Rushden memories...by Paul West

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"The Cabbage Patch Man"...     by..   Jill S Wagner.

My boyfriend and I had enjoyed the evening at the Three Feathers pub in Rushden, he had drank one too many and felt ill. So we went into the parking lot and sat on the wall and he promptly heaved up the evenings suds over the side. There was about an eight foot drop on the other side and a cabbage patch had been planted from there,  to the back of the West End club. It had rained so the air was quite smelly, anyway,  all of a sudden my boy friend screams, "God, what is that down there," and he started to shake like a wet dog !
I looked and there...trying to get up from the wet cabbage was this huge man about six feet six inches tall, [ who had just been thrown up on] trying to get to his feet. I tried to pull him up over the wall, but it was too high, so he fell back into the cabbage, while I returned to the pub to enlist some help... 'Help', was coming only after they finished their pints, so again, I tried to help the man over the wall. With spiked heels and a skin tight skirt really hampering my efforts, I finally managed to do the job, the man just staggered off into the darkness of night. Then my assistants showed up, but of course it was too late !!
Six years later, I had married and was living in Utah, U.S.A., I had joined a British wives club and was making friends. One day, I invited several of the girls over with their families for a barbeque. The men were swapping stories, the women were cooking. My husband brought over one of the men to see if I recognized him, "No", I said "I don't know him"... It turned out to be the cabbage patch man, his wife, who was from Wellingborough, had pushed him over the wall and left him there. Funnily enough he had also lived in the house behind me as a child.
What a small world..... an ocean and several thousand miles away, I had learned the identity of the cabbage patch man !!!!
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The "Ups"  and " Downs" of Rushden...  by Graham Joyce..
gtjoyce@tiscali.co.uk

Isn't it strange how most of the things that were important to us when growing up in Rushden
 in the middle of the twentieth century...  involved ' up' or ' down '.....
So... we went ' down street ' 
' up the park ' 
' down Spencer park ' 
 ' up the Jube ' 
' down the baths '
' down the feast '
 ' up Newton road ' 
and 'down Church street '
but!!.....  ' along the back way'
I suppose that the two most important activities involved...
were ' going down street '...and ' going up the park '...
The former activity initially took place on a Saturday, often in the morning, 
and was much more than just a shopping trip.... 
At that time, groceries were likely to have been obtained locally, 
from the Co - op or a corner shop.... 
Milk and bread were normally delivered, as were newspapers, and often meat too....
 So ' going down street ' involved the purchase of other foodstuffs, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, although many grew their own...
 and treats... such as sweets cakes and pastries....
Of course some of the items were hard to come by during the war years...
 and for several years thereafter...
On some trips, a clothes purchase was important and boys were taken off to the Co - op outfitters, or across the road to Webb's to get suited. If it was a school uniform that was needed then you headed for ' Hall's ' upstairs showroom. I'm sure a lot of other significant items were purchased from the shops ' down street ' but, as a small boy these largely passed me by....
Possibly the most important reason for a trip 'down street ' on a Saturday morning was the matter of seeing and being seen by friends and acquaintances. It was obligatory for families to stop and exchange pleasantries with people they knew, even when they worked alongside them all week. News and scandal were passed around, so everyone could keep up to date on the things that were happening across the town. Strange customs could be observed, such as the placing of a coin in the pram of a newborn baby, when it was making the inaugural trip ' down street'..
As we grew older ' down street ' was somewhere we passed through on the way to ' the pictures '..
 at the Palace, Ritz or Theatre, or somewhere we walked up and down in the evening, with our friends, in a sort of Rushden form of the Italian ' passeggiata '....
 where the need was to see and be seen, especially by members of the opposite sex...
 The Waverley provided a sort of pit stop on the endless march and there were also opportunities to pass the time playing snooker in various locations, particularly the YMCA and the Adult school. The ambience of the snooker hall at the back of the Waverley..
 was a little intimidating in those days... Thus were our youths misspent!..
' Up the park ' was another important place to go, especially on a Sunday...
 It was usual to get dressed up in your Sunday best and set off ' up the park ' ..
often on Sunday afternoon, after coming out of Sunday school...
 Again it was a question of being seen about, meeting your friends, catching up on the news and checking out members of the opposite sex. There was a certain amount of walking involved in making at least one, and possibly more, circumnavigations of the park, often entering and leaving by different gates to widen the potential for social interaction.... 
In summer, when the nights were light, it was a popular activity to go for another stroll round the park, or else stroll further afield... Life was pretty simple really in those days....
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I just wanted to tell you how much I've enjoyed your Rushden website.I arrived in England a couple of days after graduation from High school in June 1955..I was almost 18 years old....My husband was already there, we were both from Michigan... His base was actually R. A. F. Cranage, up near Holmes Chapel in Cheshire, but when I got there he was on a tdy at Chelveston....He was with the 7523rd Support Sqdn., 
We lived in Kettering..... Northant's was my initiation to England and I was enchanted...
[ at least until pregnancy and a terrible case of homesickness set in in July, ha, ] 
But that's where I saw my first thatched roof cottage, somewhere on the road.. between Kettering and Wellingborough....My first real double decker bus. 
I remember asking my husband what was he [the conductor] saying. It sounded like "One tuppy, one tuppy"...Cliff laughed, "he's saying On top please"........  
It was also great having milk and fresh bread delivered right to the house, those imperial pints sure looked like QUARTS to me......It's funny, you know.. sometimes now, I can't remember what happened last week, but I remember every address that I lived at while I was in England and that was nearly 50 years ago!
We were in Cranage from the fall of "55 'til around May '57. Lived in Holmes Chapel, my two oldest children were both born at the base hospital at R. A. F. station Burtonwood, near Warrington... Then they moved us down to Manston, near Margate, in Kent... We lived in Burchington, then rotated back stateside in May 1958... I got home and had such a British accent, my family couldn't even understand me, ha..
.Anyway I have some fond memories from England, sad to say, I never got to go back, 
a number of our guys married girls from that area.....
Cliff and I separated in 1962 and divorced in 1964, I learned a couple of years ago, that Cliff died in Florida in 1988...I didn't see or hear from him in all those years...he opted not to help me raise the children in any way...we had two more, born in Nebraska .
I'm attaching the only picture I have, taken at Chelveston, it was taken in 1955... Cliff is on the right, he was a clerk typist in personnel.....Again congrats, on a job well done on the website.. Oh!, one more thing, too bad I was not "into" genealogy back then...I've learned that my ancestors came from Bedford, Luton and Cardington. They were right there on my back doorstep and I didn't know it....cheers...
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"Pork Spare -ribs".....   by.. Jill S Wagner...

Stella says.....My husband had brought home pork spare-ribs, I thought they looked like something...
 you would feed the dog.!!!! ....    Well, I had never cooked any before... anyway, when my husband came home I said, "Don't you buy anymore of them spare - ribs they are bloomin awful". 
He said "How'd you cook em ?,
 "Getting shirty", I replied, "Fried em what else?, even the dog turned his nose up"....
 I have since learned to boil them for about an hour, take them out of the water, smother them with barbecue sauce and sizzle them under the broiler or plonk them on the grill, they're delicious !!!.... 

I had a friend who invited her parents over for dinner, she had a barbecue, 
her mother took her aside and asked if she needed a few quid, 
"No, why," she said. Her mum replied, "Well you're eating dog bones", ha ha!..
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Sam was in Viet Nam and I was here in the U.S. with four little boys, very scared...
 so I decided to go back to Rushden.. where my family and friends were....
I bought a child harness for each of the boys, 
determined that I was not going to lose any of them....
 So there I was, in N.Y. airport, struggling with kids and luggage, etc.,
 and being frowned on by some people, especially one woman...
"Poor kids, such abuse", .[ I don't think they'd ever seen a child harness before..]
 I got settled on a bench and the kids were contented watching everyone passing by. 
Suddenly a woman screamed that she had lost her two kids...
 she was the one with the frown.....
 A few minutes later here comes a man with a bunch of kids...
 tied together with clothesline...about two feet between each one.
 He smiled at me, ha, WE knew where our children were! 
We arrived safely in Rushden, no one lost , just cold!!
there's a big difference between Rushden and Florida weather...
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" Gravy""...  by...   Joyce Wade....

Joyce says... When I first came over here, it was an ordeal to get used to thickening up the gravy..
 with the old flour and water....
 That was what we used for sticking things together and putting pictures in the album...
 You wouldn't believe the lumps, it was awful.!!! 
I had to ask mum to "please,... send some Oxo's and Bisto as soon as possible"...
[still can't do without 'em]
 I bet a lot of you girls had the same problem....
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