After The War

After the war was over, in time as things sorted themselves out, street lighting returned. The road that we lived in being right on the edge of farmland had been very dark at night during the wartime and when the streetlights were switched back on the ones in our road were gas-lit. My friends and I used to think nothing of being out playing after dark, and one evening they bet me I could not throw a stone over the top of the gas lamp. Of course I said I could and promptly threw it straight into the glass at the side. There was this almighty crash of breaking glass and we all took off home like greyhounds. However a few minutes later there was a knock at our front door and there stood a man from the Gas Company. Unluckily for me, not only did he live right alongside the lamp in question and had seen me break the glass, but he recognised me. My father had always had a high respect for law and order and did not want the police involved so he offered to cut a piece of glass to fit into the lamp if the man would not report it. This he agreed to and honour being satisfied nothing further ever came of it, although it must have cost my father something to get the glass and cut it.

Although we were still living in the requisitioned house at West Wickham, my father continued to use the allotments on the railway bank at Beckenham to produce vegetables. In order to carry his gardening tools and other items to and from the allotments, he made a small cart with pram wheels to tow behind his bike. This cart was made from what was commonly referred to as a sugar box, for in those days wholesale sugar deliveries came in large wooden boxes much the same size of the tea chest, but made of thin wood rather than plywood. After I started my education at the Grammar School if I knew for sure that my father would be at his allotments when I came out of school, I would go along. Then when he had finished I would climb into the trailer and he would pedal it the three miles or so back home with me in the back.

In 1946 or 1947, it was announced that West Wickham would revive the pre-war Fair and Flitch. This word Flitch meant nothing to me but come the day in question, apart from all the side shows such as a coconut shy (which was a novelty to me), I found out what a Flitch was. It turned out to be a side of bacon for which people bowled and the person with highest score at the end of the day would win the Flitch of bacon. Remember that at that time all sorts of foodstuffs were still rationed and a whole side of bacon must have seemed a fantastic prize.

When street lighting and neon advertising were switched on again, our parents took us up to London to see the lights around Piccadilly which had been relit and that was the first time I had ever seen Neon lights. Sometime around now I joined the Boy Scouts and of course this again meant that my parents had to find money for a scout uniform etc. I think I must have stayed in the scouts for about a year, but I soon realised that even the weekly Subs was not an easy amount for my parents to provide, and so I left. However I never told my Parents that my reason for leaving was that I did not like having to ask for the money. What I did not know or even would have understood until years later, was that even though we had been bombed out and were not living in the house, my father was still having to repay the money owed on the mortgage as well as the rent for the requisitioned house.

One of the jaunts, which my friends and I used to make, was to the ponds at Keston, about three miles away. This was all right except some of us had bikes and some didn’t. To overcome this it was common practice for the non-owners (of whom I was one) to ride on the cross bar of the bike someone who did have one. However the person I always seemed to end up with did not like me sitting on his crossbar as he had rather long legs and anyone sitting on his crossbar got in the way. He overcame this by insisting that his passenger sat on the handlebars facing forward. This was okay when you got used to it and in fact I preferred to ride that way. Keston ponds were at the top of a range of hills and the road went up quite a steep hill. One day on the way back we were going down this hill at the bottom of which there was quite a sharp turn, when a car came round the corner towards us. This was very unusual as cars were few and far between in those days. Anyhow my driver sort of grunted, said, “hang on” and with great difficulty we leant over and managed to negotiate the bend. We seemed to be going rather fast and after we had got round the bend I asked him why he had not slowed down or even stopped when the car approached, to which he replied, “I haven’t got any brakes”.

In 1947 there was a long period of heavy frost and then deep snow and we children had great fun sledging, even late in the evening in the dark. We used to make sledges from Coop milk crates which at that time had the main part constructed of two galvanised steel tubular frames curved at the top like sledge runners and with a square frame attached on the base. By taking out the interior part i.e. the bottle holders, and turning the remaining frame upside down it provided a perfect sledge albeit only about eighteen inches square. However ingenuity being what it is, we soon found that by tying two crates end to end it made a perfect sledge in all respects. I must add that three or even four crates tied together end to end were not unknown.

During the winter of 1947, my father suffered a bad attack of rheumatism, and was away from work for some weeks after which he went away to a convalescent home. During his absence, due to the fact that heating in the house was poor (as it always was in those days), one night the lead pipes in the loft froze up. When they thawed out, there was a split and water was flooding all over the loft and running down the light fitting in our bedroom.

Before the coming of smokeless fuels etc, I recall in the 1940’s and 1950’s, the old “Pea Souper” fogs that were very common on winter nights. The smell of the smoke from the coal fires, the smarting of the eyes, the coughing and the sight of the paraffin flare lamps on the corner of roads and on the Keep Left islands are a thing I would not like to see come back again. One particular afternoon about 1947, the School was closed early because of the dense fog and we were all sent home. Having arrived at the bus stop, we found a long queue of people waiting because there had been no buses for over an hour. Consequently, myself and a friend who lived close to me, set off and walked the four miles home. In later years I can remember going to the cinema one evening and while we were inside, a “smog” developed and gradually crept into the cinema. The Smog was so bad that eventually the screen was virtually obscured and we all got our money back.

While still living in the requisitioned house, I had become friends’ with a boy at the Grammar School who lived in the road next to our bombed house, and our favourite pastime became swimming. The swimming baths were a short walk from a railway station convenient to get to from West Wickham and it became standard practice for me to meet my friends every Saturday morning and go swimming. To do this I used to leave home around eight o’clock in the morning and would not get home until around one or two o’clock in the afternoon.

One day, whilst in the baths, I was running along the side (which of course we were not supposed to do) and on this particular occasion, I slipped over and hit my head on the stone floor. Picking myself up I touched my head where I had hit it and found blood. This did not particularly bother me, and I just jumped back in the water. However I was soon hauled out by the attendant for the cut was much worse than I thought and I was staining the water red. I was ordered to get dressed and having put a makeshift bandage on the cut I was told to go down to the hospital where they sewed it up (same hospital as 1943 when I split my chin and again with horsehair). The nurse insisted that I stayed in the emergency room for some time to make sure that I was not suffering from concussion, and by the time I arrived home, it was late afternoon and my mother was beginning to wonder where I had got to.

It must have been about then I also saw for the very first time, a house being built. Throughout the war it was common to see houses being patched up to keep the weather out after bomb damage, but to see one started from ground level was completely new to me.