This is an undated interview of three sisters. Similar interviews were taken in the 1980s.
Interviewer: Where did you live in Stirchley?
Miss. Brettle: We lived in Ivy Road and we lived at the bottom and I mean if you walk down there now it’s nothing like it was. Well I mean Marge [Mrs Langley] can remember cows opposite you see.
Mrs. Langley: Well when we lived down there we lived in a yard with four houses.
Mrs. Porter: With a pump in the yard that fell in.
Mrs. Langley: Well there were two houses that had a brew house [wash house] at the top and we each had out own toilet and that was very good in those days it was. Then the other two houses used the brew house at the bottom and they’d got a toilet each which was very good in those days because some houses on the other side of the road had to share toilets, well we were fortunate then.
Interviewer: Did you say you had the one tap in your house?
Mrs. Porter: Yes on the brew house outside between two families. One tap and we shared it with the family next door.
Interviewer: What about hot water?
Miss. Brettle: Boiled a kettle.
Mrs Langley: You had a kettle on the hob all the time.
Interviewer: What about washing?
Mrs. Porter: Well, we had a boy didn’t we that our dad made and our mom used to put the bowl in and fetch the water from outside and we’d wash in the kitchen in winter all of us children.
Mrs. Langley: And then we’d have the zinc bath of course and we had to have that in the house as well.
Interviewer: What schools did you go to?
Mrs. Langley: Stirchley Street School.
Miss. Brettle: We were all uneducated if you come to think. Nobody had an education then did they, not really, not a proper education.
Interviewer: What was school like?
Miss. Brettle: Well, let me think.
Mrs. Langley: Well, I suppose, they taught us the three R’s as well as they could.
Mrs. Brettle: Well, this was the attitude. I’ll give you an incident. I had Chicken Pox. I can remember that and I was very fond of reading and I remember having these books and I don’t know how long I’d been away from school, well I had it rather bad, perhaps three weeks, would it be, I don’t know. When I went back it was time for reading you know, and I wanted this book back and all the teacher said to me was “You shouldn’t stay away so long” and that is all the sympathy I got. But I was very fond of reading you see, she didn’t know, she’d got a child in front of her who could, how could I put it, maybe have something up here… [she said pointing to her head]… That was it, that’s all I got, that was all Miss. Figure said to me.
Mrs. Porter: Oh, they had no imagination, she was a terrible person.
Miss. Brettle: I mean, fancy saying that to a child and I mean it was reading time.
Mrs. Porter: Well she may have been a teacher but she’d got no intelligence.
Miss. Brettle: Well, she was a horror really, a horror.
…..
Interviewer: What shops do you remember in Stirchley?
Miss Brettle: Well, there is a haberdash that’s on the corner of Hazelwell Road…and it’s still the same, they sell all the old fashioned drawers down to here [i.e. down to the lower thigh] and they used to sell buttons, linen buttons, chank buttons.
Mrs. Langley: Everything!
Miss. Brettle: Ribbons, you used to get ribbons piled high.
Mrs. Porter: It’s just the same, almost as exactly the same as what I can remember when we were children.
Miss. Brettle: They used to sell the embroidered towels, underwear that sort of thing you know. But it is still there the same and it’s on the corner of Hazelwell Lane opposite Stirchley School, […] but the stuff’s more modern of course naturally, but they sell Winceyette night-dresses all elastic you know, all that sort of thing, but it’s what we used to call the haberdashers.
Mrs. Porter: I’ll tell you another shop in Stirchley that I used to love, out mom used to go to the Allsorts shop on the corner of Mayfield Road.
Mrs. Langley: What shop was it?
Mrs Porter: The Allsorts shop.
Mrs. Langley: Oh yes, the Allsorts shop, that was really something.
Miss. Brettle: […] they used to sell dates and they were always in big slabs and they used to chop them up you know, but they sold dates with everything else you know what I mean, soaps etc.
