Mother's culture

Here we are as children, doing as children do at parties -sausages on sticks, and cheese and pineapple I shouldn't wonder. This picture is taken on North Hull Estate. It was a long way from our house, and I was always very aware that all the house sort of looked the same. And not like ours. Even though aunt Joan had a big garden (we didn't) I knew that this was a corporation house. It was something about the colour of the doors. They were mostly the same colour. I was bandying about a theory the other day (mostly in my own head) that you learn a lot about your culture via your mother. The thought was born out of one of the respondents of my survey, who said that culturally he felt he was his mother's culture, but his class was determined by his father. Does this stem from the fact that culture revolves around food, and the things you learn with regard to it in the early stages of life - beliefs, values, attitudes, customs, institutions and social relations (and class was always your father's job)? Obviously it is more complex than that - but I am struck by the fact that the purity of my mother's class is never disputed - (and recall that if your mother was jewish for the Nazis then so were you no matter what else was thrown into the mix.) In the time this relates to - my life story anyway, the 1970s, mothers really did spend most of their time with you, choosing what you wore, what books you read (if any), and generally taking care of you, including all of your interests and establishing how things were to be and ensuring that you adopted the rules. My mother was a bit of a harridan so there was no transgressing what she said without consequence. And the consequence? Often she would say, "Just you wait til your father gets home" and this was usually enough. My mother was quite interested in us being occupied. That was why we went to the guides, and the swim club (not to learn to swim from teachers - for some random reason we went to play as part of the railway man's children's night. We weren't, and never have been railway man's children so I have no idea why this was allowed, but we certainly benefitted from it), Tuesday club and Sunday school (and because they handed out free cakes, and my sister and I liked that.) We went to the panto every year because of my dad's work. Things are evidently not this straight forward though because some people don't live with their parents, or indeed their mother... but I suppose so far as I am concerned with regard to a lot of what I learnt, my mother was central. I have often thought that my father only really came into full focus as I got older (though I was and probably still am, a daddy's girl.)
The second picture is of my grandparents, standing outside their back way. The entrance with the towel leads to the outside/inside toilet on one side and the kitchen on the other side. Their toilet always either had newspaper or izal medicated hanging behind the door - and it was freezing in there even in the height of summer. It wasn't the first choice in terms of toilet, and I think we waited until we got to Aunt Joan's (who lived round the corner) to make use of her facilities. I loved my grandmother and grandfather's house. He sat in a big chair, and beside him was the latest Guiness book of records, something he bought more regularly in the later years of his life. He loved that book. The fire was usually blazing, and above it there was a mirror, reflecting into another mirror opposite so that you head and face when you looked in one was reflected back and forth dozens of times to infinity (and beyond?) There wasn't much else in the room - a side board, a couch, and a table and chairs.
The kitchen was always dark and almost always smelt of carbolic soap; bits of it saved in a jam jar.
There was a pantry and a coal shed off this kitchen, and in the coal shed you could see my granddad's lollipop stick - he spent his last few working years as a lollipop man. I always think of him when I pass lollipop people, unsurprisingly. There was a cooker, and a small table and a table on which grandma baked cakes and buns. Nothing was fitted - they weren't those sorts of people.
They are long dead now - she died when I first began teaching, and he died many years before that - the fags that he smoked constantly finally catching up with him. He died on my older sister's 14th birthday.