Roger Atkinson - Blackout, Austerity and Pride

27
A black sheep in green uniform
I answered the doorbell and found a formidable lady in a dark
green WVS uniform. “You will not know me; I am your Aunt
Edna”, she said. “Do not worry, I have brought my own lunch”
and she held up a brown paper bag containing a plaice. She rapidly
assessed the dire state of our house.
An example of how grim it had become even before my father’s
death can be cited. My mother was becoming so disabled with her
advancing multiple sclerosis, that she could not get herself out of
the bath; my father, with his wounds from the Great War never
ceasing to trouble him, was too disabled to lift her. Our house at 89
Clarendon Road, Leeds had a peculiar feature. Whilst an attic extended
over most of the bathroom, the space above the bath itself
went right up to the roof. Thus the attic room ended in a fairly low
wall at that point; it did not extend into the eaves. In this wall there
was a vent, perhaps to extract the steam from the bath. My father,
being an engineer, constructed a system of pulleys in the attic and
lowered a rope through the vent and on the end of the rope created
a sling or loop that my mother could put round herself, under her
shoulders. She could get into the bath unaided, but when she was
in it, he lowered the sling to her. She called out when she was ready
to come out of the bath. My father worked the device. But he soon
decided that, at the age of 12, I might be as strong and physically
capable as he was, so he called me to the attic to see whether he
had devised the pulleys well enough for me to work them. Neither
of us could see my mother, of course; use of the pulleys was activated
by gentle shouting. This Heath Robinson-style contraption
actually worked extraordinarily well. But I admit that when Aunt
Edna found that this was the sort of state in which my mother and
I had been ‘keeping calm and carrying on’, she was more than a
little shocked.
My father had died on the night of 15/16 August 1940, after we
had heard that evening, on the 9 o’clock news, that waves of Ger-