GROWING UP IN BRIGG PART 4: CLIFF MAKES US PRIVY TO THE DAYS OF THE DILLY CART

Today we continue the life story of Cliff Turner, now 91 and living in New Zealand, who grew upand went to school in Brigg. Part Four recalls the 1930s when the Dilly Cart came to call at many households.

I know a bit more about Granny's family, the Mussons, and even vaguely remember my great-grandmother Mary Ann Musson, nee Doades. I have a "four generation" photo of her, Granny Hills, my mother and myself in which I look about three years old. Great Grandad Musson died in 1904, before I was born. 
I remember four of Granny's siblings. Joe lived in Queens Road, Spalding, next door to Granny. Aunt Nell Turner (no relation to the Brigg Turners) lived a few doors away and Maud lived with Great Grandma just across the road and stayed on there after her mother died. Aunt Ada, after whom my mother was named, married a bulb farmer, Arthur Wade, who was as deaf as the proverbial post. Growing tulip bulbs was, and still is, a big thing in the Spalding area. On our trips to Spalding when I was a child we used to pay ritual visits to all of these relatives.
Hannah and Charles had seven children; my mother Ada Lydia was the eldest, born in 1903. Next came Charlie, Harry, Ernie, Joe, Dick and finally Nancy who was born in 1914. Joe never married and Harry had no family. In total I think I had eleven cousins on my mother's side but strangely I only have contact with the ones I first met most recently - Dick's daughters Shirley and Sandra. Nancy and I first met Shirley on a visit to England in 1988 after Uncle Harry urged us to call on her, but we had to wait until the end of 1998 to meet Sandra when she came with a large family party to New Zealand.
My mother left school when she was thirteen as was permitted then. The school leaving age was not raised to fourteen years until 1918. I think she went immediately into service with a Mrs Sly.
Mrs Sly's daughter married a bank clerk called Maurice Dibben and when he was transferred to Brigg my mother went with them. At first they lived about two miles from Brigg at Kettlebythorpe on the Caistor road but later moved into a house in Albert Street. My parents never talked about their courtship so all I know is that they were married at Fulney Church, Spalding, in June 1923. I was middle-aged before it struck me how young my parents were when they married.
I am almost certain that they immediately moved into 5 Princes Street. A parallel street is called Albert Street which suggests that the house was built in the mid-19th century. A copy of an auctioneer’s advertisement reproduced by Nostalgia (in the Scunthorpe Telegraph) shows that the land on which houses in Albert Street and Princes Street now stand was to be auctioned on 27 November 1851.
In his History of 19th Century Brigg, Dr Frank Henthorn describes the row of five houses as being superior accommodation for working class people, or words to that effect. That might have been the case when they were built but it was certainly no longer true by the time I came along. The five houses formed a single block and between numbers 3 and 4 a narrow passage at ground floor level gave access to a communal back yard.
The houses were one room wide; a door in the front room opened onto the street as in TV's Coronation Street. This front room was, as in most working class homes, a Holy of Holies used only on Sundays and at Christmas. Our only source of water was one cold tap in a porch by the back door. One side of the porch was open to the elements and another side had a door which gave access to the pantry.
On the first floor there were two bedrooms and from one of these another stairway gave access to an attic which was much more spacious than the two bedrooms below. It was sparsely furnished; the floor boards were bare except for a small rug between the beds. We children slept in the attic which had no form of heating; in the winter mother would wrap a heated iron shelf from the coal fired oven in an old sheet and put it into the bed a few minutes before bed time.
The attic had a dormer window in the roof; from it I could see the windmill at Wrawby which was at that time still working. In the summer months I used to watch swallows flying to and from their nests under the eaves of a house across the street.
In the small back yard there was the lavatory and wash house. The lavatory consisted of a seat with a hole; under the hole was a large bucket which was emptied by Council employees in the early hours of Saturday mornings into a large horse-drawn tank known as the dilly-cart.
We used to sing:   
The Corporation dilly cart was full up to the brim,
The Corporation driver fell in and couldn't swim.
Perhaps it is just as well that I have forgotten the rest of the ditty.