Roy’s sister Pat talks about the practice of “doing the steps”

Resource Type: Audio | Posted on 22nd July 2011 by Liam Physick

Pat recalls how the people in her street would “do the steps” of their houses with sandstone that she and the other children collected from the station, it having crumbled off the station walls

Interviewee: Pat

Interviewee Gender: Female

Interview Transcript

Pat: The sides of the wall, most of this station was built with sandstone, and Spekeland Road, it used to fall off . . .

Terry: Crumble, yeah.

Pat: . . . with the bad weather, so, my job, along with a supposed many other children there, we used to come out with the little bags and collect all the pieces of sandstone, so every morning, the steps were done, and if you were posh, you done the outside of your step, with the sandstone which put, like, a pinky colour, and then we’d have a white stone, what we got off the ragman instead of a balloon cos me mum was dead careful . . .

Terry: Yeah.

Pat: . . . wasn’t she, and we’d do the middle with the white stone, so if you were posh you had Edge Hill station’s sandstone, pink, round the outside and the middle white (Jenny laughs), and if not, if we’d run out of the white off the ragman, we had it all done pink with the sandstone, dip it in water, and it used to come up a lovely pink! And that was my job! (Jenny laughs)

Paul: And, and if, if my, if my recollection’s correct, it was called “doing the steps”, wasn’t it?

Pat: Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.

Paul: That was it, “doing the steps”

Terry: Well you see in, what’s her name, Of Time in the City . . .

Pat: Yeah, yeah.

Terry: . . . Terence Davies, and, that, you see lots of people doing the steps, don’t you?

Pat: Steps, yeah.

Tagged under: spekeland road, sandstone, doing the steps

Categorised under: Change & Communities