No 8 Beals Buildings buildings was the house I was born in. It was in the slum area of Birmingham in the UK and was accessed down a narrow cobled stone gully with houses on the left hand side and a tall brick wall imediately oposite.
There was a small front room with a bay window and an even smaller kitchen, underneath the front room and accessed from it was a dark damp cellar and its sole purpose was to store coal which most families could not afford to buy.
My dad worked infrequently as an off hand grinder and over many years the grinding dust damaged his lungs and by the time I was eleven he stopped altogether. Mom had a part time job counting out hairpins and putting them in packets, that was where the saying came from ‘ they only pay pin money’
She was still counting out pins at the age of seventy three and it really hurt me that she worked so hard and long in her life for so little money.
And it still upsets me.
As far as I remember there was never any coal for heating and I would wake up every morning in the winter shaking from the bitter cold I found out when I was older that when dad went to work he would take the overcoat from off my bed that acted as my bed clothes.
Funny how small things from childhood stay with you. I still feel guilty about drinking milk from the bottle when we didnt have enough money to buy any more. And how good it tasted and how hard I tried to drink as little as possible.
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