The nearest they would have come to ‘entertaining’ would have been at the dances which were held in the kitchen of Joseph Bickerstaff’s home in Upper Ballinderry or the occasional concert which the McQuoids may have attended at the McQuiston Memorial church hall on the Castlereagh Road in Belfast.
Humour when it came to it was usually of the home-made variety and built around the comings and goings of family life.
Often it would be tinged by the hard-edged or taciturn industrial mood of the workplace or have a wry or self-deprecating style of expression which reflected the nature of their occupations in the country fields or in the urban landscape.
Dorothy (Doris) Duffield was twice married (in each case to a Yorkshire man) and lived for most of her life in Huddersfield where she made many friends. Hers was a ‘home away’ for her siblings when they became rich enough to travel ‘across the water’ and more so for niece, Christine, during her time at university, and her nephew, Peter, when he worked as an IT consultant in Great Britain.
She was lonely, however, at many times and some of her correspondence home mirrored this in the occasional appendages to letters such as the following bitter-sweet addenda: -
A mother’s letter
Dear son
Just a few lines to let you know that I am still alive. I am writing this slowly because I know that you can’t read fast.
You won’t know the house when you come home; we’ve moved.
About your father, he has got a lovely new job. He has five hundred men under him: he cuts grass at the cemetery.
Your sister, Mary, had a baby this morning but I haven’t found out yet whether it’s a boy or a girl so I don’t know if you’re an aunt or an uncle.
I went to the doctor’s on Thursday and your father came with me. The doctor put a small tube in my mouth and told me not to talk for ten minutes. Your father offered to buy it from him.
Your uncle Patrick drowned last week in a vat of Irish whiskey at the Dublin brewery. Some of his workmates tried to save him but he fought them off bravely. They cremated him and it took three days to put the fire out.
It only rained twice this week, the first time for three days, then for four.
We had a letter from the undertaker. He said that if the last payment on your grandmother’s plot wasn’t paid in seven days, up she comes.
Your loving mother
PS I was going to send you five pounds, but I have already sealed the envelope.
What is a senior citizen?
A ‘senior citizen’ is one who was here before the pill, television, frozen food, credit cards and ball point pens.We are today’s ‘senior citizens’ – a hardy bunch when you think of how the world has changed and the adjustments we’ve had to make.
For us, ‘time sharing’ was togetherness, not computers, and a ‘chip’ meant a piece of wood. ‘Hardware’ meant hard wear and soft wear was not even a word. Teenagers never wore slacks or jeans. We were before panty-hose, drip-dry clothes, dishwashers, clothes dryers and electric blankets.
We got married first, and then lived together and thought ‘cleavage’ was something butchers did. We were before a batman, disposable diapers, jeeps, pizzas, instant coffee and ‘Kentucky Fried’ wasn’t even thought of.
In our day cigarette-smoking was fashionable; grass’ was for mowing, ‘pot was something you cooked in. A ‘gay’ person was the life of the party, whilst ‘aids’ meant beauty lotions or help for someone in trouble.
Doris was married to ‘Tony Firth’ in the first instance and to ‘Brian Chatterton’, a friend of the first husband in the second.
