Headlong Into Pennilessness

[Sheffield History]

The Front Room - chapter from Michael Glover’s acclaimed ‘Headlong Into Pennilessness - lessons in life from ‘50s Sheffield’

If you had opened the door which separated the kitchen from the bottom of the stairs, you would have seen another door, just beyond the overloaded coat pegs you could always hide behind for a game, which led into the front room. This was the room which overlooked the street, the front room, the room reserved for best.

 

Best of what though? Best of almost nothing. Very little happened in this room until I was a teenager. At that point a gas fire replaced the old fire grate, and the grandmother clock - a wedding present for my mother - which had always stood in the corner, and which was the closest this house ever came to owning an object of value that, in future years, might even mature into an antique, moved upstairs onto the landing outside my uncle's back bedroom.

 

That clock sits in my sister's house in Holymoorside now, proudly maturing away. Like the bedrooms, this front room was miserably unheated, and therefore uninhabited for the most part when I was very small.

 

Except on social occasions. At Christmas, hazel nuts and walnuts and brazil nuts, all patiently waiting to be cracked open, would appear in a special bowl on a small side table, together with the nutcrackers, so that my grandfather could do his manly work of cracking them open.

 

One of his other manly jobs, as I think I've already mentioned, was to expertly carve every joint of beef that ever entered the house to make slices thin enough to see the light through.

 

There would also be a box of dates, and a bottle of sherry. This bottle of sherry never cut much of a dash. I felt that it was there on sufferance, as a nod in the general direction of what usually happened, in most families, at this time of year.

 

My mother Dorothy wholly disapproved of drink, and I seldom saw anyone actually opening this bottle or sampling the dangerous stuff. I do not remember it ever being surrounded by sherry glasses either. What were sherry glasses any road? It merely stood there, a stiff, defiant, ever present testimony to the fact that, well, this was Christmas, wasn't it, and any great feast such as this one generally entailed a modicum of alcohol.

And then there was the old upright piano, Dorothy's world.

 

On the top of this piano, at the far end on the left - I can still nearly touch it - there would be the special Christmas trifle in a high-sided, circular, faceted glass bowl, inches deep with tinned strawberries and tinned mandarins and custard, all mixed up together, and topped with thickly foaming whipped cream.

 

Looking through the thick glass of that bowl, down and down through the various layers of deliciousness, was a bit like swimming underwater, open-eyed, at the sea side. Except that trifle tastes a thousand times more delicious than salty sea water, ugh.

 

45 Coningsby Road, second on the right past the shop

Yes, if there was any ritual in that house, any rite which brought us together - and there was very little - it pivoted about the old upright piano, which Dorothy had been taught to play from childhood on, and which had been brought down from Crimicar Lane. And how she did play on these occasions! Never for very long though. It would not have done to go on for too long.

 

The sheet music would be kept inside the piano stool on which she sat, and out it would come, each double page spread held open on its fragile wooden rack attached to the back of the piano, with tiny spikes of metal that swung from side to side - if you made them do it - like car windscreen wipers.

 

Dorothy would play her favourites - Chopin's waltzes or Rachmaninov - with tremendous gushes of emotion, flinging her arms up and down the keyboard with uncharacteristic abandon, almost frightening in its intensity. It was as if, at last, she was being swept up into the romantic cinematic dream of a lifetime, some yearned for tryst with Robert Mitchum, as far away from the humdrumness and the dreariness of Coningsby Road as it was humanly possible to be.

 

We would all sit there, marvelling. Kenneth would be hunched slightly forward, gently stroking his moustaches or, from time to time, sniffing at his nicotine-stained finger ends. He was a bit of a smoker in those days. Not later though. Dorothy always played the same tunes, in exactly the same way, and we always marvelled at her, and clapped her furiously when she had finished.

 

And she always laughed, quite flightily, quite dismissively too, as we did so, as if to say: there's loads more where that came from, but you're not necessarily getting it.

 

What else was there in this room? Precious little. I remember it as featureless, odourless, a place generally lacking in human love and human attention. There was a built in cupboard beneath the window which, when opened, smelt powerfully of damp.

 

It was here that we kept, unloved, neglected, the only book which contained photographs of works of art I ever remember having been in that house. It was quite a grand book, red and leather-bound, large in format, but its cover and its damp, ripply-warped pages smelled of mildew.

 

Occasionally, intrigued by its presence there, I would leaf through its pages, some half glued together by the damp, of black-and white reproductions of sentimental Victorian narrative scenes. The world of art seemed so sad and so old-timey distant.

 

And then, at a certain point in the early 1960s, the character of that front room changed. It was no longer the cold place it had always been, set apart, seldom visited, used on ceremonial occasions only. What made all the difference? Gas and television.

 

A gold-coloured gas fire was installed with a gridded front through which you poked, at about seven o'clock in the evening, and even earlier if you wished to catch the evening news, sputtering Captain Webb Safety Matches while, simultaneously, twisting the metal key in the centre of the gas pipe that snaked along, dangerously, at floor level. All of a sudden, it would flame up and out with a mighty roaring BOOMF, and you would jump back, instantly warmed if not scorched - and delighted.

 

What an astonishing thing this was, instant heat that could be turned on or off at a metal tap!

 

And then, as if encouraged by the prospect of comfort, there also arrived a big, saggily comfy sofa in front of which to enjoy a small, heavy television, with a twelve-inch screen, which would give us programmes until such time as they stopped, quite abruptly, and we all stood up, stretching and yawning, with Uncle Ken looking at his watch, which he always wore facing the inside of his wrist.

 

And then he would turn it off, and we would all watch the display shrink down to a tiny, mesmerising white dot. One of the favourite rituals of my later teenage years was now in place, to sit there with my family, all happily bunched up together in the semi-dark, and watch Steptoe and Son, Hancock's Half Hour and Brian Rix's farces beamed directly to us, in north-east Sheffield, from the Whitehall Theatre, London. Marvels indeed.B

 

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