Connie, Betty and May at Connie’s house in Conchar Road, Sutton Coldfield. John Tarplett also present. Dated 19.2.92, though that needs confirming because it’s the same day as the recording of Zillah and Kath at Station Road, which seems unlikely.
Unfortunately, the quality of the sound on this particular recording deteriorates and gradually speeds up (batteries failing in the recorder, probably), so the voices end up high-pitched, fast and rather strangulated!
It begins with Betty and May saying “She wouldn’t have been able to tell you much, would she, Martyn?” “No, she wouldn’t remember much, would she?” I think they must be referring to Kath. And I say, “Oh, she remembered a lot, an awful lot. She remembered a lot of anecdotes and stories about funny incidents that had happened…”
Connie starts with a memory of when they were living in Rotton Park Road and Kath pushing the pram with Zillah in it and the pram tipping over. The tale of Zillah trying to walk to Kidderminster comes up again.
Betty talks about Henry Ford singing saucy songs e.g. A Boy Met a Girl (A boy met a girl walking through the wood / He was very naughty, she was very good…) B seems surpised I don’t know the song and I explain that Father’s days of playing the ukulele and singing comic songs were long over when I arrived on the scene.
I ask Connie (the oldest) about her memories of her sisters and brothers being born.
Before Rotton Park Road (so before 1918) they lived at 42 Laxey Road.
She was made a fuss of because she was the first after Joey, who had died in infancy.
She reveals that Pop was against having the children vaccinated.
Connie says at one point: “Your mum is like Auntie Ada. Everybody loved her – you could always talk to her. Zillah is the same.”
Zelda and her mother Rem lived round the corner. Pop and Nana felt sorry for them and used to invite them over.
I ask them about their memories of Christmas and the presents they received (I wish I’d asked more about this).
About 20 minutes in it gets harder to listen to.
They talk of Pop’s strength of character, how he exercised control without ever having to raise his voice. May: “We were disciplined … sadly lacking today.” Connie says that her father was a clever writer (sad that none of their writing, for example letters, have survived).
But he was, she says, “a man of many moods.” Nana’s family seems to have been Baptist rather than Wesleyan, as I had previously thought. Connie says, rather bizarrely, that her father predicted helicopters and that she put it into a composition she did for school and got 100% for it. “Did you get it out of a book?” the teacher said. Connie, Betty and May went to the City Road Elementary School then St. Paul’s convent school in Edgbaston. Connie went on to commercial school on Dudley Road. Betty says that her teacher went to prison for not maintaining his wife. Connie tells a story about pretending to be spending time working in the bank when she was in fact having coffee with her friend Vera Wiseman who wrote poems. Zilla Eardley, their grandmother, always had a Bible by the bedside.