THE FOLLY OF SHEERNESS

Once he acquired his Ariel Motorcyle, flamboyantly red in colour which gave it a dynamic appearance, my father became fond of weekend jaunts to local places of interest. They were usually places he recalled from his childhood years growing up in the children's home in Chatham.   The boys, if the ensured they had been of good behaviour, were frequently taken on trips with an educational edge to them financed by local philanthropists keen on doing good in the community.  He recalled these outings fondly and sometimes I wondered why.  My mother tolerated these trips down Memory Lane just as long as they involved an afternoon picnic and my brother was too young for his opinion to count.  I wasn't expected to harbour opinions in the first place and in any case I was quite keen on picnics.

I remember well the Saturday when we visited The Folly of Sheerness because it rained quite heavily causing us to surreptitiously picnic in the Family Room of the nearby pub called The Ship of the Shore, though it didn't particularly resemble a ship.   We were the only family using the room at the time and because my father ordered half pints of Mild for himself and my mother and lemonades for me and my brother, plus two packets of crisps, the woman beind the bar kindly turned what my mother said was a Blind Eye to our egg and cress sandwiches.  We had of course abandoned the idea of making tea on a camp fire but the lemonades made up for that.

I wasn't altogether impressed with The Folly but I listened politely to the story behind it because the crisps were not going to be distributed until I did.   Apparently in the late 1850s a ship called The Lucky Escape ran aground nearby carrying a cargo of cement in barrels which a day or two later floated to shore by which time the contents were wet.  Before long an enterprising local broke open the barrels and used the cement blocks to build the Folly which probably was quite a good way of putting them to some use.  

There was a great deal of confusion as to where the cement had come from in the first place although there was in fact a cement works along the coast at Queenborough Creek which survived in business into the next century.  It might have been sensible to have simply made an enquiry with them.

Whatever the truth of the matter, I couldn't help thinking that Rochester Castle was a great deal more interesting overal and not such a long trip in the sidecar of the Ariel either!

Memories of the Domestic Architecture of Gravesend

It was not until I started school at Wombwell Hall when I was thirteen that I consciously realised how charmed I was by houses.  The fact that real people, living breathing individuals had actually slept, ate, read books, wrote letters and had hopes and dreams the same as me – and added to all that, had actually lived in that wonderful old house was thrilling and always half felt as if someone with a great imagination was making it all up specifically to fool me.  I actively looked forward to each school day for the next three years!

I realised by the time I was five years old that the terrace cottages in York Road, where we lived in Northfleet could not have been described as elegant; not that I knew that word at the time.   I must have been half aware of the street’s deficiencies for more than a year or two because whenever we visited Aunt Mag in her semi-detached Council house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford, I never failed to be immediately approving of the bathroom, firmly inside the house.    My Aunt’s family were never reduced to donning raincoats in stormy weather simply in order to pee with a modicum of comfort.   I knew better than to discuss this in too much detail with my mother because although she professed that she certainly didn’t envy her sister for her upscale living conditions,  she frequently commented to me on the bus going home that the lav could certainly do with seeing the occasional splash of bleach.   I had little idea what bleach was but a reasonable understanding of what she meant. However, despite the inadequacies of my aunt’s cleaning I enjoyed the visits we made to Crayford and admired the house and those of the neighbours not just for the bathrooms but for the splashes of stained and coloured glass that in those days were still largely intact in the windows and doors of these interwar homes.   Mostly these were glass diamonds adorning bay windows but there were also occasional and exciting re-creations of archetypal sunrise motifs on the upper lights of front doors.

On afternoon walks with my mother and her good friend Grace Bennett to Lime and Robina Avenues and Laburnum Grove which were planned and executed primarily to observe how those further up the social scale were coping with life, I was always enthused to survey similar flashes of coloured glass, designs of flowers, leaves and grasses, that early in the twentieth century would have been described as New Art.     

As I grew older I began to admire the houses closer to Gravesend, those in Burch Road in particular.  Burch Road was named for Benjamin Burch who apparently built Crete Hall down by the river.   His son in law, Jeremiah Rosher very much wanted to create an entire suburb of fine houses for those who could afford them which I later realised would only be those we called Toffs because they were the people who went in for buying houses rather than renting them.   For many years I was not familiar with anyone who actually owned a house in any case so it was somewhat of a foreign concept.

Jeremiah Rosher was said to have been influenced by the fine homes and garden squares of West London where only the home owners had keys to the greatly admired green spaces.  

Full of enthusiasm Rosher flamboyantly engaged a famous architect, H E Kendall and gave him full details of the dream suburb he was intending to create which was to be called unsurprisingly, Rosherville. Perhaps his enthusiasm waned when he began to run out of money but his plans never came to total fruition although the impressive  houses created in the early years of the nineteenth century still stand and there is still a great deal to admire about them. 

The elderly couple who lived next door to us for some years, Ted and Annie Bessant had a daughter called Ena of whom my mother heartily disapproved  and described as Much Married which was a label she gave to anyone who had been through the scandal of divorce and had remarried.    Ena was a garrulous woman, much given to wild exaggeration.  She had two young daughters with whom I was instructed to play from time to time.    I didn’t care much for the daughters but I cultivated the older one, Evalina, in the hope that I would be invited inside the house in which they had lived since they conveniently rid themselves of their original husband and father and replaced him with a rather successful travelling salesman called Norman.  They now rented the lower half of a Burch Road home.   Unfortunately the house had fallen into some disrepair but when I did manage to inveigle my way inside there were still enough vestiges of its former grandeur remaining to stir the imagination.  The grand marble fireplace still stood proudly in place in what had been the Drawing Room and it was clear that the homes had been early recipients of piped water.    And naturally enough I was delighted to note that there was a proper inside bathroom on the second floor landing, smelly and in need of much bleach though it was.

Jeremiah Rosher’s proposed suburb still stands firmly between Gravesend and Northfleet, the Northfleet Parish boundary stone being set into a wall on the Overcliffe just to the rear of the Pier Road houses.   One researcher into the history of the area claims that an early owner was a jeweller who lived in a four bedroom, two reception room home.  The kitchen was in the basement.  With him lived his wife, maiden aunt, five children and one live in servant.

Rosherville had been infamous for the popular pleasure gardens nearby though they had long since gone by the time I was growing up.  Old Nan, however, remembered them well or at least said she did and so did Old Mrs Bessant who, unlike my grandmother, said that they were definitely not a place you would take a Nice Girl to.   Apparently the important statues that had once been in the Gardens had been stored for safe keeping in one of the chalk cliff caves during the war and were re-erected in 1965 outside a new block of flats where almost immediately they were vandalised.

My mother and her sisters said they recalled well a Rosherville pub called The Elephant’s Head that they patronised as teenagers for reasons now forgotten but Aunt Martha said it was because their sister Phyllis had a suiter by the name of Frank who rented a room from a Miss Lavender who lived in a very smart house called Bycliffes demolished just before the second world war.    For good or for bad the housing in the Rosherville area remained to the forefront of my most desired list until I was at least twelve years old, no matter how tarnished and smelly the toileting arrangements were.  However by the time I was heading towards my thirteenth birthday I was becoming just a little bit in love with what was on offer on the south side of The Overcliffe.   I read somewhere that the highway had been constructed around 1800 as a turnpike road to replace the original which had become dangerous because of the extensive chalk excavations.

The first houses there were built in about 1835 on the north side of the road but were apparently demolished in 1953 to make way for a car showroom.   I should of course remember this happening but I don’t.   It was originally meadowland and called Fairfield, named after the annual Gravesend Fair.  The houses on the southern side were built between 1860 and 1870, each having a long rear garden leading to pastureland.   How I longed to investigate the interiors of these buildings, each looking full of promise from without.   I didn’t speculate as to whether there were inside bathrooms as I felt it certain that the residents of such upmarket properties would demand them.  Many years later in Auckland I met Jennifer who told me she had spent the formative years of her childhood in Gravesend, living in one of the very Overcliffe houses that I had admired so fervently.   I was of course, very impressed but did not ask any questions relating to bathrooms or toilets of any description for fear of sounding ill mannered. 

 Sometimes when Molly and I walked into Gravesend by ourselves I mentioned that it might be exciting to live in one of the earliest Overcliffe houses those built in 1830 but she maintained that her own most favourite house was that which housed the library at Northfleet.  Nevertheless she agreed that living in a place with so many rooms could be a liability and she feared she might be forced to take in lodgers should she ever own it.   She  ventured that aiming for a smaller property like those around the corner from us in Springhead Road would be much more manageable and she did wonder if the library might be like biting off more than she could chew.  

When my father died and my mother started to work for the Lovells in Darnley Road, the houses there quickly joined my list of favourites.   I no longer remember the Lovells’ address which is a pity but I do recall their impressive dining room with the vast oval table and round back chairs upholstered in red plush.  Later, as a teenager I briefly went out with a young man who worked at The Kent Messenger and lived in one of a pair of Darnley Road villas built in the Gothic Revival Style.    I terminated our relationship when it was clear I wasn’t ever going to be invited inside his grandparents’ rather impressive house which I longed to examine in detail.

Anyone with an interest in domestic architecture could not fail to be impressed by Harmer Street which along with Berkley Crescent formed the first stage of another ambitious speculative plan this time attributed to Brighton Architect Amon Henry Wilds who also designed the Town Hall in the High Street.  The houses date from the early 1830s and in my twenties, accompanied by my brother, I found myself inside one of them.   I don’t recall all of the details now but the then new owner, from what was at the time called Bombay,  was about to open a restaurant in the town.  He showed us through his property acquisition with pride and although there was a great deal of work to be done to upgrade the building, it was not difficult to visualise what life within those rooms might have been like early in the previous century.   However, it was with a small shock I realised that they may not have enjoyed the privilege of indoor plumbing – although I examined the house as carefully as I was able, there were no signs of a bathroom.  I toyed with the idea of asking to use the facilities but immediately abandoned this notion for fear of being directed into the back yard.   I still hope I was mistaken about the absence of this important feature.

It was to be decades before I developed an appreciation of those terrace cottages in York Road where my life began, said to have been built in 1840 to house workers in local industry, chalk or cement workers maybe.  At the time such houses were often constructed on small parcels of land that were sold off to different builders, resulting in differing styles emerging.   York Road certainly differed from Shepherd Street and Buckingham Road.  

The houses came equipped with gas lights, curved Victorian grates in bedrooms and parlour and small closed ranges in the kitchens.   The sculleries had coppers for heating water and washing and shallow sinks with wooden draining boards.   Baths of course were portable and brought into the scullery for the occasion.   The outside cistern lavatories that I so detested were I now realise a great improvement upon what went before them – privies that took a variety of forms:  bog-house, pail and earth closets.  These were regularly emptied by Nightmen which sounds horrific. 

Over the years I have been able to investigate the interiors of many differing homes in various styles in a number of places in the world.   The domestic architecture of Gravesend still remains especially vivid in memory though! 

Password Purgatory

There is definitely a lot I like about modern life:   the immediacy that ensures wants and wishes are satisfied for instance and the relative ease with which a taxi can be called to the door.   No more regular episodes of trawling through the yellow pages, or queuing up at Tom’s Happy Pizzas because all fast food can be ordered to arrive at your convenience.  What’s more instead of telephone calls costing painful pounds per minute, a two hour block to your best friend in the Orkneys can take place every weekend if you so wish for simple sums that represent a four year old’s pocket money.   I like on line banking and the ease of using Eftpos cards especially those you simply have to wave in the general direction of the machine.  Magic!   I’m a fan of being able to order books on my Kindle and have them available to read within minutes (even though on balance I still prefer proper books with paper pages to turn).  

Yes, modern life is a great improvement on those years growing up in York Road, Northfleet even though there was something to be said for joining the queue for Fish & Chips in Shepherd Street on a Friday, especially in late autumn when on the way home, clutching the hot newspaper bundle the temperature had dropped another degree and your breath formed small grey clouds ahead of you.   True it was highly inconvenient to have to wait at the red telephone box on The Hill for Jacqueline Haskell to complete the call to her boyfriend at the Sea School but to be fair it didn’t affect me too much as I didn’t really know anyone with a telephone that I could call in the first place. 

Modern life can be delightfully stress free, or it should be and probably is for many of us.  What I despise and detest about this brave newish century is Passwords.  Yes Passwords, those codes that grow ever more intricate that you must at all costs remember because without them you might well find yourself quite unable to accomplish any of the above listed delights and the joys of online banking will become a dim memory not to mention the bliss of ordering the new volume on the life of Pepys that was just reviewed on radio.  In fact it is highly likely you will never be in a position to listen to radio again because unless you still have one of those old fashioned ones tucked away, those operated via battery, electricity or steam, you will be quite unable to access the programming.

To think that all those years ago (1931) Aldous Huxley predicted the massive societal and technological shift that brought us to the frontiers of this brave new world where we seem to have become dehumanised and disoriented and yet delightfully happy to be the owners of mobile phones via which we can text those we know, and others we don’t know, in an instant. Although Huxley does not specifically mention Passwords in the book, I feel free to lay some of the blame for them at his feet because he was in many ways simply asking for trouble by writing the wretched novel in the first place.

Passwords are all very well as long as you remember them but that of course is easier said than done considering that you must under no circumstances write them down and you must never use the same one more than once.   I might even have had a reasonable chance of success with these restrictive password parameters thirty years ago but I don’t have a dog’s chance now.   And it’s all very well reminding myself that in the final analysis I can always pretend I have Forgotten the Password and simply apply to make a change because I can assure you that does not always work as I found out to my cost this very morning.

The lovely Samsung people, out there in the ether, those who are in total control of my account and forgive me the trespass of Password forgetfulness, like Huxley’s world government want me to be happy.  They want my Password to be restored despite the lie of forgetting it.   They probably know I didn’t really forget it because I had actually written it down hadn’t I which is an even worse trespass.   Nevertheless they are more than willing to give me a chance and allow me to change it, they send me a code which I must not share with anyone.  I obeyed them and didn’t share – there was nobody around to share with.     I know I got the code right – I wrote it down and when I entered it, it actually worked!   Success!!!    I am all at once ecstatic.  My cup runneth over!   But not for long.

Minutes later when I confidently returned to the Apps store to access the Sky TV Guide I am told that my account is unauthorised.   And that is when I realised that I must never, ever write down Passwords again or use the same one too frequently because the modern day equivalent of Huxley’s chilling world government, controlling every aspect of our lives will surely KNOW when I do and their wrath will assuredly descend upon me. 

In essence I have not really moved very far from that dire childhood situation when I suddenly realised that God KNEW every time I lied, each time I spent my Brownies sub on bubble gum and every time I cheated at long division and copied Pearl Banfield’s answers.  But to give Him His due, at least He did not add into the mysterious mix of Catholicism the terrifying possibility of becoming ensnared along the way and toppled into Password Purgatory.  

Memories of Gravesend

 

When I first came to New Zealand I was a little surprised to find that, oddly to my mind, my newly adopted country had a few definite ties with Gravesend.  Those who proudly told me their ancestors were from England, often added that in fact they left from a place called Gravesend, one or two adding to be precise, Bawley Bay.  The only connection I had previously had with Bawley Bay was going there with my mother and Old Nan to buy shrimps for tea;  always a treat.   So when next on a revisit we headed for Bawley Bay because by this time my husband had discovered that his own forebears had made that self same journey and he was therefore now keenly involved in family history.

In general the most memorable tie was for New Zealanders interested in the history of aviation.   Apparently the town had developed an airfield by the 1930s and by the middle of the decade the much revered New Zealand aviator, Jean Batten, took delivery of her new Percival Vega Gull from there.   Later the RAF took the facilities over and by the time I was a young adult it had become a housing development called Riverview Park.  

My own personal memories of the town start as a five or six year old being taken to the market on Saturdays and watching Old Strongey sell china tea-sets and the finest wool blankets, then walking past Papa’s Ice Cream Rooms and being told he was Italian and anyway his ice cream was nowhere near as good as the British variety which we would be able to get again soon once rationing was over.   And always coming into view that iconic Clock Tower, nearly twenty metres tall and made of Portland stone.   Later as a schoolgirl I learned about Princess Pocahontas with great interest because she was the daughter of a real Indian Chief, they who were always the Baddies in the movies we saw and thus seen as totally exotic by me and my best friend, Molly.   It took a while for us to process why Gravesend had a connection to her but eventually we learned that she had died in the town in 1617 and was buried in St George’s Churchyard though the actual site of her grave had been long lost.  Sometimes we went looking for it, convinced we would be successful.

Sometimes I reluctantly went shopping with my grandmother and she told me tales of what life was like in the town years before, boring facts concerning the time when buses took over from trams because, believe it or not, by 1930 there were no more trams and when that happened you could have knocked her down with a feather because she did so love them no matter how slow and noisy they were.  However, they put on new routes and one went right out to the Kings Farm Housing Estate which was good for anyone who wanted to go there though for the life of her she wondered why they would.

I  loved many of the old buildings, the Town Hall which had been replaced in the mid 1700s, the new building added to in 1836 and dramatically enhanced by an impressive classical entrance portico.  I told myself that it had been built by the Romans because I didn’t know of any other ancient culture including the Greeks and anyway I ignored all facts that did not fit this narrative. 

My favourite street was Harmer Street for the elegant houses and particularly the Grand Theatre building for its links with times past.  I was devastated when it was finally demolished without much ceremony late in 1952.   Why wasn’t there outrage?  There should have been outrage – and I felt the same when the arch at Euston Station met a similar fate a decade later.  

Old Nan said never mind theatres and stations because what she missed was the hotels of long ago like The Mitre in King Street where when she was a young mother Mr Harold Mott was the licensee of both it and the adjacent Public House.  The pub had been up and running from the early seventeen hundreds and at one time was called The Pelican and didn’t become The Mitre for a hundred years or more.   At the time she spoke of it, the building remained intact, the pub still doing well and wasn’t to be closed until 1970 by which time she had definitely departed from this life herself. 

Her hotel of choice, however, was The Prince of Orange which had been built in the early nineteenth century when the New Road was first developed.   At the time it was built the pub of the same name in Windmill Street was hastily renamed The Old Prince of Orange.  However, by the 1930s Burtons had firmly replaced the newer version.  

When I was growing up Gravesend offered a multitude of pubs, and the family favourite seemed to be The Three Daws which I was told was the oldest pub in Kent.  Always an attention grabbing building, much of its structure dates from medieval times and it is said to have seven staircases and three underground tunnels reputed to have been for the convenience of smugglers and those avoiding press gangs.  It remains to this day a firm favourite for me when visiting the old town. 

The Tilbury Ferry always seemed to be up and running and in fact my father maintained that the Gravesend crossing to Tilbury was the oldest of its kind and could be traced back to the thirteenth century.   We used it frequently because it was the easiest way to get to Southend for a day by the sea.   When I attended Wombwell Hall school several girls in my class who lived in Essex used the ferry on a daily basis.   I was particularly friendly with one such river traveller, whose name was Gloria Glover and whose parents had both died of cancer and so she lived with an aunt.  She said she had to be especially well behaved or she might be thrown out. Because of Southend and Gloria the ferry crossing has a firm place in my memory.

My mother and aunts felt that nobody with an ounce of common sense would say that Gravesend had a beach, well not a respectable one at least.  And by New Zealand standards the idea of the town beach is even vaguely embarrassing.  However, the line of pebbles and the lapping waves certainly made it a beach for me and as a very small child I very much enjoyed sitting on the sea wall and contemplating the town pier extending out into the river. 

Those old wooden clad houses I fondly recall have now largely disappeared and I wonder how that was allowed to happen.  In New Zealand that style of building is known as weatherboard but in Gravesend I seem to recall it was called clapperboard.  Whatever the correct term, for me the old houses made up a firm childhood memory.  I had no idea how old they were, who lived in them, whether they were comfortable or not but lining the narrow streets down by the river they seemed to me that they had always been there and would remain part of the town’s configuration and structure.   In fact in that first year or two in Auckland, when feeling particularly homesick I often retreated into the inner suburbs of Ponsonby and Parnell simply to sit and look at  houses of similar construction because they were like a comfort blanket and reminded me in many ways of what I had left behind.  I was cheered in recent years to notice that a modern block of waterside homes, smart flats looking out across the river now echo the traditional design of those white wooden clad houses of old.    Progress has a habit of throwing little arrows  of consolation from time to time. 

The Magic of the Wireless.....

 

A week or two ago I learned that Radio Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand had been continuously broadcasting for one hundred years and in fact reports with pride that as an uninterrupted broadcast network it is five weeks older than the BBC!

When I first came to New Zealand in the early nineteen seventies, one of the things that impressed me was how advanced radio appeared to be when compared with England.  Every town seemed to have its own radio station and cities like Auckland boasted a number of choices with miniscule operations in surprising suburbs, all heavy on providing advertising opportunities for local businesses.   Talk radio was alive and well and very nearly an institution after a decade of development and it immediately became my number one listening choice.  And back then I quickly turned into a contributor, phoning in regularly and giving my views on a variety of subjects.

I was delighted to partake of radio on any level.  It has always been a familiar medium to me.  Listening to the BBC with my mother is one of the enduring memories of my earliest years because in our house The Wireless was always on, down low for Workers’ Playtime and Forces’ Favourites, the volume increased for Children’s Hour and definitely for The News.  One way or another we listened to everything, news, entertainment, music, plays, recipes, health advice and always to Winston Churchill and the terrifying Lord Haw-Haw broadcasting ominously from Germany.  Via The Wireless we were thrust through a number of emotions beginning with the jollity and jauntiness of ITMA and Variety Bandbox and concluding with the horror and disbelief conveyed by Richard Dimbleby when describing Belsen Concentration Camp.  Through good times and bad The Wireless was a reliable source of information and companionship and what we would have done without it I dread to think.

Years later as an impressionable young adult my inherent trust in all things to do with broadcasting led to an exciting relationship with those setting up pirate radio on a Dutch ship in the North Sea, Radio Veronica.  Dazzled by the excitement of it all I totally failed to see that the Technical Director I admired so much was actually embezzling money from the company which rapidly led to its collapse almost before it began.   Just a handful of years later commercial radio took off properly via yet another pirate ship and Britain edged just a little bit away from the total control of the BBC.   Meanwhile it would seem that in New Zealand it had long since stopped being embryonic and was well established throughout the country and that was probably so in Australia, Canada and undoubtedly the USA.

As a small child I don’t remember programming that could be described as Soap operas but I do have memories of my mother and aunts waxing lyrical about something called Arnold Grimm’s Daughter which apparently was broadcast from the mid 1930s until 1942.   And of course by 1948 we had Mrs Dale’s Diary which was still going strong in the 1960s though it never had much appeal to me.

One of my first significant purchases when I became a wage earner was a transistor radio called Pam and I think, produced by Pye.  Pam shared my bed every night and I was blissfully able to listen to Top Of The Pops until it finished at midnight followed by The Shipping Forecast which to me seemed to be a bridge between nostalgic poetry and a hint of longed for travel to romantic places.   Other listening favourites were The Goon Show, Hancock’s Half Hour, In Town Tonight, Letter From America, Any Questions, and A Book At Bedtime.

Contemplating those years that followed WW2, two absolutely first class stand-out programmes spring to mind almost immediately and I associate both of them with the early 1950s.  To my mind where radio always had the edge on television as far as youth was concerned, what it was able to do deftly, was amplify the magic of any story by allowing the visual images to spring from the listener’s own imagination. 

The Box of Delights I associate most particularly with those weeks leading up to Christmas.   The book was written in 1935 by John Masefield as a sequel to his earlier novel, The Midnight Folk.   It told the story of a boy called Kay Harker played by Patricia Hayes whose chance meeting with Cole Hawlings, a Punch-and-Judy man, leads him into a world where almost anything is possible.   The story captures the true spirit of Christmas better than any other similar drama and I might still shudder on hearing the Punch-and-Judy man proclaim his ominous warning that evil lurked close by – The Wolves Are Running!   Hawlings is the keeper of the elixir of life and the custodian of a magic box that he is so anxious to keep out of the hands of wrongdoers he has been on the run for seven hundred years.  To say I was transfixed by this early evening tale does not adequately describe my fascination and my young brother was equally engrossed.   And while we hunched beneath the wireless, barely daring to breathe, my mother boiled eggs and made toast and a coal fire burned snugly and brightly and we could almost smell the tangerines and taste the marzipan treats that heralded the coming festivities.

Completely different, Journey Into Space was a BBC Radio science fiction programme written by producer Charles Chilton.   In 1953 it attracted a bigger evening audience than the up-to-the-minute  TV sets that people were beginning to buy.  Several series were produced, then translated into seventeen languages and broadcast worldwide.  It would be true to say that it enthralled the nation, nearly every one of us tuning in on Monday evenings at 7.30pm happily abandoning Robin Hood & His Merry Men, Kaleidescope and even The Quatermass Experiment.   No such decision had to be made by us as we did not become TV owners for several more years.     

Operation Luna, the first totally gripping tale was set in the far flung future of 1965 and concerned the conquest of the Moon.   Andrew Faulds played Captain Jet Morgan and David Kossoff played an amiable character called Lemmy and I seem to also remember Alfie Bass, David Williams and David Jacobs.  The second series was called The Red Planet and the final was The World In Peril.  Charles Chilton became a household name so when I came across him many years later working as an occasional guide for London Walks I was definitely impressed.    Retired from the BBC, he was in his late seventies and seemed bewildered when shown the admiration and regard accorded him by so many of his walking clientele.  I had by then discovered that he had also written  a radio programme called Oh What A Lovely War which led to the musical and the film.    A Kings Cross lad from a very poor home he had joined the BBC as a 14 year old messenger boy and was later to be described as `the one true genius the BBC ever produced’.

Destined to remain in our lives as a viable and essential piece of technology eventually The Wireless had to relinquish a great many of the gripping stories that had so entertained us as one by one they vanished from the air waves and were claimed by television.  But many of us maintained that they were destined never to be quite the same and failed to enthuse and energise us or create the same magic as the originals.

The Wireless had always been a force in our lives but it was a force that had never needed our full attention at all times and we had always been able to cook, clean and carry out a host of other tasks whilst listening.   By the 1960s fuller attention was being given to the no longer new-fangled television sets and The Wireless half returned to its original position in the background of our lives.   And as it did so local commercial radio stations were finally taking off in the UK and were firmly established in places like New Zealand.

Today radio holds its place as an important source of information and a venue for the exchange of ideas.  When I was in London for several months this year I listened a great deal and in general as a vehicle for the dissemination of news, knowledge and analysis radio broadcasting takes some beating.  For the insomniacs among us it’s invaluable.   Radio flings you face to face with a range of ideas you may not like very much and forces you to examine bigotry.  Whether you like it or not you find yourself listening to the reasons why a section of society takes on a cause or an individual sees themselves as a warrior for social justice.  And from time to time it becomes apparent  that your own thinking is taking a different path.  No matter how incomprehensible or nonsensical some ideas you stumble across may seem at the time, every bit of information provides part of a patchwork of data that accurately reflects what is actually taking place within a society and may very well form stability for the future. 

All ideas have value but some have an obvious significance that can be all too easily overlooked.   One of the stories told about the great Charles Chilton is that he was the very first British DJ and as such had recorded a number of programmes in the 1930s for jazz enthusiasts.  However at a time when Received Pronunciation was the order of the day when his cockney accent reached the ears of the great Lord Reith then Director General of the BBC he pulled him from the programme very fast indeed asking ‘what kind of accent do you call that?’ to which Charles rapidly responded, ‘It’s the accent of the capital of the British Empire’ which left Reith flummoxed.   However, he still pulled him off the air and I cannot help wondering what he would have thought of some of the accents happily accepted without comment today.

Times change and whether we like it or not, we change with it. 

A Love Affair With Department Stores

 

I fell in love with department stores from the moment my mother and I stepped through the imposing access doors of Bon Marche in Gravesend in 1945.    Later I learned that the original store was in Paris and it was said to be the oldest such emporium in the world.  By then I already realised that the doors had not actually been as imposing as I at first thought.  However, when I was five years old I had not yet heard of Paris and didn’t know all that much about doors and what made them impressive. 

What I did know was that Bon Marche was, at least as far as we were concerned, high-class and exclusive.   Their goods, according to my Grandmother were on the dear side, and my mother definitely agreed with her and sometimes said daylight robbery was involved.  Nevertheless we browsed their shelves and departments on a reasonably regular basis, observing Pringle twin sets and Burberry raincoats from afar and once we even bought some hair ribbons.   I couldn’t help noticing that we were reluctant to scrutinise some items of clothing too closely for fear of attracting the attention of a staff member who might enquire whether we needed assistance but at the same time look as if that notion was most unlikely.  

If we were on a serious buying expedition we avoided Bon Marche completely of course and went directly to British Home Stores where the goods were less costly and the staff less intimidating.   And we remained great fans of the market where back in those days both underwear and outerwear items were priced within the reach of those like us who weren’t made of money.  The only exception made by my mother was when we were buying shoes because she maintained that cheap shoes were a false economy so I never had to wear those the market offered. 

We definitely saw window shopping of all kinds as a pleasant pastime. From time to time we ventured further afield and went by bus to Chatham which I really enjoyed because on the way we saw flying boats on the Medway and caught glimpses of Rochester Castle.   The main reason for the Chatham trips was the vast and daunting Bentalls Store in the High Street where a whole morning could be spent loitering in the aisles and where staff attitudes were less alarming than those at Bon Marche.  Even more attractive was the fact that they used a cash carrier system that sent customer payments whizzing across the ceilings to the cash office whilst making a satisfying humming noise.   Watching this happen was for some reason extraordinarily exciting and seemed to place me at the cutting edge of technological advances.  Just as thrilling, there was also a café on the top floor where waitresses in black and white uniforms took orders for tea and scones or even hot meals.   We only patronised the café when in the company of several aunts or my Grandmother and when we did so we always ordered from the afternoon tea menu and I had to eat up every crumb ordered for me or I was in Big Trouble.  Meanwhile my love affair with Department Stores grew ever stronger.

I no longer recall if top floor cafes featured anywhere in Gravesend but if they did we didn’t go to them although I would have liked to though I knew my mother was of the opinion that they catered more to those who had more money than sense and anyway she was much more comfortable at the tea stall in the market.  All this might seem tedious now but the fact was that at an early age I developed a keen desire to be Upwardly Mobile even if I hadn’t much idea what that meant.

          Somehow the Department Store conveyed both style and glamour with its firmly designated areas, nightwear and underwear together in one almost welcoming space, women’s daywear adjacent, children and menswear separated by a journey in the terrifying lift perhaps even operated by a uniformed attendant who announced whether you were Going Up or Going Down just in case you were confused.  The magic started for me immediately upon entering the store, hopefully via astonishing revolving doors.   The unfamiliar and exotic fragrances emanating from ground floor perfumes and beauty items immediately transported me into a pleasantly parallel day-dream world where the possibility of a rooftop café was forever on the horizon.  Just as memorable, there might even be a bookshop hidden away in one of the corners where Enid Blyton story books, at that time still permitted, might be on sale for those children whose parents actually went in for buying books.   

          In those post-war years our serious purchases were invariably made at markets.  When she became interested in dress-making my mother always bought what she called Off Cuts from the fabric stall in Gravesend Market and then purchased the appropriate Simplicity pattern from the drapers in Northfleet High Street or Perry Street.   Nevertheless this didn’t stop her making a thorough examination of the fabrics and patterns in Bentalls.   By this time I was considered just old enough to be allowed to browse in the Children’s Books & Toys Department which I did very happily.   My worship of such shopping emporiums increased with each visit we made.

Little wonder that when I first went to work in London at nearly sixteen I spent a great deal of time savouring the delights of Oxford Street - Selfridges, Peter Robinson, Bourne & Hollingsworth, D H Evans and John Lewis.  The possibilities were breath taking.  Within just a few months I ventured further to Gamages of Holborn and The Army & Navy Stores in Victoria.   And somewhat belatedly I discovered Swan & Edgar at Piccadilly Circus.  In those early days I rarely made purchases and so I was very impressed when my cousin Connie, just a year older than me paid thirteen pounds for a pale blue raincoat at Gallery Lafayette in Regent Street without a great deal of accompanying drama.  

When tentatively stepping into bedsitter-land the fact that I was relatively close to the delights of Derry & Toms and Pontings and just a hop, skip and a jump from Harrods made the move from riverside North Kent seem enormously safe and secure.  Later with a move to Bayswater the proximity of Whiteleys of Queensway was comforting.  

Unsurprisingly as time progressed I was to deeply mourn the loss of the Department Stores and the disagreeable handover to the Age of the Shopping Mall.   It’s possible that I’ve never even tried to come to terms with the idea of Malls with their faceless, windowless thoroughfares and their food plazas where bright orange curry outlets sit dutifully alongside those offering dumplings or pizza and the same low key music plays in the background as you hurry with your tray to locate a table in the allotted space that offers a modicum of privacy.   Neither do I like their terrifying ability to ensure that it will be difficult for you to ever escape from their bland interiors by never providing proper Exit directions.

The Mall does of course offer elongated shopping hours together with endless parking bays whilst the Department Store of long ago might close its doors firmly at six pm leaving you stranded outside to struggle home by bus with your packages.   However, at the conclusion of shopping hours the soft interior lights would still glimmer and flicker invitingly and certainly enough to summon the would-be customer to hesitate for a moment and perhaps linger to examine what might be within.   Even a brief consideration of the window displays rarely let you down with their promise of what would be possible at 9am once the doors opened again.   Even if there was no purchase to be made there might at least be a café on the top floor where wait staff in uniform would take your order for afternoon tea.        

C o r o n a t i o n D a y

 

I remember Coronation Day 1953 very well indeed and that’s because it was my thirteenth birthday.   I was a teenager at last, it was a Tuesday and by rights we should have been at school but instead a Public Holiday had been declared, what my mother and the aunts called a Bank Holiday.      Twenty miles up river in London apparently it was raining but in our part of North Kent the sun shone, at least that’s how I remember it and what’s more a Street Party had been organised.  The Street Party was not the only unusual and exciting event because someone highly pro-active had also organised a Fancy Dress Parade and someone else was to judge a York Road, Shepherd Street & Surrounding Areas Talent Contest.

The lead up to the day seemed to involve endless conversation between my mother and her favourite sister about what had happened before the War when the now deceased King George VI had been forced to take on the burden of kingship because of his wayward brother and that American Hussy who had waltzed into his life and tempted him.   It was all reminiscent of Harry & Meghan eight decades later only not nearly as shocking because at least The Royals of the time had not been accused of Racism.   There seems to have been a lot more basic respect for Royalty back then and quite apart from that Racism didn’t feature in everyday conversation nearly as much as it does now. If we indulged in prejudice and bigotry we certainly didn’t realise it.   My Grandmother focussed more on the coronation of the previous Monarch, George V which was also held in June but way back in 1911 and followed hard on the heels of the Empire Festival at Crystal Palace.   She and her Edgar had joined the throngs lining the streets outside the Abbey together with Little Maggie and Nellie and Martha and Maudie, all waving flags.   Maudie was still a baby bless her heart but she was very knowing even then and she screamed blue murder until she got her own flag.  All of the little buggers dropped their flags when Edgar bought them toffee apples of course but then what else could you expect?  It was unclear as to whether there had been a street party back then or if in fact the family managed to get back to Maxim Road, Crayford to take part in it if there was.

There was no chance of us missing the York Road party all those years later because the day’s various activities had been cleverly staggered in order that none of us should miss a single moment of the fun if at all possible.    In fact the very first event was the Fancy Dress Parade and I was definitely going to take part as a Crinoline Lady.   My mother had always been overly fond of Crinoline Ladies and bought endless embroidery kits featuring them which became table cloths and cushions.    She had also become adept over the years at making costumes out of crepe paper and now I can see she harboured a strong creative streak which when I was young I failed to appreciate.    Using an old petticoat or similar suitable garment as the base, frill upon frill of pink and blue crepe were attached to great effect and in no time at all I emerged from number 28 looking for all the world like an extra in Gone With The Wind.   You can see why I felt sure I would win one of the prizes – jigsaw puzzles of the golden coach, but of course even back then the prizes went to those who had come as cardboard boxes or balls of wool, and that’s always been the case.   Anyway my poor mother was more disappointed than I was.

So we didn’t miss the street party and I even had time to change out of my crepe paper costume back into whatever else I was required to wear that day before attacking the fish paste sandwiches, lemon jellies and jam doughnuts that were piled up on the trestle tables in the road.   I don’t know where the tables had come from but Alan Bardoe said knowledgeably that they had been hired.  I had no real idea of what that meant at the time.   We did have to bring our own chairs, however.    During the party our photographs were taken many times and then we sang songs before dispersing, most of us towards the Talent Competition which was taking place outside The Prince Albert in Shepherd Street.  

It had inevitably been suggested that I enter the event singing Bless This House or even We’ll Meet Again but I did not have the confidence in my singing voice that my mother had.   Molly, who had a much better voice than I did, considered entering with a Doris Day song, favouring The Silvery Moon but changed her mind.   In the end it seemed that only the more determined and hardy souls among us or maybe just those with the pushiest mothers actually fronted up to display our talents on the day.

Rita Jenkins did a tap dance dressed as a Dutch doll and wearing one of her famous embroidered bonnets of which she seemed to have a great many.   In my opinion she was now becoming too old to emulate dolls of any description and in any case now I had reached the great age of thirteen I had stopped being jealous of her for being allowed dancing lessons in the first place - and I had been thirteen for a number of hours.  So I agreed with Molly when she observed that Rita had done quite well.  A girl with a great deal of confidence who was, her mother said, as keen as mustard on ballet, performed what seemed like a complicated ballet routine whilst an elderly relative played a piano accompaniment from inside the pub.  There wasn’t wholehearted approval of her because apparently she wasn’t local enough.    A small group from the Baptist Sunday School sang a rousing hymn and Betty Haddon sang Alice Blue Gown which she was always willing to sing given half a chance.   Little Elsie from Buckingham Road who was wheelchair bound was supposed to recite a poem about a mouse but she got an attack of nerves at the last minute and burst into tears instead.

As we watched Molly said that we should have performed a One Act Play because there were plenty to choose from that needed just two actors.    Although both of us at that time were keen on a future in acting, me in the London Theatre and she in Hollywood, I was quite glad that we had avoided it on this occasion.  Serious acting I felt was not going to earn total support in York Road and in any case I didn’t really know any one act plays for two performers and I doubted if Molly did either.  Later she said well if we couldn’t find one in the library we could have written one ourselves and I was even more doubtful.

There were a number of other hopeful contestants but most of them I have no memory of at all.   To my mind in any case the star of the show was most definitely Colin Bardoe, Alan’s twin, who had a good, strong singing voice and sang a song about dying in the desert under the Libyan sun which was very sad.  I can still remember him with his head held high and plenty of dramatic gestures.  I can’t actually recall if he did win the five shilling postal order but he certainly should have done.  As far as I recollect he didn't even have a pushy mother.   No matter what the neighbours thought of Colin, and back then his insistence on playing with the girls rather than the boys did provoke a certain amount of disapproval, he had a lively and engaging personality coupled with an ability most of us lacked.  Of all the contestants he is the one who still stands out vividly in memory for me.    

Of course by 1953 a number of our neighbours had already acquired television sets on the Never-Never and were watching the proceedings at Westminster from the comfort of their living rooms but mostly with the street doors open so they could exit with ease if something more exciting happened outside.   The more generous hearted among them invited a selection of the neighbours to join the viewing and some of the Best Front Rooms, normally only used at Christmas, were filled to bursting point with interested adults standing or perched on the sides of sofas and children crammed on the floor.

Our family was not to feature among those who could afford modern technology for some years to come and even Aunt Mag was not to reach that dizzy zenith until 1955 so I suggested to Molly, who was in the same situation, that we simply peer through windows from time to time which we did.  Meanwhile my little brother waited hopefully for Hedley Davis to invite him in because Hedley had told him the Davis family were definitely going to buy a TV set in time for the Coronation.   Whether they did or not I still don’t know but poor Bernard definitely wasn't invited in.