This is Mum’s life story, as transcribed by Mary-Ann in 2007.
I was born on 15th March, 1935 in the house where my Mum and Dad lived with my maternal grandmother at 2, Bridge Place, Croydon. My father, Thomas Walter Knight, was a leather worker at this time according to my birth certificate, but I only ever remember him working on the railways as a lengthman. My mother, Helena Maud Bateman, used to take in other peoples laundry (her mother, Rose Emma Edwards, helped her in this). She had had other jobs before this, she had done some nurse training at one time, and then at the beginning of the First World War she worked in a chandlers shop. When her older brothers went to war (3 of them were to die in the 1st World War) she had to go and help in the family’s greengrocery business.
The first house I remember living in was a big house in Sydenham Road where we lived with my grandmother and Mum’s sister Auntie Kit. It was by a flour mill and we lived down in the basement and I remember going to a nursery school when I was 4yrs old. Once, when I was about 2 or 3, I picked up a ‘worm’ that I found tucked down by something in the garden (I was very keen on worms at the time) Unfortunately it was a rat’s tail, with rat attached! My Dad shouted at me to put it down and then he chopped at it with his shovel till it was dead.
Dad used to bring home big railway sleepers through his job and chop them up for firewood. My job was to then cut the pieces into sticks, ready for the fire. This was quite an important perk of his job because it kept us warm through the winter when coal was short. Another good perk was free and cheap rail travel for him and his family, which meant we could go on day trips to the seaside and even on holiday to Ramsgate in 1939.
There was always singing in the house when I was little, Mum and Gran sang while they worked and they sang to me. Gran would sometimes make me little dollies and would play dolls and tea parties with me. Dad would allow me to follow him around and ‘help’ him with jobs, sending me to fetch things and letting me hold stuff for him. They must have paid me quite a lot of attention
in those early years because I could both read and write before I went to school – quite an achievement as none of them had had much education and they all came from a long line of poor, working class, manual workers.
Dad also liked a game of cards and taught me to play when I was a bit older. My Dad was always very easy going and I soon worked out that he was the soft one and my Mum was the strict one in that household. Once, when we were going to a wedding, Dad was writing in the card and managed to knock over the bottle of ink. It went all over the table and nearly ruined my dress which was laid there – Mum went mad, raging about how useless he was, while Dad just sat there and took it.
By the time the second World War started we were living, with Grandma yet again, in a rented house in Davidson Road and I started going to Davidson Road School, which took children from 5 – 14 years old. On the day war broke out Mum, Dad and I were on holiday at Ramsgate, staying in a bed and breakfast. Mum had persuaded Auntie Rose to look after Gran and she was made of stern stuff, but on our return she said she would never have her again. She kept her word, and no-one else ever had her either. Auntie Kit could never have coped with Gran, she was a bag of nerves. Anyway, we were on the beach that day when the air raid alarm went off for the first time. There was lots of panic, everyone thought it was a real raid and the beach cleared very quickly. My Dad was still swimming a long way out to sea and he didn’t hear the alarm. Mum was calling and calling and getting in a panic but he didn’t hear her. Eventually he returned and the alarm turned out to be a practice anyway! We didn’t have any other holidays away until after Gran died.
During the war I do remember day trips to Brighton and Eastbourne, using Dad’s free and cheap rail fares. You couldn’t go down on to the beach because there was barbed wire and tank traps but we used to walk on the promenade and sit on deckchairs. It was just nice to get away for the day, Gran never wanted to come so she stayed at home and the next door neighbour kept an eye on her for us.
Dad’s occupation on the railways was reserved, he tried to join up because one of his brothers was in the RAF and two were in the Navy, but he wasn’t allowed to go. He was still in danger because he had to do shift work and was often out working in the Blitz, he also had to do firewatching duty for the railways. Some of the other children at school used to make nasty comments and said my Dad was a coward, which was very unfair and I found it quite hurtful.
Mum worked in a munitions factory in 1940/41, making small arms in premises just across the railway which had been a typewriter factory. The work was shift work so Gran often looked after me which I liked because she was soft on me and my cousins. We always ran to her for protection when we were in trouble. I don’t remember her anything other than vague and dotty so I’m not sure that she was actually up to the job, but I didn’t come to any harm. When I was still quite little I used to get sent each evening, with a jug, up to the off licence at the top of the road to collect her stout. Sometimes Gran used to go walking up the road during the blackout with a candle to light her way, she didn’t seem bothered that she was also lighting the way for any stray German bomber who was lurking!
We had an Anderson shelter in our back garden, and during the Blitz we either sheltered there or under the kitchen table or in the cupboard under the stairs. There were periods went we went to the shelter every night, there were so many alarms. The people next door went to Chislehurst Caves every night. One night a bomb landed really close and I felt the whole shelter lift. Dad and some of the neighbours went to check and found that the house next door but two had got a direct hit. The bomb went through the water main and the people drowned in their shelter – a family with a new baby. We had lots of bombs landing close to us because of the railway, once there was an unexploded bomb on the railway right at the bottom of our garden. I can remember the soldiers coming to defuse it, we were evacuated to Uncle Ernie in Addiscombe for the day. I was very anxious about the soldiers safety.
On August 15th 1940 the German air force launched their first day time raid on London and their target was Croydon Airport. I saw a pink glow in the sky like a sunset and what seemed to my 5 year old eyes to be a long line of insects, flying over the airport, laying eggs as they went. Suddenly I realised they were bombs and called out excitedly to Mum to come and see.
An event which I found much more frightening happened early in the war when I was with my mum at Crown Hill street market in Croydon. Without warning a lone German fighter plane came flying low down the length of the street, strafmg the people below. I didn’t really realise quite what was happening at the time, but there was lots of panic and shouting. Mum pushed me under a fruit and veg. stall, I was most put out because I was shoved in with all the mouldy, rotten
rubbish under the stall. I was a child who didn’t like being dirty! I don’t remember seeing any injured people myself but I think two people were killed, and there must have been people hurt as well.
I went to school in different places during that time, Davidson Road School closed quite early on because most of the children were evacuated (I’m not sure why I wasn’t, I think my mum just didn’t want to part with me). Those few children left behind were all gathered together so we moved around, for a while we were at Ashburton Road. Later on Davidson Road reopened. It was during the war that my dad started keeping rabbits and chickens, a welcome addition to our limited war time diets, and he continued to do so afterwards.
We were finally evacuated towards the end of the war, after the doodlebugs had started, probably about 1943. My mum and I were sent to Nottingley in Yorkshire where we stayed with a lady called Norah. Auntie Kit and cousin Jackie came too, Auntie Kit would never have managed at home – without my mum’s support she would have fallen to pieces. I suppose Gran must have been with us as well, but I don’t remember.
It was a lovely rural location and there was lots of fresh food – vegetables, home baked bread, Yorkshire puddings and onion gravy – better than Mum’s cooking. Mum was vexed because she said that Norah took all our meat ration tickets but never gave us any meat to eat!
Although we were only there for 8 weeks, I went to school for a little while. Strangely, the other children were all miles behind me academically but they were nice and I used to play with the 2 little boys next door. Yet again there were nasty comments, this time directed at Mum and Kit, such as ‘Go back to London, you cowards’. I think they were basically anti Southerners. There were some exceptions to this general animosity, however. My cousin Jackie fished a boy out of the canal one day and his mum was very friendly after that. Our landlady always made a big fuss about boiling up water for a bath, and this lovely lady invited us to her house for baths. It was lovely, a real bath, running hot water and it felt like heaven. But I missed my dad, and Mum missed him even more, so that’s why we only stayed for 8 weeks although Dad would have liked us to stay longer. So we all made the railway journey home and funnily enough, the first noise we heard when the train drew in to London was a V2 rocket – for me these were the most frightening of all the terrors because you could never guess where they might be landing. For some years after the war I still looked for shelter every time a plane flew over. And even as an adult an extra loud firework could make me cringe.
Apart from her confusion and dementia my Gran was always quite physically fit, but in 1946 she had a bout of what seemed to be very bad indigestion which only lasted about half an hour. Two weeks later my Mum found her dead in bed so it seems that she had probably actually had a heart attack. As was usual in those days, she was laid out in our front room with pennies on her eyes and we were expected to go in to kiss her and pay our last respects – not something my cousins and I enjoyed at all. The smell of violets always makes me think of her funeral because everyone brought them to lay on the coffin as they were her favourites. I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, I was considered to be too young, but I got myself into trouble with my Mum by running up the road after the hearse, waving goodbye to my Gran. Mum was really miffed later on when relatives came back to the house and began removing items because ‘she always wanted to leave me this’. She said it felt like they were stripping Gran away. However, I do also remember her dancing around the room saying, ‘I’m free, I’m free !’ when Gran died and she also threw out all of Gran’s old ornaments, much to my disgust.
As a youngster my playmates were children from school with whom I played in the street or, more often, in mine or their back garden. Mum was very close to her sister, Rose, so I played with my cousins Ron and Ken a lot. Also my cousin Jackie (Auntie Kit’s son) and cousin John. They both lived a bit further away. When family visited, the grown ups often went to the pub and we children had to wait outside with a lemonade and a packet of crisps if we were lucky. On some occasions, I was left to wait by myself, could you imagine that in these safety conscious days? I also loved to listen to the wireless, especially ‘Children’s Hour’, in fact the whole family listened in a lot. We didn’t have a television, of course, but Auntie Rose did and occasionally I watched ‘Muffin the Mule’ on her set.
At Christmas, I always got a stocking with an apple, an orange, some cheap little games and maybe a doll. Gran and Mum would sometimes make dolls clothes. And I always got a new book. We had some ancient old decorations which had come down through the family and we always had a small tree decorated with cotton wool, bells made from milk bottle tops and lighted candles – it was a wonder we didn’t set the house on fire! Not many people could afford turkey, like us chicken was a more usual Christmas Dinner and everyone listened to the Queen’s Speech on the radio.
Birthday parties were small affairs at home with half a dozen girls and jelly and sponge in the front room (a room which was seldom used). We played old fashioned games like Oranges and Lemons, Pass the Parcel, and Treasure Hunts. I felt really grown up on my 12th birthday when Auntie Kit gave me some blue moonstone earrings.
When I was 10 years old, I and my good friend Mavis were sent to Ashburton Primary School where, together with other ‘likely’ candidates from the area we took our Scholarship Exam. Mavis and I both passed so went on together to Selhurst Grammar School. The rest of our classmates either went on to secondary school at 11 or stayed at Davidson Road until they left school when they were 14.
My best friends at grammar school were Sheila and Pam Potts who was Anglo-Indian. I was amongst the first year of school children to take the new ‘O’ levels and I took English Language, English Literature and French.
Whilst I was at the grammar school, when I was about 12 or 13, we went on holiday to Plymouth, to stay with Auntie Kit (Dad’s older sister). I loved it, the cliffs, rocks and beaches were exciting and my Auntie had a son called John who was 15ish that I had a crush on. He was from her 1st marriage – her second husband, Uncle Alf was nice too. Auntie Kit used to make her own clotted cream, which sounds very nice until I found out that it meant that there were always bowls of rotten milk in the larder. This was probably the last holiday away that I had with my Mum and Dad, they continued to go on days out, but I didn’t always go as I had got to that teenage stage where you think that everything your parents do is boring.
My social life revolved around the church youth club from about the age of 14 or 15 – my friends Rosemary, Betty and I would go to the dances there. Sometimes we went to dances at Caterham Barracks (where there were national service boys), Whitgift School dances or the Orchid Ballroom in Purley.
I was 17 when I left school and went to work as a laboratory assistant at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Beckenham. I had spotted the job advertised in the local paper and I needed something to fill in a year until I would be old enough to start nurse training. I think I probably wanted to be a nurse because my mum had done a bit of nursing, but I never got round to it as I liked it at Wellcome’s.
It was quite a way from home to work, I used to cycle the 7 miles each day, unless I was going out after work, then I used to get the bus. I was assistant to Miss Marshall and my job involved making up solutions, restocking, and sterility tests among other things. I do remember testing penicillinase, which was then used to test penicillin. A bit later on I also worked for Miss Lock who was doing research on leptospira vaccines.
The first time I saw Keith (my future husband, Harold Keith Favelle), was when I was being shown round at my interview. He was leaning against a door frame, smoking, and I was interested in him right away. I was very disappointed when I actually started work to find that he was already engaged. To start with we just used to pass the time of day, but then his engagement broke up and we started going out together. We used to go for bike rides or walks and quite often to the Regal cinema in Beckenham, followed by egg and chips in the café next door. Occasionally we went to dances, sometimes they were with his sister Joy and her workmates, but Keith was not exactly a keen dancer. On Friday nights we used to go to Joy’s place and play darts or cards. Her boyfriend, George (later her husband) was nearly always there although he was still a married man at the time.
Beryl was my best friend at work, we were always laughing together and we used to go out together quite a bit as well. I got to know her in quite a convoluted manner – two young men (John Young and Cyril Brett) worked just across the corridor from me and our two rooms did some work together. Through John, I met Jill who worked for Mr Proom (as did Keith) and Beryl was a friend of Jill’s. John Crowe was another friend, he worked with the boys downstairs and sometimes we went to the theatre with him.
I had my first holiday without my parents shortly after I started working, I was probably about 18 years old. I was still going to the youth club, so I went with Rosemary and Betty from there and Beryl from work. I was the one who suggested the holiday and did the booking so I was also the one who got the blame when, on arrival at Butlin’s in Clacton we found our chalet was in the boys’ line and we had been booked in as boys! Still, they didn’t seem to be too upset about the error! We had great fun, there was always something going on – keep fit on the beach, swimming, dancing, shows, tennis – it never stopped.
We were very amused that Rosemary seemed to have a new outfit for each activity and spent considerable amounts of time changing. One of the boy’s taught me how to dive and there were many friendly boys there, but I had already met Keith and I missed him badly. But all the other girl’s found themselves a boy for the holiday. Anyway, we had one week at Butlin’s and then went for another week to Rosemary’s aunt who lived at Melksham. There wasn’t room for us all at her house so some of us stayed at the Black Horse across the road. We needed a restful week after Butlin’s and we did some walking, went on a couple of coach trips – one to Stonehenge and one to Cheddar Gorge – played skittles with the locals, and went to a dance in town.
It was such a successful holiday that the next year the same quartet went to Switzerland. I had suggested this because I had a picture postcard of the Matterhorn on my wall at home and I often used to look at it and think ‘I’m going to go there one day’. Well, we didn’t go precisely there but it was all just as beautiful as I had imagined. Mostly we went for mountain walks, we were just 5 minutes walk from the Reichanbach Falls where Sherlock Holmes met his fictitious death. We also went on a day trip across to Lake Garda in Italy, where we took a boat across the lake to a little island. One lovely, warm summer day we set off in our shorts up a mountain path and the weather turned. We got almost to the top and it started snowing, followed by hail. The path turned into a stream and we were freezing, but we were amazed to be able to buy hot chocolate right up there! The only downside to this holiday was that, by then, Keith and I were seriously courting and I missed him terribly. He sent me a letter which I would take out and read and reread until the others got pretty annoyed with me.
So the following year Keith and I wondered about a holiday together. Just by chance, a leaflet came round at work offering a cheap holiday abroad via a workers’ association so that’s how we ended up in Italy for two weeks. The first week was on the Adriatic coast at Rimini, back then it was a lovely small place, but it used to get very, very hot in the middle of the day. For the second week we moved further north to Malveno in the mountains, where it was cooler and we did loads of walking through the most beautiful scenery. The food was also much better. Keith was as keen as I was to go on this holiday, in spite of his usual reluctance to try anything new – maybe he was hoping to have his wicked way with me! He didn’t show his true Favelle colours until after we were married and we never went abroad again!
Shortly after I started at Wellcome’s, when I was still only 17, my mother (who had been feeling generally unwell for quite a while) became very ill. She was admitted to hospital with stomach pains and died quite soon after from ovarian cancer. Dad and I went down to Auntie Kit’s in Plymouth for a bit, after the funeral and in fact both Auntie Kit and Uncle Alf then came up and stayed with us in Croydon for a few weeks because Kit didn’t think we would be able to manage without Mum. She was the only one of Dad’s siblings that Mum and Dad got on with – they always kept in touch and wrote to each other.
After that I kept house for Dad, taking over the washing and cooking and so on. He really wanted me to give up working and stay at home full time but I was determined to keep my job.
My dad fell ill a few years later, just after Keith and I got engaged. He had been plagued with digestive problems for a couple of years and finally went into hospital with what was thought to be an ulcer. They operated and I was then very shocked to be told (by a junior doctor who thought I already knew) that he had inoperable stomach cancer. Some of Dad’s family were in the waiting room (my aunts Bertha and Lucy were there with their families, and maybe Uncle Alf) but when I told them what the doctor had said they refused to believe me and told me to my face that I was lying. I knew that the Bateman’s (Mum’s family) and Knight’s had never got on but it was very upsetting as you can imagine. I don’t think they turned up to his wedding as they thought my Mum was beneath him and then they didn’t even turn up to his funeral when he died a few weeks later.
In contrast, when I cycled, sobbing, over to Keith’s mum’s house that day they were both extremely supportive and offered me a shoulder to cry on. Needless to say, I never saw any of the Knight family again, apart from Auntie Kit. I certainly never went looking for them.
After Dad had got over his operation a bit he was moved to a convalescent hospital and I visited him over the next few weeks, but he quickly deteriorated and after a period in a coma, he died. Again, I went to stay with Auntie Kit, just by myself. It was a peaceful couple of weeks, I was left pretty much to my own devices by my uncle and aunt. Cousin John was there and he took me out crabbing in his rowing boat a few times.
So, when I returned to Croydon, I was only 22 years old, I had lost both my parents, my grandmother had died just after the war and I was pretty much on my own.
But by the October (Dad died in May) I was married. Keith and I were married on the 5th September, 1957 at St. James Parish Church in Croydon. Both my parents and my maternal grandparents were married in this same church and recently I have discovered that my great grandparents also married there so I was upholding an established family tradition. It was also the church where I and all my Bateman cousins were christened.
It was a fairly small wedding, partly because of Dad’s recent death but also because that was what we wanted (and what we could afford!). My godfather, Uncle Jack, gave me away. He was Auntie Kit’s husband and most of my Bateman aunts, uncles and cousins came but not the Knight’s. For my bridesmaids I had my friend from work, Beryl, and Keith’s cousin Betty’s small daughter Pat. Beryl’s shop bought dress was a pale mauve and Keith’s mum made Pat’s dress in the same colour. I planned to buy an elegant, plain ivory, v-necked dress like the one my boss had worn at her recent wedding but when tried on that style looked like a lab. coat on me. I ended up with a much more elaborate style – a lacy bodice and a big skirt with pearl buttons, beading and bows all down the back. I really only tried it on for a laugh but it really suited me.
Mrs. Boxall, a greengrocer friend of the Bateman’s who had known me since I was tiny, offered to do the flowers for free and we accepted the kind offer gratefully. I asked for small, simple bouquets, maybe freesias but what arrived on the morning were huge bouquets with trailing ribbons, so heavy that the smallest bridesmaid had trouble holding hers up! Still, we could hardly complain as they were a gift.
I had left Davidson Road and gone to stay with my Auntie Rose a couple of weeks beforehand and so that’s where I got ready on the wedding morning. It was pouring with rain first thing, and Auntie Rose cooked Beryl and me a great, huge breakfast that we couldn’t eat – not a good start, but my hairstyle at least, I thought, was sorted because I had been for a couple of trial runs in the weeks leading up to the wedding. I had read in a magazine that it was a good idea to get to know your stylist and have a rehearsal and I was very happy with my stylist and what she had planned. What a well organised bride I thought I was!
Disastrously, when I got to the salon that morning I found that my stylist was ill and I ended up with a chit of a girl who, despite my protests, gave me a head of tight curls which looked awful and did not suit my veil and head dress at all. Once I got back to Auntie Rose’s we had to spend ages try to comb it out and calm the curls down a bit. Then Beryl decided to give her dress a final press and managed to burn a hole in it! Luckily the hole was in the very full skirt and Auntie Rose was able to conceal it by sewing a fold of the skirt together.
Things were not going any better round at Keith’s mum’s. During the morning he told her he was just going over to his friend Morris’ to drop off his motorbike (Moms was ‘bike-sitting’ while we were on honeymoon). But instead of returning home he then went on to the shops to buy new socks and a tie. This took longer than expected and his poor mum was going mad, thinking he had crashed his bike or had got cold feet and had skipped off. Just as she was trying to decide what to do, Keith sauntered back in with quarter of an hour to spare, cool as a cucumber. She was so angry with him!
But in spite of all this, an hour before the wedding the sun came out and we had a lovely ceremony. The reception was held at Keith’s mum’s house in Sylvan Way, West Wickham. This was quite a posh house in a well-to-do area, Keith’s family had virtually comandeered it during the war, when they were bombed out of their more modest abode in Beckenham. It was a fairly common practice during those times that those who stayed to brave the bombing would ‘squat’ in the houses of those who had evacuated for the duration, and in many cases it took the owners years to get their property back.
I guess we must have looked like a newly married couple on the train going on our honeymoon – I had on a new pale blue suit and hat and Keith had a buttonhole – as a gentleman sitting opposite us in the dining carriage bought us a bottle of wine and paid for our meal, which was a lovely gesture. We went to Croyde Bay in Devon and the sun shone for the whole two weeks, we pottered around and hardly saw anyone else. The only small disagreement we had was that I had forgotten to pack any other shoes and so only had the tottery high heels I had arrived in. So we had to waste some of our precious time and money going into the town to buy sensible lace ups.
When we returned from our honeymoon we moved into a little flat at 25, Lawrie Park Road in Sydenham. This was a big old Edwardian house, very grand when built, which had been divided up and we had the side flat.
By spring of the following year I had given up work and was waiting for the birth of my first baby. Susan Joy was born at home on the 10th July, 1958 and she was a very pretty, contented baby. She was quickly followed by Kathleen Jane (Katie) on the 31st August 1959, and Mary-Ann on the 22nd May, 1961. We had always planned a big family and loved our growing band but had given up hoping for boys by the time our fourth child arrived on the 25th November, 1963. Matthew Keith was the long awaited son and heir and Keith was a proud dad indeed. We had very little money in those days and life was quite hard in some ways, but the children were all healthy and happy and that made us contented parents. Keith would give me housekeeping money once a week and that had to last until Friday when he got paid again. There were no credit cards or savings in the bank in those days so when the money ran out then we had to make do without.
Sometimes, I would have just enough food for the children and Keith’s tea on Friday and I would tell them I wasn’t hungry myself and would just have some bread and butter. Or I would ask Keith if he had any money on Friday morning and he would give me his coffee money, then he would get his friend Morris to lend him enough for his morning coffee.
When the children were little it was easy to make them clothes from my pre wedding wardrobe. All those full skirts that were so fashionable in the 50’s provided enough material for dresses for the girls, and I made the boys shirts from Keith’s old shirts. There was usually enough decent material left in them for that.
I remember Keith’s mum, who was a dab hand at knitting, showed me how to unpick the cuffs and borders from a cardigan that Mary-Ann had grown out of and then knit in an extra bit with a different colour. Mary-Ann hated the result and would only ever wear this cardigan when forced.
Shoes were always a big expense. The girls hated the fact that they only ever had one pair each and they had to be plain and sensible for schools. They never had party shoes and I never had new shoes at all, I wore the same pair for years. Jumble sales were a good source for many of our clothes and that’s where we got things like bikes and scooters as well. Sometimes things were passed on from friends and family too.
Once we got to Blandford Road other gifts found their way to us. The greengrocers, who came round in their lorry two or three times a week, would give us bags of fruit and veg. which was damaged or stuff that they had a surplus of and which would have otherwise been wasted. Our next door neighbours would pass brimming, brown paper bags of cherries from their tree over the fence for the children. A lady down the road gave us apples from her garden. This was the normal way of things in those days, people helped each other out. Although our relative poverty might seem pitiful in these modern times, we were a very average family and there were many worse off than us.
Shortly after Matthew was born we moved into a bigger flat at the front of the house, where John David was born on the 25th October, 1965. The birth was uneventful but the midwife noticed that John had a very slightly bigger head than normal and she got the hospital consultant, Mr. Forrest to come and examine him. He was non commital and asked us to measure his head every day over the next six weeks and then go and see him again. John was a bit more restless than my other babies and harder to feed, and his head got ominously bigger over the next few weeks. When we took him back to the hospital, Mr. Forrest confirmed that, as he suspected, John was suffering from hydrocephalus. This is a condition related to spina bifida and results in a build up of fluid around the brain. Without treatment babies suffer brain damage and usually die in childhood, so John had to go for his first operation to put in an artificial drain.
This was the infancy of such operations and John had 18 further operations over the next two or three years as complications and blockages arose. He was very ill during this time and the strain of worrying about him and trying to keep home life going for the other children was very hard. By then the three girls were all going to St. Bartholomew’s Primary School and juggling school and hospital and looking after a toddler and a sick baby was quite a challenge.
When we first moved into the flat in Lawrie Park Road, straight after our marriage, the landlady was a pleasant, elderly woman with whom we got on well. But, about this time, she died and left the house to her nephew who was called John Smith and he moved into the top flat. He seemed nice to start with but then started a vendetta of petty annoyances. At the root of this was that he wanted to convert the house into bedsits to maximise his income and he set about removing all his sitting tenants one way or another.
We had mould growing on a wall in the girls’ bedroom which he refused to do anything about and then he started banning things that we had done for years without complaint. First he decided we could no longer keep our boots in the communal hall, then our pram and then we were no longer allowed access to the garden which was hard on the children and the dog. There was a lot of work being done in the house and on one occasion we came back from an outing to find that the bay window in our bedroom had been removed. We’d been given no warning and no chance to protect our furniture, consequently there was mess everywhere. We tried to get on the council housing list but didn’t qualify and we couldn’t afford to buy a house of our own because we had no money for a deposit. One of the worse things he did was to ban us from keeping our dog any more, forcing Keith to get rid of Ben who was much loved by us all. This upset all the children, Katie in particular.
In the end someone at Keith’s work suggested to him that he ask Wellcome’s for some financial help. We had nothing to lose so he did and they helped by providing a loan for the deposit on a house. We were mightily relieved, of course, as continuing to live in that flat was a nightmare but it left us in a very tight financial situation. In fact Keith later had to take out a private loan to cover repayments, something that he did without telling me. For some years our finances were very shaky indeed to say the least and Keith had many stern letters from the bank.
We looked at quite a few houses, mostly in poor condition as that was all we were going to be able to afford and then in 1968 we moved to Blandford Road in Beckenham. Our new house was a wreck, with no electricity and the plumbing was out of the ark so life was a struggle to start with but at least it was ours. Keith worked all hours to replumb and rewire the whole house and things gradually improved.
The children were all at Churchfield’s Primary School just down the road and John’s health was settling down too when, when John was six years old, I discovered I was pregnant again at the grand old age of 36. At the time, this was considered rather old to be having another baby. I worried about this baby’s health and had a hard time during the birth, finally ending up being taken to hospital for a forceps delivery, the one and only time I didn’t have my baby at home, so you can imagine how happy we were when a fit and healthy Peter James was delivered on the 27th May, 1971. Pete was a much loved younger brother for all the others and consequently he was rather spoiled, but his cheeky grin and loveable nature always got him out of scrapes.
The children began to grow up, going to secondary school, taking exams and then going on to university (Katie, Matthew and Peter), or to work (Sue became the nurse I might have become and Mary-Ann followed her dad into the laboratory). John was the only one to remain at home, his independence impeded by his disability and his naturally lazy character.
Keith got more and more disillusioned with the rapidly multiplying red tape at work and when the opportunity presented itself, took early retirement at the age of 58. He spent more time on the allotment which he’d dabbled with over the years and I had my garden of which I was very fond.
Then Katie’s brief marriage broke up when she was pregnant and when she became a single mum in 1988 I got very involved with caring for my grandaughter, Rosie. For a while I was looking after her for three days each week while Katie was doing her teacher training. When Rosie was three years old, Katie remarried and moved near to Portsmouth.
This left a big gap in my life, I no longer had children to care for, and I began to have attacks of anxiety and depression which got steadily worse over the next years and I became housebound. We stayed on at Blandford Road until Keith died in June 2004 when I moved to a sheltered flat in Cheltenham, near where Mary-Ann lives, with Matthew and his family not far away in Swindon.
This was a really difficult period in my life, my mental health was still very poor and I had lost my dear husband of 47 years and felt very alone. It is now 2007 and, of course, I still miss Keith. But my mental health is much improved, and with lots of help from the excellent psychiatric team here in Cheltenham, I am beginning to get out and about more and finding things I can enjoy. I have gradually found new friends here at the sheltered housing with whom I share music evenings and other social occasions, even running the gardening group!
I also go to a poetry group, a church social group and a gym class, so my weeks are pretty full. I am also learning to appreciate the positive side of living alone and not having to consider anyone but myself.
I have related this life story to my daughter, Mary-Ann, who is researching our family history and I hope that one of my six grandchildren will pass it on to the next generation.