Biscuit Girls Read online

  She is fit and active, no aches and pains or frozen shoulders, unlike some of the ex-workers. Perhaps she never exactly knocked herself out? She smiles at that. More likely her nature is to be calm and placid. By remaining for those twenty-two years at Carr’s as a humble packer, with no wish for promotion to charge hand, perhaps she had avoided too much unnecessary stress. In the end, it was being tired of working, of going out to work, not physical exhaustion or pain, which made her pleased to retire.

  ‘Standing for twenty-two years on a stone floor, that can’t have been good for you, but it didn’t really bother me. I never complained. Towards the end they did bring in those safety shoes, those lumpy things, that we had to wear. Some of the girls moaned. I didn’t. I liked them. They felt comfy and did my feet good.’

  In 1996, aged fifty-seven, she went in a plane for the first time. She had, of course, been on a plane aged three in 1942 when her father put her on the wing of the crashed Lancaster bomber. She went to Tunisia, invited by her sister and family to join them on their holiday. ‘It was a bit worrying at first. We went from Birmingham airport and when it took off, it swung right round. It was very alarming, but it was OK in the end. I’ve been abroad four times since then.’

  She visits the Carlisle crematorium on her parents’ birthdays and on their wedding anniversary and other significant dates.

  ‘Their ashes are in the March Garden – there’s a garden for each month of the year. They were both born in March. Their names are in the memorial book inside. There’s nothing on the place where I scattered their ashes. But I know the exact spot. I scattered my mother in the shade, under a tree. She always liked the shade. My father is out in the open. He always loved being out in the open.’

  She misses them both, but has got used to living on her own.

  ‘I suppose I did think I would get married, most people think they will, don’t they? I had a few boyfriends, but it just didn’t happen. I don’t want to get married now. I feel quite happy. I like doing things my way, being my own boss. I suppose the only thing I do miss is having someone to talk to, since my parents died.

  ‘As a girl, I was really rather shy, but not now. Sometimes I think I am too outspoken. I often speak before I’ve thought. I don’t have rows or arguments with people but sometimes I come out with my opinion when I don’t have to. I often think afterwards I should have said nowt. I think perhaps I might have upset them. But then sometimes they upset me by saying things. I suppose, thinking about it, if I had to pick on one time, the happiest period in my life was when I first started work. I had my own money and was able to go out more.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had what you might call low moments. I don’t ever remember being at my so-called lowest. And I don’t really fret about the future, not for myself. When I think thoughts of the future I think about nuclear bombs, and what they might do to the world, so I hope they might not happen. And of course I am upset at the moment when I hear about all this fighting going on out there, in the rest of the world.

  ‘But I do feel I have had a happy life. I enjoyed my time at Carr’s. I felt proud to be working for a long-established firm, sending water biscuits all over the world.

  ‘I have no regrets. Well, none I can think of. Well, I suppose I should have stuck in harder at school, but too late for that now.’

  Chapter 19

  Jean

  Jean in 2013

  Jean was born in Liverpool in 1936, making her just three years older than Dulcie and Dorothy. Like Dulcie, she too eventually began to suffer health problems.

  In 1992, after ten years as a charge hand, and before that eleven years as an packer on the line, Jean was having more and more days off than working days, with pains all over her body, some days so severe she could hardly walk or get out of bed. And at work she often had to be sent home.

  After lots of tests and endless cortisone injections, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia – a disease causing chronic pains throughout the body. It mainly occurs in women, creating physical symptoms due to some sort of stress, and is often allied with depression. Some think the causes are genetic, others believe it is environmental, perhaps going back to childhood trauma, which of course Jean suffered from greatly with her stepmother while growing up in Liverpool, or somehow connected to her childhood polio.

  She has investigated her father’s side of the family to find if any grandparents or other relations suffered in the same way. None of them had. But she knows nothing about her mother’s family. Her mother died when Jean was three and there was no contact with her family afterwards. So she thinks it might come from her mother’s side of the family. Perhaps surprisingly, while always hating her stepmother who died several years ago, Jean has always kept in touch with her stepmother’s family.

  Her husband Jack – the Carlisle-born soldier she met when he was stationed in Liverpool – has his own theories. He puts it down to those twenty-two years standing on concrete at Carr’s. He says that must have affected all her muscles, plus coming out in the middle of the night after eight hours in a boiling-hot factory into Carlisle’s cold night air.

  Jean herself thinks that could not have helped her general health, but doesn’t blame Carr’s for her present condition.

  ‘But quite a few of the others lasses did have things like frozen shoulders, which must have been directly aggravated by packing the biscuits.’

  While still working at Carr’s, but increasingly stuck at home sick, she was visited by Ivy, then working in personnel. Ivy discussed Jean’s health problems with her, and her future. Ivy eventually brought the appropriate forms for Jean to sign in order to be pensioned off early on health grounds. So in 1993, aged fifty-seven after twenty-two years at Carr’s, Jean retired.

  Her husband Jack, now also retired, went on to suffer from ill health and today has gall bladder problems and diabetes.

  Jean herself, despite her physical condition, is bright and sharp, speaks clearly and fluently, never at a loss for names and dates, unlike Jack, whose memory is not what it was.

  She still has little interest in fashion, no more than she had as a child. She makes a lot of her own clothes, as she always did for herself and her children when they were growing up, working from patterns. ‘But I did wear a miniskirt at one time – a bit late in the day, as I had four children by then.’

  Bing Crosby is still her favourite singer. She considers modern music to be rubbish.

  She has started to write her memoirs of her life growing up in wartime Liverpool to pass on to her family. She has no computer or mobile phone but has managed over the last few years to write out in longhand about 3,000 words, taking her life up to leaving school and her first job in Liverpool. It could be the makings of a Catherine Cookson novel. But she doesn’t know if she will ever finish it. She reads books, liking those written by Anna Jacobs and Katie Flynn.

  She eats more biscuits today than she did in her childhood growing up in Liverpool, but then it was wartime. She always has a tin of biscuits in the house, to offer visitors, or to have one herself every afternoon, with a cuppa. She still loved Jacob’s Cream Crackers as she did in her childhood, and prefers them to Carr’s Table Water Biscuits: ‘They are a bit dry for me, I much prefer Jacob’s. But I do like Carr’s Cheese Thins.’

  She was unaware that Jacob’s is now part of the same empire as Carr’s – of United Biscuits – so she was still helping company profits.

  In her day at Carr’s, they were never allowed to eat any of the biscuits at work, and she never did so, even behind the line. ‘But there was a time, in the seventies I think, when we used to be given tickets that we could take to the works shop and buy a tin of broken biscuits very cheaply, for a couple of pennies. My children loved them. You could also buy chocolate biscuits, like Carr’s Sports, but you paid more for them. Everybody loved them. For a while we also got given a tin of biscuits at Christmas as our Christmas present, but that had stopped before I left.’

  Jean does all the cooking, for
herself and her husband, and has not altered her cooking and eating habits since she was young, not having much truck with what she calls modern fancy dishes and ingredients, sticking to the dishes that her grandmother made for her during the war, such as scouse and roasts.

  ‘I had to learn to cook and bake when I left home, and lived on my own, but I just copied what I had seen my grandmother doing. In our early married life, when my husband was on evening shifts, and coming back very late, I would leave his meal for him. It could be anything, really. If it was something hot, like scouse stew, or sausages and mash, or corn beef hash, I would put it on a plate, a sort of deep oval one, like a soup bowl, and leave it on top of a pan of hot water, which I’d boiled. Then I’d put another plate on top. It did keep the food hot, or at least warm, for quite a long time. It was safe and cheap and if he didn’t come home till late, it didn’t get burned or waste gas. Mind you, it might have gone cold, but that was his problem.

  ‘Today our habits have not changed since we were first married. We still prefer the old types of food. As for shopping, I just go to wherever is the cheapest. We never have drink in the house.’

  Neither Jean nor her husband votes, though growing up in Liverpool she came from a strong Liberal home. ‘In those days, the Liberals were the top party in Liverpool.

  ‘I didn’t like Tony Blair, right from the beginning. Margaret Thatcher was all right, I suppose. But really I think they are all the same. They promise heaven on earth – but you always end with prices going sky high.’

  Because of their health, her and her husband’s social life has become restricted, but they still have a little car, for which they get disability benefits. Neither of them has ever been abroad or flown in a plane – though Jean did sit in a plane once, while in the WAAF. Their holidays have been spent in England, usually in a caravan in Lincolnshire.

  Their four children have produced ten grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. There have alas been some bad times and worries with one member of her family – and they have not spoken for two years.

  Has it been a happy life? Jean thought long and decided it had been hard rather than happy. She was happy at Carr’s, no complaints there, the best thing being the other lasses, but if she had her life over again, she would have liked more money. She always seemed to have money problems.

  ‘I suppose the happiest time in my life, which might seem strange now, was during the war. You got four rides for a penny on the tram and we would go to places like Woolton Woods near Speke Airport, which is now called John Lennon Airport. For tuppence you could go across on the ferry to New Brighton. You can’t travel anywhere for those prices any more. We also used to go to Southport. So even though there was a war on, and rationing for many years later, when I look back, all I remember is the fun we used to have.

  ‘I also enjoyed being a teenager. You had no worries, no commitments to other people, no husband or children. You could just please yourself. As a teenager I got a bit rebellious, going off to live on my own. I suppose it was to do with my mother dying when I was a baby and my dad away in the war. But I don’t feel rebellious any more. I’ve changed a lot. If anything, I’ve gone a bit too soft.

  ‘I do worry about the future, about whether I will be able to cope or not. My hands are now going, so I can’t write as well as I used to. That’s my latest worry.

  ‘Overall, thinking about it now, I suppose what I feel is that I have not achieved much in life, not as much as I would have liked.’

  However, they did manage to buy their council house – paying £6,000 for it in 1983, but then had trouble paying the mortgage and lost the house for a few years. They were allowed to rent it for a while, then finally bought it back again.

  ‘I have thought about leaving him several times, as many wives do. He drove me mad at times and I wanted to walk out of the door. I was just fed up with him. Nothing specific. Just like many wives, I suppose.’

  Jack, meanwhile is sitting by the gas fire, filling in a puzzle book, smiling to himself, not at all upset by what his wife is saying.

  ‘But we stuck it out together. And now it’s coming up soon for sixty years married. There seems no point in leaving him now, or leaving Carlisle, even if I could, or even if I really wanted to. Not after all this time.’

  Chapter 20

  Barbara

  Barbara in 2013

  As post-war children, Ann and Barbara – born in 1949 1953 respectively – had opportunities that became available to women today which were denied those in previous generations, but went on to experience some of our modern post-war pleasures and problems. Could it be because women expect more today, demand more today than their sisters brought up in those tough wartime years?

  Both Barbara and Ann, for example, are whizzes on their computer and dab hands on their mobile phones, unlike our four women born in the 1930s. Having started as packers on the line, they each progressed at work, though in different ways, and also invested in property. Especially Barbara.

  In 2002 after fifteen years or so as a charge hand/supervisor, Barbara became a manager, gaining quite an increase in her salary – going from £16,000 to £22,000. She was now working inside an office, not being able to help out on the lines as frequently as she had done as a supervisor. But she still tried to spend as much time as possible on the factory floor, where she could see what was actually going on in the areas she was responsible for.

  She was technically a section leader, responsible for several of the plants – as the main biscuit production and packing areas are called – with around a hundred workers under her supervision. She had to ensure all the lines were running safely, reduce waste, think about health and safety.

  ‘My shoulders, arms and wrists had begun to ache all the time by then, once I got to around fifty, which happens to so many of the girls. On a good day, you may hardly feel it, but on a bad day you can hardly get out of bed, far less face going into work. So, I felt it was time to do less physical work and jumped at the management job when it came up.’

  One of the problems Barbara had to face as a manager was the Carlisle floods of 2005. In the early part of the twenty-first century, there did seem to be an unusual spate of floods all over the country, which might have been somehow connected with global warming, a threat that Ivy and anyone else born in the 1930s tend not to worry about as much as the next generation.

  On 7 January 2005, there had been unusually heavy rain over the Lake District hills and the Pennines – a month’s worth of rain falling in just twenty-four hours. Carlisle happens to be at the confluence of three rivers: the river Eden, the main river, is joined in Carlisle by two smaller ones, the Caldew and the Petteril. The city has often experienced floods over the centuries, but this was said to be the worst since the 1830s – the decade when J.D. Carr opened his biscuit factory in Caldewgate.

  The next day, 8 January, over 1,800 homes were flooded in the city and had to be abandoned, with another 1,000 homes in the surrounding villages and smaller towns and countryside equally affected. Sewers and drains could not cope, nor could the normal flood barriers. Three people were killed, and the total damage was put at £400 million. In the city both the police station and fire station were flooded. At Brunton Park, home of Carlisle United, the pitch was six feet underwater, reaching up to the cross bars, with goldfish swimming around on the centre circle. They had escaped when the floodwaters had rushed through houses in the surrounding Warwick Road.

  Carr’s factory was affected immediately, being so near the Caldew and also the Eden. The whole of the ground floor was flooded, with the water up to six feet high, and had to be abandoned. Outside the main gates, cars were totally submerged and emergency services in boats rescued people from upstairs windows and roofs.

  Two years later, there were 120 homes still unoccupied, especially in the Warwick Road area, but miraculously the Carr’s factory was back in operation in just three months.

  Barbara and other members of the management staff worked fu
ll-time, as did many of the ordinary workers, to clear up the mess. Very soon afterwards H plant, where the custard creams and Bourbons were made, was in full operation, with three million custard creams coming off the conveyor belts every twenty-four hours.

  Meanwhile, thanks to her promotions, Barbara and her husband continued to move up the property ladder. Their Link house – the first house they had bought for £11,600 – was sold for £19,000. Then they bought a semi for £21,000. In turn this was sold, for £53,000, and they paid £72,000 for a brand-new three-bedroom detached bungalow with two bathrooms and a garage. They added a conservatory and another garage, as by this time David had two cars.

  ‘Yes, we had done quite well, coming from a council house, but it was all our own hard work. You often see people with nice houses and a big car but very often the car belongs to the company and the house is rented. You never know.’

  Barbara was making the most of the explosion in property prices that was happening all over England from the seventies onwards, with prices almost everywhere doubling every five years or so and people on the property ladder becoming notionally wealthier. Carlisle prices have never been anything like those in London and the south – usually about half – or in the posh parts of the north, such as Cheshire, but values did rise steadily if not spectacularly.

  If Barbara and her husband had been earning two wages in London over the same period and had used it as astutely to buy their first property in 1974, then traded up every few years, selling for at least 50 per cent more each time, taking on a bigger mortgage and a better house in a better area – then over the thirty years, by the year 2004, they could well have ended up as millionaires. Perhaps even £2 million by 2014. At least on paper and if they had lived and bought in London. By Carlisle standards, though, they had done very well.