My Memoir is receiving praise from readers of ‘The Road to Cleethorpes Pier’

I am delighted with the response I have received to the release of my memoir of childhood. There are 5 star reviews on Amazon, including the one below. Copies can be bought from Amazon as paperback or as ebook downloaded to Kindle

Ebook: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08776HTMB

Paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Cleethorpes-Pier-memoir-prose/dp/1999870573/

One of my poems ‘Washday Wednesdays’, speaks about how complicated doing the laundry was in the 1940s/50s without washing machines! My Nan came to help my Mum and they used equipment which is now displayed in museums. Below you can see a photo taken at an exhibition at Lincoln Castle showing zinc tub, dollyposher ( for beating dirt out of the clothes), a scrubbing board and a tin bath. In addition ( not shown) a huge mangle was needed to put the clothes through and sting out the water before pegging out on the line. Doing the weekly laundry was a very time-consuming activity.

WASHDAY WEDNESDAYS

On windy washdays mum was stressed.
Wind chimes clanked and jangled
in the fierce gale. Washing flapped wildly

on the clothes line –- a string of ghostly bodies
on the hangman’s gallows,
bloated corpses with distorted limbs.…

In the lull between gusts you might catch
the crackle of sweet wrappers in forgotten pockets,
loose buttons tapping out morse-code messages.

Across the lawn crumpled leaves,
as lined as Nanny Buttle’s street-map face,
went chasing ceaselessly back and forth.

The tight-lipped dolly pegs swung
like pendulums with each new assault.
Yet their resistance proved too much

for the wind’s frenzied onslaught.
He would turn on the sulking clouds
with their churlish attitude… . . .

Something had to give,
Someone had to bend to his will
before he blew himself out.

With a frown on her face, hair tied up factory-girl style
in a neat turban, my mum pushed the damp clothes through
the mangle, Wilfred Pickles would often be on the radio.

I knew it was best to make myself scarce,
so I would creep off to my bedroom with a book,
knowing I could read my Enid Blyton tales undisturbed.