Diamonds at Dinner Read Free

through Stamford and the coaching trade elevated old medieval inns into major nationally renowned hostelries. Soon, prosperous professional men and merchants were attracted to the town and they built their fine houses, which have lasteduntil today, as well as the more humble homes constructed for their workers – and in which I would be born.
    The arrival of the railway in the 1830s signalled a deathblow to the coaching trade and, with it, Stamford’s fortunes. The main train line to the north bypassed the town and so stunted industrial development. But Stamford people were made of stern stuff: they adapted to the industrial revolution and quickly became famous as skilled agricultural engineers. Blackstone’s, the factory where my Dad worked before he went off to war, was just one of the companies which set up and prospered.
    But the railway’s bypassing of Stamford would have a much longer-lasting – and, ultimately, much more pleasant – result. The fact that it escaped the vast satanic mills and shoddy terraces of mean workers’ hovels, which broke out like sores in other places – together with the traditional, almost feudal, relationship between the ordinary people and the aristocracy – preserved and pickled our little town in history. The very streets where I grew up living and playing were unchanged from a century or more before and they’re still like that – on the outside at least – today. Which is why, almost 80 years after I was born, the BBC chose Stamford as the place to film its great Victorian drama serial
Middlemarch.
    Now, I said that the houses – including our little home at Number 5, Vine Street – remain just the same on theoutside, and so they do. But if you want to know about life – real, honest, working-class-life – in the 1920s and 1930s, we must step inside. And how different things are here. Let’s open the front door – which led directly into the front room – and step back into history.
    As you read this, please look around your home and see all the everyday things we now take for granted in our lives. Not just the television and DVD player; the computers, connected to the whole world via the Internet; the telephones – both mobile and plugged into the wall; the washing machine and the microwave oven. No – look again and try to see with my old eyes the things that, as a child, would have seemed like something out of science fiction (if that term had even been invented). You may be reading this with the lights on. Today we never even stop to think about flicking a switch when it gets dark. But there was no electricity in Number 5, Vine Street: in the 1920s very few houses – not even many of the grand and magnificent mansions of the gentry, and certainly not the sort of humble houses that working-class people lived in – were wired for electric power. For us, turning the light on was something only grown-ups could do, because our lamps were powered by gas.
    If that seems archaic to you, we were one of the lucky families: many – perhaps most – people of my class at that time lit their homes with paraffin lamps. And the reasononly an adult could turn on the lamps in our house was because you had to be careful with gas. It was piped to the light in copper tubes, which stretched up the walls and across the ceiling: a little brass tap regulated the supply. The lamps themselves had a small net bag – known as a mantle – made of cotton impregnated with metal: the gas was forced through this and had to be lit with a burning taper. It would make a popping sound when the flame met the gas and gave off a slightly sickly yellow glow. Often as not the mere act of lighting it or (more often) turning the gas off at the tap would cause a small explosion, which blew the mantle into tiny bits. Replacing it meant a trip to the ironmonger’s shop and then fiddling about for an age to fit the new one in place. Sometimes today, when a light bulb blows in my nicely lit flat and a