Gardens and Playgrounds

Today is an absolutely beautiful day, but for the next hour I shall enjoy it by looking at all the roses and geraniums in the flower bed that is visible through the open door to my side. I just wish my gardenwas larger, but then again, I am perfectly aware that many people have to content themselves with just balconies or the local park, to catch up with their share of fresh air and sunshine.
That was how it was when I was a child. If I wanted to go outside, playing in the garden was not an option. Balconies used to enchant me. I remember, a friend of my mother had one, in her small council flat, right out in one of those places near the end of a London underground line. I was allowed to water her balcony plants once, but only once. I think I must have watered a little too enthusistically, for she never asked me again. Not that we used to visit her very often, which was just as well really, because once I had exhausted the delights of her balcony, the beautifully-dressed Golly that sat on the sideboard, but I wasn't really allowed to play with, and certainly not take home, and the big seashell in which you could hear the sea if you put it to your ear, I became bored and restless, and probably a bit of a pain too.
There was a large garden behind our London house, but the only time I was allowed to go in it was to accompany my grandmother when she hung out the washing. Then I used to play in the waist-high long grass and make all manner of secret paths through it. I used to blow on the dandelion clocks to see what time it was, and there were plenty of opportunities to try again if the first one did not work. Dandelions would jostle with thistles and all manner of other weeds which thrived in that urban wilderness. My Grandmother always used to say "If you don't plant a garden, it will plant itself" and I had to agree with her.
Unfortunately, although she was only a tenant like ourselves, Mrs B. downstairs had control of the garden, and she didn't want me in it, or anybody else for that matter.
When I was about nine or ten, this same aunt who had the balcony, gave me an Enid Blyton gardening book. It was a bit cruel really, but I read it so thoroughly that I learnt a great deal about gardening. I knew all about how to dig over a flower bed, how to plant seeds and how to prune roses. I even learned about garden pests, and how to deal with them, but the book didn't give me any ideas how to deal with the biggest garden pest of all - Mrs B.downstairs.
Yes, I had actually had the temerity to dig over a bit of the wilderness and plant it out. Over the period of a few days I spent several happy hours out in the fresh air tending to my little bit of garden. Then one morning I came down to find that my plants had been trampled on and just for good measure, bucketfuls of weeds and coal dust had been thrown over everything.
I threw the book away. It upset me too much, now that my little foray into gardening was effectively brought to a close. But I think that incident might have been one of the contributary factors that lead my mother an I to leave London a couple of years later and try our luck in North Wales.
But there were still the Camden Gardens, five minutes walk away, even if you were not allowed to walk on the grass. People looked after things more in those days, and respected them. But the presence of a full-time park-keeper cum gardener definitely helped.
The flower-beds were not trampled on, no litter was left lying around and the actual playground at the end of the gardens, was locked up every night and painted at regular intervals.
From about the age of five, I used to go there on my own. There were always other children to play with once you got there.
There were no sandpits though, so I had to reserve my bucket and spade for visits to the actual seaside or till my mother took me to one of the playgrounds in Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens. There were no baby swings either and definitely only a hard asphelt surface to land on if you fell. But we never did. Not that I can remember, at any rate.
When I think of all the things we used to get up to it sends shivers down my spine. We thought nothing of hanging on by our knees to the bar of a big roundabout called an umbrella, and swinging out while the others pushed it round as fast as they could. Occasionally we even climbed right up to the top and sat on top of it, but that was definitely dangerous, and the park-keeper would then order us down in no uncertain terms.
With the big slide, one of us would slide down it with trailing a wax crayon behind them, with the result, when the wax had worked its way in, the metal slide became extremely slippery, and we used to shoot down it and right off the end, like bullets from a gun.
I think we had the most fun on the swings though. The chains were long, so you could swing really high. You could swing the highest of all if you stood up, especially if there were two of you facing one another. One sitting and one standing was another variation, as was swinging while the twisted-up chains unravelled, throwing you in all directions. The swings on either side had to be hooked up for this stunt, to avoid banging into them.
I have started talking about 'we' rather than I. Most of the time,especially when I was a bit older, I would come down with the other girls from our street. Somehow boys just did not come into the equation back then. I suppose they had their own groups and games. also, I think the girls in the street vastly outnumbered the boys, so, on the whole, we left them to their own devices.
Next time I will write more about all the games we used to play in the street. But right now, i have flower beds to tend to and roses to dead-head.

I started to write yesterday, but was interrupted by my husband coming home prematurely. And now it is lost somewhere in the murky depths of my computer. But things have a strange way of turning up unexpectedly.
These days, whenever I start loosing things, or rather failing to find them because they are no longer in the place where I had thought I had put them, I realise that it is time to have a bit of a sort out. I did this with my bookshelves in the spare room the other day, and lo and behold, what should turn up but my old stamp album.
I sat down on top of the pile of books on the floor and perused it. I had carefully stuck those stamps in country by country, set by set, all in nice straight rows. The late King George features in ten of my stamps, ranging in value from a ha'pny to tuppence ha'pny(as we used to pronounce it) I've even got three with the head of his abdicated older brother, Edward. I used to like the stamps of the young queen Elizabeth best. A whole set of stamps with her young portrait on them graces my album. As I said in my last Blog - It is pity that everyone, even queens, have to get old.
South African stamps used to come in pairs, one with Suid (pronounce sayed) Africa, and the other with South Africa. Zimbabwe was southern Rhodesia in those days, and on that page, I have four stamps of English currency, with the Queen's head on them, and the writing, Rhodesia and Nyasaland (which I believe is present-day Malawi) We used to have a gardener from Malawi when we live out in South Africa, and his name was Maxwell. How he managed to work so hard in that sticky, summer heat, I do not know. But that belongs to a much later chapter of my life and has absolutely no place under the present title.
For pure pictorial beauty, the stamps of Monaco and Hungary were hard to beat. I've got a couple which celebrate the wedding of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, as well as some lovely triangular ones from that principality. I remember watching the fairy-tale wedding on our small black and white television (already described in great detail in an earlier Blog) when the American actress became a princess. In hindsight, she would have probably been happier if she had stayed in America, where she belonged, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Visiting her tomb in Monaco's great cathedral was a sad experience for me. I was still feeling very subdued when I emerged once more into the sunshine. One day she was a princess, the next a corpse. What is life and death all about?
I don't know why the Hungarians made a point of producing such lovely stamps back in the fifties. Perhaps that was one area in which their Russian oppressors (or liberators, depending on ones point of view) let them have free rein and give vent to their pent-up creativity. Anyway, I used to love collecting them. and they had pride of placein my stamp album.
I remember when I was about seven, my mother's older sister came to visit us for the afternoon. In winter, she used to remind me of a big brown bear, with her long fur coat, fur boots and fur mittens. she even used to wear the furry, sanitized remains of some unfortunate elongated creature round her neck, bright,beady eyes shining and its tail clipping somehow into its mouth. My aunt Agnes used to fascinate me in more ways than one. She was a brilliant conversationist with a witty sense of humour, and even at that age she used to make me laugh. Anyway, on this particular visit, I must have been briefly the subject of the conversation. Directly I heard my name mentioned I started to pay attention to what was being said, as one does. "Why doesn't Josephine start collecting stamps. It is a very educational hobby."
So sure enough, a few days after this visit I got a pile of used stamps complete with parts of the envelopes they were still stuck to, and instructions about how to soak them off in a saucer of tepid water. I believe a packet of stamp hinges and a very small, album was included in the bounty.
My new hobby kept me occupied for hours one end. For the rest of my childhood, quite a sizeable chunk of my meagre pocket money would be spent on stamps, and I suppose I absorbed the rudiments of geography along the way. I began to realise that Australia and Austria were two different countries and that Jugoslavia could be spellt Yugoslavia as well. I learned that the French owned a place that had beautiful stamps called Camaroons and that the Seychelles were tiny islands in the middle of the Indian ocean, with lots of birds.
I remember one stamp, no longer in my possession, a small, green one that had 'Saar' on it. I really did not know where to stick it, so it had a special place in the back of my album. Years later, when learning about the Rhine Valley at secondary school, a small black dot, denoting 'coal' had to be put in, somewhat to the south of the Ardennes. This was Saarland, where my green stamp had originated. Little did I know at that time, that I would later spend the best part of thirteen years there.
We used to have fun swapping stamps at school and in each other's houses. Everybody seemed to collect stamps in those days. And dare I say, our knowledge of the kind of geography as to where countries and continents were, and what was the capital of what, was far superior to that of kids today. I put a lot of that down to stamp collecting.
As for me personally, Geography was one of the subjects that I always seemed to come top in, in secondary school, without really trying. I had a good pictorial memory, so I could remember maps and graphs fairly easily, but the main reason was, that my curiousity about our big wide world had been nurtured and nourished sufficiently during my formative impressionable years. And in this, my hobby of stamp collecting had definitely played its part.







We used fiddly bits of specially gummed paper called stamp-hinges, to stick them in.

Pause for a pacemaker

Apologies to all my readers for this rather lengthy pause in my musings. I have got half an excuse in that I have had a heart pacemaker fitted.
If you don't mind a short digression from the subject in hand, I don't mind enlarging a bit in delicate matters of the heart so to speak, if you do, just scroll down until you come to the line of asterixes (whatever the plural of that word is)
Let me start by saying, that I definitely do not belong to those who denigrate our British National Health Service in any shape or form. I think it is wonderful. My procedures must have cost many thousands of pounds, but the only time I heard money mentioned was when a nurse offered me a penny for my thoughts.
That was at the time when no-one really knew what was wrong with me, including me, and I was hooked up to machines which bleeped and blinked and had lots of tentacles which stuck to me and itched.
The first big test was the angiogram, which meant staying in hospital for the day. The procedure involved cutting into a big artery in the groin, and threading a catheter through it up into my heart. Yes, it sounds gruesome, but it wasn't. The theatre was so modern, that I thought, in my tranquilizedup to the eyeballs way,that I had been transported to an alien spaceship, with a technology far superior to ours.
The worst part about it was having to lie flat on my back for two hours afterwards. Or perhaps it was the awful sandwiches they gave us, straight from the fridge that was the very worst, especially as we actually ate most of them, having been starved since the night before. Yes there were four of us done that day, at hourly intervals, but we all made it safely home that afternoon.
Next came numerous blood tests, from the vampire department - tubes and tubes of the stuff .
And then came the fun of having a twenty-four hour heart monitor strapped to my chest. I was actually feeling fine that day, and was able to carry on just as I normally did. However, the verdict, when it came through was that my heart was missing beats and in general misbehaving itself. And that was without consciously even setting eyes on any particularly dishy male throughout the whole day. My husband sadly, does not come into that category any more although I suppose he must have done once. Getting older is a sad state of affairs, when you think about it.
So the result was, that I was hauled into hospital yet again to have a pacemaker inserted just under my left collar-bone.
The fun bit was, that I was conscious throughout the operation. I was as high as a kite, but more or less compus mentes. I would have liked to have had a mirror hung up to enable me to see exactly what was going on, but as it was, I had to make do with the reflexion of a shiny metal arm which gave rather a distorted image of things, to say the least. But I did get a blow-by blow account, as the surgeon had his mentor standing right behind him. I learnt that one wire was going into the right atrium and the other into the right ventricle. I did ask which one was which, but the surgeon was so busy telling me that he had never got round to discussing the polarity of the wires with any patient before, that I think he forgot to tell me, or I forgot the answer; one of the two. But I have got an excuse, I was only half way down from my morphine high.
They hadn't been able to get the local anaesthetic to produce the desired effect, so they had given me a slug of morphine as well. That had done the trick! I was away with the fairies for at least ten minutes, and when my mind made its tortuous journey down into my body again, I had the distinct feeling that they were operating on someone else, and not me at all.
I went home a day later, having spent the night with a strange man. He had had the same operation, and was in the bed opposite me. There is a great controversy raging about mixed wards, but as long as nobody snores too loudly, I don't really mind. It is more important to have someone who you can talk to and be a bit friendly with, than whether they are men or women.
It would be nice to have his and her bathrooms though. Men rarely remember to put the loo seat down.
That's was it really. I came down fully from the morphine the next day, and started to feel literally a bit down, as well as completely washed out, as my mother would have said. After all, all the excitement was over, and the pain, though not excrutiating, was definitely there. I had to devise tricks to put on and remove jackets, and anything else with sleeves, and I wasn't allowed to get the affected area wet for a week. Though I did remove most of the yellow antiseptic stuff that made my neck look as though I had some scary life-threatening disease. As I had no wish to be ringing a bell as I walked along the street, shouting 'Unclean, unclean!' I decided to wash off any remaining trace that would have been visible above my clothing before presenting myself in public.
It has taken a month for my old zest for life to return, but return it has. I want to do things again, and am strong enough once more. But I have to admit, I did my fair share of moaning in the meantime, as my friends and family would testify. (Given half a chance)
I think it is time for the asterixes.
* * * *
The trouble is, that I don't feel like writing any more today. But now that I have got into the swing of things again, there will not be a very long pause, so keep watching this space.

Comics and things

I had forgotten about the tin pencil box with aspecial pen and pencil inside, and a picture of the newly-crowned Queen on the lid. We were all given one at school to commemorate the coronation, but I have forgotten what happened to it. If only I had made the decision in my childhood to preserve some of the things I had in the fifties. If only I had put them away carefully, looked after them, or in other words, didn't use them, play with them or get any pleasure out of them at the time. But I was not encouraged in this. We were not that sort of family, and I was the sort of child who believed in squeezing every tube of toothpaste that life offered me, until it was absolutely empty. Pencils were used and sharpened with the kitchen knife, until they were stubs, too short to hold. Fountain pens did not fare so well under my tender care. I seemed to have a habit of dropping them on their nibs, or the little rubber tube inside would burst, making a dreadful mess. Tins got dented, broken or lost. Comics, once read and kept for a few weeks, became clutter, and ended up as fire-lighters or in the dirt pail.
I was an avid comic reader from quite an early age. I suppose Beano and Dandy were the ones I bought most frequently, as they were only two pence, a penny cheaper than all the others, and two pence cheaper than the one my mother ordered for me, that used to be delivered on Sunday morning. That was 'Girl' of course, sister comic to 'The Eagle', the one I think I would have preferred. But I am afraid, my mother's attempts at gentility did not really make much impression on my. Definitely before I was ten, Minnie the Minx and Dennis the Menace were my undisputed heroes. I found it delightful how they invariably ended up being put over an irate parent's knee and being thrashed with a slipper. Belle of the Ballet and Wendy and Jinx didn't get a look-in in the popularity stakes. It was only as I started to get older, that they started to appeal to me. I wish I had a pile of my old comics now. Comics, or what passes for comics these days, like lots of magazines, seem to be all pictures and headlines with no 'meat' in the middle, or they want to teach children their letters and numbers. Children don't want comics to be taught letters and numbers, or anything else that the adult world wants them to learn. They need comics to slip into and enjoy the private world of childhood. They need to be vicariously naughty, stuck-up, stupid or just plain bad, through the characters in the comics, and learn the consequences of such behaviour. In fact, there was a black and white morality in comics. Bad deeds and naughty children always got their just deserts in the end. The good and downtrodden were ultimately rewarded. The world made sense (what the public was allowed to hear, that is) But now, the unmuddied morality of those days seems to have turned into a veritable morasse of political correctness gone mad and justice frequently stood on its head.

The Coronation

I never quite manage to keep to the title if I write it first. I find the best method is to meander to where my writing takes me and think of a title afterwards, when I am done with the day's offering. For example, the subject of food leads quite naturally on to the theme of parties and Sunday School parties, and a street party for the coronation.
It was 1953 of course, and I watched from the upstairs window how long trestle-tables were put up in the middle of the road. Everybody had to bring their own chairs, so it didn't matter about those. The party can't have taken place the actual day of the coronation because we were away at my Aunt's at Hatch End to watch it on the TV - the one with the tiny twelve-inch screen, that we would acquire a few years later.
I remember, on the morning of the party, my mother looking pessimistically at the leaden June sky and predicting that it would pour with rain, and the half-a crown that she had paid for me to go would be wasted. But it didn't rain, not more than a few drops anyway, but it was chilly, and I had to cover up my best summer dress with a thick bobbly cardigan.
People had gone mad with red, white and blue. In the house opposite us they painted the palings of their fence in pillar-box red, royal blue and snowy white. The bunting they put up for the party, the decorations in all the shop windows and even my hair-ribbons were red,white and blue. My not desperately patriotic mother declared when the coronation was all over, that she never wanted to see those colours again as long as she lived. But she did take me into Central lLondon a couple of times, along the Mall and to Buckingham Palace, to join in all the excitement of getting ready for the important occasion. I think it was even bigger than Charles'and Diana's wedding. Probably it was a celebration that the war and all its privations was well and truly over. The country needed a reason to celebrate, be happy and go a bit mad. And the ascension to the throne of the pretty, young queen with her then, handsome husband and two beautiful children, was the excuse that everybody had been waiting for. It was a burst of pure sunhine after a long,dark night.
Not that there was very much sunshine to be seen on the actual day of the coronation. But the wonderful, mile-long procession went ahead anyway, with all its pomp and ceremony in spite of the fine drizzle which hardly let up the whole day. Sovereigns and statesmen from all the parts of the Comenwealth were there. I remember especially the Queen of Tonga who was over six foot tall and enormously fat, who rode in her own coach. And what a splendid display all the soldiers made, not onlyour own soldiers, but the colourful mounties from Canada, the Ghurkas and the Australien troops, with their wide-brimmed hats pinned up on one side. The palace guards wore their bearskins, but rather disappointingly, their red uniforms were covered by their long, grey coats, because of the rain.
The thousands of people waiting along the coronation route, however, hardly seemed to notice the rain , so loudly did they cheer. Probably the rain was evaporated in the warmth of their exuberance and enthusiasm, and the few drops that reached them merely served to send them into even greater frenzies of cheering. That is how it seemed to us, safely watching it all on television in a dry, warm living room at Hatch End. Perhaps the reality was, that many people got colds and suffered from mild exposure, especially those who had been there all night.
I can see it now, in vivid technicolour in my mind's eye, though at the time, I was only able see it all in black and white. I even remember the gold of the beautiful royal coach, with the Queen waving and smiling, and the crowds going mad.
Princess Anne a tiny little girl then, with a shock of blond, curly hair, was considered too young to go. Prince Charles, a serious, chubby little boy with a sheet of thick hair combed straight over his forehead, was allowed. He was very, very good. The royal children were not much younger than I was, so I could identify with them.
At school, on Monday mornings I queued up to buy National Savings Stamps. I mostly had to be content with a sixpenny stamp, with Princess Anne's curly head on it, but sometimes, when my mother had been feeling more generous than usual, I would be able to buy a larger stamp for half a crown (five times more expensive than the sixpenny one) with Prince Charles on it. Soon, my savings book was full of stamps, and my savings could be transferred to a Post Office account. I have forgotten what happened to it after that. The Post Office was a sort of black hole, where once you had handed your money in, over the counter to the clerk behind the metal grill, you never saw it again.
My Grandmother used to buy a magazine every week, either 'Woman' or 'Women's Own'. One of them, round about that time, had a centre-fold of Prince Charles and Princess Anne sitting in a beautiful garden, and surrounded by lush, dark foliage. It had the atmosphere of a Watteau painting, mysterious and exciting. I remember setting myself the challenge that if I looked at that picture long enough and concentrated hard, I would suddenly find myself transported into that magic garden with them. Needless to say, it didn't work, and somehow, after the failure of my little experiment, the mundane hit me especially hard. I didn't want to be in a place where nylon underwear and stockings, dripped from a line strung up in the kitchen. and where my grandmother wore an old working apron instead of a tiara.
I can see myself now, carrying the old kitchen chair down into the street. It was not a particularly safe operation for a childof my age, considering how many stairs and outside steps I had to negotiate, but I was adament. I wouldn't let anyone help, so my mother just hovered, just in case. Nothing happened. I got to the bottom without mishap, and took my place at the trestle table, right in front of an enormous green jelly. Yes it was the normal party fare for those days. The hard-pressed adults in charge did their best to get us to behave and eat the sandwiches first before demolishing the cakes and jellies, but I don't think they entirely succeeded. Jugs of orange juice were passed rapidly up and down the table, and became empty so quickly, that it was almost a full-time job for someone to keep replenishing them. Mugs got spilt. Colourful table decorations got spoilt. Balloons escaped from their tetherings or burst, sending the little ones into floods of tears with the shock. Naughty boys discovered ten different things to do with left-over jelly and blancmange, and the whole thing ended in our part of the road, with our table collapsing. By this time we were all overexcited and our parents began to appear to remove us from the fray.
There was the advantage of course, that I didn't have far to go home. By this time, my red, white and blue hair ribbons were drooping, throughhaving been dipped in the orange juice and I was tired. There had been too much excitement that afternoon.
I suppose I had better call this instalment 'The Coronation'

More about fifties food

Now where were we nearly a week ago? Examinining the contents of the biscuit barrel I think. But to move on from there to my all-time favourite meal as a child, egg and chips. The chips were home-made of course, shallow-fried just out of the pan, and the yolk of the egg would be yellow and just a bit runny. Then liberally sprinkled with salt and vinegar, and with a huge dollop of tomato ketchup on the side of the plate to dunk the chips in, I was in heaven for as long as it took to consume the feast, which usually was not very long.
From quite an early age, I always remember, when I ate alone, I usually had a book of some description propped up in front of me. That is another bad habit that I have not been able to break. Even now, when no one else is around while I am eating, there is never a book or a newspaper far away.
The back of cereal packets were quite a good source of entertainment too, in those days. There was plenty to read on them, and things to make when the carton was empty. Most of the breakfast cereals that we had in the fifties are still around today, but I think that sugar coated puffed wheat was the only sweetened one. Weetabix had to be opened from the top in those days, and then you just had to pull back the paper inside to reveal a neat row of biscuits, or slightly less neat, if I had been at them first. I once sent off for a Weetabix Wonder Atlas which only cost tokens as far as I can remember. I kept it for decades, well into my mid-adulthood. Perhaps that might have been one of the reasons why I got so hooked on geography. I loved finding out where other countries were, and wondering what it was like to live there. Indeed, I would often take my precious atlas to bed with me as bed-time reading.
I am tempted here to let myself be completely sidetracked from the subject of fifties food, but I cannot let it go without mentioning the delightful theme of junior school dinners. We had to eat them up, that was the worst of it. Every last grey lump found in the mashed potatoes, every last piece of fat or gristle in the meat and every last spike in the spiky dark-green cabbage. I used to sit sometimes in misery, the only occupant left sitting at the long table on the long bench , with my portion of evil-looking cabbage or congealed fatty meat staring back at me, and I would miss half my play time. They were the days when I had not been quick enough to get to the waste-food container without being seen by the teacher on guard. Usually, I was quick enough, and sometimes the food was palatable enough to finish without undue problems. So I didn't miss all that many playtimes.
A clean plate was a passport to the promised land of pudding, or dessert or afters, as I mostly called it and I rarely had any problems with that. The iced cake was delicious with hot custard over it, for the custard melted the icing in a most delightful way. Funnily enough, they usually managed to get the custard right, smooth and creamy, just the way I liked it. Even things like rice pudding and tapioca, which we used to call frogs' eggs, were quite palatable. But the favourite was at Christmas time, when they put coins in the Christmas pud. I once found a silver sixpence, and I have never forgotten the thrill of it. I think that was probably the present that gave me the most pleasure that Christmas.
It was at Christmas and mostly at Easter too that we experienced the luxury of luxuries, a whole chicken, roasted brown and still sizzling from the oven. The sage and onion stuffing which invariably accompanied it had been livened up with butter and extra onions and also done to a turn in the oven until it was crisp and brown on top. At Christmas time, this was always accompanied by fairy cabbages as my mother used to call brussel sprouts and roast potatoes.
No I can't exactly make out a case for being deprived and undernourished in the post-war years. But I am sure that in reality, I was just too young to appreciate the very real privations of the forties, and by the time my memory started to function reliably, it was the fifties, and things were beginning to look up.
But until quite late into my childhood, my banana intake was rationed to one a week, and it took me quite a long while to realise that pineapples ever had an existence outside the confines of their tins. Nuts, and dates we only had at Christmas time, and the nuts were still very much in their shells. We found that a flat iron in the fire-place was the best way of cracking brazils, even though the nuts inside were invariably smashed into a hundred small pieces; and poking the point of a pair of scissors in the join at the top and then twisting it, was the best way of prising open reluctant walnuts. Nuts definitely lasted a nice long time, and at least half of the pleasure of them lay in getting the things open.
It was the same with the winkles that we kids used to purchase by the handful when the winkle man came pushing his cart along our street with his cart. We used to extract the black, slightly slimy contents from their small snail-like shells with a hair-pin or a hair-grip. That was the interesting bit, but I never ate much of them. They were too cold and salty for my taste. It was a bit of a waste of a penny really.
What else did we used to eat? Butter-beans had to be soaked overnight to make them ready for cooking the next day. I used to quite enjoy them in soups and as a vegetable, although on a white plate they would look a bit insipid. Liver done in the oven with bacon and onions was better, from that point of view. But one thing was for sure, our menu was English through and through. Not even the Italian delights of pizza and bolognese, had filtered through to us, in the fifties, and exotic Indian and Chinese dishes, without which we could not imagine life today still lay at least a decade into the future. I don't think my grandmother had ever heard of curry, but we did eat rice. In fact my grandmother's rice puddings were second to none. She used to make them with custard and they had a lovely nutmeggy skin when they emerged piping hot from the oven.
We didn't go short on home-made cakes, sponges or pies either. Making a sponge-cake required a lot of beating and we used to take it in turns to beat until the mixture had reached the required state of fluffiness, and tasted good enough for me to take a surruptitious fingerful. As for pastry-making, I used to help with that too, crumbling the fat and flour together and lifting it high in the air. I loved to watch the floury mixture cascading down from my fingers, most of it landing in the bowl, but a considerable amount having to be scooped up from the table-top before my grandmother noticed. As a reward I was usually given a bit of the pastry to fashion how I liked and put in the oven by myself on an old saucer. That bit, still hot from the oven, with a dollop of jam on the top, always tasted the best of all.

Food (part1)

When I talk about the food we used to eat in the fifties, it fits in well with one of the stories that the newspapers are suddenly making much of lately. It definitely provides a contrast. When I was a child, "Thou shalt not leave the food on your plate" had the force of the eleventh commandment and I knew that I had to do my best to finish my meals. Indeed, if I dared to leave so much as a crust of bread or a solitary brussel sprout on my plate, I was told to think of all the starving children in Africa. My unspoken retort "They are welcome to it." would mostly remain unspoken as I would contemplate the logistics of sending the sloppy, unwanted remains of my dinner all the wayto Africa. At quite a young age, I decided that that particular operation was not worth the trouble, and I proceeded to pay as much atttention to it as the old chestnut, "Eat up your greens dear, they will make your eyes sparkle" Years later I tried that tactic out on my grandson, then aged four or five. When he had dutifully finished his cabbage, he blinked his wide eyes at me and asked in all innocence, "Are my eyes sparkling now Nana?"
For Sunday dinner, at least when we had visitors, we would eat in the living-room cum my grandmother's bedroom. The one huge flap of the highly-polished mahogony table would usually be up anyway, either for my jigsaw puzzles or my grandmother's sewing. When visitors came, all traces of these activitieswould be swept out of sight, and on a pristine white table-cloth, the best dinner service would be laid. Perhaps I should say the remains of the dinner service that my Grandmother had received as a wedding present in the early years of the nineteenth century, in Edwardian times, in fact. But one by one, over the years, the serving dishes and the soup tureen had got broken, until all that was left were the dinner plates and a couple of gravy-boats. Even the glaze on the plates was all cracked due to the family habit of putting them in the oven to warm, and often forgetting them until they were too hot to hold without a teacloth or an oven glove.
We usually had a Sunday roast of some description. I can see andalmost smell the aroma from the joints of pork even now. It would be covered in delicious crackling and served up with home-made apple sauce and Paxo sage and onion stuffing. Joints of beef would be expertly carved into wafer-thin slices with a knife as sharp as a samurai sword. They had been sharpened to perfection on a rectangular bit of stone which, even then, was wearing a bit thin in the middle because of all the use it had had over the years. A small dish of bright-yellow strong English mustard was always on the table when beef was served , and you would ladle out thecontents with a tiny spoon. Brown, continental mustards had not yet found their way to British tables, and neither had all the spices and herbs that we use today. Salt and pepper were the only condiments we had, and they were sprinkled liberally on everything. No-one had heard that salt was bad for you. My grandmother always used to keep a small pepper-pot in her handbag though. "Just in case..." she would explain. But she would never say in case of what.
As for cooking herbs, a small pot of mint on our kitchen window-sill would hang precariously to life, even when most of its foliage was picked to make mint sauce for the leg or shoulderof lamb
we weregoing to have that Sunday. First of all, it all had to be chopped impossibly fine and mixed with a teaspoonful of caster sugar. Then vinegar would be poured ove itand itwould be left to mature for at least twenty-four hours. We didn't use mint for anything else though. We had never heard of mint tea for example.
My grandmother did love her cup of tea. At least five times a day she would sit down and sip the steaming brown liquid in utter contentment. In fact, I can hardly recall her drinking anything else at all. Tea bags still lay in the future, back in the fifties. Instead, tea was purchased in small packets about the size and shape of a box of After-Eight mints. There were all sorts of makes, like Lyons, Tetley's and PG Tips, and prices. I cannot remember tea being rationed, but I suppose it must have been. But as it definitely belonged to the necessities of London life, and was not a mere luxury, I should imagine they took it off rationing as early as possible.
My mother loved her cup of tea too. Indeed, at the office where she worked as a typist, the tea lady was an extremely important person.
Even I, as quite a small child was taught to enjoy tea, sweet, milky and not too hot, served up in a white enamel mug. It was back then that I began a habit, which I have never been able to wean myself from, namely dunking my biscuit in my tea. And worse still , that socially questionable practice was handed down to my children, and now my grandchildren. Even if they have not got a cup of tea of their own, they ask if they can dunk their biscuits in mine. What can I say!
The biscuit barrel was always kept on top of the radio in the kitchen. It was literally a barrel-shaped container, with wood-effect on the outside, and china inside. The shiny metal lid was not at all air-tight, but just rested loosely on top, ensuring that the contents would be stale by the end of the week. Not that the biscuits often lasted that long, although we only had one packet a week, and I wasonly allowed a couple a day. It was only when I was ill or absent, that it was really put to the test. I can remember custard creams and chocolate wholemeals, as digestives were called then, being the height of luxury, but usually we just had bog-standard rich tea or shortcake. Really the british biscuit has not changed much since the fifties. That is a nice thought.

Junk that we used to eat

I'm afraid I have not written anything these last few days, but the weather has been so lovely, and I have been catching up with all the gardening jobs.
Freedom was something that my generation had plenty of, even if we didn't have nearly as much in material things as today's children. I started to make little forays to the local playground on my own when I could not have been older than five or six. Yes I really was so young that I hadn't yet acquired the knack of consuming unmessily either penny ice-lollies or sticks of chewing-gum. I remember walking home one hot summer's evening from Camden Gardens, where I had been playing, with my hands and face, not to mention my clothes, all stuck up with sticky, grey strings of what had once been a piece of chewing gum, or on another occasion, with the front of my dress soaked with orange ice-lolly effluent.
I started childhood being a parent's dream as far as sweets were concerned. I didn't like them. And I didn't much care for chocolate either, and I only liked ice cream if it was a cylindrical type, that fitted on top of a cornet. I wouldn't touch oblong-shaped ice cream, which was the only kind you could buy in Regent's Park. As for fizzy drinks, I wouldn't touch them.
But by the time I was eight or so, all that had changed. I had graduated with honours into the land of teeth-rotting junk that children loved and still do. The only difference being between us and the children of today is that our pocket money was strictly limited and usually, when it was gone, that was it for the week. There was a Beech-Nut chewing gum vending machine on my way home from Junior school, and every time I passed it I used to try the handle, just in case, as actually did happen once or twice, that someone had forgotten about the free one that it gave out every fourth time the machine was used.
When I think of all the E-numbers and other additives, not to mention excess sugar that were in the sweets, ices and fizzy drinks that we all loved so much, it is a wonder that we weren't all hyperactive. Or perhaps we were, but because we had ample opportunity to burn off our excess energy, nobody ever noticed. Of course, some kids were slower at school than others, but I never remember anyone being diagnosed with hyperactivity. It was an unknown concept in those days.
In spite of my early very negative experience with ice-lollies, I came to love them. We could get teddy bear ice lollies in three different sizes, depending on whether you wanted to spend a penny, two pence or a whole (I believe) twelve-sided threepenny bit with a portcullis on the back of it. Tizer was our favourite beverage. It used to come in large, heavy glass bottles which had to be returned if you wanted your two or three penny deposit back. Our group used to club together to buy a bottle, then pass it round like a pipe of peace, everyone taking a swig, until the ambrosia was gone and the bottle was empty.
We were an unhygienic lot really, but we believed in sharing. If one of us had an ice-lolly and the others didn't, we were all granted at least one lick. 'Only a lick mind. Not a bite!' Were the usual instructions given. With gob-stoppers we took it in turns to have a suck. The rules were, that when you got to a new colour, you had to pass it on. Do those huge round sweets, that seemed almost as big as golf-balls, still exist? They used to cost a penny each, so it was just as well they lasted a long time. With sherbert, we were all given a small heap in our dirty palms, which we proceeded to lick with relish, enjoying the exquisite fizzing sensation on the end of our tongues. When we had finished the last morsel, we would discover that the middle of our palm was considerably cleaner than the rest of our hand, even if still somewhat sticky.
Palm toffee was a challenge. It was so hard that an electric drill would not have made much impression on it, and breaking it into bits small enough to get into our mouths, was not a task for the faint-hearted. Throwing a heavy brick on the rectangular bar worked too well, as half of it would be smashed to smitherines. We found hitting it against the corner of a wall or a post while still holding it flat in your hand worked best. But even then it took at least ten minutesof concentrated hard chewing until the postage-stamp sized piece became soft enough to really enjoy. No wonder I had to go to the dentist so often!
Back then, nobody thought anything of it when we bought fairly realistic packets of sugar cigarettes which we proceeded to 'smoke' imitating the adults we saw in the films. Such attitudes would be unthinkablein this day and age - getting children into bad habits, and so on. But on the other hand, a packet of crisps was a bit of a luxury. I really only remember having crisps during visits to Southend-on-Sea. They would be no particular flavour. They would just be Smith's Crisps, and have a little twist of blue paper at the bottom of the packet containing salt, which you sprinkled on the crisps.
As for chewing gum; that gave way to big blobs of pink bubble-gum, which we used to chew with relish until all the sugar had gone, then we used to get down to some serious bubble practice. I was never the street champion, though it wasn't through lack of practice, whenever I was outside. I wasn't allowed the stuff at home. I can hear my mother now "Josephine - put that disgusting stuff in the dirt pail, and don't let me see you with it again." It was very sad having to throw a perfectly good piece of bubble gum away, with hours of useful chewing life still left in it, so I decided that it was not worth the hassle, to chew gum at home. Ditto with school. They were very strict about it in those days, at least as strict as the drugs control at Bankok airport, and we feared the inevitable sanctions just as much. It was by far the easier option to smuggle in the occasional packet of Spangles or Fruit Gums, or even in desperate times, suck a button, which we also generously passed round,to relieve the boredom of sewing lessons and suchlike.

Books, Reading and First School Days

To begin this subject properly and start from my very earliest memories we have to travel back a few years from where I left it yesterday.
When I was still a tiny child, I vaguely remember my mother musing to herself, as she was apt to do, 'I think she's old enough for Grimm's Fairy Tales now'. And sure enough, soon afterwards, the book in question appeared in my life. Very quickly it became quite indispensible to my emotional well-being in the evenings. In fact, without at least being read two stories before going to bed, I would feel absolutely cheated.
It is just as well that my mother enjoyed reading aloud as much as I liked listening. Sometimes, however, she would be impatient to get on with something else or just be plain worn out, so I would be handed over, complete with long flannelette nightie, slippers, teddy bear and very often a crumbly biscuit or jam sandwich, to my grandmother's lap. She had a softer voice than my mother - my mother's could shatter windows at fifty paces if she put her mind to it, and somehow the stories sounded gentler too.
Grimm's fairy Tales took me into a different world. Jung, the 19th century psychologist called it our collective unconsciousness, and likened it to an immense, underground cellar that stretched below all the insividual houses which represented our individual, conscious thoughts. This world was inhabited by witches, dwarfs. fairies and dragons, who played out their stories against wide, wild tapestries of, dark, impenetrable forests, enchanted houses, vast subterranean palaces and magic, mysterious mountains.
How colourless and mundane the modern equivalents of television and early computer games, seem by comparison, that are dished up so frequently to today's young children. But I must admit, at this point, the only woodland I knew back then, was Kenwood, and that somehow didn't quite live up to how I expected a forest to be. As for witches, Mrs Brown downstairs, was not a bad substitute, and I always regarded her rare gifts to me with great suspicion.
Our particular edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, by Dent and Dutton, was filled with the most wonderful illustrations. I eventually became so familiar with the contents of the book that just by looking at the pictures, I was be able to recount the story they illustrated. Even now, in my mind's eye, I can see the evil old witch beckoning Hansel and Grethel into her house made of bread, cake and barley sugar, or the prince climbing up to Rapunzel's tower with the fearful thorns below.
Choices of stories were rarely left entirely up to me as I would invariably choose the longest ones. But as soon as we had agreed on a compromise, I would settle down, gazing at the flickering fire behind the bars of the kitchen range, and be prepared to be transported to another world.
It was no wonder that, afterwards, when I had been finally put to bed, that I made hobgoblins out of the patterns in the curtains of my bedroom and believed the dark cupboard in the corner housed all sorts of malevolent beings after dark. No matter how many times my mother opened that innocuous cupboard for me during the day to show its innocent, mundane contents, I did not feel reassured when I was alone once more, in the semi-darkness with a head full of fairy tales.
Following hot on the heels of Grimm's came a small volume of some of Hans Christian Anderson's best known Fairy Tales. They were somehow more realistic. I instinctively snuggled closer to the warm fire as we read about the unhappy 'Little Match Girl', or the wicked snow Queen, and I could hardly bear to listen when the little Mermaid had her tongue cut out by the old sea witch in payment for her human legs, or when Karen, who couldn't stop dancing in her new red shoes, had her feet cut off by the old woodcutter in the forest.
Other books that I remember enjoying in my early childhood was a volume about Winnie the Pooh and his friends and Milly Molly Mandy stories, a girl who lived in a little cottage in the country and had little friend Susan and Billy Blunt as her friends. That was the first book that I borrowed from St Pancras public library.
Reading was a part of family life. Both my Mother and my Grandmother borrowed books from the library on a regular basis, and were often to be found reading when they were not knitting or sewing, or cooking or cleaning or ironing or reading me stories. So I suppose it was inevitable that I would take to the world of books too, like a duck to water.
I remember the reading scheme we had at infant's school, it was all about two children called Dick and Dora. They had a dog too, but I have forgotten his name. The first step up the ladder of this particular reading scheme was to master twenty reading cards of increasing difficulty. I remember being stuck on card four and not being able to decipher the word 'There' for absolutely ages. Then suddenly it all fell into place and I raced through all the remaining cards, finishing first in the class. They all gave me a clap as I returned to my seat.
I enjoyed Infants School from day one. In the nursery class I remember that we all had to wear floral button-down overalls nearly all the time, and that it was sent home on Friday's to be washed and ironed during the weekend ready for Monday. I remember doing rather a lot of painting too, outside, if the weather was nice, on upright easels with extremely watery paint. Paint, which no matter how careful you were, always ran down the picture in vertical ribbons of colour. We all loved making aeroplanes in that class, out of two bits of wood fixed at right angles to one another with a big nail knocked in the middle. Both girls and boys would run around the asphalt playground, providing what they considered were the fitting sound effects for their aeroplanes as they swooped, dived and engaged in the Infant equivalent of dogfights.
The most tiresome bit of the day was our afternoon rest. It was all right if you were a rising five who was still used to an afternoon nap, but I wasn't and never had been, and I just used to lie there, bored stiff, in my canvas, metal-framed bed, looking at the picture by my clothes peg, which was an engine, and wishing with all my heart that nap time was over.
It was in the next class that we had a lovely teacher who I still remember with affection. She took a group of us out once to Trafalgar Square, and we all had drinks and iced buns in a Lyon's Teahouse, which was a wonderful treat.
It was in her class that I made such a good start with my Beacon Readers, and we did such delightful things in the afternoon such as draw with pastels on sugar paper and play with plasticine. I became the class expert at fashioning plasticine sheep on a small board. I would dig the elbows of my home-knitted cardigan into them until they had an extremely realistic-looking woolly fleece, but I never did get round to telling my mother what I had been up to.
Apart from the percussion perfomance and learning a couple of words of French, which I have already written about, that is practically all I can remember about Brecknock Infant's School. I do recall actually while in the class of the French lady, having to spend a morning on the bottom table 'The Snowdrops' rather than my usual top table 'The Roses' and how 'The Daffodils', 'The Primroses' and 'The Buttercups' all thought that my mishap was screamingly funny. Teachers - think twice before you humiliate even a small child, because the chances are that they will remember the incident all their lives.

Nearly everyone has heard something about the great smog of winter 1952. It must have happened just a couple of weeks after I returned home from Tangmere. It lasted for several days, because according to my grandmother, there was just not enough wind to blow it away. So we just had to keep the lights turned on at midday. as we huddled round our coal fire to keep warm. Probably families all over London were doing exactly the same, which did not exactly help matters.
It was a fact of life in those days, that almost all adults that lived in London, suffered from bronchitis during the winter months. My mother and grandmother were no exception and would bring up great gobules of green phlegm at regular intervals, while we sat round the fire in the evenings. Nobody thought anything of it. There were no paper hankies either, so the winter wash would always feature a separate container, being boiled on the stove, for snotty hankerchiefs. One of the last questions I was always asked as I started out for school in the mornings were 'Josephine, have you got your pocket hankerchief?' Indeed I had a whole selection of them - children's ones with bright prints and cartoon characters on them.
In spite of all the bronchitis around nobody ever spat in the street. That was regarded as the height of bad manners. The London underground did not have to feature the English equivalent of the Parisian 'Ne pas cracher' notices. They were totally unnecessary. Not so today! I think our footballers have a lot to answer for in that respect. Don't they realise, that whatever they do, there are hundreds and thousands of kids trying to emulate them!
The appearance of fog and smog over London in winter was as predictable as the fact that it would always rain directly my grandmother had hung up her washing outside in the garden downstairs. Mostly, the fog was mostly more or less white, like the shirt or socks of the unfortunate child in the old advertisements whose mother didn't wash with Persil. I used to enjoy how it would envelope everything I was usually so familiar with, and impart an air of mystery and isolation. Even sounds would seem muffled, and landmarks like letter boxes with GR embossed on the front in elaborate letters would suddenly and unexpectedly pop up right in front of you.
But the yellow flashing of the spherical, lollipop-like belisha beacons on either side of the new zebra crossings was reassuringly visible from some distance, which was just as well really, as the cars that were still about, few as they were, had time to slow down and look if anyone was crossing. But even the swish of their tyres on the road surface was more subdued than normal as if they were all trying to keep quiet. In fact that was how it was in London during a bad fog. It was just as if there was an gravely ill person trying to sleep upstairs, and the world was making a huge effort to be as quiet and as unobstrusive as possible. It was peaceful.
It was not so peaceful, however, in the late afternoon of December 5th. I'm afraid I cheated here and looked up the exact date. I just remember, that it was that miserable part of the year when the excitement of Guy Fawkes was over, (and I had used up the packet of sparklers that I was allowed for the occasion,) and we had not yet started putting up Christmas decorations. It was four-thirty and time for us to go home from school but the fog had been getting steadily thicker all day. By mid-afternoon all the lights were turned on and by the end of the afternoon it was dark.
Just off the hall there was an area with a polished stone floor where we had our milk in the mornings and where the locked library cupboard was kept. All the kids who usually walked home by themselves and had no-one to fetch them huddled together here, feeling like little orphan Annies. We were not going to be allowed to go home on our own, that was definite. I remember my pleading fell on deaf ears.
Eventually, a father who lived further at the bottom end of my long road, and had come to collect his own daughter, found himself in charge of a whole group of us, and was instructed to see us all home safely.
I can see myself now. That winter, and the next one too I would wear a grey wool coat with a velvet collar, that my grandmother had sewn for me on her hardworking treadle machine. Scarves, hats and gloves were always knitted by my mother and this time, she had knitted me a fair-isle beret which had a very complicated pattern with many differently coloured wools, that had taken her ages to make. Brown lace-up shoes and knee-length socks, secured with an elastic garter under the turnup, completed the ensemble. I was a well-dressed child, and in those austere post-war times, when it was very hard to find good-quality ready-made clothes, to be well-dressed in inner London, was the exception rather than the rule.
It really was a pea-souper this time, and it was a novelty, even for us, to put your hand up quite near your face, only to be able to see the vaguest outline. Apart from stumbling up a kerb and nearly bumping into a doorpost I got home safely. Even my own house seemed unfamiliar and unrecognisable, until I had actually opened the low, wooden gate and had started to climb the eleven stone steps that led to the double front door. The little party of the remaining children continuing on its solitary way, was soon enveloped in the fog. As I turned to wave goodbye, they were already gone.
I can't remember whether we had school the next day, but we probably did. School went on, come rain or shine.
That fog lasted four days, during which time public transport practicallyground to a halt and the hospitals were overflowing. Over four thousand, mostly elderly and vunerable, Londoners died of of bronchial and related illnesses during that time.

I shall endeavour to continue at the same cliff-hanging spot which I had reached, when I was yesterday so rudely interrupted.
I believe I was pondering on the delights of having carpet on the stairs on the way to opening the door for the doctor. Doctors always wore dark suits and ties on home visits in those days, and really did carry large black leather bags. I watched the elderly doctor as he opened his bag, revealing all manner of shiny instruments and a rubber snake-like thing. I didn't get to see much more, as everybody seemed to remember at once that I should have been at school, so I was duly sent on my way.
My grandmother had had a heart attack and was to spend the next three weeks in St Pancras Hospital. She was already gone, by the time I got back from school that afternoon. I evidently had not thought to tell anyone in authority at about what had happened, so I just walked home with my friends as usual.
The nice lady upstairs with the baby opened the door to me and explained that I was to stay with her until my mother got home. It was quite a novelty look out of the windows and see the street below even further away than it was from our windows, the floor below. It was also a novelty that they had a television. I remember there was a very interesting programme about the sun on children's television, but the baby kept on crying and I couldn't hear it properly.
I knew all about televisions of course. My aunt who lived in a nice house in Hatch End had one, as well as carpet on the stairs, and the three of us had gone there to watch the Queen's coronation, the previous summer. A few years later, we were to inherit that particular television set, that unfortunately could only receive BBC, and not ITV, which rendered it redundant at Hatch End.
When it arrived in our narrow kitchen, it looked even more enormous than how I had remembered it. It was a huge, solid, wooden cube-like structure, with the end of the cathode-ray tube protruding another six inches or so from the back. In the front, was a (by today's standards) a tiny twelve-inch screen with a couple of bakerlite control knobs
underneath. New, this contraption cost £64 which would have represented more than two months' salary for my mother. But, of course, we didn't pay anything like that amount.

How did I get on to televisions, when I was meant to be talking about heart attacks? My grandmother had indeed had a heart-attack that morning, and she was lucky to have survived it,she was told afterwards.
It was a long walk to St Pancras Hospital, even further than to the library, which was also a long way away and in more or less the same direction. My mother and I used to go to the hospital every evening, and I got to know it quite well. Visiting times were very strict though, and at the end of the allotted hour, a bell or a buzzer would sound, at which all the visitors would obediently troop out. The ward where my grandmother lay, like all the others in those days, was one long room, with big windows down one side and the nurses' desk in the middle, where all the patients could see them and feel reassured, unless of course, the floral curtains round the bed were pulled.
Some people used to stay in hospital for an awfully long time back then. In the bed next to my grandmother was an elderly lady who had been in that ward for over five years, and the woman in the bed in the corner had been there so long that no-one could quite remember any more, when she had arrived.
During my childhood, the nurses wore smart, white and blue striped dresses with rolled-up sleeves hidden under lacy arm-bands and lacy hats to match. Their aprons looked so white and stiff that they could have been made out of best quality shiny paper, and they always wore black stockings and flat, black, shiny shoes. The wards were kept spotless and smelt of a mixture of disinfectant and soap. They smelt clean. You felt that it was safe to be as ill as you liked in such places. The sister in charge wore a darker, plain blue dress, and although she always seemed to be rushing about, she was always very nice to me.
After a couple of weeks of trying to fulfil three functions at once, being a dutiful daughter and a regular hospital visitor, being a full-time employee and trying to look after me at the same time, my frazzled mother packed me off to Tangmere, where my uncle lived in the airmen's married quarters.
It was fun playing with the other kids in the underground air-raid shelters. We found a sack of carrots in one once. It was at Tangmere that I learned to find the Plough in the unpolluted night sky, and it was there that I went to a tiny village school with only two classes, and all taught in the same room. It was also there that I came to the conclusion that I was not on the same wave-length as my aunt, and my uncle seemed frighteningly strict. With the insight of adulthood, I would realise what great people they were, and they truly tried to do their best for me. But back then, I felt like an evacuee, and I all I wanted to get back to London.
A few weeks later I did just that. It was lovely to be home again. My grandmother was still recuperating, but her personality had returned to normal so I felt reassured and safe once more.
For the first time I was given my own front door key, which meant that my grandmother would not have to come traipsing downstairs to open the door for me several times a day, and I could let myself in.
I was also sent out more frequently to the Brecknock to do bits of shopping, and it was my job to keep the coal bucket filled up. In the course of this last job, I made a new friend. He was a little brown and white mouse who used to do back somersaults out of the coal bucket. I began leaving him crumbs and to regard him as my secret pet. I have forgotten what happened to him. He probably ended up in the mouse trap which my mother regularly put out , and she didn't have the heart to show me his mangled remains.

Grandmother's illness (part 1)

I cannot leave the subject of medical matters without mentioning my grandmother's health problems. I remember that traumatic morning as if it were yesterday. I can still bring to mind the taste and the colour of that day.
By the time I was seven I could dress myself more or less, although I still needed help with things like buttons and sashes, positioned, as they mostly were, inconveniently at the back of my dresses, and having my long hair put into two neat plaits. My grandmother used to do all of this for me in the morning as my mother had to start out quite early for work. Although we lived in central London, it would still take her over half an hour to get to the West End.
But this particular morning was in winter, and a cold, dark, grey morning it was too. Suddenly the bedroom door opened and I hardly recognised the old, grey woman who shuffled in, holding on to the arm of the settee for support, as she spoke to me in a voice a little more than a whisper. "Josephine, get dressed, get dressed" She repeated, without really knowing properly what she was saying, I suspected.
My world had fallen on its head and I didn't recognise it any more. It was to happen to me again, years later under different circumstances, and in both instances, things would never quite be the same as before. Both occasions were seismic faults in my life.
As my grandmother sat slumped on the settee, trying to catch her breath, I decided that finding another adult was probably the best course of action. These were the days before most people had private telephones, but that was a minor detail, beause there were at least half a dozen adults in the neighbourhood, indeed, in the house, that I could call on for help.
The landlady of the house, Mrs Brown, was no special friend of mine as she didn't like children much, and except on very rare occasions, made no secret of it either. Nevertheless, she was in, whereas the friendly lady with the baby upstairs was out. It was not without a certain amount of trepidation that I knocked on her door. The 'Dragon's Den' would have been a good name for her part of the house in my opinion. But on realising that something serious was afoot upstairs, she was with us in minutes, wearing her floral overall and still wiping her hands on a tea towel and she climbed the two flights of stairs to our flat.
It was at this stage, that my seven-year-old self was sent on a very important mission. I was given the Doctor's telephone number and told to go to the phone box round the corner, about five-minutes' walk away. Standing on tip-toe, I lifted the black, heavy receiver and put four pennies in the box. The dialing tone seemed endless but then a voice answered. It was at this point that I had to press button A, not button B, otherwise I would have been cut off and my four pennies would have clattered into the little recepticle below.
Somehow, I must have given the doctor's receptionist at least enough correct information, for the doctor to be with us half an hour later. Maureen, next door had also been sent to phone the doctor, I learned afterwards, just in case, but the doctor was already on his way.
And sure enough, a few minutes after she had got back, we heard a knock on the door. We hadn't told him that it was two knocks for our flat, three for the flat at the top of the house and one for Mrs Brown. But it didn't matter. I was sent down to open the door. My legs were the youngest, was the reason given. So I went running down the eighteen stairs covered with brown, cracked lino,and down the hallway which was also covered with brown lino. How I used to long for carpet, like my aunts had in their nice houses. For me in those days, carpet on the stairs represented the very height of luxury.

This has got to be continued tomorrow as I have been told in no uncertain terms by my beloved husband, that he wants his tea at six (it is now five-thirty) and I should 'Blog off'

Mostly Feet

There has been a bit of a pause because all the reasons why I should not be writing this Blog gained the upper hand for a few days. Self criticism is all very well, but it should never get to the stage when you ask yourself 'What is the point of what I am doing?' or even worse 'I'm making a bit of an idiot of myself.' Did I have these feelings as a kid? Probably, but I've just conveniently forgotten about them. But having said all that, if I could have a few comments about how relevant or interesting it is, (or isn't) I would redouble my efforts.
In spite of the last section being called 'Doctors and Dentists' I had so much to write about dentists that I didn't get round to anything else. Actually, apart from my teeth I must have been a fairly healthy child. It is just as well, as on the occasions that we did visit our local GP, we had a very long wait. I just remember there being a gas fire, one of those old-fashioned zissy ones, and that I learned that you could not throw bits of paper into it, the way we could with our kitchen range at home.
I was lucky, in that the only childhood illness I had was chicken pox. In those days there was still no defence against potentially dangerous illnesses such as measles and whooping cough, although I had been innoculated against killers such as diphtheria and scarlet fever. My mother remembered till the end of her life, when she was in hospital with diphtheria as a tiny child, and how she was forced to eat a huge lump of fatty gristle. Her older sister was in hospital with scarlet fever, an illness from which she not only survived but lived on until she was only two weeks off her hundredth birthday. All through my own childhood, I was most disappointed that I was never ill enough to justify a stay in hospital , and have a red blanket on my bed.

Probably the worst thing that happened to me healthwise, was a verucca on the ball of my right foot. For ages I thought I just had a splinter in it, and apart from giving it a periodic poke with a needle that had been put in a gas flame to sterilise it, I just put up with the discomfort.
My favourite shoes for playing out, were black lace-up plimsoles, when I was allowed to wear them, which was not very often. There were no elastic-sided plimsoles or ones with velcro fastenings, back then. In fact, I don't think that velcro had even been invented. It was necessary to learn to tie laces as early as possible.
My winter shoes were always brown, lace-ups too. But I had my special method to deal with the difficulty of a shoe-lace coming undone while I was out. That was to tie a loose double knot and then poke the ends through the middle of the knot. I could do this as long as the ends still had the stiff bits in them, but if not, the loose double knot invariably became a very tight double knot by the time I got home.
Yes I had two pairs of shoes a year, and a pair of plimsoles. The shoes were Start-Rite, the best my mother could buy. She always suffered dreadfully from a painful bunion, caused by her shoes not being fitted properly as a child, and she was determined that the same was not going to happen to me. I've inherited her rather large feet, size 7-8, depending on the fit of the shoe, it is true, but thanks to her care I have never had any corns or bunions and my toes are straight.

I used to enjoy my visits to the shoe shop. They would have an x-ray machine which I found absolutely fascinating. I would climb the two steps up to it, put my feet underneath, as far as they would go, then look through the top. Magic! My bones and the outline of the shoe would show up white and everything else would be green. It was even better when I wriggled my toes, or tapped my feet a bit, and I would always make sure that I would have at least one unsolicited visit, if not several, while the grown-ups were busy doing boring grown-up things like paying for the shoes. They probably cost half of my mother's week's wages, but I was oblivious to such details. When I think, however, how much unnecessay radiation I subjected myself to I become quite thoughtful. Those x-ray machines in shoe shops have been gone for a long time, and there must have been a good reason.
But, back then, as we emerged from the shoe shop clutching a brown-paper bag containing either yet another pair of winter, brown lace-ups or a pair of red or brown summer sandals, such thoughts were far from my mind. Summer sandals did not have peak-toes in the fifties. Instead, mine had lots and lots of little diamond-shaped holes on the front, a T-shaped strap and metal buckle fasteners. The crepe soles were much better than the leather soles of my winter shoes for outdoor activities that i particularly enjoyed, such as tree-climbing, hop-scotch and running, so they mostly met with my approval, especially if they were red.
I always remember the Start-Rite advertisement in the London underground - a huge poster, stuck on the opposite side of the tunnel, which you looked at while you waited for the train. A small boy and girl, with knitted pointy hats would be wandering up an endless, tree-lined road that stretched to its vanishing point in the distance; both shod in Start-Rite of course, but not an adult in sight. Even as a young child, I found this advertisement strangely disquietening, although I could not have told you why.
Anyway, back to my verucca, which by this time is about a year old and has reproduced itself enthusiastically on both feet. The trouble was, that not many people had heard of veruccas in those days. They had tried cutting it out but that hadn't worked. For that procedure I had gone to the little outpatients' hospital in Camden Town. It is long closed down now, and I can't even remember where it was exactly. But I do remember what a novel experience it was to have my foot frozen with ice so it wouldn't hurt, and afterwards, limping home with my foot swathed in bandages. That put me out of action for a few days. And actually the cure was so simple, only we didn't find this out for a few more months. Once we did and we had bathed my feet every evening in hot water and afterwards, painted on the magic tincture, I was completely cured in a matter of weeks. The original verucca, and all its offspring did not stand a chance, and came out leaving numerous holes of varying sizes, all over the balls of my feet.

Doctors and Dentists

I remember, the teacher who marched the school choir, as we were called, was suffering from very bad toothache on one occasion, and she tried to speak as little as possible because the cold air would hurt her tooth even more.
I could sympathise with that sad state of affairs extremely well, as I had suffered from a similar affliction on several occasions. Eclampsia during my mother's pregnancy and Delrose Syrup had a lot to answer for. I had lost both my front teeth before I was four, and my back ones were not much better.
As a small child, I got to know Great Ormand Street Hospital extremely well, where my dental treatment was always carried out by a very nice dentist who didn't hurt much. And afterwards they usually gave me a small children's book, so early visits to the dentist were definitely not a negative experience. On the contrary, on leaving the great hospital I would always look up where I could see the children who were actually staying there, and wished that I could stay too. I loved the bright red blankets on their beds, and I wanted one as well.
The negative experiences with dentists came later, when my second teeth startedto come through. On at least two occasionsI was taken to the emergency department of University College Hospital to have a painful molar removed.
I think injections were around then, but I always had gas, which was a horrible experience, that I feared with all my heart. First, a huge black rubber object with a shiny metal chain on it, was wedged between my teeth, then they would put a black rubber mask over my face and I was told to breath deeply. SuddenlyI was transported into a terrifying, spooky world, where the dentist and the nurses in their white coats, and me in the dentist's chair, were all caught up somehow in a horrible grey spider's web and we were all spinning round in it accompanied by unearthly whistlings and hummings. Only then, would I finally become completely insensible. It seemed hours later, although in reality, probably only a few minutes, that I started groggily to come round. I remember being glad that it was over, but feeling so ill and so sick that I couldn't really enjoy it. The yellow stuff that they gave me to drink was meant to make me sick, and it did. Then after half an hour or so I was pronounced well enough to go home.
I remember three things about the ENT waiting room at that big London Hospital, The walls were glazed bricks, I used to give myself headaches trying to count them; the people sat and waited on long wooden benches; and there was a huge, realistic rocking horse at the front. When I was younger, and obviously not feeling so ill, it would be a wonderful treat to ride on this wonderful rocking horse, although of course, by the time I was having my back molars out I considered myself far too old for such unsophisticated pleasures.
Almost as bad an experience as the gas at the hospital, were visits to a certain dentist, when I was about ten or so, who lived on one of the streets just outside Regent's Park. It was a tall, imposing house, and I entered it with dread. The only reading matter he had on his highly-polished waiting-room table were copies of Punch magazine for adults, of which I quite liked the picture of Punch on the cover, and a German book of Salutary Tales for Children, featuring such horrors as thumbs being cut off by a huge pair of scissors and a boy expiring from hunger after not eating his soup. Neither the poems themselves nor the graphic illustrations which accompanied them did much to enhance my mood as I waited to be summoned into hell.
This particular dentist did not believe in injections, so I had to suffer the full gamut of pain which he could inflict on me with his cumbersome, noisy drill. He would select the bits for it with care and I had learned which ones hurt the most.
In his defence, the actual fillings he gave me lasted many years, and were well done, but there should have been a law about subjecting a child to so much pain, fear and suffering. But times were different then. You just put up with things as stoically as possible.
I always remember the beautiful walks home through Regent's Park. It always seemed to be Autumn with red and golden leaves swept up in huge piles. I used to love walking through these crisp rustling leaves and searching for shiny conkers. Even now, I associate conkers with happiness and I find them beautiful.
It is strange, that in spite of such unpromising beginnings, I still have my own teeth, over fifty years on, and people still sometimes compliment me on how neat and even thay are.

Earliest School Memories

Music in school

The highlight of my Infant's school time was taking part in a class percussion performance in a real theatre, where the audience, although shrouded in darkness applauded very loudly indeed, as we marched off the big stage. But I have no idea where this was. All I have is a vague memory of wearing my best green dress with the wide shiny sash, and having to travel by bus to get there, but that is all.
How I had longed to play one of the drums or even a nice jangly tambourine, but instead I was landed with the sticks. Yes, just sticks, which i had to hit together to make the required noise. I was so disappointed. And we had what seemed like absolutely hours of rehearsals too. Woe betide us if we dropped anything for we were not allowed to pick it up. Playing with two sticks was bad enough, but playing with one was well nigh impossible, so on one occasion, after the offending slippery stick had clattered on to the wooden floor, I just had to stand there, mute and incapacitated.
Our teacher at that time was a dark and lively lady with frilly petticoats and a foreign name beginningwith Z. Among other things she taught the 'top table' which was 'TheRoses' how to count in French up to six. It was quite easy, 'Under twa cat sank the sea' We chanted, giving our own slant on the unfamiliar French vowels and consonants. That would be my one and only encounter with foreign languages for the next six years, apart from sometimes hearing the Greek Cypriot kids who lived upstairs next door, rattle away in their own language. Societywas pretty homogeneous in those days, even in central London.
During my primary school time, there were two occasions where the person in charge had to give us all a little talking to before the child arrived, during which we were urged not to stare or make unkind remarks. The first time was when a little African girl arrived in our Brownie Pack. Her name was Bommie, or something like that, and we all found her tight curls and dark complexion absolutely fascinating. Actually, it didn't occur to us seven year olds to be unkind, but she was a novelty nevertheless.
The second time was years later, when an enormously fat girl was put in our class. I remember, she had a lovely singing voice, and she was one of the ten of us were chosen to take part in a Christmas Carol Concert. I enjoyed the rehearsals tremendously, and learned for the first time lovely carols like 'O come O come Emmanuel' and 'Il est ne, le petit enfant' (another brief flurry into French which I had forgotten about) But all these rehearsals involved walking about a mile down York Way to reach Kings Cross. Poor fat Rhona could not keep up. Perspiration would be running down her face and her breathing sounded positively alarming. I have forgotten what happened, but she only attempted the walk on that one occasion. Fat children were a rarity in those days. Rhona was by far the fattest in the school, and the cleverest, I hasten to add. She could beat us all hand down in every subject except anything which involved physical activity. But unfortunately, she was too young to take the eleven plus with the rest of us so she had to stay down a year. I didn't really hear much about her after that.

Junior School Lessons

But I suppose, at some point my patient or impatient teachers must have instilled a bit of knowledge into me, and I do actually remember a few bouts of enthusiasm. Even then I quite enjoyed writing, and when I was about ten I remember writing this long, long story about a shipwreck which ended with the hero sinking slowly into the briny depths and describing everything on the way down. I didn't appreciate the impossibility of the situation even when it was pointed out to me. Nothing would persuade me to change my poetic ending.
I used to like art too, and knew I was good enough to achieve mostly quite interesting results, even though I didn't always adhere strictly to instructions. Coming in from lunch time and seeing all the tables spread with newspaper and with a sheet of grey sugarpaper in each place, was a joy for me. I suppose we must have had some sort of timetable, but we never knew it, so each lesson was a sort of surprise.
We listenened to radio programs for schools twice a week. One was a geography programme with a booklet full of shiny black and white photographs which accompanied the programmes. the booklet for the nature-study programmes was in colour. Even now I can still see a beautiful picture of a red squirrel on the front cover and remember the smell of that new shiny paper.
Much of the rest of the time was taken up with grappling with the complexities of arithmetic. Children in these decimalised days do not realise how easy they have it, compared to us grappling with the old Imperial measures. We became experts at adding up £5 . 17s . 11d and £1 . 19s . 4d
for example, bearing in mind, that there were twelve pennies (d) in a shilling (s) and twenty shillings in a pound. And pennies could be slit up into half pennies and quarter pennies (farthings) just to complicate matters further.
Our problems were far from solved even when we lhad finally learned to divide and multiply with money. The measures of weights and lengths were waiting in the wings. Everything was measured in feet and inches in those days. Our wooden rulers which we keptin our cardboard pencil boxes under our desks, were one foot, or twelve inches long. Thank goodness we never had to get seriously involved in chains and furlongs, except for horse-racing, and we were definitely not into that. But weights, (not mass please note) were important. We used to buy our sweets two ounces at a time, and there were sixteen ounces in a pound. I remember my grandmother's old scales. I used to love helping her weigh the ingredients for cakes or sponges. All her cast-iron weights could be fitted into one another, with the large pound weight at the bottom and the small half ounce weight at the top and the tray where the ingredients went was all bent from the time I used to sit in it as a tiny child.
The first time I came across kilos was when I was sixteen and having my first holidy abroad. We were rash enough to ask for a kilo of plums from an italian street vendor, which he duly supplied us with, in a flimsy brown paper bag. Needless to say, half the soggy plums fell out through the bottom of the bag before we could eat them. A kilo was far more than I had anticipated.
But back to imperial weights, our weight was recorded in stones and pounds. I remember when I was about nine, weighing five stone four pounds, and my grandmother saying that I was too thin. There were fourteen pounds in a stone, and coal was delivered in hundredweight (cwt) and twenty hundredweight made a ton.
So by the time we had got our heads round all these weights and measures, learned our tables off by heart right through till twelve, and mastered fractions and decimals as well, we had arrived at the top of the school and it was time to take the exam that everyone had to take in those days,the dreaded eleven plus.
There were three papers, Arithmetic, English and Intelligence. I remember quite enjoying myself once the initial terror had subsided. It was the first exam I had ever taken in my life, and we all sat in rows in the school hall, all eighty of us. I say about eighty, because there were about thirty-five of us in class one, over forty in class two, and a fair sprinkling of kids that had stayed languishing in lower classes.
Twelve of us passed including yours truly. The exam was taken in Januaryand the results came out in May. I and my friends were on our way to grammar school.

Junior School

I can see us now, a long crocodile of little girls all with woolly hats and swimming hats, setting out for the weekly trip to Hornsey swimming baths. I suppose swimming costumes and towels were pretty important too, but I don't remember anyone not being allowed to go for the lack of either of those two items. But it was back to lessons if we forgot either of our hats.
This was in our Junior school, a three-storey red-brick affair with Infants on the ground floor, Junior Boys on the first and us girls on the second. That wouldn't have been so bad except for the fact that the loos were downstairs, outside and right over the other side of the playground. We became experts at not only running up the many flights of shallow, concrete stairs two at a time, but also jumping down them two at a time as well, which required a certain amount of agility.
I don't think school halls have changed a great deal since those days. The strong smell of polish on their herring-bone patterned parquet floors still doesn't quite get rid of the more subtle undertones of disinfectant and saw dust. We had assembly every morning in the course of which we said the Lord's prayer and sang two real hymns, not the politically-correct nursery rhymes that kids are often subjected to today. The nine classes of little girls filed in crocodile fashion, arranging themselves lengthways down the hall, with the smallest in each class in front and the tallest at the back. I was always nearly at the back no matter which class I was in, starting in class eight and working my way through classes five and three until I achieved the dizzy heights of class one and I was at the top of the pile, so to speak.
I remember once, (I think I must have been in class three,) making an utter and absolute idiot of myself in assembly and coming out of that assembly hot with shame. We were asked who St Francis was and my hand shot up. I had been reading abook about Sir Francis Drake and thought I knew it all. 'He won the Spanish Armada' I said. Whoops! The whole school seemed to be laughing, although I am sure that the younger ones did not have a clue what they were laughing about, but I have never forgotten that particular assembly.
Handiwork was big on the agenda back then. They made sure we learned to sew and knit before we were eleven. I still have the handkerchief case which I made when I was eight or nine, painstakingly embroidered in coloured silks using at least half a dozen different stitches.
With knitting I was neither enthustiastic nor particularly talented. I remember, once we were making some sort of knitted ball thing, and how my triumph in almost coming to the end of the wretched thing turned into despair when a hole was discovered near the beginning and I had to undo most of it and start again. I never did finish that particular item. A year later we were making mittens, and having taken weeks to battle my way through the two inches of ribbing at the bottom, I smuggled my knitting home and let mother practically finish it for me.
I remember how old clever cuts in our class finished about eight items by the end of the year and I had barely finished two.
In the next class we made an embroidered bonnet in the winter months, and a check summer skirt later on. I must have been gradually improving as I finished bothe items and they were actually wearable.
These skills that I learned while I was young, no matter how reluctantly or imperfectly, have always been useful, and I find it sad that not more importance is attached to them nowadays in schools. My ten-year-old granddaughter for example, bright as a button in academic work and computers, hardly knew how to thread a needle until I taught her, let alone master the complexities of knitting.
Meanwhile, a floor below us, the boys would have been beavering away with their woodwork, which was also a useful skill that probably stood many of them in good stead later on in life.
We didn't see much of the boys. A prominent white line separated the two halves of the concrete playground. And at that age we were not particularly interested in going over it. They could keep their noise and their footballs to themselves as far as we were concerned. We had our own games.
Skipping featured prominently and with all the practice we had, most of us got very good at it. We used to have all sorts of rhymes and jingles that we used to skip to and they always used to end in dubs (short for doubles I suppose) when for every skip, the rope had to go under you twice, so you had to jump quite high, and you were truly exhausted if ever you got to fifty or above. I think the record was about ninety-two. The turners would be suffering from repetitive strain injury by this time as well.
We used to say and sing all sorts of rhymes as we juggled two balls against a wall. That was a game that amused us for hours, both at school and in the street. I haven't forgotten most of the complexities of the game even now, how we used to have to stand on one leg, juggle using just one hand, stand a long way away from the wall, turn around and still catch the ball. But when you dropped a ball you were out and it was the next person's turn.
Apart from the old standbys there were lots of games which seemed to come suddenly into fashion, but then, after a couple of weeks or a couple of months, fade into obscurity. A ball, preferably a heavy, rubber one, knotted into the end of a stocking was one such game. Within a week of its first appearance we we all standing with our backs to the wall bouncing the ball in the stocking behind us. The another time we would all be making collections of the tiny woollen bobbles that tend to appear on well-worn cardigans and jumpers. We would probably look a bit like a troupe of monkeys grooming one another for parasitic insects, as we swooped on yet another unfortunate victim with a particularly promising, colourful, bobbly jumper. Soon, that particular game had run its course, perhaps because the weather turned warm so the supply of woolly bobbles dried up.
In the summer, us girls were allowed to play in the 'field'. I have put that word in inverted commas because 'bomb-site' would have been the more apt description. The health and safely people of today would have literally had a field day! There were bricks and rubble everywhere, not piles of it, just thinly scattered, between which patches of clover and tufts of grass were bravely putting in an appearance. But that field was far more interesting than the one in my secondary school which was just covered with plain old grass, and gave rise to all sorts of interesting games. From the bits of bricks we would build houses, just one brick high I hasten to add. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on a whole brick, that would be a dressing-table. There were always plenty of bits of broken mirrors around to stand on top of the brick, probably glass too, but I never remember anyone falling and cutting themselves. We were a hardy lot, us post-war kids. There were daisies and a few dandelions too, so we could decorate our houses, as well as make daisy chains when the mood took us.
Then suddenly decorating houses was no longer the rage and we were all bringing wooden cotton reels to school, with four nails sticking out of the top. French knitting had come into fashion. I remember it was quite tricky getting started but once you were, and the round multicoloured snake of knitting began to emerge from the other end of the cotton reel it became great fun. The trouble was with french knitting was that you never really knew what to do with the increasingly lengthy coils, so you just kept on knitting until you had used up all the spare bits of wool that your mother was prepared to give you. By that time we had got a bit sick of it anyway.
Why is it that I remember so much more about games we used to play than my actual lessons. Probably that is why I never got a prize. Indeed, the only time I was called up onto the platform and given a clap was to collect my swimming certificates. The same theme went through all my junior school reports "Josephine does not try hard enough" But if they didn't pick me for their end of year plays because I was too tall to be a princess, and my hair was too long and curly to be the king, and I had to sit through hours of mind-numbing rehearsals of a play that I was not even in, until, in spite of myself, I knew the whole play off by heart, I didn't see why I should kill myself with work. so I just coasted along, played with my yo-yo under the desk and chewed my pencils until they resembled palm trees and I got splinters in my tongue.

Swimming and Things

It is nearly a week since I have written anything and I believe I was talking about London Zoo. It was often a destination for birthday outings as I got older, when some long-suffering parent took their courage in both hands and marched half a dozen of us round the zoo. If they managed to return with the same number of kids that they started out with, the outing was deemed a success.
I remember once I 'fell' into the penguin enclosure, and another time an obliging relative of a friend of mine took us round the back of the aquarium where we could put our hands into the tanks and actually feed the fish. I think it was from that experience as well as seeing every Hans and Lotte Hass film that they ever made, that awakened my interest in Scuba diving, much, much later in life.
It certainly wasn't my early experiences of swimming that mustered any enthusiasm. Why was the open-air Lido in Gospel Oak always so cold? Even the sanitized footbath that you had to go through was toe-curling freezing. The pool itself was huge and blue. All that was missing were the ice-bergs floating in the water and getting in, going down the steps one at a time used to take every ounce of my will-power. The changing cubicles were even colder and more cheerless than the actual pool, and waiting at the counter to exchange a metal disc on a pin for your clothes and towel, was the coldest of all. Chattering teeth, blue arms and legs, and lifeless, dead white fingers and toes were all par for the course.
But there were some fun bits. I used to enjoy the freedom that my green water-wings gave me. Water-wings were the nineteen-fifties answer to arm-bands, and gave you the illusion of being able to swim, even when you couldn't really. Everyone had to wear swimming caps in those days. When I was very young I remember I had a soft plastic one that did up in a bow under my chin. I don't think it did a very good job of keeping the water out, but it was better than nothing. Later I progressed to the rubber ones which were murder to pull on and had a strap under the chin. But I wanted to talk about the fun bits, and pulling on rubber swimming hats definitely was not one of them. Bathing costumes were mostly knitted affairs, that pulled almost down to your knees when you emerged from the water.
The circular water cascade afforded a great deal of pleasure to unsupervised kids before it was fenced in. You could climb up each roaring white-water step, until you eventually got to the top, where you were mistress of all you surveyed, until the bath attendant yelled at you to come down of course. This of course was when I was older, old enough to go to the Lido willingly and voluntarily. But going with like-minded friends instead of parents made all the difference. We would practise jumping from the high diving board, and counting up to ten until we hit the water. We would throw things into to the deepest part. which was about nine feet, and dive to retrieve them. Yes, by the time I was ten I had practically grown fins.
It wasn't only the Lido we went to either. We patronised enthusiastically both Hornsey Baths in Holloway and Prince of Wales Baths. I remember, my mother and I went for an actual bath there once, and took our washing as well, but that was later, when times were really hard.
As for Hornsey, we used to go there on the bus with the school. I remember we used to fight for possession of the long streamer of forty or so tickets, but apart from that, we behaved ourselves. Being allowed to go swimming was a privilege that we did not wish to forfeit.
I don't remember actually learning to swim. I think it was a bit like learning to read. Suddenly I could do it without really having to go into the mechanics of the matter. So by the ageof eight I was the proud possesser of not only my fifty yards certificate,but my hundred as well, which meant that I had swum twice right round the pool without stopping.
When we went to Hornsey baths on our own, we were officially only allowed to stay in the water for half an hour, but if it was not very busy the attendant, a large kindly lady, would turn a blind eye and let us stay until our fingers turned wrinkly. (Washerwoman's fingers, my grandmother used to say.) There was a series of tiered platformsat the deep end from which we used to practise diving. I will never forget the sense of achievement when I managed to dive off the top one.
To sustain us for the mile and a half walk back we would buy a halfpenny's worth of broken biscuits at the baker's shop in Seven Sisters Road. I would still be starving by the time I arrived back home, and I remember with what acute enjoyment I used to polish off my favourite dinner of fried egg and chips.
It is difficult to know whether to follow each topic until I was a child no longer, or to proceed strictly chronologically. But that would mean that I would have to constantly keep on returning to topics. So now, bear with me. We have returned to London, my mother and I and I am thirteen. But still on the subject of swimming pools, it really is saving the best till last.
I found my mother muttering to herself one day 'I wonder if that Ladies' Pond in Kenwood is still open, where I used to go.' So we made a point of going to find it. We walked past the pond where I had fallen in as a child and later lost my toy yacht, past the men's pond, and then skirting Kenwood, another ten minutes' walk brought us to the notice which banned all males of our species. We walked up a short woodland path and arrived at a beautiful, tranquil pool. I can see it now in my mind's eye, glinting in the evening sunlight. Families of ducks seemed to have no objection to sharing their pond with humans, and continued to swim peacefully across the sparkling, greeny-brown surface, leaving hardly a ripple in their wake.
A concrete platform, very civilised changing cubicles and a series of cork rings fixed at intervals over the pond, distinguished it as a swimming area. But you had to be able to swim. There was no shallow end.
That summer I went there many times. My school was only about a mile's walk over the fields, so we used to go after school and sometimes when the days were long and light, even before, and then go into school assembly with dripping wet hair.
There is one little postscript to this. Years later when I was living in South Africa for a time, I met someone who subsequently became a very good friend of mine. We had both grown up in North London, that was coincidence enough, but what really bonded us, was that we both knew and loved the Kenwood Ladies Swimming Pool.