We lived in No1 and Mrs Bosique lived in No 2 . Clitheroe, as I mentioned in a previous post, had been a large family home which had been split into 8 flats. Our place was separated from Mrs Bosique's simply by boarding up two doors.
One of the doors was in a little alcove in the hallway which ran from my bedroom, past the bathroom to the eat in kitchen. When converting the original wreck of a flat into our home, my father and his builder friends had made the alcove with its hidden door into a deep cupboard and shelves covered by a curtain. The other door was in what became my bedroom. This door was also closed off with a large cupboard and shelves.
Mrs Bosique was a bottle blond who had a cigarette constantly stuck to her bottom lip, nicotine yellow fingers and a great fondness for beer. The neighbours assured us that there had been a Mr Bosique, but we never saw him and I have a vague feeling that he had died or run off before we moved there.
When my father and his two friends Herbert and Emil first moved in and started to fix the place up she had come out and asked where in the world he was from because she had noticed the accents. When my father told her Germany, she had screamed, rushed into her flat and locked the door. Finally she found out that my father's friends were Swiss and that his wife and child were expected to live there in a few months when the alterations were complete. This made my father somewhat less scary and so one day she tentatively asked what nationality his wife was. 'German' was the answer and she screamed anew and again rushed into her flat and locked the door.
Mrs Bosique believed some war propaganda she had heard, that all Germans were dreadful people and that they had a predilection for eating the livers of enemies! She was fond of her liver and was terrified that she was going to be murdered in the night. She probably had barricades up against our shared doorways.
When my mother and I arrived at Clitheroe and none of the other neighbours had been murdered for their livers, her attitude to us changed and she became very friendly. Nobody in the flats ever used her first name, so I have no idea what it was.
My mother and Mrs Bosique couldn't understand each other for a very long time. Of course my mother had a German accent and she had learnt very pukka English in India. Mrs Bosique spoke the broadest strine imaginable. Instead of saying 'I beg your pardon?' she said 'ay?' which rhymed with 'neigh'. One day my mother was trying to tell her that the baker had arrived. Both women must have been frustrated at their lack of communication when one of the other neighbours turned up to translate - "the bake is 'ere". All explained, she went off to collect her loaf.
Next to the flats was a tennis court which was part of the original property. In later years the land was sold and a house built there. One night there was a shrieking and squealing from the tennis court and when the neighbours turned up to investigate, there was Mrs Bosique, quite inebriated, in the nude, being chased around the net by one of her more regular boyfriends. Amused, everyone hastily retreated to their own flats.
Apparently there were fairly regular 'shenanigans' in No 2 and although I was only separated by a door, albeit buffered by a cupboard, I was a good sleeper and was never disturbed.
I thought Mrs Bosique was lovely and I would drag my little chair outside so I could climb up and have conversations with her through the window as she worked in the kitchen.
One day I was having one of these chats when Uncle Don, from No 7, grabbed me off my chair and shouted to Mrs Bosique and my mother to boil their kettles. It turns out I had placed my chair over a funnel web spider and
it was rearing up ready to strike. In super quick time the spider was dispatched. After that I was always terrified of spiders.
As part of her flat Mrs Bosique had a funny little room off the end of her verandah. It had proper brick walls so wasn't a traditional 'sleep-out'. Clitheroe was definitely a hodge podge of added on spaces. When the daughter of a friend of our's, Annedore, came to Australia to work in my father's business, she sublet the room from Mrs Bosique and lived there for ages until she married.
As there wasn't any plumbing in her room, Annedore shared Mrs Bosique's kitchen and bathroom. Mrs Bosique couldn't cope with the name Annedore so insisted on calling her Anne.
Mrs Bosique was sad when Annedore moved away. She had never had any children and very much enjoyed her company in the evenings when they would sit together over a beer or two, smoke cigarettes and discuss their day.
When we moved away from Clitheroe we lost touch with Mrs Bosique and were saddened when we heard that she had died. As far as we knew she didn't have any family or any real friends, so I guess the people in the flats were those she was closest to. She was a real character.
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