Memories of Blue Mountains by Vera Smith (nee Durose) born 1921

I was born in the attic of my granny’s house which was about the middle of a row of cottages in Little Eaton called Blue Mountains.(Vera’s granny was Phoebe Durose (1860-1953) of no.15 Blue Mountains).

Originally the cottages were built for the men who mined the sandstone quarry at the rear of the cottages. They all had a living room opening off the rough road, a kitchen, a small pantry and two bedrooms. They had a stone sink with cold running water, and were served with gaslighting, a gas stove and a black leaded grate with side oven and coal fire.

The lavatories were quite apart from the house and were either bucket or pit lavs. They were emptied by a man who came around late at night with a large metal container on a horse drawn cart, hung around with buckets. His job couldn’t have been very nice and the odour which accompanied his coming and going was far from pleasant.

Blue Mountains was noted for the bluebells which grew in the surrounding woods and got its name from them, as the row of cottages was on a hill high above the main road, surrounded by bluebell woods.

As children we would go in groups and pick armfuls of bluebells and take them to our neighbours who would give us a penny or a piece of cake for them. My dad was an engineer and very clever with anything mechanical. It is hard to believe now but he designed and built a 3 wheeled car, using scrap metal and parts, and later built a wireless, the first in our area. When a football game was broadcast, the local men would bring a wooden chair to our window and sit around outside, listening to the game.

(Vera’s dad was Jack Durose, youngest son of Phoebe and William Durose. He was born in 1900, married Doris Bull in 1920. They had 3 children Vera, Edna and Jack Vincent (born 1926). The children were very young when their father died following an operation in 1933.)

Nearly all of the men of Blue Mountains had an allotment, and granny had an orchard of apple and damson trees and hen pens. We were often allowed to go with her to feed the hens with corn and the mash which she made of bran and leftovers from the kitchen. It was always steaming hot and often smelled quite delicious.

There were about 12 of us, boys and girls and we all went to the village school where we were known as the “Blue Mountains lot”. We didn't have a very good reputation.

We were once allowed to ring the bell which called us into school. It was operated by the pulling of a very thick furry red, white and blue rope and it was a great privilege to be allowed to ring the bell. Talk about bell ringing! You could have heard it on Blue Mountains a mile away! We were so proud we pulled harder and harder until down it came, the great heavy rope on top of us all. Some of us cried, some were really hurt and some just slunk away, but we were never allowed to ring the bell again.

We loved to play in the quarry, cracking stone into “sugar” to play shops or borrowing an old broom and sweeping out a small section to play house. We gathered bits of pottery from the rubbish which our neighbours had thrown out. In those days we had no dustbins or refuse collectors, but a section of the old quarry had been given over to deposits of household rubbish.

As we grew older we got to know every inch of the woods and fields round about, and in the wood we would make tents out of branches of leafy trees which grew so abundantly in our neck of the woods.

No-one ever stopped us or told us not to damage the trees. We would make little fires surrounded by flat stones and play at cooking if we could get a few old spuds to cut up and cook in an old saucepan. How delicious they tasted even though they were hardly ever cooked through.

Sometimes we collected a bucket of leaf mould from under the trees in the wood and took it to granny who would almost certainly give us a few little apples or a drink of home-made ginger beer. Some of the children would come out and play with slabs of white bread soaked in milk with a sprinkling of sugar. Mam said it was just “common” kids who did that. Common or not, it was very enjoyable and we thought those kids very fortunate.

Our days were spent happily scrumping apples from anyone’s trees, pinching rhubarb from the allotments and then scrounging a twist of newspaper with a spoonful of sugar to dip it in. We would dig up “pignuts” in the fields and eat them. We called them pignuts but now I have no idea what they were. We enjoyed pulling up young turnips from a farmer’s field, biting off the thick outside peel to taste the lovely sweetness as we scraped the flesh off with our teeth.

One of our favourite games was Learning to Ride the Bike. It was an old bicycle frame without brakes, tyres, pedals or seat. None of us could ride but one by one we all learned on this rusty old frame which we had unearthed from the quarry. We found an old coat and tied it on to the place where the saddle would have been. Two would hold the bike steady while the eager learner was hoisted onto the uncomfortable seat. The learner grasped the rusty handlebars and was given a good push. You balanced and rode or fell off, and that was how we all learned to ride a bike.

I hear that there are only about three of the original families or their descendants on Blue Mountains. The cottages have all been modernised and every one has a modern toilet.

Our beloved bluebell woods have been sacrificed for building purposes and now everyone will be wondering “Why do they ever call it Blue Mountains”.

(This last sentence refers to housing on Rigga Lane, built from the 1950s onwards. But much of rest of the bluebell woods remains today)

(Vera married Leslie Douglas Smith in 1941 and went to live in Derby)

(In 1948 all of the quarry and the allotments, and the 16 cottages were sold off to George Arthur Hall).