This story is about the first house this contributor’s parents bought. They had to do basic repairs, completed by a set date, to be given ownership of their council house.
Contributor: Rainbow Star
Location: A terraced house in Salford
Race was on, mortgage applied for. Do house up to certain standard – basic repairs – remove old gas lights in attic and 2 bedrooms. Repair the kitchen floorboards and very minimal plastering. The time was getting close to completion. My dad, the hero, after a day of full work at Metro Vicks in Trafford Park, he was there decorating the rooms and two stairways. Cutting borders off from rolls of wallpaper. A makeshift wooden table of thin plywood as a pasting board. My early memories was dipping the brush into the mixed paste – resembled a clear jelly-like substance. A piece of string tied across the bucket for the brush to rest upon when not in use. The biggest challenge was the attic stairway – he had to borrow wooden ladders. They arrived and it was a bit like an Eric Sykes or Bernard Cribbins comedy sketch Right Said Fred. It just seemed to have been a busy time for both my parents. Washable paper, textured paper for the kitchen and bathroom. Colours were varied over the years. Don’t know how my dad acquired the skills for paper matching with the rolls of paper – it took patience and skill. This carried on until the 80s when my Dad sadly got too old. But the house was approved and city council declared my Dad the owner as he had completed the maintenance that was listed and needed to be a home owner. He was well pleased – his efforts and hard work paid off.
Here Rainbow Star tells us more about redecorating with her family:
“Most of the decorating was done in the spring and right through summer because it had to combine with my parents working. They started at the top of the house, from the attic, right down to the kitchen. The bathroom and kitchen always had vinyl wallpaper, and were decorated about every 3 or 4 years. The other rooms just had plain wallpaper.
I used to help when they went to the wallpaper shop and brought the rolls back. When you took [the rolls] out of the wrapping, they used to have narrow borders on either side of the wallpaper. I used to cut the narrow borders off, because you had to that before you prepared the wallpaper to be pasted – that was a bit of a long job but it had to be done.
The pasting table was ready-made, two square pieces of wood on wheels so it could be taken to every room. The preparation for taking the wallpaper off was long and tedious because you had to keep applying water to the wallpaper that had to be removed and wait for that to absorb through, then you had to use a scraper to take the wallpaper off which took hours. Sometimes you could just get hold of the wallpaper at the bottom and pull it right up and it would come off completely – maybe if the wall was damp or something.
Pasting the wallpaper used to be a funny task, because you always had to keep the paste table clean, and when a new layer of wallpaper was being pasted you had to sort of gather it up like an accordion fold.
The paste went right across the full length and width of the wallpaper. The paste bucket was just a makeshift bucket, that had a piece of string tied across it, so that the brush could rest on that when excess paste had to be used or taken off. I just used to dip the paste brush in the paste bucket and just sort of keep the paste going as the wallpaper was being transported up the table. I think the most laborious part was when you actually had to hang the wallpaper and when it was patterned it had to match, so that was a case of judgement I think, and patience to get it done, which took a really long time.
I think I was about seven years old. So it was interesting to do. It was necessary that the house had to be decorated, and my mum and dad did that, they never got anyone in to do it. When my dad used to paint the attic that was a nightmare; he had to bring the ladders in from the back yard because it was that high up, I don’t know how he carried them round and got them in the house, up the flights of stairs, but he did.
Most of [the wallpapers] were patterned, vivid colours, mostly flowers, and general designs really. It was about the middle 60s – about 1965.”
OH: Did you have a favourite design?
RS: I always liked the vinyl ones that were in the kitchen and bathroom, because the cut-offs from those were used to back the old school books. They proved quite useful, the remnants of wallpaper left over.
OH: When you were a child, did you wish you could choose something different to your parents?
RS: I think I’d have chosen themed wallpaper, you know, like television characters and things like that.
OH: And did you ever get anything like that?
RS: No. Oh no, I don’t ever remember anything through the entire years when it was being decorated. It always either seemed to be plain wallpaper or something with flowers on for some reason, I don’t know why but they seemed to be the two general choices.
Above: Examples of wallpapers from the Whitworth collection on show in a Family Album session
“That orange and yellow wallpaper [centre, in image above] was in a relative’s house, they lived in a semi-detached house. The same wallpaper or something very similar was in their lounge, which in the 1960s was quite distinguished from the terraced house. I think they had a lot of elaborate wallpaper up, flock design wallpaper mostly from what I can remember. They were quite high fashion, but it always seemed to be dark colours like purple and, I think red, not vibrant colours like these from what I can remember. [The carpets and the curtains were] the same… very dark.
OH: Do you remember interior decoration changing?
RS: I just think it went more colourful, and there were more patterns brought out, and the same with furnishings and fabrics.
OH: In the 90s, paint became more popular, and wallpapers start to be stripped away, do you remember anything of that?
RS: After that, when they did the decorating, they still kept the wallpaper, but they just painted over, changing the colour of the emulsion. It was a struggle with my parents getting older, so I think they did that. The walls just got emulsioned – the wallpaper stayed up.”
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