THE MOVE

It was 25th March 1947. Moving day had arrived and I was none too happy about going back to London. I remember the date well because it was my father’s 47th birthday. I was coming up to my 17th birthday.

We started out at 8am and the roads were so bad it took us nearly an hour to do three miles. We got as far as the next little village when the pantechnicon broke down. Oh boy! This was going to be some removal day. The driver had to use the public telephone box to report to the depot for another pantechnicon to come out to have the furniture transferred to it. All this was taking place in the middle of a small village called Quorn. I wanted to scream at the top of my voice that I did not want to bl**dy well go back to London!

I think it was about 11am when we started on our way again because my mother and myself were travelling in the driver’s cab with the driver while his mate was having a kip in the back.

My youngest brother had been called up in 1944 and was in the tail end of the war in North Africa. My sister had got married to a chap in Loughborough and had a little boy so there was only my mother and myself plus my eldest brother who had been demobbed in 1946 who was keeping the driver’s mate company in the back of the van.
The journey was arduous and the floods that were in the fields as we passed were horrendous. Icy roads, floods, as well as blocked roads made the journey longer. I could see dead sheep and cows that had been marooned in the heavy downfall of snow that we had that year which had started thawing in places leaving floods everywhere. It was a terrible winter that year. I have never known one as bad as that since. It was certainly a year that I have never forgotten for various reasons.

We arrived at the house in the dark at roughly 6-30 pm. It had been a very LONG weary day.

The first thing that we found out was that there was no electricity put in. It still had the gas mantles from the year dot. What annoyed me was the council promised to have it done for us when we let them know when we would be moving in. This was done a few weeks previously by letter from my mother. To make matters worse there was NO gas laid on and with no lights or heating it made life very complicated.
Luckily enough there was a shop open just opposite that sold candles so we had candles all round the house to see where we were going and to get the beds up because my father had joined us by this time. Meanwhile my mother had brought some coal with her and she got a fire going. She found the frying pan from a box that was packed and some bread and sausages that the butcher had given her as a going away present.

YES, you are allowed to laugh because it must sound like a comic opera to the reader.
The people who we had gone to live next door to were very good to us. They made a pot of tea for us because they too had the same sort of problems when they moved in. Their name was Bird and they had a son called Richard. Once we really got to know them you can imagine what Richard got called.

It took a long time to get that house as straight as we wanted it to be and neither my brother nor my father were much good at laying linoleum or anything else in the DIY department for that matter. NO fitted carpets in those far off days.

I got a job at an export factory. It was from this factory that was situated near the Old Kent Road that I wrote this poem because one day I went to work with a swollen face from an infected tooth.

The following poem was the result.

THE COST OF A SMILE

A certain dentist was being discussed and his expensive fee
It brought to mind this incident of what once happened to me.
It reminded me of when I lived in London many years ago
I turned up for work one day with toothache feeling very low.

My colleague named Eva looked at me and saw my swollen cheek
“It’s the dentist for you,” she said not giving me chance to speak.
“There is a dentist on the Old Kent Road,” my foreman firmly stated
My protests were ignored and it looked as though I was sorely fated.

As I was led into the surgery like a lamb to the sacrificial altar
A six foot six giant loomed over me ready for the slaughter,
He had arms like tree trunks and each hand as big as a spade
All my hopes of getting out alive were fast beginning to fade.

“Open your mouth nice and wide and look at the tropical fish.”
This statement to me at that time sounded more like a death wish,
A black and white fish caught my eye as it darted round the tank
And suddenly the pain had gone, my mind was a complete blank.

“There you are, rinse your mouth and get down off the bed”
I looked at him in wonderment while trying to clear my head,
“Is it out?” I asked, in awe “because if it is I never felt a thing.”
I was feeling on top of the world and to me he was a king.

God knows what he had used to get rid of the flipping pain
But I knew where I would go if it ever happened again.
I paid the fee of half a crown or twelve and a halfpence today
And quickly made my exit to enjoy the rest of the day.

Now I am fifty years older I don’t go to the dentist any more
I can put my choppers in a bag and post them through his door.

I also found out where my friend had gone to live who came from London and who had been evacuated to Loughborough but not at the same time as me. Her family had returned a year before us.

I hated the house that we had moved into because it was me who had to do the housework. It was three storeys high and took some cleaning. My mother was never there on a Saturday morning because she got a job as forelady over the cleaners at Scotland Yard so I was the sludgebump. We had not got much furniture but my father who had been in WW1 was a stickler for cleanliness. I think it was because he rose in rank to be an RSM. I do believe he thought he could be the same with his family. He had an irritating habit of running his finger along the window ledges to see if he could find dust on them. Having coal fires there was much more dust and pollution in the air at that time. He was also fanatical about the white hearth stoned front door step.
The step had to be done everyday with the hearthstone --- this was like a solid white lump of chalk that had to be moistened with water before applying to the step. Woe betides anyone who stood on that doorstep if they called. The insurance man ALWAYS stepped over it because he remembered the ranting he got from my father for standing on it.

One Saturday morning after cleaning the whole house through I was just scrubbing the long passage which was my last job as my father opened the front door and came in.
He just lost his temper and wanted to know why the so and so house was not cleaned. Something snapped in me at his remarks. I saw red and without even thinking what the consequences would be I picked the bucket up with the floor cloth in it and threw the lot all over him saying at the same time “I have been a sludgebump for long enough. Get someone else to do it because I am getting out” He was so taken aback that his daughter could show a tantrum he never offered to stop me when I grabbed my coat and bike and flew out of the door.

YES I did run the bike wheels all over that blasted step. I had cleaned it and I was going to dirty it.

I finished up at my friend’s house having a wash and tidying myself up but I had to borrow a dress from her. It was nearly midnight when I went home. I was all prepared for a showdown with my parents. I was by this time coming up to my 18th year but being treated like a slave. I had everything sorted out in my head what I would do if my father raised his hand to me or my mother come to that.

As I opened the front door and took my bike in the passage my father looked out of the kitchen and said “ Ah, I am glad that you are home because I owe you an apology for today. I was out of order. I’m sorry for laying into you.” I WAS STUNNED. Everything that I was going to say or do just disappeared.

I walked into the kitchen where my mother sat at the side of the table smoking a cigarette and she said “I wont be working Saturday mornings in future.”

Blimey! What had gone off between my father and mother I never did find out. I was nicknamed Spitfire by my father after that incident.

This is me outside the house in Atwell Road in Peckham in London where we had moved back to from Loughborough.
It was 1948.

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