Tuesday 19 September 2017

Lowry


I went to the talk yesterday on the painter LS Lowry. It was very interesting but also personal in that many of the townscapes showed the places where I'd lived as a little girl.
It brought back desperate times pre war.
Those scenes of people hurrying to work all rang true. My mum working in the mill supported us when my dads wages all went on booze.....
Desperate times. Really!
There was little or no joy in living near to the town centre in terraced homes with no loos or bathrooms and often no electricity either.
We lit mantles in those days which I often broke as a little girl. The tuppence for the replacement came out of my pocket money! Of less than a shilling....
It was in my memory a hard life....not the sort of sanitised existence showed on early Coronation street episodes.
To get from there to here has been an extraordinary adventure...but to see the scenes of my early life whilst on board a luxury liner sailing the Mediterranean was very odd...
I remembered the times I defied my parents by choosing education rather than what was expected of me...going into the mill.
I clearly made all the right decisions .
But to see my early life in the pictures of Lowry was really weird...there was nothing in my memory that made it acceptable. Especially when all the churches the lecturer said were so important to the artist were actually the huge northern town halls...each one outdoing the rest to demonstrate prosperity.
My life, so different then was framed in a Lowry picture....I must buy a print....
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

1 comment:

UKViewer said...

Sometimes people paint a rose tinted picture of a life lived in poverty. In the sixties, we still lived in a London Victorian flat, which still had Gas, not electricity and gas mantles were still sold in all of the hardware shops. We had coal fires in each room, and a large kitchen range in the combined living room and kitchen. No bath, but thankfully, a WC at least.

I can't say that it was comfortable, and during the very hard winter of 62, we nearly froze to death. Burning rolled up newspapers as we couldn't afford coal, as father was off work sick, and the National Assistance were pretty stingy in paying out benefits.

We had to pawn things or sell them to get some money.

Hard times, well remembered in my comfortable, warm home, which is owned outright and which demonstrates how far I have come in 50 years.