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Hilda's laughter fits could run into several minutes for the more that she laughed, the more the room laughed with or at her, and the more that the room laughed, the more that Hilda laughed until eventually people had to leave the room in order to just survive.
Lily Liar did not have a compulsive laughter problem; instead she had a compulsive "ours is better" problem.
When one of the Bronte ladies bought an item at the shops, then Lily Liar already had one - and it was bigger and better. She lived in a modest, small terrace house, but I was the best small, modest terraced house in Leeds and when Lily Liar described it, it had several reception rooms, at least a dozen bedrooms - all en-suite, live-in staff and a liveried chauffeur to bring her to Bronte every morning.
Of course when the other Bronte ladies expressed a wish to visit such an impressive residence it was always inconvenient, or the family would be guests at Harewood that weekend.
When Lily Liar polished the Bronte Hall refectory table then no one else could polish the refectory table like Lily Liar.
When Lily Liar cleaned the craphouse at Bronte Hall then no one else could get their hand around the U-bend like Lily Liar could.
And when Lily Liars husband died of a heart attack then no-one else's husband could die of a heart attack as spectacularly as Lily Liars husband did.
Fringe Benefits
The Bronte job didn't pay well in hard cash - why it only just kept us kids in Action Men and Subbuteo teams, but it had fringe benefits. None of the Bronte ladies had ever had the need to purchase any form of cleaning material at their local supermarket.
All sorts of cleaning materials were freely available from the Leeds City Council stores, without questions asked.
"Why on earth" the Carnegie College storekeepers must have asked "Do Bronte ladies go through five yellow dusters per day - each?"
"How come the Ajax consumption at Bronte is seven times that of all the other halls put together?" they must have mused.
"And where on earth do six tons of Izal toilet roll disappear to every month at Bronte?" someone must have puzzled.
But no, no one ever asked the question. The nearest thing that they got to security was that every item, every duster, every teacloth and tea-towel, every Ajax bottle had the word "Bronte" stencilled onto it. A more pointless exercise I have never come across as, if you are not going to check the materials at their final destination then there is no point in marking the goods in the first place.
So it was then that for many, many years all cleaning materials in our house had the word "Bronte" stencilled on it, and when you asked our mother why, she would just laugh to herself and tell you to "Never mind".
Even several years after she had retired and been rewarded with a ceremonial presentation dinner at the Leeds Civic Hall for "long, honourable and trustworthy service to the council" (if only they knew), we were still using Bronte cleaning materials, in fact when I moved out of the family home for my enforced sojourn to the North East, I took several boxes of Bronte goods, to the eternal puzzlement of my new Geordie in-laws who must have thought that "Bronte" was some strange mystical Yorkshire symbol for "cleaning materials".
The only downside to living in a Bronte ladies house was the endless supply of Izal toilet paper.
Izal toilet paper was stiff, unforgiving toilet paper, shiny on one side and rough on the other, a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea you could skid the shiny side up your backside and achieve nothing or use the rough side and not sit down for a week.
It was also "medicated", or so it stated down the edge of each strip.
Exactly what this meant is unknown but I can state quite categorically that after using Izal for several years I never once had a disease of the arse.
Imagine my delight on moving away from the clutches of home and the endless supply of Izal to find that the rest of the world used a much softer, more benign toilet paper during their ablutions, and shock of all shocks - you had a choice of colour.
Oh the pleasure to be obtained from wiping your nether regions with paper as soft and as white as the driven snow, I have to confess right here that I became addicted to laxative chewing gum in order to guarantee several visits per day to the abluting chamber and experience the delight and unashamed luxury of soft toilet roll.
Excercise
As we grew older we were allowed to stay at home during the school holidays while our mother carried out her morning duties as a Bronte lady, and it was on one of these mornings that we recorded the Bronte Ladies Exercise Tape.
One of the Bronte Ladies had purchased one of the first exercise albums on long playing vinyl (of course it was long playing vinyl - it was the only format available). It had been recorded by some old biddy from a church women's guild and consisted of a series of stern instructions from said old biddy set to some cheap orchestral music, intended to help ladies of a certain age keep their joints moving and their brain cells ticking over.
Now our dad was a bit of a gadget freak, we had to have every new gadget even though he was most reluctant to part with his hard earned cash for it. So whilst most of our friends counted themselves lucky to have a mono record player, we had the full hi-fi stereo set-up. Wharfedale amplifier, tuner, record deck and solid teak speakers that weighed several hundred kilos each.
Normally such a hi-fi setup would have cost many hundreds of pounds, but our dad being our dad he had bought the lot as seconds from the Wharfedale factory in Shipley, who just happened to be customers of his (everybody was one of his customers - if you wanted anything he'd go straight to the factory and sell them a time clock just so that he could then scrounge an employees pass into the factory seconds shop).
The icing on the cake was a stereo cassette recorder, a proper hi-fi stereo cassette recorder, a step up from most other families mono battery operated cassette players which couldn't record. We were extremely proud of our hi-fi stereo cassette recorder which had also been bought at the Wharfedale seconds shop, and it was this family pride in our hi-fi system that led to our mother volunteering my brother and I into taping the exercise LP so that the rest of the Bronte ladies could exercise away to their hearts content during their 10.30 tea break.
So one morning when only Ned and I were in the house we put on the LP, set a tape up in the machine, switched it on and set the record off playing. After a few minutes we were bored and as we sat there staring at the record going round at round the same thought started to hatch in both our minds.
As the old biddy on the record encouraged us to stretch our arms above our heads, I stretched instead across the record and placed my finger ever so gently on it. The old biddys voice slowed down a few octaves, as did the music and she began to sound as if she was talking through a mouthful of very sticky toffee.
Releasing the record caused it to speed up again, and stifling our laughter Ned then pressed the record harder until it almost stopped and the old biddy sounded like the possessed girl in "The Exorcist". Releasing the record would cause it to speed up too fast so that the old biddy sounded possessed one second and like Pinky & Perky the next.
Nowadays this is called "mixing" and club DJ's are paid thousands of pounds to do this every night - in 1973 it was called "mucking about" and it was getting better by the minute.
Leaving the record taping we ran into the kitchen and howled out our pent-up laughter - the thought of the Bronte ladies trying to keep up with this exercise tape was too much. We put our plan together in the kitchen - we had a microphone that had been supplied with the cassette deck and we put together a script that would encourage the Bronte Ladies in their quest for fitness.
By this time a couple more tracks had been recorded without event so whilst I set up the microphone Ned mucked about with the record speed, slowing and speeding up the record as the whim took him. When the dubbing mic was ready we then inserted our own commentary such as
"come on Lillian, get those knees up"
or "stop laughing Hilda and stretch those legs"
and "listen to the old biddy ladies, she knows best"
and "put the kettle on Joyce, you're a lost cause".
Finally the tape was finished and we boxed it up and gave it to our mother when she came home, at which point she told us how excited the Bronte ladies were at the thought of keeping fit, starting from tomorrow.
The next day when she came in from work we could tell that all was not well, in fact we could tell that she was fuming and as we dodged past her and out the door we could hear snippets such as
"what did you do to our tape"
and "never been so embarrassed in my life"
and the classic "wait 'till you father gets home".
By this time we were well down the street and spent the rest of the day keeping out of her sight until ultimately we had to go home and face the music in front of our dad. She sat us down in front of him and started to tell the story of how she and her ladies were all seated comfortably and loosening up with the old biddys gentle exercises when the tape went all wonky and threw them completely off their stride.
We sat their biting our cheeks trying not to smile or laugh out loud, as experience had taught us that it is not a good idea to smirk when you are being punished. Our dad sat their looking very serious, shaking his head, tutting his tongue and looking at us in a very stern way until our mother played her ace card - she had brought home the tape and told him to play it and listen for himself.
He put it on the hi-fi and kept his straight face for all of 8 seconds before bursting into uncontrollable laughter when the old biddy slowed down in treacle then skidded off out of control as if on ice. When the commentary started he could stand no more and switched it off with tears streaming down his face, Ned and I of course had joined in the jollity and I for one had almost wet myself.
Our mother however took a very different view and declaring us all "imbeciles" stormed out into the kitchen where she sat sulking for the rest of the evening. She didn't make any tea for any of us that night and as men couldn't cook in the 1970's we had to starve all evening - but we were happy to have established a bond of brotherhood between ourselves and our dad - we were males and had a well developed sense of humour, whilst the Bronte ladies were females and so of course had none.
They had tea-towels though, lots of them.
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