Roscoe’s Farm is no more. My childhood home, where I lived for the first 23 years of my life now goes by the name of Rustic Oak Farm with huge signs excitedly announcing the change. The new name has none of the history nor prompts any of the questions that passers-by will ponder – who was Roscoe? does he (or his descendents) still live there? In fact, Roscoe’s Farm took its name from my paternal great-grandparents, who were called Roscoe, although I understand that on older documents, the building was recorded as Dobcross Farm, but throughout the 20th century, it was known as Roscoe’s Farm.
In 1948, my dad and mum bought part of the row of three cottages for £300 and started their family there later that decade. Although outwardly there appeared to be three cottages, only two of them were habitable. The third, constructed from stone was a later addition to the first two brick dwellings and since the 1940s was only used as a barn. The building did have glazed windows, but only had an upper floor in the front half of the building, this being accessed by a ladder. Of the eight rooms in the two cottages, my dad’s mum (Elizabeth Kellett, née Roscoe) lived in two of the downstairs rooms, and in later years, my mum’s dad moved into a room above. After I was born in 1959, the four bedrooms held Mum & Dad, (May, born in 1926 and Bill, born in 1914), me and my two brothers (Frank – 1949 and Tony – 1950), my two sisters, (Margaret – 1951 and Pauline – 1953) and my maternal grandfather (William Cannon). There was a connecting door between the properties on the upper floor, but not downstairs. To visit Grandma it was necessary to leave the back door, walk along the flagged yard and come in through the other back door. I cannot recall the exact layout of these downstairs rooms, but I remember seeing a large range and a kitchen, which had a cold tap and a slopstone, although I can’t visualise just what was where. The floor comprised stone flags and was covered with rag rugs. In my mind, the whole room has now taken on an appearance of a museum, since I was only seven when my grandmother passed away.
I now only have vague recollections of the two grandparents who knew me, these comprising a small montage of scenes and part-recalled conversations. I never knew my other grandparents. Dad’s father died in 1920, when Dad was only five, so my dad barely knew him. Mum’s mother died of cancer in the mid 1950s. I recall taking a walk with Granddad alongside the locks of the Leeds-Liverpool canal. We were talking about submarines, and he told me that a submarine was far too big to fit in a lock, and for years, each time I walked past a lock I’d remember this fact. I also remember him promising to take me up in an aeroplane when I was older. In his defence, he may have simply predicted that I would fly in an aeroplane in the future, not that he would actually take me. It would have been a rash promise for a 70‑odd-year-old with very little money to have made in the mid 1960s.
I never recall my grandma ever leaving the house, not even to go to church. I may be wrong, but that’s my recollection. Her role appeared to be to annoy my mum by giving me a treacle butty whenever I asked for one, often just before my tea. She would also answer her back door whenever I knocked and offered to the ‘buy’ whatever imaginary goods I would be selling from the little boot of my trike. Thinking about this now, she must have spent much of her time standing by the door, because she always answered quickly, and she didn’t walk too well. I have a clear memory of returning home from school in 1967 to find the curtains drawn and then being told the dreadful news that Grandma had died. Granddad also died quietly in his sleep the following year leading to considerable changes to the living arrangements in the next few years.
In 1967, with just their own family living in the property, my dad took out a further fifteen-year mortgage (he was 53 at the time) and employed a local architect and builder to ‘modernise’ the house. The initial estimate was £2662. I was too young to realise at the time, but neither the architect nor builder would pass muster in today’s climate. The proposed design, even for the 60s, was woeful, and the building work was, at best, shoddy. With no thought of ‘future-proofing’ (admittedly not even a known phrase in those days), each room was equipped with minimal electrical outlets: each bedroom had just a single socket and a single ceiling light rose. Windows were enlarged, and single glazed wooden-framed replacements fitted. These were very cold and draughty, and showed signs of rot very soon after installation. The flagged floors were covered with a layer of asphalt throughout the property which revealed a further problem in that the two cottages had different floor heights, and so a small ramp was laid between each room. Every visitor to the house stumbled over this ramp each time they walked through.
I still get angry on behalf of my parents to this day when I think about the dreadful things that they put up with on that design and building work. It was partly because they had very little money to afford better quality, but also because they were too naïve to know what could be done on a limited budget, and there was no-one around to advise them. I have the impression that when a professional, such as an architect, told them anything, they believed it absolutely, without any questions asked.
The house was in turmoil for a long time (perhaps 6 months?) and we lived in it throughout. The entire family were employed to chip off the pebble-dashed render to the front of the property using hammers and chisels. This was our evening occupation for weeks. I have recollections of climbing a ladder to bed, and the upstairs bedroom having floorboards missing. How was this allowed? Eventually we had a four bedroomed house for seven of us. Downstairs, there was a living room, lounge, dining room and kitchen. In the living room, we had a mural on the wall above the fireplace which was about four feet tall and six feet across. It was a scene of the seashore and became a talking point for all visitors. (This decorative feature pre-dated Hilda Ogden’s by some years, in case you were wondering) The lounge was fitted with a distinctive carpet which had a very dark base colour with a pattern of huge colourful roses, each about 18 inches across. Dad loved his roses, and I can see why my parents were so attracted to it.
My dad was a very good gardener, but not so good as a handyman. He loved tinkering and making things, although his joinery skills were rudimentary. The items he made generally worked, but were very rough and ready. His phrase “it just needs sandpapering” became a catchphrase for the whole family. In 1974, Dad had a great idea for the dining room which worked really well. We owned an old drop-leaf table, to which he decided to fit a wooden circular top, about five feet in diameter. Thankfully, he had the wisdom to ask a local joiner cut out the plywood to his specification, and fit it with dowels to locate it onto the table legs. I remember helping to glue the brown wood-effect Formica onto it. The table gave excellent service for many years, only being discarded when Mum moved to a small bungalow in 1997.
There was barely any heating in the house apart from a modern solid fuel stove in the living room which also heated the water. This could only burn very expensive smokeless fuel, and had a small door which contained a number of vertical glass panels which were very delicate and broke very easily. The glass panels were rectangular, about 1.5” x 8” and it was stupidly difficult to fit replacements. Dad seemed to be forever cycling to Chorley to buy very expensive spares (they cost 5/6 – 27.5p in today’s money) and then struggling for what seemed like hours trying to fit them. The lounge was a large room, perhaps 16 feet square, and was almost open plan with the dining room until a room divider was fitted between the two rooms in 1969. An open doorway connected the dining room to the kitchen. This arrangement made the lounge very cold and draughty, especially since neither the kitchen nor dining room had any form of heating. The heating in the lounge was a simple two-bar electric fire with a convector heater. The fire had very little effect on raising the room temperature, so we rarely used that room between October and March.
None of the bedrooms had heating apart from a portable paraffin heater. I cringe when thinking about this now, particularly of one time when I shared a bedroom with Frank and Tony. I had gone to bed as normal, but at some stage, probably quite early in the night, I’d wet my bed. I was ashamed to tell my mum, so I took off my pyjama bottoms and draped them over the paraffin heater to dry. I then jumped back into (a presumably wet) bed and promptly fell asleep once more. I remember waking up later in the night with Frank muttering and cursing to himself, having come into the bedroom (or perhaps been woken up?) to find a pair of smelly, urine-soaked pyjamas steaming over a lit paraffin stove. Once the material had dried off, the pyjamas would almost certainly have burst into flames with dreadful consequences. Frank must never have told our parents, because I don’t remember getting into trouble over this. The paraffin heater would usually have been extinguished as soon as the last person was in bed, and on a mid-winter morning, the bedroom would be close to freezing. Very often beautiful ice patterns formed on the insides of the windows, but their beauty went unappreciated at the time. In the morning, it was someone’s first job to run downstairs and light the fire in the living room so that there would be some hot water and a little warmth for breakfast.
For several years I had a recurring nightmare involving Frank. The dream was that he had walked into the bedroom and received a fatal electric shock when he touched the light switch on the wall. Thinking rationally in later years, I suspect that I must have been woken by Frank one night as he entered the bedroom and turned on the light, and the image of him being suddenly illuminated must have become etched into my sub-conscious.
In April 1970 we had a telephone installed (at a cost of £18 19s 6d) with the number Chorley 6956. The grey telephone was in the living room (we had no hall), and rested on a table made from the iron frame of a Singer sewing machine. Whenever the telephone rang (we rarely rang other people), someone would walk round to pick up the phone, whilst another person would go to the TV to lower the volume. Think of all the exercise we got before remote controllers! We were taught to answer the phone by saying “Chorley 6956”, as if that would help the caller in any way. In the 1970s, everyone seemed to answer the telephone that manner: why did we do that and not just say “hello”? Telephone calls were never private, with the device being situated in the living room, and so there could be no secrets.
1971 was an unhappy year for me, and I suspect more so for my parents. Although I was a bit young to fully appreciate why, I could certainly sense the unhappiness. In 1971, not long after all the work been finished on the house improvements, my siblings began to leave home. In February of that year, Frank married Denise and moved out. During the summer, Margaret had a serious fall-out with Mum & Dad because they suggested she should wait a few years before marrying Roy, and save up for a house. This suggestion wasn’t well received, and in August, she moved out anyway and stayed with Roy’s parents in Coppull until they got married on a cold and snowy day in November. Meanwhile, Pauline had decided to join the Royal Navy, and so in September she moved out to Reading (HMS Dauntless at Burghfield Common) for initial training, then in October to her first posting to Chatham in Kent. Tony was still at home, but I rarely saw him since he kept very different hours to the rest of us. So within eight months, seven became four.
The family were invited to attend Pauline’s passing out parade after her initial training, and Mum, Dad, Tony and I travelled to Reading for this. The family didn’t have a car but Tony drove a red Thames 15cwt van. It was an interesting journey in the van since it only had two front seats, and Tony had thrown some cushions in the rear where Mum would sit, in the dark, and unable to see outside. I sat on what we called ‘the hot seat’, which was actually the steel cover over the engine. (The van was forward control, so the engine was located inside the cab, between the two front seats.) I had a cushion to sit on, because the cover was hard and did get quite hot, but there were no seatbelts. We set off at 4am, but in 1971 the M6 only reached as far as Walsall, and so we had to drive through Birmingham with unsuitable maps, seeking out the A34 on the other side of the city. We got hopelessly lost, and Tony, in exasperation, finally announced, “I’m fed up of this. I keep seeing signs to Cannock, so that’s where we’re going.” It was only after a further half an hour that my dad found Cannock on the map and said, “Cannock’s in the north: it’s the wrong way”. We arrived at Reading at 11:15, an hour late, but just in time to see the parade. I still remember very clearly the journey south, although I cannot recall the journey home later that day. We drove home via Evesham to visit relatives there and to give Tony a break from the driving.
Roscoe’s Farm was a smallholding while I grew up. We had five acres of land across two fields. One field was adjacent to the house and garden, and I regularly used to play in there, whilst the other field (we called it the meadow), was across the road and backed onto the canal. At some point during most years, sheep were grazed in the field, although these belonged to our neighbour, Tom Schofield. In the 1960s, Dad kept hens and ducks, and on one occasion, pigs. I remember the pigs very well, although I must have been only about seven or eight. I have memories not only their smell (which I still love), but also that of the mash they used to eat. Mum would boil up bran or oats along with potato peelings, and any other vegetable trimmings, and leftover food and serve it to the pigs, pouring it into a trough using a half-round steel ladle with a wooden handle. I remember two pigs, although there may have been more. Once they had gone, Mum wouldn’t have any more because sending them to market upset her too much. Apparently, rather than receiving payment in cash for the animals, we were reimbursed in the form of some of the butchered meat, which mum couldn’t eat, knowing where it came from.
Dad grew all our fruit and vegetables for much of the year. We always had potatoes, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, peas and beans, lettuce, onions, rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrants and plums. All the soft fruit was bottled or made into jam. Mum got into trouble with a washing machine engineer once. She had taken out a service contract on the washing machine and a maintenance engineer would come regularly to carry out the service. On this particular day, he came unexpectedly, and found Mum using the washing machine to sterilise jars prior to bottling fruit. Dad had made a wooden contraption to fit over the agitator, so that the bottles could be stacked in and the machine’s integral water heater did the rest. The engineer was stuck for words, and joked with my mum about it for years afterwards.
Food was simple, and offered on a take it or leave it basis. We were given a meal plated up, and we ate it. There was no choice. I don’t remember ever leaving food, even though I didn’t always like everything that was put in front of me. There is now no food that I dislike. Mum had become quite predictable by the time I was approaching my teenage years. I remember coming home one night and saying, “Oh, I love Thursdays, it’s pasties for tea!” and Mum was surprised that I knew what we were having. I find it hard to believe that Mum never realised that I was able to spot a weekly meal plan, but she always maintained she’d never noticed until I pointed it out. The pattern generally went Sunday – chicken dinner (one of our own chickens); Monday – soup made from leftovers from Sunday; Tuesday – usually ham, served with something hot in winter or a salad in summer; Wednesday – hotpot; Thursday – left over hotpot made into pasties; Friday – fish and chips. Notice that all the meals had potatoes as a staple, and all would be served with a large plate of white bread and butter on the table. Mum later joked that she’d peel 5lbs of spuds, and only then start thinking of what to make for tea.
Most weeks, Dad would catch a hen that had stopped laying, knock it out with a lump of wood, cut its throat and let it bleed into the outside drain. While still warm, the hen would then be hung up over the wheelbarrow in the barn and plucked. Half an hour later, it would be handed over to Mum who would clean it out and pop it in the oven for roasting. I never became sentimental about the hens: they just provided eggs for a few years, then meat at the end. For a while it was my job to feed them and collect the eggs each day. I was always a bit nervous about taking the eggs from the broody hens, since they wouldn’t move and you had to reach under them to pick up the eggs. They would often peck during this operation, and whilst it didn’t hurt, it made me jump, and for a seven year-old, it was quite nerve-wracking.
Dad would spend all weekend in his garden. I rarely used to help, but whenever I did, he was always so grateful, even though I’m sure he never really needed me there. I think he was simply glad to see that I was making an effort, and he would have enjoyed spending time with his son. It’s only now as a parent that I can see what joy he would have gained from this. In later years, Mum was a keen advocate of the freezer, having first bought one following a visit to the Preston Guild in 1972. For many years we had two freezers, and at one point, we might possibly have had three. There was certainly a huge chest freezer in the barn. It was about 6’ long x 2’ wide x 2’ 6” tall, and I was always nervous about tumbling in it and becoming trapped. We also had a large upright freezer, or possibly two. Mum had a friendly butcher from Chorley market who knew that we had large freezers, and often on Saturday evening after the market closed, he would pop round with bags of meat to sell to Mum at a substantial discount (typically 30%). This was perfectly good meat that he hadn’t sold on his stall that day and he didn’t want to waste it. Mum would freeze it and it would last us several weeks until David (the butcher) next had a surplus. I suspect that he knew of several women around the region who were willing to help him in this way. Mum never knew when he would arrive, nor what meat she was getting, but she didn’t seem to mind: she could cook anything and make it into delicious meals. If the freezers weren’t full of meat, they were full of frozen fruit and vegetables from the garden.
