Voices Of Experience

Steve Finan from “The Sunday Post” shares the story of researching a new book of household tips from yesteryear . . .

WHEN I was young, my Granny A was a powerful presence in my life. She was a tiny woman, but as strong as steel and quick as a whiplash. She was also incredibly generous and loving and would fight for “her own” as hard as any grizzly bear.

If you had a problem, Granny A could solve it. She could cook like a cordon bleu chef, sew up a wedding dress from a few rags and work as hard as any man who ever walked the earth.

Her best friend, another formidable woman named Annie, was always in Granny A’s house. They lived on cups of tea and cleaned everything. Absolutely everything. Spring cleaning lasted from April to the following March.

Eventually Annie, although only in her early sixties, had to be put in a nursing home. We didn’t, or at least I didn’t, understand the term “early onset dementia” at the time. Fiercely loyal, however, Granny A visited two evenings each week. She stoically sat for two hours each night, talking to her lifelong friend.

Sadly, Granny A then developed vascular dementia and I had to put her, too, into a home. I’m sorry, Gran. Decades had passed and I had no choice. I had a wife and family of my own to look after. My wife and I worked full-time; the children needed our attention.

In the years that followed I could never quite shake the sense of guilt at how I’d treated the strongest person I’d ever known.

I’ve always worked with words. It is my calling. Eventually I became involved in the world of publishing and found myself editing a book of “The Sunday Post” “Pass It On” tips. The job involved searching through old newspapers for hidden gems.

“The Sunday Post” was, and still is, the newspaper that people like my grandmother swore by. The paper’s wholesome family values were their values.

Everyone in Scotland took “The Sunday Post” in those days – it was the best-selling newspaper in Scotland. It also carried a column throughout the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s in which the hard-working, tweed-clad ladies of Scotland exchanged tips on cleaning, baking, sewing and thrift. To have a tip printed in the bible of canny, upstanding workingclass citizens was a medal of honour.

Even 50 years later it was clear that these tips were magnificent, a rich seam of nostalgic gold. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a job so much.

More than 60 years after it was first printed, in the faded pages of an edition from the mid-1950s, I discovered, there on the page, my Granny A. Her tip, from the days before cooking pots had glass lids, bore her name and address. It advised that: “When cooking stew, soup or steam puddings that need a long cooking time, replace the lid of the pot with a Pyrex plate. You will see how the contents are getting on without removing the lid.”

I stopped, a lump in my throat. Those memories flooding back were the truth of the woman she was. Her true memory is of a vibrant, capable woman whose iron moral values and pristine standards of cleanliness marked her out as respectable and proud.

The picture of that poor woman in a home blew away from my mind. From then on I could again think of Granny A as a woman, in the prime of life, who was clever enough to have a cooking tip printed in a newspaper. That’s what she was. n