Lives Remembered
Minnie Watson

1908 - 1989

 

Mrs Watson was born and raised in Helmdon.  Girls wore pinafores and dresses.  School started at the age of four.  Some children started school in the morning at nine, some nine thirty.  Mrs Watson was taught to sew.  School started with a hymn and scripture.    The school was warmed by a stove filled with coke.  Mrs Watson loved to sing, write, she loved school.  Mrs Nichols was the head teacher.  Mrs Watson often got rapped on the knuckles for talking in class.  She read all the books she bought.  All the children had to go home to eat.  No food was allowed in school.

She regularly rode in trains.  They were good transport and were very cheap.  There were very few toys in the country.  You might have a doll or an iron hoop.  There were also whips and tops.

During the war people kept pigs.  If you had two you had to give one to the government.  The women would plough the potato fields put them in bags and send them off to the factories

Mrs Watson was married with two small sons when the war broke out.  Mrs Watson came from a family of eight, one of her brothers lost a leg and foot in the war.  At 5 o’clock pm they put a blackout and a man from the village would come round and check there was no light showing.  The children didn’t know their fathers very well, some of them got killed.  Mrs Watson’s mother-in-law made sparrow pie. 

 

        

Antonia Watts (A pupil of Helmdon School.  Part of a project detailing memories of the older people in the village.)  First published in Talkabout Spring 1989.