Rough Music
Edith Geere
This short extract from my interview with Edith Geere very nearly wasn’t recorded at all. My interview with her took place in December 1999, when she was 92. She told me a lot about growing up in Sompting and the difficulties poorer people had in making ends meet. In those days all my interviews were recorded on C90 audio cassettes; and it was just as the tape was running out that Edith told me about the poor beggarman who called at her house on his way to the workhouse at East Preston.
Literally, as she finished telling me of the beggar being arrested and her mother’s reaction, the tape ran out. The indignation in Edith’s voice is still palpable, even though she was describing an event that had taken place so many years earlier, before the First World War.