FAR TOO INDULGED .....

I definitely showered far too many books and toys upon my children.  At times they must have felt completely submerged.  For years I totally abandoned any idea of sexy high heels and up to the minute fashion clothing and channeled all spare cash into what I then saw as the needs of the children.  In fact I can't remember them ever nagging for something because I was excellent at anticipating their current cravings.

There was a time when I was never happier than touring toy shops and children's book departments, seeking out the very latest Playmobil essential or yet another retelling of Greek Myths.  Looking back now I rather wish I had given more attention to the writing I felt I didn't have time for.

The obsession, because that's what it was, seems to have emerged from the circumstances of the second world war.  Toys and books simply disappeared from shelves and even when they began to return they were prohibitively expensive.   The mysterious illness my father fell victim to in North Africa prevented him from being among the first wave of demobilised troops and placed him nicely among the last.  At least that's what I was told and I certainly wasn't too concerned as I didn't for one moment think he would be staying long if and when he returned and I certainly did not contemplate the fact that he might be living with us.

My mother, however, frequently mentioned that when he came back to us we would be in a much healthier financial position and might even be able to buy items like dolls' tea sets and books with colourful illustrations should they ever become available.  In the interim she did very well on my behalf by creating a range of dressing up clothes out of discarded garments generally involving mock ups of what she called Crinoline Ladies.  She was inordinately keen on embroidering these women from history onto tea towels and pillow cases so I was rather more familiar with them than most four or five year olds might be.  The required Poke Bonnets that accompanied these outfits were fashioned from wads of newspaper covered with no longer serviceable flannelette bloomers.   I was never too critical fortunately but appreciative a year or two later when bundles of brightly hued crepe paper became available from Woolworths in Gravesend High Street.

Other home fashioned games, particularly when the weather was warm enough involved a somewhat rough and ready tent made from a bed sheet and erected from the scullery door across to the tall fence that divided us from Mr & Mrs Bassant next door.  On a summer afternoon a lot of fun could be had by factoring in the zinc bath that hung on the scullery wall and filling it with cold water.  Equipped with sturdy tea mugs and a small saucepan or two several hours of entertainment could be had.   These were shared with Molly from number 31 and sometimes a cousin or two from Crayford or Waterdales.  Overall I preferred Molly's company and did not get on terribly well with any of the Constant cousins and none of the Hendy ones.

Winter was devoted to drawing pictures on the endless supply of paper kindly donated by my Uncle Walter who was a foreman at Bowaters.  Some of the paper was described as Greaseproof and could therefore be used for tracing.  With sheets of this and a newly sharpened pencil I could more accurately engage in reproducing the various advertising pictures and slogans in The Gravesend & Dartford Reporter.  

On one occasion the pencil was so sharp and I leaned forward on the kitchen step to admire myself and it in the mirror by the scullery sink so enthusiastically that a nasty accident transpired.   Somehow or other the pencil itself became embedded in the roof of my mouth and I was hurriedly conveyed to Dr Outred's waiting room, feeling important.    However the latter feeling dissipated when he proceeded to give me a lecture on irresponsible behaviour that forced my poor mother to worry about me.  Looking back I believe his attitude was somehow related to what had happened months previously when I redistributed all the drugs awaiting collection on his waiting room table to ensure that everyone got at least one of the small red ones.

There were times when I added my name to the dozens of drawings I did on a weekly basis of a detached house with smoke emerging from the chimney, a home carefully constructed between a row of trees and flowers.   Already I had become keen to upgrade my living arrangements and our terraced cottage with no bathroom and an outside lavatory was not my first choice.

This decision about preferred housing only firmed up as time went on, particularly once I was old enough to join the library.  Back then I think you had to be at least seven years old.  The only books we had at home were The Home Doctor and People of the World in Pictures.  I think both had been offered by the News of the World, postage included in the more than reasonable cost.  I was startled years later to come across a copy of that self same People of the World on the shelves of a friend's London house and a quick examination revealed the very same families from far and wide that my mother had created stories about all those years ago.  The most fascinating for me had always been the Australian quartet, totally naked in the outback.  She never gave a believable reason for them losing all their clothes.

It was to be decades later that the lack of books and toys prompted me to ensure that my own children would never be in a position to think the same way about their own early childhood.  It's quite odd that many years before they were likely to be born I was already organising in my imagination exactly what books they might be given to read.  And whilst reading about the spacious and well equipped playrooms and toy cupboards of the middle classes I would at times even be compelled to design my own in the notebooks that had at some stage superseded Uncle Walter's wartime art paper.

One aspect of ensuring that the youngest members of the family have endless entertainment that was undoubtedly learned from my mother is that of never admitting defeat regarding a play project until all avenues have been explored.   Thus when the kids became fixated on King Tutankhamen and all that went along with him it took less than no time to reach the conclusion that all things Egyptian should come to us in Kohimarama as far as possible.   King Tut and one of his sisters were effortlessly brought to life with dress-up designs my mother would have been proud of.  Spray paint, crepe paper and coloured ribbons rose magnificently to the occasion.   A totally invented Egyptian meal circa 1320 BC was stimulating to compile and meanwhile the exploits of Howard Carter were avidly studied.

Later the various adventures of King Arthur's Round Table Knights were met with equal enthusiasm and by the time an interest in how plague and fire swept through seventeenth century London was expressed we had become old hands at recreating history.  All in all it was a lot of fun and I am only now beginning to realise how much those Crinoline Ladies from the past played their part.   Perhaps more importantly I also now see that the showering of Lego sets and Playmobil together with endless books on every subject were not nearly as important as they appeared to be at the time.   

Things We Dread Doing

I have still not learned to fill the car with petrol and although I can't say it's an undertaking I've always longed to conquer, I actually have tried.   The problem is that those hose contraptions are far too heavy for someone suffering from moderate arthritic deterioration of wrist joints.  So generally I go to the service station very early on Sunday mornings and beg for help.  The Z station nearby are usually more than co-operative though I can't say the same of others.

 Recently, with my daughter visiting from London and thus buoyed and heartened with false confidence I tried once more to get on top of the dilemma because unless I'm prepared to take buses or Ubers everywhere, it's a problem that has to be overcome.  She would stand by ready to intervene should it become necessary she said and it became necessary remarkably quickly because not only did I drop the unmanageable hose, my bank card suddenly decided not to work.   So she used hers because there was no escaping the fact that we needed fuel as we were on our way to visit Ellie in Miranda.   We drove towards the motorway in silence;  well, she was driving of course because not only am I incapable of filling a Honda Jazz with fuel, I also no longer drive motorways.   To be honest I've never been keen on them but there was a time when I would drive English motorways, if I'd had plenty of sleep the night before and didn't have the children quarrelling in the back seat.   Somehow the lanes on UK motorways seem just a little wider and people are much better at signaling what they are about to do.  There's something about New Zealand motorways that seems rather more hazardous.

Considering all the above  I found the prospect of the Probus morning talk the other day decidedly tedious because not only am I not overly enthusiastic about cars in general, when car companies go in for major operational changes I find it more traumatic than most people seem to. It took me more than a year to become accustomed to the Automatic after driving a Manual all my life.   

It seemed that Desley the Deputy Mayor was not available to talk to us about whatever it was she had in mind and instead someone called Peter would give a talk about EVs - he had been a devotee for nearly a decade and knew all there was to know.   Peter certainly gave us a great deal of information which clearly a number of us found informative because I noticed two people taking notes.   He was getting close to the end of his discourse and I was hoping there would not be too many questions when realisation dawned, quite suddenly and perhaps a little like some people find religion.  I won't be as dramatic as to claim I felt I was touched by the wings of angels but it was a little like that.  -  If I became the owner of an Electric Vehicle I would never again have to face the daunting prospect of filling a car with petrol!   My heart actually began to beat a little more rapidly I swear it.  

No more dawn visits to the Z station - no more humiliation as truck drivers on morning pie breaks stride forward to give assistance - no more sleepless nights as the fuel gauge creeps relentlessly ever closer to zero.   Just a simple plugging into whatever the charger device might be called - and didn't Peter say they were all over the place?   We might even think about getting one for Farnham Street.  

It's an idea definitely worthy of consideration.    

FATHERS, THE FOND & THE FAITHLESS .....

    As a brash and slightly arrogant new mother in my twenties I rather thought I knew all that there was necessary to know about being a parent and I imagined I was matchless in that capacity, a superlative mother.   It's just possible I might have considered that notion with more care had I not been sharing the top two floors of a damp should-have-been-condemned late Victorian house near Paddington station with my very best friend, Stella - also an exceptional mother.  We had rather got into the habit of supporting any idea the other expressed.

This all happened during a time when society in general still rather looked down on mothers who were unmarried, whether or not they considered themselves superlative so possibly our shared shell of over confidence could be forgiven.   Supportively, the terminology around young women in our position had recently changed from Unmarried Mothers to Families Without Fathers and naturally enough we were behind the new lexicon one hundred and ten per cent.  We counted as a Family whether we had husbands or whether we didn't.  We were totally in accord with the idea that if children had outstanding mothers they did not actually need fathers!

In my case this might well have had something to do with the fact that I had had an ambivalent relationship with my own father, thrust into my life as he was at the conclusion of WW2, a stranger, an imposter trespassing into the comfortable relationship between me and my mother.  I would never have described her as superlative or exceptional in any way because I was always in conflict with her.  To me she seemed to spend most of her time preventing me from doing the things I most wanted to do.  However, as time passed I began to see her strengths, though reluctantly.

I did not remain a single parent.  Out of the blue as far as my friends were concerned, I suddenly decided to get married when my son was four years old a situation that I felt sure he would find difficult to process.   Because I had no doubts whatsoever as to my parental impressiveness it came as a shock when he greeted the idea of taking on a virtual stranger as a father with delight.  Without doubt this had something to do with the fact that his biological father had made it totally clear that he wanted nothing to do with the responsibility of parenting in any way whatsoever and although his attitude was fine as far as I was concerned, I failed completely to see just how much a pre-schooler could be affected by the rejection.

Decades later when his stepfather died after a debilitating illness it became all too apparent how much the father-son relationship had meant to Patrick, a fact that the substitute parent was never completely aware of.   Patrick had always been a somewhat difficult child, full of ideas and energy and never quite able to conform to the rules and norms others accepted with ease.  And for whatever reason it was a photo of the first child of the marriage that was kept in his father's wallet, the son of his own flesh and blood - who sadly when he lay dying completely ignored him.  I then felt for Germaine Greer querying in Daddy We Hardly Knew You - was I in your wallet at least Papa?  Did I perhaps ride with you in your wallet?

The significance of never knowing a father, or losing a father before the idea of loss is completely understood becomes ever more apparent to all now heart wrenching situations are laid out before us via tv screens.  Those suddenly told as adults that the man they always knew as their father actually is not can become bereft, those who have grown up without any father figure whatsoever equally so.  My London flat-mate's adult daughter approached me a few years ago, convinced that I knew who her father was and urgently requiring that I tell her.  I was unable to tell her anything because she was born during that period when we felt mothers reigned supreme.  We had been a merged and glorious fatherless family, we had no need of patriarchal influences.

It was not as if males had always formed an integral part of a child's upbringing.  After all, analysis of the origins of the traditional nuclear family becomes blurred with investigation.  History tells us that Genghis Khan was the ultimate absent father, spawning dozens of children destined to never know him and of course we know nothing of the way his progeny viewed him, but naturally enough he wasn't alone.  Throughout the ages fathers have abandoned their sons and daughters with an extraordinary lack of regard, ensuring that society should continue to value only those children born within the sacrament of marriage or at least some similar socially acceptable arrangement.  Those infants abandoned are comfortably left to the responsibility of their mothers aided by the various alleviating corners of the culture within which they were born, for decades seen as largely unimportant.

Most illegitimate children remain quietly unobtrusive whilst just a few rise to significance - Leonardo da Vinci, Oprah Winfrey, Fidel Castro, Marilyn Monroe, Steve Jobs, TE Lawrence to name just a handful.  We don't know a great deal about their attitude to their biological fathers although Marilyn is said to have spent years trying to fill the void left in her life and not altogether succeeding.  Steve Jobs, given up for adoption as an infant professed no interest but did form a relationship with a half sister he came across later in his life.

Possibly we should learn not to make too much of being seen as inconsequential, it's said that Lord Salisbury paid little attention to his legitimate children, less I am certain to the illegitimate.  Once whilst standing behind the throne during a court ceremony he noticed a young man smiling at him in a very friendly fashion.  He enquired who he was of a nearby courtier to discover it was his eldest son!

So it's abundantly clear that some fathers whether they abandon their offspring or not, can be rather disappointing but on the other hand, some children are said to be equally below par.  Searching through historical accounts Edward I was apparently a first rate king.  He was the son of Henry III and the father of Edward II and each were as unlike him as it was possible to be, causing disappointment across several generations.   Richard Cromwell, the son of the more immediately recognisable Oliver, was no more like his father than Hamlet was like Hercules, no doubt causing Oliver to despair.  In France the son of Charles V was described as imbecilic.  In Greek history Paralus and Xantippus, the sons of Pericles were reputed to be little better than the lacklustre Cromwell son - a sad disappointment.   These accounts rather put modern day father-son examples into perspective and possibly King Charles III might find such reports helpful when contemplating the problems Harry has thrown up to test him with in his old age.

But of course feuds and reconciliations have long formed a part of human relationships and you need to look no further than the family Bible (Luke 16: 11-32) for a compelling account of a father's over the top delirium of joy to have a wayward son returned to him.  However, I'm always left wondering what transpired when the fatted calf was totally consumed and the revelry ended.  What happened next?   Did the prodigal son return to his reckless, profligate ways or did he become more like his stay at home and possibly rather overlooked and taken for granted brother?   If so, given similar circumstances could Harry become more like William?   It seems doubtful.

However many of us know too well that there are certain situations where the transgressions are so immense and the violations so unfathomable that appeasement becomes impossible.  Invariably the prime reprobate is the child who has been given a great deal, more than their siblings perhaps, the one for whom many sacrifices were made because their individual needs seemed great.  Then the pain of a separation that is inevitable ripples into perpetuity and becomes the only solution for the transgressions.  Shakespeare can be somehow heartening, noting in King Lear, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.

Love them or hate them our relationships with our fathers should we be privileged enough to have known them safe within our childhoods and youth, are supremely important both for good and for bad.  I was never able to get on well with my own father no matter how diligently he worked at the problem and his death when I was eleven years old I am ashamed to say was something of a relief.  My brother, then four years old, found that final separation savage and life altering.  When he died himself decades later his grief remained unresolved.

Quentin Crisp and his father, perhaps not surprisingly, did not get on well at all and at one stage the elder advised his son that he looked like a male whore.  Years later Quentin admits that he was moderately cheered by this comment.  In fact it was then he decided that on the very next occasion he went up to London he would try very hard not to come back.

When he was a small boy living at 31 West Hill, Highgate John Betjeman loved his father dearly and writes in Summoned by Bells:   My dear, deaf father, how I loved him then before the years of our estrangement came!

Now I fretfully consider how much my own children loved that most Decidedly deaf father.  I know that his stepson loved him with an unusual intensity simply for filling that important void, that place where a Father is supposed to fit.  He required little of him because that Father simply needed to be there in a prime space to be referred to proudly as - My Father.   And my daughter cherished and valued him as only a daughter does, travelling across the globe to be close in those last months when he was fighting sickness, writing down her appreciation and emotions for him as he grew ever more ill.

And now I believe that the much loved boy in his wallet also contemplated a time when he had loved his dear, deaf father.  That there was a moment when like Dylan Thomas he might have urged him not to go gentle into that good night, to rage relentlessly against the dying of the light.

THE ECCENTRICS AMONG US .....

When I arrived in New Zealand all those years ago I was not expecting the country to harbour so many eccentrics.  For some it was eccentricity verging on deviancy - Felix for example who taught violin and did his best to alienate most of his students.  And Elwyn who somehow or other became Principal of one of the biggest primary schools in Auckland and made a religion out of loathing the School Inspectorate.

Then there was Carol with whom I struck up an immediate friendship.  Funnily enough I cannot for the life of me recall who introduced us, what the circumstances were, all I remember is entering her large untidy house in Remuera where each room appeared to be lined with books from floor to ceiling.  And excitingly for me at the time with my own pre-occupation with enticing children into the world of books, so many of them were what we then called Reading Schemes.  Row upon row of little volumes outlining the day to day activities and adventures of child duos called Janet & John or Susie & Sam who were sometimes accompanied by dogs called Timmy or Tommy.   Carol proudly told me each Scheme was complete and the earliest dated from the Victorian era, one entire volume containing words of only two letters.  It began with the edifying sentence:  Lo I am an Ox!  There was of course an appropriate illustration.

Carol had a husband who taught either maths or science and three girls who were roughly the same age as my own children.   My three considered her to be a fantastic mother, the kind any self-respecting child would be inordinately proud of.  This assessment had emerged originally from Seamus because at a time when he longed to own a lizard she had caught one for him in her teapot.  What's more the creature, unimaginatively named Lizzie, had been pregnant at the time of her capture and shortly after becoming resident in the glass tank in his bedroom obligingly gave birth to many lizard babies.  Oh what exciting days they were to be sure!

There were always lots of animals at Carol's house - cats, hens, rabbits, guinea pigs, the occasional goat and from time to time a piglet, wandering at will outside and inside, their needs considered at least as important as those of the human inhabitants.  Little wonder that it was a popular destination for local children whether or not they were keen readers.

The multitude of animal life was not always equally admired by the immediate neighbours it must be admitted who from time to time complained and upon realising that Carol was impervious to complaints, rang the SPCA and spoke of noise and fleas and even cruelty.  They were of course being somewhat over-dramatic and it was clear they were not part of Carol's fan base - she maintained they had also been responsible for the complaints about the two abandoned cars on her front lawn.  She had no intention whatsoever of getting rid of the cars as she might well think about restoring them to road-worthiness at some future stage and in the interim her children and a host of visiting playmates really enjoyed playing in them.   Yet another reason why she retained her phenomenal popularity with all who had not yet reached their teens and indeed some who had.

New Zealand is a place that has always operated admirably upon the work of community committees and Carol was an enthusiastic participant.  Strangely this did not always meet with the approval of other team members.   She had a problem with suffering fools gladly and an uncanny knack of pointing out the obvious in a manner that would have earned the approbation of Donald Trump himself.  Like him she cared little about what others thought of her and her at times scathing and caustic comment regarding hitherto ignored elephants in committee meeting rooms were met with silences that echoed relentlessly from wall to wall.   She was constantly central to critical and disparaging discussion and often to be her friend invited the same censorious analysis and fault finding.

Happily Carol was able to rise above the condemnation and never stray from the path of what she considered was righteous and decent.  She continued to give back to the Community and was the only person I knew who would happily sit with dying nuns night after night,  knitting for stress relief, intricate socks for Highland dancers, often with eight different balls of wool.

It was she who kept me on the straight and narrow when I was going through an enthusiasm for keeping a tidy house.  She told me she had stopped doing housework at the birth of her youngest daughter - after two years she maintained, the cobwebs and dust in all the corners would not be noticed.   She was of course correct.

Carol was highly intelligent and her educational achievements eclipsed those of the majority of her critics.  She was also a loyal friend and she was most definitely an eccentric.  People like Carol are never easily ignored - and they are rarely forgotten.

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.