Living in digs

Maura Taylor recalls her hilarious early experiences of living in digs as a teenager…

Working away from home meant going into lodgings or ‘digs’ as they were called. Aged 17, my first digs were in a sooty terraced house overlooking a goods yard, rather like Tony Hancock’s famous No 23 Railway Cuttings!

The door was opened by a squat little woman wearing what looked like a knitted tea cosy on her head. Passing a taciturn husband, we climbed to the top of the house where she showed me into a bedroom looking out over a vista of grey slates and noisy railway lines. Indicating the bed and the wardrobe, she said that breakfast was at 7.30, the evening meal was at six and to keep the door locked because she wouldn’t trust the lorry driver next door…

The lorry driver was big and apparently called ‘Jum’. He sat across the table as we ate, winking and making a series of clucking and clicking noises as if trying to attract a nervous animal. After a few days the clucking noises lessened and

‘Jum’ sat across the table as we ate, winking and making clucking noises…

were replaced by impolite questions. ‘You don’t look more than 15!’…’Got a boyfriend?’. I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t stick it for long and soon found somewhere as different as it could be – lodgings in the best part of town in a huge Edwardian house with an elderly spinster.

There seemed to be five or six bedrooms – but she led me to the attic! I asked how many others were staying and she said I was the only one. I didn’t dare ask why I couldn’t have a proper bedroom. All she ever said was ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good evening’. My breakfast, by the time I’d trekked down all the stairs, was served in solitary splendour. After putting the plate down, complete with starched napkin, she would disappear. In the evening it was the same routine. It was lonely, so when a friend said she knew of a family who would take a lodger, I moved on again.

My third lodgings was with a motherly lady who had three daughters. I was quite happy, eating with the family and watching television with them, but after six months the mother became ill and one extra daughter was one too many. I had to move on.

My friend Josie and I then found digs with a Mr and Mrs Smith. It soon became apparent that the couple were not on speaking terms, they used the kitchen at different times and Mr Smith kept mostly to his bedroom or the garden shed. Mrs Smith spent her days in the sitting room working on a huge industrial sewing machine. She was quite content, she said, as long as she didn’t have to set eyes on ‘Him’.

After we’d been there a little while however, we heard the husband shouting very loudly at his wife downstairs. Later I said to her, “I thought you said you didn’t speak to your husband”.

“Oh no, we never speak”. “Only we thought we heard shouting”.

“Oh yes, he shouts!” she said. “He shouts like billy-oh! But we never speak. I ‘aven’t spoke to him for 15 years!” As strange as the set up appeared, it suited us. We entertained our boyfriends in the dining room and went on double dates. I don’t know whether Josie married her date, but reader, I married mine!