A Whisper to the Living by Ruth Hamilton Page A

house had flagged floors, there was a proper kitchen instead of a scullery. This large, single-storeyed square was attached to the rear living room and its unplastered brick walls were painted in a light shiny green colour.
    My mother was proud of her new kitchen, especially after she had replaced the low slopstone with a proper porcelain sink and had purchased a kitchenette, a tall cupboard, green to match the walls and with many compartments and drawers fitted into it. She also bought a real cooker which she tended with loving care, forever polishing and cleaning its various surfaces, while in truth she still depended greatly on the living-room range, though she would never have admitted her distrust in the new-fangled gadgetry with which she was filling our home.
    For many months she would not switch on the new electric lights unless she had a cloth in her hand to protect herself against the unknown. For a while, she even wore wellington boots for such occasions, having heard or read somewhere that rubber soles ‘stopped it going through you’. She adhered rigidly to the use of her flat irons until Eddie Higson proved, by plugging in the new iron to the ceiling light fixture and surviving, that she might try an easier way of pressing the clothes.
    Our living-room range was another novelty, being constructed of a beige ceramic material that required no leading and having a raised area of tiles set on to the floor in front of it. In the recesses to each side of the chimney were floor-to-ceiling cupboards in which we stored crockery and such linens as we owned, thus making redundant the large mirrored dresser that had always dominated our Ensign Street kitchen.
    There was no lobby in this house, just a small square vestibule leading straight into the front room, which had a wooden floor, a source of great pride in my mother’s book. This room also had cupboards in the recesses, but while the living-room cupboards were panelled in wood and strictly utilitarian, these were ornate by comparison, their upper portions being glazed and leaded. Into these compartments went my mother’s few treasures, bits of cut glass, framed photographs, a plaster saint or two and a set of white demi-tasse coffee cups, a wedding present for which she had never found a use. A square of moss-green secondhand carpet was acquired and my mother spent many hours varnishing and polishing the surrounding floorboards.
    But outside, there was still the midden and the tippler lavatory and no amount of fancy cupboards and instant lighting could compensate, in my mother’s mind, for these two festering sores. So when Eddie Higson’s window round became reality, when he had finally purchased bucket, leathers and goodwill, my mother began to save with a grim determination known only to the victims of true deprivation. We were forced to eat strange meals, soups thick with lentils and barley, meat and potato pies with the emphasis strictly on the potato, scones without raisins, jam butties without margarine. The closest Eddie Higson and I ever got to camaraderie was then, as we stared blankly at one another across a table that held these odd offerings.
    I had never had many clothes, but now I began to look shabby and down-at-heel, was forced to curl up my toes so that weekday clogs and Sunday best would last a few months longer. She stopped smoking too, which meant that her temper became less than even and I learned to keep my distance at certain times, like after meals when she most craved a Woodbine. Eddie Higson took to rolling his own, using bits of paper and a strange machine like a miniature mangle, often including the contents of discarded dog-ends he had picked up in the street, occasionally treating himself to an ounce of fresh tobacco.
    To give him his due, he worked hard during those first few months at Long Moor Lane and, after reading several borrowed tomes on the subject of plumbing, he undertook, with the help of his brother, the installation of