"just look at my kitchen"

This blog has been a long time coming, my brain cells have been in a winter induced hibernation, as such nothing came out when I sat down to type. But the sap is rising and the brain is working again, here goes….

You think you can cook? Just look at my kitchen!!

Mum had a pressure cooker that she used every once in a while. It used to fascinate me that something could cook a huge piece of meat so quickly. The meat was placed inside the cooker, which looked like a big heavy pan with a locking lid. A small amount of water was put in it, and a weight placed on top of a small spout on the top of the lid, this weight allowed the steam to be kept inside the cooker so that whatever was inside cooked very quickly. As a cooking medium it was very boring, nothing to see, no bubbling, boiling food, and no aroma, but it worked.

What marvelled me the most was that at the end of the cooking time, she would use a fork to lift off the weight on the top of the lid to let the steam out before opening the lid to reveal the cooked, though very pale, meat. I thought this was great, with steam shooting up, whistling as it came out, until it slowly died off as the pressure dropped inside the cooker. I once asked dad how it worked, of course I got the normal ‘shut up” answer, nonetheless I knew that one day I would have one, I just knew it!



our home is on the right



Roz and I were married on the 15^th June 1974, and we moved into a new house on Lydgate in Harle Syke. To move into a new house was amazing, though we had very little money, we sold our car to buy what little furniture we had, and still had no carpet in any room, we did have the basics, and were very proud of our house. But we had no pressure cooker. After working and saving we eventually got carpets, more furniture and some luxuries like a stereo. Finally as a surprise I bought a pressure cooker, Roz was mortified, she had never seen one, let alone used one and was worried about it right away. Of course, in my normal ‘know it all’ way I told her it was ‘easy’, mum used one, “nothing to it, leave it to me” (two words, head and big spring to mind)

But what to cook, I had to prove to Roz that it would work, and that not only was it a time saver, but that I could do it. Mum always used it for meat, but that was expensive for us and I did not feel like spoiling any in case I got it wrong. So I decided to use spaghetti, easy, cheap, a perfect way to show off my ‘high pressure’ culinary skills.

I put water in, put the pasta in, closed and locked the lid and turned on the gas. The thing shook a bit, then slowly the little button on top of the weight rose indicating that the pressure had built up and we were in business. The cooker stopped shaking, steam came out of the vent under control, all looked good, and I looked very smug. “See I said to Roz, I told you it was easy”

I had no idea how long to cook pasta in a pressure cooker for, (in retrospect, who on earth would) so I left it for ten minutes, then proudly proclaiming to Roz that she should stand back as I bravely removed the weight, I grabbed a fork, and with a fluid motion that would have been graceful on any West End stage, I removed the weight from the top of the lid.



what a creation - beautiful



With an almighty whoosh the steam came spewing out of the top of the cooker, just like at home, but with it also came a gluttonous mass of pasta, who knew that pasta would turn into a sticky goo? This mess went straight up onto our kitchen ceiling and stuck there. Our new house, our new kitchen was now dripping with pasta ‘juice’, it was everywhere, I looked and felt horrified, this had never happened at home, what had I done wrong?

To my dying day I will always remember Roz, on her knees, looking at the ceiling crying her eyes out and saying “my kitchen, what have you done”? It was a mess, nothing I could say or do could save me now. I was doomed, it took the longest fifteen minutes for the steam to finally stop, then we just looked as slowly, drip by drip the pasta came off the ceiling, dropping back on to the stove, pressure cooker and floor. I looked at Roz, having joined her on my knees next to her, she was distraught, as mum would say when describing a person in shock, “she looked poorly she did, she looked very poorly”

The pressure cooker had a very short life, it was removed the next day, I cleaned up, then painted the ceiling, when we moved out in 1981, there was still pasta stuck on to the ceiling, painted over, no pressure cooker, and no mention of buying another one!

“If it was good enough in ancient Egypt, it’s good enough for me”

Pyramids and sphynxes

As our business finally started to actually make money, the G.&D. Kirkham property repairing business got more and more jobs by referrals. As anyone in a service business knows, this is the best advertizing  that you can have, when you start a job on the recommendation of someone else, you start off on the ‘front foot’ as a cricketer would say. One such job we had was in a house overlooking Scott Park. This house was owned by a doctor, and was huge to me, in fact to both of us. When you had lived all your life in a four roomed house, this job in a house with four huge rooms downstairs alone was big. We had to knock a doorway from the kitchen into the front room so that it was easier for Mrs Doctor to serve food during their frequent ‘dinner parties’. There was a doorway already, at the far end of the kitchen, but it meant that she had to walk an extra twenty feet, the impertinence of the original architect was beyond reproach!

Now Gordon was a great guy, every day I enjoyed working with him, but as I got more technical I realised that Gordon, even though an incredibly hard and honest worker, had an aversion towards spirit levels, accuracy and design standards. One day we installed a new sewer line in a backyard in Padiham, when the pipes were laid in place he sealed the joints with the brown clay that we had just dug up. When the homeowner asked what we were doing, Gordon said that the pipes were made of clay and once dried than this would be just as good. It was the first time of many when I heard the “it worked for a thousand years in ancient Egypt, why won’t it work here” speech. When I pointed out (when the homeowner left us alone, having no answer to this apparent logic), that the clay would shrink and the joint would leak when it dried out, Gordon thought for a second or two and then said that we should “bury the pipes quick before they do”. To my knowledge the pipes never leaked and for all I know are still working fine!

The incredibly well dressed and obviously educated doctor’s wife, met us and showed us the kitchen wall where the door had to be knocked through, then took us into the ‘lounge’, we had never actually been into a house where the owner called the front room a lounge, especially in what we called a posh (Southern) accent. Our homes had front rooms, this one had a ‘lounge’! When she left we looked at each other, and I said in a very poor London accent, “I say Gordon, shall we place the door here so that we can enter the lounge?” Gordon said in an equally bad accent, “I shall now retire and get the tools from the van, toodle pip old boy”

The wall was a regular single brick wall, and we had done dozens of these, you knock just enough bricks out across the top to install a lintel, this supports the wall above. Then take out the bricks below it to make a doorway, screw in the frame amd put some trim on the outside of the new frame. An easy job and usually a ‘one dayer’. Modern lintels are cement with reinforcing steel inside, we used wood, again in keeping with the ‘it worked for a hundred years why change’ philosophy. The modern listed building people would now be queuing up for our services! After a career in management dealing with legal issues of competency and procedure, I give thanks that we never realised that we were supposed to have building permits for work that alters the structure of a house. Our wooden lintels would never have passed a building inspection!



just like egypt!



Gordon had many ‘quirky’ things that made life interesting working with him. He would measure a yard of rope by holding it in his hands and then touching his nose with the other end, I once questioned this only to find that it was as close to a yard as you could get. So when he stood back, held his hands up photographer style, with one thumb straight up, and the other at a ninety degree angle, proclaiming that the new doorway was square who would question it? Well, the doctor would that’s who. The man of the house came home for lunch. I found out that people with Southern accents have lunch at dinner time and dinner at tea time, very confusing to a young lad like me. He came home after a morning of doctoring and realising that the new doorway looked slightly out of plumb, and had got his spirit level out and checked the doorframe that was by now sitting in the new doorway.

Of course the frame was neither perfectly plumb, (straight up and down), or perfectly level. Gordon’s thumbs must have been a bit out that day, when you stood back it was obvious that something was not quite right, and when we went back after dinner the Doctor was there with his spirit level to show us the error of our ways. Gordon stood back, leant his head, pondered for a while, then his leant his whole body to one side, looked at the door and said “it might be a bit out, just at the top corner, we’ll put it right” the doctor showed us again with his spirit level, then asked Gordon to get his level so that we could double check, “spirit levels, I don’t use them” Gordon said proudly, “in ancient Egypt they used shadows and string, we don’t need them bloody things” if there was ever a wrong time or wrong person to say that to it was this customer. If straight and level were abstract things to Gordon, and I suppose, myself being the latter half of the G and D duo, it was anything but abstract to a man who had a career in accuracy, after all a patient isn’t treated using ancient medicines we were informed, “why not said Gordon, sometimes they work better”.

the deadly tool!!

Gordon, was clearly a man before his time. Now that the world is once more embracing natural medicines, this would not seem such a strange statement now as it did then. After a quick course in spirit level technology by the doctor, he went off to work, and we went back to our work. The first task of which was to send me to buy a spirit level!

We got the doorframe adjusted, (it was barely out of square, Gordon did have it close) screwed it into place and filled in the gap between the frame and the wood before installing new trim around the outside.

The job turned out great, it looked perfect, nice and square, trimmed off nicely and we even applied a coat of primer, something that we never usually did. As we were leaving having done for the day I asked Gordon why he always talked about ancient Egypt, after all this was modern Burnley. Gordon was amazingly well read, something that most people may not realise about him. I got a quick lesson in Pythagoras, how to build a pyramid and erect a sphinx, all useful topics for a young Burnley lad. I laughed, and under my breath probably called him a couple of names beginning and ending with crazy. Now that I am over forty years older, and having made a career in engineering techniques and methodologies, I have to admit that today’s buildings will never survive four thousand years. Having said that, even the ancient Egyptians did actually have spirit levels, something that I never had the bravery to tell Gordon!

two chimney sweeps, one fireplace, and disaster

some saw muck, I saw money!

Gordon and I had a lucrative scheme every Wednesday, when we would sweep chimneys. We did this for about two years, it was hard work, and of course very dirty. But in Lancashire there is a saying “where there’s muck there’s money”, and chimney sweeping certainly proved that. One thing that is a certainty in business is that if you can find something that no one wants to do, someone will pay you handsomely to do it. Of course I wanted to charge more, I always did, but Gordon lived his life helping others and would have done it for free if you asked him, my heart sunk sometimes when I thought of our lost profits, but my protests fell on deaf ears, after crawling around in soot for an hour if an old lady said she had no money it was a ‘freebie’. I suspected that the 'old lady' network was bigger and better organized than MI5 because we seemed to do more for free than for money some weeks. That hurt me and my undeniable passion for money, but we always managed ‘to put a crust on the table’ as they say.

a perfecdtly sealed fireplace

The job involved going into the room with the smokey fireplace, sealing with a small sheet and masking tape so that the soot that was dragged down the chimney by the brush was contained. No one wants a house full of soot! All the chimneys we cleaned were in terraced houses, the flues were against one wall, with a fireplace in each of the two downstairs rooms, and one in each of the upstairs rooms, which is why every terraced house has four chimneys. To clean the chimney properly we had to open up a small two or three brick hole in the flue in the loft so that we could sweep both up and down the flue, then finish off by putting the flue brush into a small hole in the sheet we had taped on to the hearth, this is the final sweep and the one where the brush pops up out of the chimney for all to see. Finding the correct bricks to remove in the loft was critical for obvious reasons; remove the wrong ones and shove the brush up or down and the soot being cleaned went into the wrong room. But luckily the bricks had been removed many times before in the hundred year old history of the terraced houses we worked on so the bricks were easy to spot by the relatively new mortar holding in said bricks.

Everything that Gordon did involved him taking on a new persona, for chimney sweeping it was a Yorkshire accent. I have no idea where the accent originated, or where he practised it, but every Wednesday it came out as if he had just driven in from the dales. Instead of saying “you go into the loft and open up the flue” it came out as “yoo gu up in’t loft and oopen up t’flooo” sometimes it ended with “sith thi” he also wore a brown leather vest and a large red handkerchief around his neck.

We tied the ladders and brushes on to the ski racks on the Ford Transit van and set off for a day of cleaning soot filled chimneys. We could clean six flues a day easy.  Tape the hearth, find the flue, take out a couple of bricks, brush up and down, wait for the flue brush to stick out of the chimney, pull it down again and clean up. We put the soot into large paper sacks that we got for free from a builders merchants that once had potatoes in them. These went into the van, none of them were really sealed and soon the van had an acrid sulphur smell and a film of soot was everywhere.

One day we had a job in a big house in the Burnley general hospital area. It still had four rooms, but big rooms, but this was the proverbial job from hell. “Na then where’s t’chimney love” the older lady that met us was what I called snooty. She seemed to look down on us as low life workers as soon as we went in to the house. She had white sheets on the floor laid out in a path to the back room where there was an imposing fireplace, the type of which I had never seen before. It was made entirely of slate, polished black and certainly beautiful. We received our explicit instructions, “do not step off the sheets, do not leave any soot, and do not break anything”.



success! brush spotted through the firepot



This was normal in some houses, we were sweeps, no longer human and of course no longer intelligent, so we had to receive orders before being allowed to start. Gordon reassured her with “don’t thi worry we’ll tek care of it, wi ‘ave done this before tha kno-ows”. I started to tape up the hearth and when I stood up I hit my head on the slate shelf of the mantle, I hit it really hard and immediately fell back onto my knees with the impact, closely followed by an ornament that was on the top of the hearth. Whatever it was, it was now no more, shattered pieces of porcelain were everywhere. The lady shrieked in horror, Gordon tried to lighten the situation, ‘at least it were’nt a new un love!” not good, she was not happy. I left Gordon to it trying to calm her down, and escaped up the sheet lined stairs to get into the loft to open up the flue. I had done this dozens of time, ‘easy peasy’ job. Up I went, counted the flues, downstairs on the outside , upstairs on the inside, I found the flue and opened it up, removing the three bricks that we would now put the brush in to clean the upper part of the flue. I screwed the flue rods together and pushed them up, Gordon was outside by now and I heard him yell through the slates that the brush was through. I then pulled the rods out and pointed them down to clean the lower flue and pushed them in. I pushed and pulled and pushed them in a bit more and pulled back slightly until Gordon, who was now in the back room yelled up “start whenever thi wants too Don”! 

Start? I should be finished! My heart sunk, in a dizzy stupor after hitting my head I must have removed the bricks from the wrong flue, “Gordon I yelled, iv’e buggered up”. That was all I had to say, he knew immediately what had happened, he ran upstairs, I climbed down from the loft, and we met teach other at the top of the stairs.  We opened up a bedroom door and saw nothing but soot. It was in the air, on the floor, on the bed, probably inside the bed. “Bloody hell” I said, “now what”. Gordon was almost speechless “don’t know” he said, all I could say was “sorry”. Gordon made a facial expression that could have been deep thinking, or deep worry, or both, “Jesus, she'll go mad”.



not sure why he's smiling, that is one dirty job!



The lady had done what most people did and left us alone while she went into the neighbours while we did the cleaning, after all who wants to stay in a house with two chimney sweeps. It was at the same time that had we found the disaster than she came in, another shriek, and the nicely spoken woman let out a stream of expletives that left us in no doubt that we were in fact stupid and stupider. “Na then we’ll just open up reyt flue and clean proper chimney, then we’ll clean this lot up for yoo, good as noo” Gordon said. The woman said very matter of factly “you will replace the bricks you have just removed, then remove yourselves from my house and do not speak to me when you are doing it”.

Very quietly I climbed into the loft to replace the bricks, that I thought was the best place to be, ‘the old woman could never climb up here’ was my thinking. We picked up our gear, put the ladders and brushes on the top of the van, the empty soot bags inside the van and climbed in. The van had no passenger seat, so I sat on my milk crate and looked at Gordon, “Sorry I said, didn’t mean to do that”, “don’t worry” Gordon very kindly said, “we all make mistakes” as we were driving away. When we stopped at the end of the street we heard a woosh as the ladders came flying off, closely followed by the brushes. We had forgot to tie them down, as they dropped onto the small front of the transit van we just looked at each other and started laughing, such was the life of a chimney sweep. “Reyt” he said, “lets get t’next un, and this time don’t mess up, sit thi!”

calling doctor Kirkham

“If he puts one foot on the floor, he’s dead!”

Those were the first words out of mums mouth when she came rushing in the back door of our house. I could swear that she had a slight grin on her face as if to say ‘I told you so’. She had been to an elderly couple’s home just a short walk away further along Clough Street. The husband, Mr Howell, had suffered what was possibly a minor heart attack, the doctor realising that he was in no immediate danger had told him to stay off his feet for a week and rest before going down to his surgery to see him. Of course mum had been to visit Mrs Howell, seen her husband and immediately diagnosed his impending demise if he so much as stood up. "stay off your feet", meant that if he stood up, well, he would fall down again, for good!

What followed was the customary, and by now expected, diagnosis of Mr Howells illness, the possibility of a brain haemorrhage was always top of mum’s list of likely outcomes, closely followed any number of death inducing events.

“I told Mrs Howell, I’m here if he takes a turn, oh yes, I’m here WHEN he takes a turn”

Mum was an amateur doctor, which I suspect is the result of bringing five boys into the world and looking after them during their various illnesses, and watching Dr Kildare. At any time she would arbitrarily decide that a person had suffered a stroke, heart attack or cerebral haemorrhage. She would always preface this with, “I thought he looked off" or, "I knew something would happen” when I heard this I often thought ‘well why didn’t you warn him then’, in fact one fateful day I said just that, she walked in saying that Mr so and so had suffered a brain haemorrhage, and even though the doctor missed it and had simply told him to rest at home, he was actually very sick, mum would have to be ‘ready’.

Dr Kildare's medical school?

Mum loved illness in other people, she revelled in their misfortune; she could diagnose with amazing speed a multitude of diseases and ailments. This was confirmed, just as a group of doctors will concur on a diagnosis following lengthy discussions with Mrs Barnes who lived one side of us and Mrs Connell who lived on the other side. The three of them would discuss the symptoms, deciding if the victim would live or possibly die, “well you know he looked peaky last week”, or

“it runs in the family”,

perhaps the best I ever heard was “you know I dreamt that last week, I did, I dreamt that this would happen, Oh yes', followed by "I did to, so did I” the three of them nodding in unison at the memory of a week old dream. Surely a quiet word in the unsuspecting ear of the patient might have helped? I heard the “I dreamt it would happen” more than once, always after the event, and always with a rendition of the actual events not the predicted events.

Sometimes mum would come home with “he’ll be dead by the end of next week!” Now to me this would be serious stuff, that statement was always followed by “but he’ll be happier when he’s gone!”

“Why mum?”

“Because I said so”, well that scared the living daylights out of me, to be told that not only he would die happy but would be happier when dead, I was only twelve, I mean what did I have to look forward to?

The cure to all illness was a bag of fruit bought from the greengrocers across the road. “I’m going for fruit!” was heard and mum would be off holding her purse bringing back a big bag of fruit. This would consist of apples oranges and grapes, apples and oranges were optional, but the grapes were a must, they cured everyone and everything.

“She’ll be better after these grapes” I tried one once, taking a grape out of a bag lying on the sideboard, when she saw me mum shrieked at the top of her voice, “don’t you dare take grapes from a dying woman’s mouth!”

Won’t they be wasted on her then I thought, to myself, better not say that out loud. But, if I ever got seriously ill all I needed was a big bag of grapes and I will be fine, grapes, the cure-all of the Kirkham’s.

Mr Howell made a remarkable recovery, and was one of the first people in our neighbourhood to take a foreign holiday, Spain was becoming a holiday spot, and Mr and Mrs Howell celebrated his new found health by having a week in the sun.

“That foreign food will kill him, what do you think Mrs Barnes?” “Kill him” Mrs Barnes replied nodding in agreement, Mrs Connell who with her husband owned the chip shop next door was equally adamant, “No fish and chips in Spain Mrs Kirkham, no fish and chips in Spain, he’ll never last”

So it went on, our three very own doctor Kildare’s dreaming of and predicting illness, offering help and condolences in advance to neighbours, buying fruit and waiting for ‘news’. My mum's suspicion of 'foreign food' carried on for many years, maybe for the extent of her life. Shortly after Roz and I were married, I developed Bells palsy, mum came to visit and shouted at Roz as she stormed out of the front door, "if you didn't feed him that foreign muck this wouldn't have happened!'

Our mistake was that we had just offered mum and dad an Italian dinner of spaghetti and meatballs!