One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 38 December and beyond

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

Joe and Mary Ann did not have children and it would be a full sixty years before there was a Christmas in the house which centred on young people.

The first was our eldest who was born just a month and bit before the Christmas of 1984 and in the succeeding years the event has been dominated by the children.

Now all four are grown up but we still pretty much celebrate the way we have done for nearly 30 years.

The tree has to be the biggest we can find and somewhere along the way we added a second more modest one.

Everyone has their own spot in the front room where each year their stocking is placed and Christmas dinner is worked around the boys playing football on the Rec.

Usually during the late morning we have people round and in the evening the house empties as one by one the lads go off and meet up with their friends.

And some years we have the family from Italy over which always transforms the traditional Christmas into something a bit different.  And of course now we also share the event with Polly and Anna.

I have no idea what Joe and Mary Anne did.  They may also have entertained or gone visiting themselves to relatives.

Looking back those old Christmases would have been cold.  This is not a warm house and in the absence of central heating I guess must have been uncomfortable outside the rooms Mary Ann decided to have heated.

But of course anyone born before the 1970s will have lived with that simple fact that once you left the front room and before you reached the kitchen the house was very much a cold zone.

You went to sleep in a cold bedroom warmed perhaps only with a hot water bottle and as often as not woke to ice on the inside of the windows.

If you were lucky like me you lived in a house which had one of those solid fuel stoves which heated the water and was kept going day and night through the winter.

It made the kitchen a cosy and reassuring place and pretty much ensured that was where you stayed.  Ours had been knocked through and so a full forty years before such things became popular we lived in the one big room just as they had done two centuries before.

This was where you ate your meals, listened to the radio, watched as the food was prepared and played on the big kitchen table.

Joe and Mary Ann’s kitchen was smaller but it did have the range and I guess was a warm enough place during the cold months from late November through to March and April.

And like many families before them there is some evidence that they lived in the rear of the house leaving the front room as for best and special occasions.

Now I can’t be sure of this but their television aerial was at the back of the house and the cable led down into the back room.

All of which meant that the front was surrendered to a peace and quiet which has never been the case since 1984.

Of course now that they are all grown up we seem to be experiencing more and more of that quietness which Joe and Mary Ann must have known.

So perhaps the house has almost come full circle, although not quite yet.  All four will be here for Christmas and a lot of the old magic will return.

And if we are lucky it might just snow.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The story of a house, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house