Family

Mrs Holmes: What date would that be? I’m 92. I was just thinking, I was born in High Street, Barrow. My mother was a Sileby woman, my dad were a Barrow man, you see, and my dad’s father lived up ‘town end’, we used to call it ‘town end’, you see, in our day, and he kept a shoe shop up ‘town end’, and he used to make boots down the garden in a shed. That’s my dad’s father, you see. My dad was a painter and decorator, and my mother had enough to do with, to bring us up. We had 13 children, my mother had 13 children. That’s a photo of some of us. Some of them died, you know, little.

Interviewer: Did you have a big house for this big family?

Mrs Holmes: No, I don’t think so. You know where Elsie Mayle (?) lives, the shop… well there’s a row of houses there, cottages, and we lived in two of those, we had two of them you see, and some of us had to go to bed up one staircase and some the other, you see. And then eventually they built these new houses in New Street, Edward Cottages, so we went down there, and that’s where I ended up before I was married you see, down New Street.

Interviewer: Was that a nice big house?

Mrs Holmes: Oh yes, well, ordinary six room wouldn’t it be, six roomed house. But we had to sleep three in a bed, and we slept this road, not this road, across you see, the girls did.

©EMOHA