Majorie's story

I worked in a shop and it was very ordinary. I didn’t want to do it, but that’s how it ended up. There was a posh shop called Francis, and I used to think, I’d like to serve in there. Did anybody ever want to do anything interesting? I suppose that I did. Many people fancied me and I suppose I fell in love once or twice!

They talked about feeding your head, but nothing happened. I grew up in Grangetown near Middlesbrough. It was a little, very ordinary shopping place. There wasn’t much open to us. No one was taking anyone on. It was a period of recession, so there wasn’t much that you could do. Nobody had any money. You would only work if you got a certain amount of pay. Nobody had any money to think about teaching children like me to work.

There were two of us in the family, only two years between us. If they took one on they had to take the other too. You know, to be fair. There was nothing really but shop work, serving in shops. There is a limit to how many people they can employ to serve in the shops. We went into service when we were younger. There was no work. If anyone had any work it was meagre rates and poor pay. Our parents seemed happy to look after us. They didn’t push us out to work, as there wasn’t any. They were happy for us to stick together and take what work there was. My bothers and dad worked in the steelworks. There wasn’t work for women. If there was a family of boys and girls, the boys worked and the girls had to work at home or go further a field. You were expected to kill yourself.

There wasn’t work for women except for going away into service, but they didn’t get much work out of us because we weren’t trained. They paid us very small wages. I don’t remember it much. It’s something that wasn’t important. There wasn’t the money floating around like there is now. People were satisfied with very little.

For entertainment, the radio came to our house. We paid about a shilling to listen to it.  Back in those days, there weren’t bathrooms. You had to get washed in the house, but in the family you had to share the water. You didn’t have the money to chuck about. Whatever money came into the house, it had a certain set of legs.