Treat To Scrub
by Pam Llewellyn

My memories of old Taunton stretch further back than those of Robin Cassell and Richard Parrish – to the days of World War II, in fact.

My mother instilled in me a love of the cinema and we often went to a Saturday matinee at the Odeon in Corporation Street, where, after the performance, we had afternoon tea in its café – toasted teacakes in silver-lidded dishes, very elegant.

My mother belonged to Boots lending library, as she felt the County library’s stock was getting extremely grubby. At Boots you could be either a Class A or Class B subscriber. On one visit to the library I must have wandered off, and can still remember the feeling of panic as I ran between the bookshelves, unable to find my mum.

I was a small child at that time, living first in Wellington and then for a while in Bridgwater. Trips to Taunton were a big treat, occasionally tempered with what seemed like danger - journeys from Bridgwater involved queuing for a bus by a huge static water tank in the town centre. The bus was powered by gas in a trailer, and often passengers had to get off and walk up the hills as the gas was not powerful enough to take its overloaded complement to the top. Anyone travelling about the area had to be sure of the way, as all the signposts were removed, and stored in the yards of the workhouse, which is where I lived.

My father was Master and my mother Matron of the workhouse, which was then called a `Public Assistance Institution’. It housed elderly people (segregated by sex), children, mostly illegitimate, some of them the coloured offspring of local girls and American soldiers, single mothers, and `tramps’ who were only allowed to stay for three nights. There was a padded cell for difficult inmates.

I can remember helping to make beds, learning to turn `hospital corners’ in the blue and white, woven bedspreads, and rolling the cotton wool balls that were kept in a big glass jar in my mother’s dispensary/surgery. On either side of the big dining room were covered walkways, and for some reason I thought it was a treat to be allowed to scrub the stone floors of these corridors!

Pam Llewellyn