Kendal Oral History Group aims to compile a picture of earlier times through the recorded memories of the area’s older residents. Doris Sharpe was born in 1929 and interviewed in 1999.

Monday was washday. So on a Monday morning before I went to school I had to go to Martindales joiners just down Entry Lane with a sack and fill it with wood shavings and sometimes the men would take pity on me, you know, this little lass going for these shavings and they would put some bits of wood in.

I thought that was wonderful.

Then I used to take them back to Mum and she’d put them under the big iron boiler up in the wash house, which was up the yard which was shared by two families.

You used to boil your whites, and you’d a mangle and a posser and a three-legged dolly.

I used to help with the washing. We used to hang it out because Mum always said it made the clothes whiter. The whites were whiter if it got frosted.

My Mum used to take washing in from one of the pubs in town. She knew the landlady who asked her: “Would she do my washing.”

There were four of them and her daughter had a family of four so she washed for another eight people besides us and that was all done scrubbing on the table and everything, drying it round the fire if it was raining, and then ironing it.

Mum also had a cleaning job, so she hadn’t time to do all the washing herself and I had to take these sheets, get the bus to White Stiles from the Town Hall, drop them in at the laundry, pick the previous week’s up and catch the bus back.

The bus driver always used to say: “I know what you want. You want the bus back don’t you?”

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