Mildred Mayer (with Eric & James

MILDRED MAYER

October 1927 with her son ERIC Jnr & Grandson JAMES

Mildred: It snowed when I got married, 22nd of December 1951 at the registry office on Deansgate, Jacksons Row. I was so excited planning the wedding I hadn’t realised that it was so near Christmas. It was through my Mum that I met Eric in the first place.

I left school on a Friday when I was fourteen in 1941; on the Monday I started work in a little bakehouse with a shop. One side was the cakes and bread the other side was sweets. I worked there until I was twenty-one.

Mum and I lived in Marley Place in Harpurhey with my Grandma and it was Grandma who looked after me until she died when I was seven.

Mum worked at the CWS Biscuit Works in Crumpsall . They said that she had a job for life because she had a bad accident to her hand. They gave her the easy job in the cellar. At 21 I managed to get a job there packing the biscuits. Mum had mentioned this young man Eric, who would get her a cup of tea and something to eat lunch time and pass on the newspaper. The other lads started pulling his leg saying, ‘next thing you know you will be going out with Annie’s daughter!!’ He said, ‘Annie hasn’t got a daughter’. ‘She has’ they said. The day I met him he tried to throw the paper to my mum, but it went askew and hit me on the eye and that is how we first got talking.

For Christmas they had decorated the cellar. During the dinner break I would go down with Eric to talk to my mother.

I was sat on top of a tea chest when Eric said, ‘I am going to do it whether you smack my face or not!’ I thought ‘what is he going to do?’. Then he came towards me and went to kiss me as I fell in to the tea chest. My legs were stuck up in the air (laughter) and everybody couldn’t stop laughing. I was still in the tea chest with my legs stuck in the air, I couldn’t get out when the boss appeared. He was a German chap one of those very nasty people. I thought ‘oh heck, we will get the sack now’ He looks about and says, ‘What do you think is going on here?’ Eric said, ‘I went to kiss her and wish her a happy Christmas and she fell in’. The boss said, ‘instead of standing there, watching her stuck there, go and lift her out, Happy Christmas’ and then he walked off. Then Eric pointed up, someone had stuck up a piece of mistletoe that I hadn’t seen. He gave me a big kiss and asked, ‘would you like to come for a drink with me’. ‘Oh’ I said ‘No, I don’t drink’. He said, ‘come on it’s only just around the corner, will you come out with me?’ I started going out with him from then on.

Eric Edward Mayer was born here in Manchester. He lived with his Auntie in Caroline Street, Hulme and his Mum lived in Orchard Street. His father came from Liberia. He had been in the Merchant Navy. He was in the Royal Navy too but all that ended just before he met me. He had a good record, never a bad one – every record was good. Our son David has his record book. He told me, when the cook was ill, they asked him to do the cooking. Mind you what he was like I don’t know, though he wasn’t a bad cook really.

I remember one day when I came home from work, he said ‘take your coat off love, just go and wash your hands and sit down, I have got your tea ready for you’. (she laughs). I said, ‘What is it?’ ‘rice’ he said. I was thinking rice pudding because I had never heard about curry, (Laughing). What he had cooked was pilchards with rice; well I was nearly sick. (Laughing). From there on we had that sometimes on a Sunday, I don’t know why!! But a few months after, he started doing it with oxtail, the curry, and I started to like it and I have liked it ever since!!

My granddaughter says, ‘courting is old fashioned’ I say, ‘well that is what we used to call it in those days’. We were courting for almost two years before we got married.

I loved dancing. I still do. Eric didn’t dance, he could jive but that was about all.

My friend Margaret and I used to go dancing at the Blackley Palais at Harpurhey. The shop opposite was what we called a Temperance Bar , they sold hot Vimto , and dandelion and burdock, no beer. When Margaret first saw Eric, she wasn’t very happy. I hadn’t told her that Eric was Mixed Race. He offered to buy her a Vimto and she said, ‘No thank you’ (delivered with venom), then wouldn’t speak to us but that was the only time that anyone said anything.

We went regularly to The Empire on Factory Lane, opposite Moston Lane. You had to climb a flight of stairs to the pay desk at the top. They got that used to us going that they saved a double seat in the corner for us. (laughter) One day I was going up the stairs and I tripped, someone shouted down ‘That is the sign of a wedding’ I just started laughing. Eric said, ‘you marry me now or you don’t marry me at all!!’ We were in a public house near what used to be the old bus station, I can’t think of the name of it. When got married, we went to a big Café on Oxford Road, near the Museum somewhere it was, that I can remember.

We went to live in Cheetham Hill. He managed to get a big room on Wellington Street East next door to a Children’s Home. Then we moved in with his Mum in Orchard Street off Greenheys Lane and then I became pregnant with Eric.

We were going up Princess Road one day when I met Barbara who had started work the same day at the

Biscuit Works. She had married a week before me and I hadn’t seen her up to then. She and I became best friends.

Our son Eric was born on the 10th December. At the time I thought ‘if he goes any longer, he will be born on my wedding anniversary’. (Laughter). And just like on my wedding day it snowed when Eric was born. I remember the snow was that deep I couldn’t go out with the pram. It seemed as if the cold weather was following me around. Back when Eric was still going to sea, sometimes when a voyage had finished, they used to go to a (white) mate’s house. The lad’s mother had twenty children and when our Eric was born, she said ‘bring your wife up sometime and her little one’. I said, ‘Oh she has got enough of her own- without having more’. ‘The more the merrier, bring them’.

Eric Jnr: My father had a lot of friends and he was well respected.

I was about four when he first started to teach me how to fight though I never understood at that age why. Obviously, he knew how to fight, and he must have experienced some racism– to what level, I don’t know. I only witnessed it once at the Baker’s club on Great Western Street. He had taken me in there to play snooker with him. A tall, broad, maybe six-foot Irishman sort of brushed past him let’s say, knocking Dad aside as he asked the barman for a beer. Dad turned around and said, ‘excuse me but you have just knocked my beer all over me.’ The man turned around and made a racial comment. When Dad didn’t get the apology he wanted, he just locked his arms round him, carried him through the doors to outside and punched him!! Chris Tottoh1 used to take me to school, at Webster Street Primary2, on his back. It was a happy school and the kids represented many different nationalities and cultures. Obviously at Webster Street I didn’t experience any racism.

But when I got to Old Moat Secondary that is when I experienced racial prejudice from both sides, not just one. I would get called the ‘N’ word and ‘a white honky’ . But I had an advantage because I had been taught how to fight and knew how to box properly. This taught me to suss peoples’ personalities out very, very, quickly. Then my motto became ‘I will beat you academically, I will beat you at sport and if you put me in a corner, I would have no option but to come out fighting’.

Mildred: Eric and I were stood in a little pub one day and it was absolutely packed, and he had to squeeze past me and this chap pinched me. I called out ‘Oh’ and then he set off laughing because he had had a few drinks, this fellow. And Eric just – Well, I thought he was going to punch him he was very jealous.

Eric Jnr: He used to take me and my brother Dave out on a Sunday to different pubs. I was about six, seven. My Dad was a Navy man wasn’t he and a lot of them liked a drink in those days. We would sit outside with a lemonade and crisps. His mates as they passed in and out would give us money, but it was different in those days. My Dad could walk into any pub coz he used to play darts and he used to play all over the place.

Mildred: Lily and Kenny Williams’s Dad used to go and have a drink with Eric and they used to call him ‘Dolly’.

I will tell you a story now. When we lived in Rosebery Street3 there were a lot of prostitutes around that area (sniggering from the son), now shut up, don’t be laughing. Eric had a friend Bob, a white man

1 SuAndi’s cousin 2 Webster Street was known as “The League of Nations” due to the diversity of nationalities on the school roll 3 Moss Side

that lived across the road who was very, very quiet, or so I thought. They had been out to the Legion4 for a drink and were saying goodnight by the front door. I was in the front bed room when I heard a commotion. A car had drawn up and I heard this voice say, ‘Hey what is going on here?’ Eric went to the car – and I don’t know whether I should say the word he said, ‘Piss off’ (she laughs). ‘Don’t come picking up outside my door, now go on’. Next thing Bob comes back across asking what was going on. Evidently it was plain clothes police and with Bob interfering, they went and arrested them both.

They were locked up in the cells overnight. When I looked at him, I asked, ‘Where are the buttons off your shirt?’. He told me that when they had grabbed him, they pulled every button off his shirt. I was upset about it especially when he had to go court. When the British Legion found out what had happened, they drew up a petition and they fought the case for them because Eric helped there a lot and he and Bob were very popular.

Eric Jnr: They took him to court, but it got thrown out because the two CID guys were obviously looking for a stooge (it was on TV). When it came out that they had been lying and the account that my father gave was the correct account it got thrown out of court.

Mildred: I had an operation on a tumour in my throat in 1999.

James (Grandson): It was sixteen, seventeen years ago, so Grandma would have been 74 probably, 75.

Eric Jnr: I had to have Dad committed; he had become a danger to himself. A doctor came to confirm if he was suffering with Dementia. You know how they switch back to childhood then forward to an adult again. The doctor is quizzing him, and he seemed as sound as a pound, as if (clap) he just switched just like that, back to normal. But the Doctor knew he was playing games.

Mildred: They took him to Wythenshawe hospital where he seemed quite happy and settled because he was wearing his own clothes and things. They kept him in there for about six months or more then something was wrong with him, so they sent him to Withington Hospital, the old Withington it was then.

They sent me in a taxi. I got there not long after him and I could hear him screaming. He was at the dormitory door as I came in ‘Mildred, Mildred, take me out of this place’ – he said, ‘it’s a madhouse’. He was in a right mess screaming and banging on the door to be let out. I said, ‘I want to see the matron’. The curtains were hanging down, there was an old sewing machine in the corner and all the staff were gathered round talking to one another instead of looking after the patients. They ignored me at first and went on talking then a doctor came to see what this commotion was about. I told him that Eric had only been there a few minutes but not a soul has been near him and he had messed himself and they had just left him. Nobody had bothered, nobody was talking to him.

About three days later the machine had been moved into a spare room and it was one nurse to one patient, just as the doctor had instructed the Matron.

One Sunday just before Christmas and they asked me if I wanted to stop for my tea. I noticed that Eric had hardly ate anything and they just took away his food before he had started eating properly – so I complained about that. Next thing, he needed the toilet, so I asked for someone to take him. There were three of them, two white men and an Indian man with a turban. They hadn’t been in the toilet long when Eric started screaming. It sounded as though they were murdering him, and it went on for quite a while; they had only been bashing him.

Eric Jnr: Obviously when you have got dementia you go from one thing to another; be quite childish or aggressive. My Dad might only have been 5ft 4, but he was still quite capable of handling himself, even with dementia. He had been a little bit obstreperous in the toilet, so they had grabbed him by the testicles.

I can remember walking in one day and he was stood at the side of the door. I could hear him through the door saying to the nurse, ‘You are in trouble now my son is here’. At first, he wouldn’t tell me. When he did, I took this nurse to one side and had a quiet word with him, I said ‘if I ever find out you are doing that again, you are going to be in mega trouble’!!

Mildred: One of the patients used to think I was his wife. Frank was a very nice quiet man. He would put his arms on my shoulder and his cheek near me and said ‘Ta ra darling’. I was always frightened of opening the door in case he got out. There was a woman who had got a Black eye and they were blaming Frank for it. I knew it was never Frank because he is too kind. Later they found out that it was the staff who were beating the patients. It was all reported in the newspaper. One of the men who had been mistreating Eric said and this is the truth, I can remember it as plain as anything. He said, ‘I might be the son of a bitch to my mother’ he said, ‘but these men, I have never heard anything like it in my life’. That was printed in the paper. I kept it until not long ago and I don’t know why I got rid of it. Later, he had an operation. He was being fed through a tube into his stomach. It was our wedding anniversary and on the big mirror, they had put ‘congratulations’. I took a cake in about as big as that table for the patients and not thinking, I took a load of drink (laughter). Not thinking that they would be on medication. So, the staff had a good ‘do’. The staff said they would give him a little piece of cake and he said, ‘is that all I get?’ I used to take in salmon sandwiches and he asked ‘where are my salmon sandwiches’. I said ‘you can’t have sandwiches – you can have a little piece of cake and then you have got to have liquids. ‘Who said so?’ ‘The doctor’ I said. Well, then he started swearing which he hardly ever did in front of me – ‘f***ing, f***ing salmon sandwiches – he is not going hungry, I am’! He died in Wythenshawe. I didn’t put it in the paper, but some of his friends found out and came. I was that upset. I didn’t have a reception, they came here because we have been here since 1992 since these flats were built.

My friend Barbara came; Barbara loved him, Irene loved him, everybody loved him.

When my Mum lived up in Harpurhey, I was going up to see her one day with both my sons – I think Eric would have been about seven – I can’t remember now. We were sat on the long seats when this lady said, ‘Excuse me don’t think I am being rude, but did you ever live up Harpurhey and go to the picture house’. I said ‘Yes’. ‘Oh, my god’ she put her arms around me, ‘I remember you, we often wondered did you get married’. I said ‘well here are the two results’ (laughter). ‘Wait till I tell my friend’ she said. It was the lady from the box office who said when I tripped ‘that is the sign of a wedding’.

I loved him – we had our arguments but we lasted fifty years.

FAMILY Erica Mayer Senior February 1924 - May 2002 Eric Junior Mayer David Mayer