Childhood

Thatched Cottage, Barkby, 1911. Courtesy of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester & Rutland.

Mrs Baines: When I were little we lived in, it were only like a cow shed that we lived in. We had to go upstairs, up the ladder, through the trap door to get to the bedroom.

Mr Bentley: How many of you slept in a bed?

Mrs Baines: Oh there was about four or five of us. We used to snuggle up against one another. We didn’t, she [mother] never bothered about a bed for us, we had to do the best we could. But she used to always send us to farmhouses for the sack bags, she had a bed herself to lay on.

Mr Bentley: So you weren’t on a bed at all, you were just on sacks?

Mrs Baines: On sacks, used to lay on the floor, and used to cover us over with old coats or anything. But they were only thatched houses, and then they started to pull them down, these here old thatched houses, went out of one house into another until they come to the other end, and then they made a shop at the corner…

Mr Bentley: And you saw that being built?

Mrs Baines: Oh yes, seen all that being built. They used to pull them down one by one and we had to shift out of one place into another until we got to the end. I think we thought we were in palace, I don’t know, when we got there!

©EMOHA with permission of Barkby Local History Group