| This is a sequel to my Post-Wartime Childhood in Scotland
We lived for about eighteen months in Scotland, after coming home from Malta and then my father was posted again and we moved to Belvedere in Kent. This was a new country for us children, we had never lived in England before. We passed through London on our rail journey down to Kent, and we marvelled at the escalators at the railway station - we rode up and down them about a dozen times before we were dragged off by our parents.
Our new house (another rented property) was a typical red brick suburban semi in a cul-de-sac - No. 40 Iris Crescent. Our house was right at the closed end of Iris Crescent, where all the local children congregated to play, so we soon made friends and spent many happy hours playing quite safely in the street. Cars were few and far between in those days; milk, bread and coal were all delivered by horse drawn wagons and if we were lucky we could sometimes hop on the back and get a ride up the road. Our mother wasn't too keen on us hitching a ride with the coalman, but we thought it was great. There was still an Anderson shelter in our garden, which our father used as a garden shed.
We also quite soon had something in our back garden which no-one else in the street had a pigeon loft full of racing pigeons. Our father having been brought up in Cumbria where pigeon racing was (and I believe still is) very popular, pursued his hobby in the suburbs of southern England. Every Friday evening was Pigeon Club evening, when the pigeons were taken to a central point to be transported to some far off location where they were released. We quickly learnt that on Saturday afternoons our back garden was a no-go area, unless you were prepared to be as quiet as a mouse nothing must deter the pigeons from entering the loft as soon as they arrived home, so that their racing rings could be removed and the time recorded.
Of course, being so soon after the end of the war, there were still shortages of essential items and rationing was in force. We had to register our ration books with the local grocer, butcher, etc. and he would painstakingly cut out the coupons as we purchased our meagre amounts of butter, cheese, meat etc. I once queued for about an hour in an enormously long queue to buy some bananas, the first ones I had ever seen, and we certainly enjoyed them. I think clothing coupons were also still in force I know that we all wore hand-me downs and new clothes were rare. I remember my younger sister, being the youngest of three girls, once wailing I’ve never had a new coat in my life! We all pooled our pocket money to buy our mother a pair of nylons for her birthday one year, they cost us 17/6d. Sweet rationing was the thing which affected us children most; although that probably did us a favour I think we had sounder teeth than today s children!
This is the four younger members of our family in the garden, with the pigeon loft clearly in the background.
We started at our local primary school, where we found ourselves to be objects of interest because we had lived in a foreign country, and we were often called maltesers , but I think we quite enjoyed being different, the novelty soon wore off anyway. We had lots of different activities to fill our out of school hours, we girls had joined the Girls Life Brigade, attached to the local Baptist Church and spent many happy hours learning first aid, knot tying, etc. We also had an annual camp at Birchington, a seaside resort on the Kent coast. There was no canvas or camp fires involved in this camp we all took our own mattresses and slept in the hall of the local Baptist Church, so we didn't exactly rough it, but what fun we had. I can still make a nifty apple-pie bed a very useful skill I m sure you'll agree.
Most weekends we attended Saturday morning pictures. For a very small entrance fee we had about two hours of films, cartoons, etc. in a very rowdy atmosphere. One of the best things about these outings was buying an ice lolly beforehand in the sweet shop opposite the cinema. This ice lolly was actually a cube of frozen orange squash which was always handed to us wrapped in part of a page torn from a magazine, but what the heck, we enjoyed them and I m sure no-one was ever poisoned by them.
My chief delight when not in school was our little local library. It was about fifteen minutes walk from our house and during the school holidays I would walk up there every day, choose a book (we were only allowed one) take it home, read it and repeat the process the next day. I can t imagine how many books I got through during those years.
My father would often take us fishing for tiddlers on Sundays in the summer. We would go off armed with nets and jam jars and a few sandwiches and happily spend all day on the riverbank. We always returned our catch to the river at the end of the day so you could call it a non-productive activity, but we loved those days.
There weren't many mod cons around then; I don t think anyone we knew had a refrigerator. During the summer our milk was always kept in a bucket of cold water outside the back door, but it was the dawning of the technological age with the appearance of the first television sets. We didn't have one until much later, but we were always angling for an invitation to the homes of friends who had TVs, and we gazed in awe at the flickering picture on the tiny screen, which was invariably housed in a very large wooden cabinet. I watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on such a set at a friend s house.
My father acquired a car during this time, not a very new car; it had to be started with a handle, but we thought it was wonderful, although I do remember one occasion when we all had to get out and walk up a hill because the car couldn't make it fully loaded! But the best thing about this car was that it gave us children a source of income we were all very willing to wash it (for a small fee). I think it must have been the cleanest car in the country; there were five of us, all keen to earn extra pocket money, and a lovely indulgent father I think it got washed every day in the school holidays!
When we reached the age of 11, we all sat, and passed the recently introduced eleven plus exam and went on to the Grammar School. We three girls went to Dartford County Grammar School for Girls (DCGS for short). We were subject to a host of new disciplines there. The curriculum was very wide ranging and inclined towards the classics. I have to admit to struggling with some subjects and wishing that we spent more time on games, which was really my forte, but on reflection I think it was an excellent school and gave me a thoroughly good grounding for later life. I have some fond memories of it anyway. DCGS was very particular about school uniform we wore a bottle green gymslip, cardigan, blazer and beret in the winter, and horror of horrors, lisle stockings! We absolutely hated these stockings, and I well remember the occasion when our class decided to mutiny. We had worked out that if we ALL turned up in the white ankle socks we preferred, they couldn't give us all a detention for being improperly dressed, so on the pre-arranged day, I left home in the lisle stockings to satisfy my mother, changed on the bus into socks, only to find when I arrived at school that I was the only one in socks! Everyone else had chickened out, claiming that their parents had not allowed them to do it. I had plenty of time to contemplate their treachery during the resulting detention.
We spent about six years in Belvedere, during which time some historic events occurred. There was the awful shock of the death of King George VI in 1952. I was at home from school suffering from mumps at the time and was visited by the doctor who I remember complained bitterly that the only thing on the wireless was solemn music! This of course was followed by the coronation of the lovely young Queen Elizabeth II. It seemed to me that everybody was a staunch royalist in those days I could never have imagined how the Royal Family, and the general public s attitude to them, would change in the ensuing years. Every child was given a coronation souvenir we had commemorative mugs, plus a visit to the Festival of Britain with our school that was a very exciting day. We also had an Iris Crescent street party to celebrate the Coronation. There were long tables laid out down the middle of the road and we had a wonderful tea with ice cream and cakes provided by all the mothers, followed by entertainment by a ventriloquist it was absolutely great.
During our time in Belvedere our family began to go their own ways my two older brothers both followed in my father's footsteps and went straight from school into the army. My older sister left school and began work as a Tracer in the drawing office of a local company. My younger brother, who was just a toddler when we arrived, had developed into a sturdy seven year old, with no respect for the maturity of his older sisters! I remember several occasions when we ran for our lives because he was chasing us with a frog, or, worst of all, a slowworm! (I can t think why I loved him). In 1953 my father made the momentous decision to leave the Army and take a job with a refrigeration company in Wembley, so this meant another move for those of us remaining at home a new location, Harrow in Middlesex, with new challenges for us all maybe the subject of another story.
Location: Belvedere, Kent
User: Malteser
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