The Sweethearts by Lynn Russell

Author:Lynn Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

9

Dorothy

Dorothy Birch was born in Heslington Road in York in 1936, a damp, low-lying area of the city where the autumn mists seemed to hang over the area for days on end. She was still only a baby when the family home and the whole of their street were condemned under the slum clearance programme. They were crumbling terraced houses, in a desperate state of repair and overrun with vermin, so the family was moved to Clifton, where they were building new houses. ‘I have a picture of me sitting on my auntie’s knee,’ she says, ‘and in the background you can see them still building the houses behind us, so they must have been moving people in as fast as they could, even while they were still building the rest.’

Her mother died suddenly in 1938 when Dorothy was just two years old, and she has no memories of her at all. Her father, James, worked shifts at Rowntree’s in the Melangeur department, and even though Dorothy cannot have been more than three at the time, she can clearly remember waiting for him and seeing him coming down the road on his way home from work – it is her earliest memory. She was still only three when war broke out and her dad had to go off to war, leaving behind Dorothy and her sister, who was five years older, and hoping that their grandmother – her dad’s mother – would be able to look after them.

For the next six years they were brought up by their grandmother. ‘We were fortunate,’ Dorothy says, ‘because she and the rest of the family all rallied round and helped each other to look after us.’ A lot of their clothing was hand-me-downs or second-hand, but if they needed shoes, their grandmother made sure they always got new ones, not second-hand, though they were usually plimsolls, which were all their grandmother could afford.

Her grandparents’ house was small, with ‘a right houseful of people living in it’, Dorothy says. ‘We were sleeping three and four to a bed, though my grandmother and granddad had a room to themselves. I was only little and I slept in the middle of our bed with my big sister on one side and my cousin on the other. We shared that room and that bed for years and as I got squashed between the two bigger girls or got woken when they snored or tossed and turned, I used to dream of having a room of my own one day.’

There was never a time when Dorothy’s grandmother and granddad didn’t have a house full of kids. Even when some of their own children grew up and moved away, there were already grandchildren to take their place. Of their own children, their son Arthur, Dorothy’s uncle, was in the Army, serving in the Black Watch regiment, and he had married and was living away, but his brother still lived at Dorothy’s grandmother’s with his wife and children. Dorothy and

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