Tell it as it
Was!
by Kathleen Hann
Tell
it as it Was
by Kathleen
Hann
US
price: $12.95
UK
price: £10.99
Format: Paperback
Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 176
ISBN: 0-595-22790-2
Publication Date: May-2002
This book will make you laugh and cry as the author revisits the Black
Country of the thirties and forties.
Browse
Before You Buy
Kathleen Hann was born into a poor working-class family in the Black
Country during the depression of the nineteen thirties. She was a clever
child at a time when it wasn't thought poor children could be clever, when
ridicule was the only way the mediocre teachers knew how to deal with the
situation. This is a book to make you laugh and cry as the author revisits
her past and evokes many of the outrageous and picaresque charcters of her
childhood, her youth and early womanhood. She was one of a hundred people
in Shropshire chosen by the BBC to appear on the programme, The Century
Speaks, in which the BBC called for people to give their views on
Shropshire. This book is living history, experienced in the raw and tested
on the pulses of a real participant whose vision of those times, while
sympathetic, sincere and humorous, is never coloured by rose-tinted
lenses. She has not given us a dry treatise of social history, but a slice
of life that will forever remain with the reader.
Available from the following
on-line bookstores:
 |
|
The following is an extract from Chapter Two:
All week grandma had promised me she would take me to
the fair on the Saturday afternoon. I counted each day off, and very early
Saturday morning I awoke, grabbed my one and only possession, a knitted
doll that I loved very much. By now, though, it was about four times its
original size. I jumped out
of bed with my doll in my arms, ran into grandma's room to remind her it
was Saturday, and more important that it was 'Pocket Money' day and the
great day for my long awaited treat. She was lying in her bed with her
eyes wide open. I climbed onto her bed to speak to her, but she didn't
answer me. I couldn't understand just why my grandma was ignoring me. I
shook her arm and, still getting no response, I became frightened. I
begged her to get dressed, to talk to me, to do anything, but not
just ignore me. Although I
was only six I realised that something was very wrong.
I rushed into my parents’ room, telling them that
grandma wouldn't speak to me. They both jumped out of bed and ran into her
room.
Grandma was dead.
She would never speak to me again.
She now lay in bed with a sheet over her face. Two
pennies were placed on her eyes. Those two pennies really worried me, but
I couldn't bring myself to ask anyone just why the pennies were on
grandma's eyes. Would the
pennies be buried with her? I
really hoped not, for I really knew my mom couldn't afford the loss of
even those pennies. I seemed to have a fixation about those pennies and
worried more and more about the loss of them. Although I loved my grandma
very much I knew even then the value of money—for it dawned on me that
now she was dead I would be half a penny a week worse off!
Neighbours and family came to pay their respects to
grandma. My dad told me to kiss her face. He told me not to be afraid. She
had never hurt me when she was alive and certainly wouldn't hurt me now
she was dead, he said.
I wasn't afraid, although her face was cold and
still. It didn't seem like my grandma at all!
After a couple of days some men came and put her in a
coffin that was left open on top of the bed. I would stand by the door and
look in, but I wouldn't go too far into the room because I didn't like the
smell. After a couple of more
days the coffin was sealed. The smell, though, seemed to linger around the
house for months.
The following is an extract from Chapter Five:
My friend told me her grandma had just died and asked
me if I wanted to see the body. I was an inquisitive child, and as I had
already seen my own grandma's body I said I would. She lived in an old
terraced cottage. I remember
going down a passageway between two cottages, then going into the scullery
where all the family were sitting. My
friend asked her mom if we could go into the front room, which was only
ever used for Births, Weddings and Funerals—which was the custom in
those days. We then went into
that room, and later how I wished I had never gone anywhere near it!
The curtains were drawn and it was quite dark. When my eyes had got
used to the darkness I could see there was an old horsehair sofa and on it
was the grandma's body.
She was the biggest and fattest person I had ever
seen in my life.
She was huge!
Going farther into the room, I noticed there were
buckets and bowls under the sofa. Water was seeping out of the body into
the horsehair sofa and then through to the buckets and bowls. I was
petrified! I turned around sharpish and ran out of that place and didn't
stop running until I reached the safety of my own home.
For months afterwards I had terrible nightmares.
|
Kathleen Harper Hann (1946) |
|
