SOME NOTES ON OUR HOUSE

After the Second World War, there was a housing shortage, and vast numbers of prefabricated houses were prefabricated in factories, and later they were erected on site.  These were the famous "Prefabs". Although they were "cold in winter and hot in summer", they were excellently designed and fitted out for their day.  There was a coal shed and a garden shed made of corrugated metal.  The house itself had a coal fire (enclosed with fire doors) attached to a back boiler which was right in the middle of the house.  On one side of the fire was the room fitted out as a kitchen.  It was very modern.  It was inside, there was no obvious fireside, but there was lots of preparation space, a hot tap and a cold tap, and a gas fridge.  Through the door was the front room, which was used regularly.  This was where the fire was.  Through the door opposite was the hall, with the front door on the left and the other two bedrooms and the bathroom at the end.  There were two hot taps and two cold taps serving a wash basin and a bath.  There was also an indoor toilet.  I had the front bedroom, and my parents had the back bedroom.  I was not allowed into the back bedroom without permission.  (When I was clearing my mother's bedroom in a different house, fifty years later, I still felt uneasy being in her bedroom, even though she had not lived there for six months or so, and had passed away a few days earlier!)

What you have to remember is that Gran's house, which we had just left, had an outside toilet, an added on shed which acted as a kitchen, and a shared outside wash house.  Apart from the back room, none of the rest of the house had any heating at all.  In comparison, the prefab was a palace. 

Underneath the kitchen table which had a coir mat in red and cream stripes, I used to play with canary pudding tins, which I used to stack on top of each other.  For Christmas Santa brought me a tin plate spinning top with a siren. 

We had a corner plot at number 68 Queens Road.  I am still in touch with Tony, (he was three years older than me, and lived at number 2 Warwick Place).  We didn't have a lot in common, but we played together.

OUR GARDEN

So my father had a corner plot, and he grew vegetables.  He grew runner beans, french and dwarf beans.  Broad beans, potatoes (two varieties, Arran Pilot and King Edward, I think), peas, sprouts, curly kale, purple sprouting, brussels sprouts, carrots in rows, rhubarb in the corner.  There were lots of snapdragons and marigolds and dahlias along the borders, and large red poppies.  Elsewhere there were roses and a small lawn.  And I think, sweet peas, whose flowers were so fragrant.  One thing we didn't have, that many of our neighbours did, was a boundary hedge.  We had a primitive post and wire fence which dated back to when the house was first built, and a gate that didn't close without effort.

Marjorie from Windgather came to stay.  I went in our car with Dad to Cheltenham Lansdown station to collect her.  Her train arrived with a red engine on the front, which meant that it was still painted in LMS colours.  The LMS had been nationalised at the start of 1948, and it is the only LMS engine I can remember.  That's all I remember about her visit!

My only other two memories in 1949 were both significant in their own ways.  Once I could walk, I chose not to.  Instead of crawling, I sat and moved myself round with my bottom sliding along the well polished linoleum, which had a wood block pattern.  This was sufficient independent movement to get rid of the pram, and get me a pushchair.  I suppose the nearest modern equivalent would be a stroller, except that mine had silver mudguards!  One day we were going shopping.  On the way to the town we passed the cricket field and I remember I suddenly thought "It's 1949!"  Nothing else.  This was my first conscious knowledge, that I remember, of time.

The other memory was of much greater significance.  Our house was at the top of a small hill in Queens Road, and just round our corner was a steeply sloping Warwick Place.

I was playing in our garden with a small stick, and I threw it in the road.  I remember that.  I also remember lying in the gutter crying my eyes out.  What had happened was that as I dashed into the normally empty road, a young man on a bicycle came speeding round the Warwick Place corner and hit me so hard that I was knocked over and hit my head on a kerbstone.  I don't remember being taken to our doctor, but I'm sure I was, and that he rendered first aid.  A few weeks later I was diagnosed with Epilepsy, which of course has changed and limited my life ever since.

 I don't recall it, but the young man was off to a tennis match, he apparently had the racquet in one hand and a box of balls in the other, which meant that he was riding without holding the handlebars, so that he couldn't swerve or apply his brakes.  The strange thing is, that ever since that occasion, when I have heard that story told, I have never ever had any feelings against the fellow.  I don't even know his name.  As far as I am concerned, it is Kismet, Karma, Fate.

After a short while I started to have small "turns".  My brain seemed to be switched off, then on again, and I didn't even fall over.  Mr Anderson, my specialist, prescribed phenobarbitone to work on the epilepsy, and benzedrine to wake me up from the sleepy side effects.

I was on barbiturates and amphetamines – uppers and downers, at the age of three.  I have never understood the attraction of "recreational drug use"

 

LEARNING TO READ

My Mum and Dad didn't teach me the ABC, instead, years before it became generally used, my parents taught me a sort of phonetic alphabet.

"Ah, Buh, Cuh, Duh, Eh, Fuh, Guh"

They also bought me some readers.  These were books with simple sentences.

"Sing, mother, sing"

"Mother sings to Mary"

"Mary sings to John"

"They sing together"

and,

"The cat sat on the mat"

"Tuh huh eh". [ No John!, the TH is always called "Thuh" or "Thith"]

"Thuh cuh-ah-tuh (cat) Suh- Ah-Tuh (sat) ,Oh, nuh (on) [good, John, well done!] Tuh, huh, eh [we've already done this] I look back and see "Thuh" "Muh, Ah, Tuh, (mat).  [So what's that all together then].  "The cat sat on the mat"  "Well done!" said Mum.  "You can read!"  But of course I couldn't.

We went through the orange book, the blue book, the yellow book and even the red book, but I knew, and Mum knew, that I had memorised sentences.

One day, when I was about four, my mother was running my bath preparatory to my bed time.  I was looking at a sentence and I was able to work out for myself: "Sing mother sing".

"Mummy, I can read" I shouted as I headed for the bathroom.  I was promptly scooped up and returned to the books. Look Mummy. "Sing mother sing". [Very good!  What's the next bit?] "Mother sings to Mary" [Very good!]"  Now she turned to another book, and opened up a page.

"What does this say then?" she enquired.

A sea of letters swam into my eyes.  But I took little bits and gradually put the shapes of the letters together.  "The cat sat on the mat and had some milk.  Afterwards he purred."

My mother was already purring.  I was in bed when Dad came home from work.  He came into my room and said "I hear you can read".  Almost certainly (although I don't remember it on this occasion) he would have given me his special smile, which was reserved for very special occasions (and ice cream!)

Very soon afterwards, I was taken into Smith's in Tewkesbury High Street and Dad bought me "Thomas the Tank Engine" by the Rev W Awdry, and that introduced me to the joy and possibilities of reading.  I never had to bother with "Sing mother sing" again.  Instead I had a proper book with real stories.

It was 1950, I was four, and I could read.  I can't really remember much about 1950.  It's not that I don't have any memories.  It's just that I don't have any events to hang those memories on.