Jellied Eels and Zeppelins (13 page)

I only had the central heating put on in the 1990’s, ‘cos I couldn’t keep getting on my hands and knees to make the fire every day.’

‘We got the pigs roughly when we finished the house. Someone Joe knew had some, which he sold to us. Joe thought he could maybe make a living out of keeping animals on our two acres. We got more and more animals and in the end we kept 150 pigs, 100 laying hens, 100 fattening cockerels, 100 turkeys as well as rabbits, ducks, a goat, a dog and a tame pheasant called Joey. Joe had a boiled duck’s egg every morning for 25 years.

Just a few months after starting the piggery, we lost most of our stock to swine fever. Joe went with a friend to the market and bought six piglets there. Unfortunately, they had the fever and that infected the majority of the other pigs. When the inspector ordered them to be shot, I went next door to Mum and Dad’s and put my fingers in my ears. We didn’t get any compensation, but we re-stocked and fortunately were not affected by the foot and mouth outbreak during the 1960’s.

We used to send up to one dozen pigs off for slaughter at a time - depending on how many was ready. The slaughter men allowed you what they called ‘the pluck’ - that was the lungs and the heart and all that - reasonably cheaply. And we had the pigs’ heads as well. The pigs were weighed and we were sent how much they were worth. If we wanted a dead pig, we marked it with special ink. We used to hang the carcass in the doorway. Once the meat was cut up, I used to weigh it and mark who it was to be sold to - this was mostly at Christmas time. We used to get orders from Cousin Flo’s firm. My friend, who taught me to drive, had the pig’s head and she made brawn with it. It was beautiful. She used to bring us three of four pots of gorgeous brawn, which we ate with bread and butter, ham and tomatoes and all that. It was lovely.

Two days before Christmas, Joe and I used to load up our van and drive to London to sell the meat. Once, we were returning to Doddinghurst at about three in the morning, when we were stopped by a policeman in Woodford Green. He asked what we had in the back of the van. We told him that there was a pig’s head. He didn’t believe us at first but after he’d checked us out, he let us go refusing our offer of the pig’s head!

I used to like the piglets, but once they went into the second sty to be fattened up, I didn’t want to know them. I did however, become very fond of one piglet, which I named Tina. Tina was the runt of a litter, so I kept her indoors for a while to feed her by hand. I even house-trained her. She used to love chocolate buttons, which she was often given by campers who came to buy eggs from us. We kept her for breeding.

One sow, which was pregnant when we got her, had 24 piglets and was only able to feed 12 at a time, so I fed the others every two hours with dried milk and milk from my goat, Nan, who would only allow me to milk her. She always used to give me a kiss when I went to feed her. Cousin Les had come to see me on his birthday and was helping me with Nan. She thought that she would give him a kiss too. He thought that she was going to butt him, stepped backwards and fell into the brook! He was soaked!

We bought our own boar a couple of years after starting our business. The boar usually served the sows twice a year. When close to giving birth, we put the sow into a furrowing crate, so that she didn’t crush the piglets. We stayed with her while she was giving birth in case there were any complications. We lost very few piglets.

Nan, Ethel’s goat

Joe had a very clean mind and would never swear nor tell a dirty joke in front of me. He didn’t think it right for a woman to see the boar and sow together, so I had to stand with my back to them after I’d helped him get the boar into the stall. When Joe said ‘ready’, I had to unbolt the door to let the boar out, but on one occasion, this big sow wanted to follow ‘im. She caught Joe unawares and charged right between his legs, so the sow was facing one way and Joe the other. She rushed out of the stall, looking for the boar and poor Joe had his fingers scraped on the silver birch tree.

My chap was six feet two, but that sow took ‘im clean off his feet. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen and I couldn’t do anything for laughing, I just couldn’t, but he cried ‘Don’t just stand there, help me!’ He eventually fell off just near the house, but he wasn’t pleased at all, I can tell you!

We fed the pigs with Tottenham Pudding
(the product of boiling lots of kitchen waste - including potato peelings and pea shells - from London
) - like a lump of black dough stuff, in a drum it was, we used to buy it in. The chickens loved it too. It made them lay lovely tasty eggs.

We used to get the swill from a school in Brentwood, an old People’s Home and from shops in the High Street - vegetables and peelings - and leftovers that farmers were unable to sell at market. We’d put it into a huge coal-fired boiler and boiled it all up, and then it went into a massive tank as big as my table. When cooked, we chopped it up and, while it was cooking, oh dear, did those pigs holler! They smelt it and loved it. And they didn’t ‘alf do well on it!

When they (
The Board of Agriculture
) wouldn’t let farmers make their own pigswill, because of the risk of disease, we used to buy in special dried food from the very old established firm, Marriage’s of Chelmsford (
W.& H. Marriage & Sons Ltd. established in 1824
).

When we had chickens before the war in the back garden, we gave them corn in the afternoons and middlings in the morning, nice and hot, to make them lay well.

I used to pull ‘em (
the chickens and turkeys
) standing out in the conservatory in the bitter cold, while Joe sat in front of the fire ‘cos he didn’t like the smell! A van used to come a few days before Christmas to take the birds alive and, after they were killed and plucked, I had to pull them (
remove the giblets
). My fingers would turn blue with cold sometimes when the birds were frozen during the winter. The first time, I tried to pluck them myself and stayed out in the shed all night. But it was too much for me, so after that, the dead birds were put into a steam machine to remove all the feathers. Good idea that was.

All the dead poultry used to come back here. We would hang them in the shed and that’s how they used to get frozen, if it was a cold night. I weighed ‘em - some people wanted a small one, others a big one - and labelled ‘em and charged half a crown for pulling ‘em. Some of our customers didn’t want their chicken or turkey pulled so I marked those to make sure that I got that right - ‘Pulled’ or ‘Not pulled’, see. We mostly received orders for birds at Christmas time.

I would also load the basket of my bicycle with dead and skinned rabbits and take them into Brentwood to sell. I may not have always liked rearing these animals for slaughter, but it was our living. Joe wanted to be his own guvnor, so I just got on with it.

But times were hard then. When people came in for a cup of tea, I worried about how far my quarter of tea was going to stretch. You know what I used to have to do when they’d all gone? I drained the teapots, put all the dregs on a tin tray, put the tray on the stove to dry out the leaves and use them again. I couldn’t afford to buy another quarter of tea. That went on for years before I got my pension. I never ‘ad no electric kettle or anything. I always boiled up the kettle on the Aga stove, which I bought from Scotland for £37 in 1952.

I had to make do with £2 a week. As well as a quarter of tea, I bought 2 lbs of sugar, as my chap always liked two teaspoons of sugar in his cup of tea and would not go without. I cooked myself a small dinner and gave him a larger one. Some days, I never had a dinner at all, but would always have a little one on a Sunday. I would have whatever I could find. Sometimes, it would just be a slice of bread and jam. I baked my own bread, because it was cheaper and used to make about 16 lbs of damson jam, which would last us all through the winter.

When Joe and a friend used to collect the swill for the pigs at closing time in a horse and cart, the baker would sometimes fill up the egg basket with the cakes from his shop window that he hadn’t sold that day, so I saved a bit of money then. I would pick out the best ones for us and the rest would be given to the pigs.

I used to earn £1 for doing four hours cleaning at a shop, but packed that up when Mum got ill. After she died, I got another job cleaning for a lady, who had arthritis. I used to earn £1 for perming her hair too and I earnt a little more from hairdressing for the neighbours. When we had the phone put on, I paid for all my own calls and used to save for one pair of stockings a month.

We couldn’t afford a lot, so when I needed to have my teeth out, ‘cos I wanted a full set of dentures, a retired dentist came round one Sunday morning and pulled them out - after I’d had a local anaesthetic - sitting at the kitchen table. As each one came out, he placed it in a bowl then tipped the whole lot down the brook! Afterwards, I cooked me roast dinner, chopped it up fine and ate the lot!! He did the same with Joe’s teeth and Joe then went and mucked out the pigs!’ (
The brook is unofficially named Elvin’s Brook - not just because of the teeth episode, but because it is on land bought by Joe’s father
).

One extremely sad incident that Ethel remembers vividly, occurred during the early 1960’s while the couple were working on their smallholding:

‘I was in the garden one morning, when a man I knew who was out walking his dog, came round (Joe was seeing to the pigs). ‘Ethel’, he said looking worried, ‘There’s a man lying in the road. I know he’s dead, because I’ve seen enough dead men during the First World War.’ My next door neighbour was just about to take her two daughters to school and I didn’t want them to see the body lying in the road, so I went indoors to fetch a blanket to cover him with. And they didn’t see me, ‘cos I dashed out of the way quick. The man was lying in the road beside a delivery van. He had died of natural causes. It was very cold and I believe he had had a heart attack. We phoned the police and a woman police officer came and arranged for the body to be taken away.

I didn’t know where the man lived, only where he worked, because of the van. I didn’t hear any more and a fortnight went by, so I went into the shop and I asked the manager to give the man’s wife a message: ‘Please tell her that I was so sorry how her husband was found, but that she could rest assured that he died in a nice quiet place and that the birds were singing.’

We had to sell off the animals in the 1980’s when we couldn’t make much money out of them, because of having to buy in their food. It was a blessing in disguise really, ‘cos it wasn’t long afterwards that Joe became ill (
Joe contracted cancer and died in 1992
) and wouldn’t have been able to look after them and I couldn’t have done it on my own.’

‘Joe and I had a Dalmatian called Bill with us in Doddinghurst. He had been bombed out in Wanstead during the Second World War and had been running loose for about three weeks. He had been seen scavenging for food in dustbins and was so traumatised by the bombs that he wouldn’t let anybody catch him. Eventually, Joe’s friend, Jimmy, managed to get hold of him - by putting linseed oil on his hands (he said that a vicious dog shouldn’t bite you if you did this). I made the dog some green trousers out of an old plaid skirt to stop him from licking his wounds after he had been treated at the PDSA Hospital. When the dog escaped again, we went round asking people if they had seen a Dalmatian with green trousers on!

It was soon after the war, that Jimmy asked Joe and I if we would like to keep Bill, as he couldn’t any longer. So we took him in and, as he had been so frightened of the bombs, we would bring him to Doddinghurst every Guy Fawkes night, to escape the fireworks.

Ethel and Joe’s dog ‘Bill’

There was a paper shop next to the ironmonger’s in Walthamstow. One morning, I was walking Bill past the shops, when a man, parking his car close to the kerb, drove straight over a milk bottle. The bottle exploded, scattering glass everywhere. One piece just missed my lower leg, but another shard shot straight in Bill’s right eye. There was blood everywhere. The car driver took him to the PDSA practice at Hoe Street, but the next day he was referred to their hospital at Woodford Green, where Doctor White advised that Nelson, as he called him (!), be kept in. He stayed for a fortnight. Fortunately, his eye was saved, but he did have a big white scar and lost some sight in that eye. I brought ‘im home on the bus, which was a bit of consolation for ‘im, because he loved buses. We found out that his original owner had been a bus driver.