Ida Crabb

Ida Crabb was born on 24 May 1912, the third child and first daughter of Alfred Crabb, a Hull coal haulier then newly working on his own account, and Jane Thomas; the birth was registered that summer in the Sculcoates district, where the family's home above the business at 43 Massey Street then lay. From about 1915 home was 57 Edinburgh Street, off Hessle Road, and the coal yard was the family's whole world: stables for three horses across the back, the wagons — rullies, they called them — in the yard, and her mother selling coal from the house on scales in stones, even through the lunch hour. Ida's own memories of that house survive on her father's page: the horses' mash of black treacle and linseed whose smell she could summon fifty years later, the horse that would walk into the kitchen for its apple, the neighbourhood children queuing for a penny ride to the park in the trap. After school she chose to stay at home and help her parents with the business, and the 1939 Register catches her there at twenty-seven — 'unpaid domestic duties' — listed between her brother Joseph, a coal carrier, and her sister Hilda, a fruit-shop assistant.

In her twenties a long spell of ill health sent her south for a year, to convalesce with her brother Alfred — by then married, and an officer of the Salvation Army in Somerset, carrying the family faith their grandfather Isaac had helped found in Hull. It was friendship that shaped the rest of her life. Lily, granddaughter of a neighbour in Edinburgh Street, lived out at Melton, and on visits there Ida met the young man who boarded in the house: Bill Drewery, a maintenance engineer at the Capper Pass tin-smelting works. They married on 22 October 1940, with the war a year old, at St John's church, Newington — the same church where her parents had married thirty-five years earlier — her sister Hilda signing the register as witness, and the certificate recording the coal merchant's daughter of 57 Edinburgh Street marrying the engineer who lodged around the corner.

Bill and Ida rented 162 Boothferry Road, Hessle, and stayed for forty-nine years. Janet was born there in 1942, Geoffrey in 1947; Bill's shifts at Capper Pass set the rhythm of the house, and Ida's hands filled it — knitting, embroidery, dressmaking. Holidays were spent in her father's caravan at Bridlington, and later, when Bill had retired, they learnt ballroom dancing together at the halls nearby and managed at last a few holidays abroad. Five grandchildren followed the two children. In their late seventies the council offered them a flat by Hessle Square — the move Ida had longed for over many years, and though she was by then close to death from cancer she insisted on making it. She lived there a matter of weeks. Ida died on 19 December 1989, aged seventy-seven; the notice her family placed in the Hull Daily Mail asked simply for 'peace after much suffering bravely borne', and for donations to the Dove House Hospice; the service was at All Saints', Hessle. Her mother's line — Crabb, out of the Cambridgeshire fens — and her daughter's words carry the same plain verdict: she spent her life looking after the people she loved, and was dearly loved by all.