No place like home after living 84 years in one house

FOR others it might just be a pin-neat, three-bedroom semi, indistinguishable from all the others in the street – but for Freda O’Brien it has been her life.

Proving there is no place like home, she has lived in the same house for 84 years.

The 91-year-old was brought up in the 1920s – a time of grinding poverty for many in the UK when domestic bliss meant a hand-cranked washing machine and hot water on tap.

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Just before her eighth birthday she and her family left their cramped terrace house in West Yorkshire for a new council home, with all mod-cons.

Mrs O’Brien said she can still remember the day in July 1927 that she first came into the house in Thornhill near Dewsbury.

“We couldn’t stop switching the lights on and off – as our old home didn’t have electricity,” she said. “Then we’d run the taps to get hot water and go and look at the indoor toilet and bathroom – it was luxury to us.”

It was not an entirely auspicious start, however. Two years after moving there her sister Grace died from diptheria.

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“I remember the hearse came to the house but her coffin was not allowed inside because she had died from the contagious illness. My mum pressed her face against the glass hearse and wept.”

She had moved into the new house with her parents Elizabeth and George, brother George, then 12, and sisters Isabella, 15, Lois, 10 and Grace, six. “It was the first time my parents had their own bedroom, all us girls were together and my brother was in the box room,” Mrs O’Brien remembered.

At 14, she started work at a local mill, earning 11s/6d, her shifts starting at 6.30am and finishing 5.45pm Monday to Friday and on Saturdays at 11.30am. Her wages, however, went straight into the family kitty.

“Mum would give me a shilling back for treats such as the cinema,” she said. “At Christmas, we couldn’t afford turkey so would have rabbit.”

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She left home during World War Two to work in an munitions factory and in 1944 – a year before the war ended – she wed Danny O’Brien and decided to continue living in the house with her parents as they couldn’t find a nicer place.

Although they went to look at a council house nearby as a new home Mrs O’Brien said: “We didn’t like it so went back home. Danny said to me, ‘We’re all right here aren’t we?’ And so we never left.”

Their two daughters Margaret Ewart, 57, and Catherine Walker, 59, were raised there and shared the box room until their grandparents’ deaths. Mrs O’Brien’s father died in 1965.

Mrs Walker said: “The coffin was in our front room for two days. We used to play on the floor and occasionally have a peep in at him. To us, he looked lovely, just as if he was asleep.”

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In the 1980s following the Thatcher reforms of local government the couple bought the house from the council and stayed there.

The lounge still has the original fitted cupboards and the kitchen boasts the wooden clothes airer on its original rope pulley used to hoist it up to the ceiling. “It’s been there as long as I can recall. I still use it,” says Mrs O’Brien, who was widowed in 1994.

She does all her own cooking and cleaning, and although she agreed to have a stair lift installed at her family’s insistence she says she never uses it, and goes out several times a week.

While she has been there monarchs and prime ministers have come and gone, England have won the World Cup, man has stood on the Moon and the internet has arrived.

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But she said: “The biggest change on the street is the number of cars. When we moved in, no one had one but now it seems they all have them. I never wanted to live anywhere else, it’s been a happy home.”

Mrs Ewart of Maynes Close, Thornhill, said: “I have very fond memories of our time at home. We were a very close-knit family. My aunt Bella lived just nearby and we could go through the garages and be at her house very quickly to meet our cousins, Christine, Alan and Granville.

“Christmas-time was really good fun with all the family from my mum’s other sister Lois around who lived just up the road and there was always a Christmas party at aunt Bella’s. The younger children would come back to our house – my grandad was always there to babysit. But now my mum is the only one left.”