a Jacobite sympathiser. Sir Walter Scott spent the night at the Crown and Mitre in 1797 on the eve of his wedding in Carlisle Cathedral to a local Cumbrian girl, Margaret Carpenter.