Elsie

Elsie, a large, imposing matriarchal seamstress, is seated at her sewing machine. Her thick brown lisle stockings rolled down above the plaid slippered feet that waited on the treadle. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun. A few escaped wisps fall over her eyes. The Woodbine inserted in her heavy jowl left to burn down like a joss stick. Her breath rasping as the ash grows into a gravity-defying curve and the smoke turns the wisps yellow.

She is in the back room. A miserly fire in the grate is surrounded by a wooden mantelpiece, home to a chipped porcelain shepherdess, a clock that wheezes and asthmatically chimes the hours, a vase holding a single pheasant's tail feather, and some strangely staring spaniels.

Two large chairs, upholstered in the same bristly fabric that covers GWR carriage seating, brood by the fire.

A kettle whistles softly in the kitchen. A kitchen that smells of coal gas and cat food. The aroma enhanced when a large black saucepan boils for hours, making bran mash for the hens. There is a larder under the staircase with a zinc mesh-covered window keeping food cool and flies out.

Shelves of stony home-made plum or eerily green gooseberry jam. Higher up there are pickled onions, red cabbage, beetroot and fiery piccalilli.

Sometimes there is tinned fruit and condensed milk, bayoneted with a wooden-handled tin opener, a sticky dribble down the side of the tin. A bottle of Camp coffee and a tin of Rowntree’s cocoa, each destined to be boiled in milk to mark time. Coffee, morning elevenses, cocoa, nighttime, nine o’clock. Two china jugs for milk, each carrying a faded, well-washed, bucolic scene. Tops covered with cracked saucers.

The kettle steams on a grey and white enamelled gas stove. At the rear of the kitchen is “the lavvy” and a coal store. A shelf runs along a wall towards a porcelain sink, above which is the Ascot, which moodily explodes to deliver spurts of hot water. On the shelf stands a brown glazed pot, holding crystals of washing soda.

A bar of pale green Sunlight soap rests on the bristles of an upturned scrubbing brush, which, together with a packet of Reckitt’s blue, awaits Monday’s date with the galvanised Baby Burco boiler. In the backyard was a washboard, a zinc bath and a fearsome bottle green cast iron mangle, the spokes of its winding wheel picked out in red. The wooden rollers washed white.

In the cutlery drawer of the scrubbed wooden table was mismatched, well-used, bone-handled cutlery and separately, some matching fish knives and forks, which were never used, even on Fridays. A cream and green enamelled cabinet housed crockery, some chipped enamel white and blue basins, a bread bin and a tin for Elsie’s baking of eternal, everlasting, eponymous rock cakes.

Elsie baited her trap, “Our Keefy likes Granny’s rock cakes”.

Our Keefy trod warily around Elsie. She had once warned him, “Behave! Or I’ll thwack thy tweaker”, and whilst he wasn’t entirely sure what his tweaker was, he felt it best to leave it un-thwacked.