My mother was born in Bottesford Leicestershire on 30th August 1909. She was the second child and only daughter of William Arthur Robinson and Sarah Elizabeth Ellen (née Woodcock).
My grandfather owned The Vineries, a large nursery or market garden on the Belvoir Road. They owned two adjoining properties. For the next 26 years they lived in the larger of the two properties. My mother lived with them all the time, apart from when she went away to boarding school.
Her mother gave her an autograph book for her thirteenth birthday. It contains 158 pages, most of which had been used by the time of the last entry in March 1932.
She was always a shy person and somewhat lacking in self-confidence. Nevertheless, she went to boarding-school in Skegness. The school was called the Orient Girls’ School. This was situated in the Red House on the corner of what is now Park Avenue and Scarbrough Avenue and in the house next door nearer to the church. At that time the area north of Scarbrough Avenue had not been developed, but was known as The Jungle. The Red House was bombed during the Second World War and remained in a derelict state for many years after that.
When I was a little boy, she told me about the tides and currents on Skegness beach. I assume she learned much of this from the time when she was at school here. There were in those days (until they built the Lagoon Walk in the seventies) a series of creeks running from south to north across the beach. She explained that these always filled from the south with the incoming tide. Some of these were many feet deep. If one was at the water’s edge, it was possible for the creek to fill up behind you and to get cut off from the shore. In those circumstances, she said, one should always wade northwards to where the water was shallower. She also warned of areas of quicksand, which could form, particularly under the Pier, which in those days extended 300 yards or so into the sea.
She played hockey and cricket at school. She taught me to play cricket. She said that they always used to put her in the slips, because, they said, she was a good catcher. She said that she was terrified, but she had to catch the ball, because it hurt if she didn’t.
She collected postage stamps – I took over her collection when I was about eight or nine. When she was a girl, she met an old man who gave her a remarkable collection of stamps, which I still have.
The Victorian Penny Red stamps were produced in pages of 240 stamps. Each row was coded A to T, while each column was coded A to L. The collector had collected one stamp from each row and column, after it had been through the post, and re-assembled a complete set in a 20 page book, containing each stamp from AA to TL for the year 1857-58.
My mother was an accomplished artist. She went to art classes, but I don’t know where. I have photographed those of her early paintings which we still have. In the first 40 years of her marriage, she did no painting and only a few drawings, but we persuaded her to take up painting again in her late sixties.
She enjoyed tennis. Some of the early photos we have of her were taken with her wearing a tennis dress.
Dorothy Stapleton was her best friend. There are many photos of the two of them together. Dorothy gave her The Longfellow Birthday Book for her nineteenth birthday. It cost four shillings, which was a tidy sum in those days.
They had another friend called Alice Lovett, who lived a few doors away from the Vineries. Below is Alice’s contribution to my mother’s autograph book.
She made a scrapbook. I don’t know when she started it, but she was still making it, when I was a little boy. One of the last entries is of one of my sixth birthday cards (1945).
She did some work for her father at The Vineries, but never had paid employment for anyone else. She went to the Netherlands with her father on one occasion – the only time she went abroad until she came to see us in Brussels in 1978.
I believe she met my father, Hugh Mackley, once, but didn’t see him again for a year or more. The next time they met was at a dance in 1931. It was love at first (or second) sight. After that, they started “courting”. Their courtship lasted almost five years.
I don’t think either of them had another serious boy- or girl-friend. After my father died, his brother, George, said to me: They were very much in love, you know!
I don’t imagine that my Robinson grandparents thought a blacksmith journeyman was a very good match for their daughter.
My father confided to me one evening that, while they were courting, on at least one occasion, they slept in adjoining rooms, but we were very good, we didn’t do anything that we shouldn’t.
Her parents retired in 1935 and moved to a newly built house in Skegness – the house where we live now, 85 years later. The garden was laid out with crazy paving. When I was small she confided in me that one of the workmen was very naughty: he wrote her initials ‘MR’ in the crazy paving.
My father was still working in or around the Vale of Belvoir, but he got a job for part of the year working for a blacksmith on Roman Bank, Skegness.
It was not considered right to get married before the man could support his future wife financially. My father looked around for businesses where he could set up on his own – Leadenham in particular was mentioned. Eventually he acquired the business at Wymeswold at the end of 1935. They were married at Bottesford Church on 25 January 1936.
My mother played the piano. Her parents gave her a new piano, as a wedding present. The piano was transported by horse and cart from the Vale of Belvoir. Unfortunately, it was left overnight in the pouring rain and got soaking wet. She kept the piano for all the rest of her life. She had many piano tuners look at it, but some of the high keys never worked properly.
They went to live in the house in Wymeswold, where I was born. It must have been hard for my mother. She had been used to having enough money. Now she was married to a man who had acquired a business, with a very low customer base, but with a good potential. Even if he worked full-time, which I think he did most of the time, he sent out his bills quarterly and was paid when his customers thought fit to do so. My father admitted that on one occasion they had saved threepence for the church collection, but he spent some of it to buy Woodbines from the machine outside the Post Office.
She had difficulty conceiving a child. Eventually I came along after they had been “trying” for over three years. I was born at home. I visited the house with my father in the late nineteen-nineties. He told me then that I was born in the bedroom, which I had occupied when I was a boy. I had always assumed that I had been born in their bedroom, but my father said the doctor had insisted that they use the other bedroom, because it had a fireplace in it.
Not only had my mother been used to having plenty of money, she had also been used to having comfortable accommodation. The house in Wymeswold was three hundred years old. The staircase was narrow, the floors were uneven. Some of the walls were damp. There was an endemic problem with mice and beetles. Drinking water was obtained from a pump; other water came from a tank across the yard; both of these froze in winter. The lavatory was the other side of the garden gate, thirty yards from the back door.
There was a large garden at the rear of the house with a flower border. There was also a flower border at the side of the yard, which was mainly used otherwise for storing farm implements which had been left for repair and my father’s stock of iron. My mother looked after the flower garden and picked the apples from the two Bramley apple trees. These were carefully stored for much of the winter until they were turned into apple pies.
My mother was a traditional housewife. Most women did their washing on Mondays. For some reason my mother always did it on Tuesdays. That was a major operation. We had a separate wash-house. It had a fireplace and a built-in copper. The fire was difficult to light and I don’t ever remember it being lit. I do remember that in about 1946 she acquired a second-hand electric copper, which I believe she still had when I left home 12 years later. Once washed, the clothes were passed through a huge manual mangle, which had been placed on the left-hand side of the wash-room. It was very heavy and did not move very far. The clothes were then pegged out on one of the two long washing lines which crossed the yard. They were hoisted up by means of two wooden props.
Once the clothes were dry they had to be ironed. That was another major operation! We had a good fireplace in the living room with a built-in oven and, unlike all the other fireplaces in the house (there were four in total) it was relatively easy to light. The iron had to be heated on the fire and then put in a stainless steel case before the clothes were ironed. This was a delicate operation. While I am sure my mother was more careful than most, scorching was not excluded.
My mother was an excellent pastry cook. She made all sorts of puddings and pies, the latter served with delicious thick custard. Her apple pies, in particular, were very special. The same cannot be said of her savoury cooking, which, I am sorry to say, was very ordinary.
Cyril Hubbard, a local farmer, delivered milk most days. My mother had a set of blue willow pattern jugs, which she took out for him to fill with a ladle out of his churn. There were three bakers in the village. Mr Walker delivered our bread three times a week. There were also three butchers, plus two or three pork butchers. We bought our meat from Mr James. John James senior had a big farm. He told my father, when he first came to the village, that my father could not expect Mr James to bring his horses to be shod, if he didn’t buy his meat from them.
Mr Warden from Keyworth had a fish lorry. He came round just before dinner (mid-day) on Thursdays, so we often had fish and chips for dinner that day. The chips were beautiful: my mother would put about ten chips in a frying pan and cook them individually, turning them over, when they were brown on one side. She also made delicious pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.
Most Thursdays she caught the two o’clock bus to Loughborough. (Thursday was market-day there.) Quite often she went to the Midland bank to pay in any cheques which my father had received. She would look round the market, Woolworths and the clothes or hardware shops and then catch the ten past three or quarter past four bus back home.
Fridays was shopping day. I remember going with her when I was a little boy. She had two lists: one for the Post Office and one for Mr Bond, who had the shop opposite the school in the main square. The aim with both lists was to keep the bill to under £1. In those days before supermarkets, one turned up at the shop and waited to be served. If there were a couple of people in front of you – and that always seemed to be the case – the whole process could take an hour. That was particularly so with Mr Bond, who was slow anyway and spent a lot of time chatting to his customers. From the beginning of the war until well into the fifties, my mother, like everyone else, had to cope with the problems of food rationing. In particular, for some years the weekly butter ration was two ounces per person. This meant that we were allowed six ounces a week. Mr Bond decided that we could have half a pound one week and a quarter of a pound the next. This came to be known as “big butter week” and “little butter week”.
Sunday was a big day for her. She would spend most of the morning cooking the Sunday dinner. We always had a roast, usually beef, but also pork or mutton. We hardly ever had anything else: no turkey, duck, goose or guinea fowl. Chicken was a delicacy reserved for Christmas Day. I remember once having pheasant and the occasional rabbit (not on a Sunday and not after the myxomatosis epidemic in the early 1950s).
On Sunday evenings she would put on her Sunday best clothes and her fox fur and go to church, where she would always sit in the same pew with my father and me before I went in the choir. When it was still daylight we would go for a walk round the village after church. One evening when it was a dark and stormy night, we came down the hill opposite our house. The brook had overflowed and we couldn’t cross the road. We went a hundred yards upstream and tried to cross at a little footbridge. I don’t recall the precise sequence of events, but the result was that my father pushed my mother accidentally off the bridge into the cold brook, which was several feet deep at that point. My mother was very wet and not amused, but she survived, as did their marriage.
My mother joined the Women’s Institute and the Mothers’ Union. There were Whist Drives on Tuesday evenings in the Village Hall. My parents used to go to these, though I think they alternated, when I was young.
My mother was not politically active, but she had strong traditional conservative values, which she tried to pass on to me. Soon after the war, one of the four grocers’ shops in the village was taken over by the Long Eaton Co-op. I was not allowed to go there, because she did not agree with these socialist institutions.
In the long cold winter of 1947, there were coal and food shortages. According to my mother many of the problems could be laid at the door of the socialist government. At the tender age of seven, listening to her, I thought that Shinwell and Strachey, who were Ministers of Fuel and Food respectively, were some sort of demons. Strachey’s demonic status was confirmed when bread rationing was introduced and the price of bread went up to a shilling a loaf!
In August in the long hot summer of 1947 my mother took me on a Mothers’ Union outing to Hunstanton. When we got there the tide was in. We went to a café for lunch and afterwards I wanted to walk down to the water’s edge. By this time the tide was out. We walked a long way over the muddy beach, before giving up. I remember her saying that she wasn’t feeling well. She was admitted to hospital in Nottingham a few days later, with what I now believe to have been an ovarian cyst. The operation appeared to have gone well and she went to a Convalescent Home. There she sat out in the sun and got sunstroke. She told me afterwards that she was drifting away to a pleasant place, but a gentle voice said to her: “We’re not ready for you yet.” This reminds me that someone once told me that my mother was “an old spirit”, meaning that her spirit had been reincarnated many times. I am reporting that without further comment, other than to say that, in spite of her shyness, she did have an inner calm.
While she was in hospital the plight of a fellow patient made a big impression on her. According to my mother, this woman had eaten some watercress. This watercress had not been washed properly and had frogspawn on it. The frogspawn had hatched in her stomach and grown into tadpoles. My mother never ate watercress again; neither did I for another fifty years or so!
When my mother went into hospital, I went to stay with my aunt in Wollaton for a few weeks and went to school there. Then I came back to Wymeswold school before going to Skegness for a fortnight in October to stay with my mother’s parents. While we were there she received a letter from my father which had been posted in 1935, before they were married, twelve years earlier! Apparently she had been upset in 1935 that he hadn’t written to her.
Not long after that my mother had all her teeth out. She would have been under forty at the time. She had them out under gas. She said that she had a wonderful dream and then it was all over.
A big change occurred in 1952/53. Some years earlier my father had bought a plot of land for £100. He decided to build a new house and workshop on the land. He approached Warner Wootton, a local builder, and they drew up plans based on the design used for a number of other double-fronted detached houses in the village. My mother was heavily involved in the drawing up of the plans and was upset, when they were rejected by the planning authorities, who wanted something more modern. Eventually, however, my mother’s views prevailed and she got something like what she wanted. The house cost about £2400 and the workshop was £400.
Compared to the old rented house, this new house was bliss for my mother. It was situated on a T-junction and so had a pleasant view down the lane to the fields on the hill beyond. My parents were both very proud of the new house. There was a front garden, which my grandfather designed (not very successfully in my opinion). This had a lonicera hedge round it, which still hadn’t grown properly when they left it 16 years later.
The inside of the house was luxury compared to the old house. It had straight walls, a straight staircase, windows and doors which fitted; a bathroom and two toilets all with running water.
Her jet-black hair gradually turned grey when she was still in her forties.
My parents never had a holiday together in a hotel until 1959. Before that our holidays consisted of weekends with my grandparents; in particular we used to come to Skegness from Saturday to Tuesday for the Whitsun and the August Bank Holidays. In the long hot summer of 1959, they booked to go on a coach tour to Wales. It was the first time my father had been “abroad” and he was particularly excited about that. They thoroughly enjoyed it and the holiday was a great success.
The following year they went to the Isle of Wight. My father was surprised to go across the sea and still be in England. They enjoyed that enough to encourage them to book to go to Great Yarmouth the following year, but I don’t think they enjoyed that very much and they never stayed in a hotel after that until they came to see us in Brussels in 1978.
Other than their three holidays I have not so many memories of my mother between 1958 and 1969. I went off to University in October 1958, but came home for some of the holidays. I spent most of the time between April 1960 and September 1961 in France, including a whole year from September 1960, when I didn’t come back home at all. This included my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, which, to my shame, I completely forgot about, preceded by my twenty-first birthday, which, of course, my mother did not forget about! Nevertheless I exchanged weekly letters with my mother during the whole of the period I was in France. I also came back to live at home between September 1962 and February 1963.
I went back most weekends between February 1964 and February 1965: I had met my future wife, Jennifer, and came back to the East Midlands to see her most weekends, spending one night in Nottingham and one night in Wymeswold. Jennifer recalls going into the bathroom in the morning and seeing two pairs of false teeth staring at her. One Sunday in May or June, Jennifer and I had been staying with my parents. We went back to Nottingham and decided to get engaged. I telephoned my mother (from a call box!) to tell her the news and was somewhat taken aback when she burst out crying. We were married in Wymeswold church. Two years later her first grandson, Peter, was born and he too was baptised in Wymeswold church. We visited each other from time to time, but didn’t see each other very often between 1965 and 1969.
My grandfather Robinson had died in December 1957. Sometime after that my grandmother came to live with my parents. When my parents went on holiday in 1959, my grandmother was already living in a new bungalow she had had built in the field opposite our house. After some years she decided that she didn’t want to live in Wymeswold anymore. She owned the house in Skegness next door to the one they had retired to. This had been converted into two flats. The downstairs flat became vacant and she decided to go and live there. She started “nagging” my parents to go and live in the upstairs flat. One of my grandmother’s arguments was: “You won’t need to pay any rent and you won’t eat much!” Eventually they relented.
June 1969 must have been traumatic for my mother. At the beginning of the month, her only son (me) left England with his wife and her only grandchild to go to live in Africa. A couple of weeks later, she left her house, which she was very proud of, and all the friends that she had made in Wymeswold over a period of 33 years to go and live in a north-facing flat in Skegness, where she knew hardly anyone. During the following 18 months we corresponded each week: incredibly on a few occasions, I replied on a Monday to the letter she had sent me in reply to my letter written the previous Monday. We were in Swaziland. There was a Civil War in Nigeria (Biafra). On one occasion my mother expressed concern, whether we were affected by the war. I replied, somewhat sarcastically, that we weren’t, but wondered if they were as they were nearer to Nigeria than we were!
Her mother died just over a year after they went to live in Skegness. My parents then took over the whole of the house, without altering it. So there was a big upstairs living-room with a good open view; there were kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms downstairs and upstairs. There was no double glazing or central heating and so it was very cold in winter, especially the downstairs toilet.
We came back to England in November 1970 and went to stay with them for Christmas. We saw them two or three times a year for the next few years, either in Skegness or when they came, by coach, to visit us in Bushey in Hertfordshire. I have no particular memories of that period.
We then went to live in Belgium in 1978. My parents came to see us the first three years we were there. On the last occasion the young man in the travel agency persuaded them that they could “easily” do the journey in one day. So they set out from Skegness by train, changing at Grantham, King’s Cross and Victoria and then boarded the ship at Dover for the four-hour crossing to Zeebrugge. They looked old and exhausted, when we met them off the boat. That was the last time my mother came to visit us – anywhere!
Towards the end of the seventies, we bought my mother a painting set. It was not painting by numbers, but a board with an outline and written guidance on how to create a picture from the outline. We did not think she needed that, but it did get her back into painting for the first time in fifty years.
In December 1981, at the age of 42, I decided I wanted to take up painting. I had never been good at art. I will rephrase that: for the one year that I did art at Grammar School, I was bottom of the class and hated it! We drove over to Skegness from Belgium for Christmas and Jennifer gave me the set of oil paints, which I had asked for. The following evening, my mother and I sat down together and she taught me how to paint my first picture. Jon still has that picture: it is one of the best I have ever done (or nearly done: some of the best touches were my mother’s).
We came back to England in the summer of 1983. We came over to Skegness for a few days. One day we drove over to Tattershall Castle. That was to be our last outing together. We moved to our new house in Watford just before Christmas. We invited my parents to come and stay with us in February 1984. A few days before they were due to come my father told me she was not well enough to travel. She was admitted to Pilgrim Hospital the following month and died on Palm Sunday, April 15th 1984. There were daffodils flowering in the gardens we could see out of her hospital window. I was holding her hand when she died.
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