General Chat

For anyone who is interested, this is about the neighbourhood where I lived. Ann Glos

Chapter 4 My Home and Neighbourhood In 1939 my parents bought the first and only place they were to own. This was a three bedroom bungalow in St Michaels Grove, on the West End estate, Fareham. They paid approximately £500 for, what was then, quite an upmarket dwelling. It was semi-detached and, as was normal in those days, had no garage. But it had a large front garden and a very large back garden. The house and garden were always their pride and joy. Our bungalow, was at the top end of a very long road. The lower half of the road consisted of semi-detached houses, our end was all semi-detached two and three bedroom bungalows. During and just after the war the road was still gravelled and very bumpy to travel along on the bus. The buses, owned by the Provincial ‘Bus Company who had their Headquarters at Hoeford, on the Gosport Road Fareham, were, in the early days numbers one, two or three. It depended which way they went in Gosport as to the number and also whether or not they went all the way up St Michaels Grove to Fairfield Avenue or terminated at the bottom of the road. Later it was reduced to just numbers one and two, and they all went to the top of the road The buses were a blue/green colour, double decked with an open platform and all had a conductor to collect the fares. The fare when I was a young child was one penny to Fareham. At the very top of our road was the fence of H.M.S. Collingwood. We were so close that we could hear the tannoy and all the announcements from our garden. Memories of my childhood include the frequent call of ‘Now hear this….shore telephone call’. At either end of Longfield Avenue were fields where we played all day and every day in the holidays with no fears for our safety. We would wander as far as the Farm to find tadpoles in their duck pond, or we would sit and talk in the crater left by the bomb that fell near to the end of Fairfield Avenue (before they built the new estate). Near to one end of Longfield Avenue was Fort Fareham where we would regularly trespass, hiding from any soldiers that may be around, or sometimes not hiding and chatting to the soldiers. There was also a pond near here where we used to find newts. Our local shops were in Fairfield Avenue; in the days before I married this was a cul de sac road with just one road running off it. The Fairfield Avenue shops, when I lived there, consisted of Emery’s paper shop, later to become Callendars, the Co-op where my Mother bought all her groceries, carrying them home by hand if they were light or having them delivered. Then there was a butchers and a post office, and one shop that for a while was used as a Sunday School, although I didn’t attend that one as I went to Fareham Baptist Church Sunday school. The butcher very kindly came round to kill our chickens for us when we needed them to eat. Also in Fairfield Avenue was a Plymouth Brethren chapel. In the sixties a very large council estate was built . At the lower end of our road there was a large field owned by Tom Parker, our milkman. Tom lived to the ripe old age of 86, he died in 1982. His name could still be seen on milk floats around the town several years after he had died, and may still be now for all I know. The annual gymkhana was held in this field on Whit Monday, to the great enjoyment of all of us children. As a Junior Red Cross cadet I was often ‘on duty’ on Gymkhana day although we were more used for general errands than for First Aid. Tom Parker’s dairy was about a mile away, when I was a young child his milk used to be delivered by horse drawn cart, his cart was painted green and cream. One of the things we older children used to enjoy was going to help in the dairy with sorting the returned empty milk bottles for washing. This was done on a large conveyer belt which circulated the empty glass bottles through the washing machine. Besides the milkman, the baker and later the Corona man another person who was a regular caller was the rag and bone man. We children would collect jam jars for him and exchange them for a goldfish. I was lucky enough to get one and had him in an aquarium (and called him with great originality ‘Goldie’!). To be continued if wanted. Ann Glos

Anne sounds really good but ive missed the first 3 chapters! you must have had a very happy childhood and i am interested as part of my fam came from the gosport area.

clap,clap more .more.............please,,,,,,,,,,

Ann , just read your story part 4, it's better than the book i'm reading . keep going . Hazelx

:-)

Ann that was amazing would love to hear more It was like reading a good book catherine xx

OK I will finish this chapter then go back to the beginning. prepare to be bored!! Please tell me when you have had enough. ann

Our bungalow was double fronted, the outside pebble dashed, and the windows of the front room, that would nowadays be called the lounge, were on the left as you faced the central front door, the windows to the main bedroom, where my parents slept, were on the right. You went up two steps to the front door which had a circular window in it. The bungalow was called Jervis Bay after the ship that my Mother sailed on to Malta when she and my Father were first married. Once inside the front door you were faced with a long passage with the door at the far end opening into the kitchen/living room. Halfway down the passage was a small side passage leading to the bathroom and toilet, outside of which were the meter cupboards containing the electric and gas meters, the latter turned off every night by my Father for as long as I can remember, he having formed the habit during the war. When we first lived there the gas meter was a coin in the slot meter but that was eventually changed after the war. The small third bedroom next to this was my bedroom from 1945 until about 1950 when my sister Rosemary moved in there and I was ‘promoted’ to the larger second bedroom, which was also at the rear of the bungalow. When I was younger I used to have to have the hall light on when in bed in my little bedroom. I would lay there listening to familiar sounds like the rattle of cups in the kitchen and the footsteps as Mum or Dad walked up and down the hall and the background hum of the wireless. The kitchen/living room was a large bright room overlooking the back garden. It could get very hot in there as the sun shone straight in most of the day and, in later years, my Father fitted up a blind outside. The kitchen had a tiled fireplace where a coal fire burned when I was a child. There was, of course, no central heating, so to keep warm I would sit on the rug in front of the fire as close as I could safely get to its warmth. We would cook toast on this fire on a brass toasting fork, or cook chestnuts using an old coal shovel to hold them over the fire, jumping out of the way when they overcooked and burst with a bang. At night the fire would be banked with potato peelings and coal dust to keep it in as long as possible. Then the fireguard would always be put in place to prevent sparks jumping out on the rug. Either side of the fireplace were two wooden arm chairs, one a ‘captain’s chair’, curved with low arms. This was my Grandfather’s chair, brought with him when he came to live with us after Grandma died in 1945. the other chair belonged to my Grandmother’s sister Henrietta Warner, she never married, was profoundly deaf, and spent all her working life in domestic service first with a vicar and his family, and then as a lady’s companion. I don’t know why or how we came by her chair but I still have it, and my grandfather’s, to this day. The water was heated by an Ascot in the kitchen which, when I was younger, I was very wary of as it made me jump when it ‘whooshed’ when the hot tap was turned on. There were plenty of cupboards for storage, a built in sink unit, a wall dresser for china and a large pantry. The pantry had a mesh window and it kept lovely and cool, for these were the pre-refrigerator days. In the war and post war years there would invariably be a bucket in the pantry containing our new laid eggs preserved in Isinglass, plus a muslin bag dripping into a bowl. In the muslin would be sour milk slowly turning into cottage cheese. The front room also had a tiled fireplace and coal fire although to save lighting the fire this room was only really used at Christmas when I was young, which always made it feel sort of special. In the front room there was a sideboard, with a chiming clock standing on it (I still have the clock and it is still working). There was also a piano and two easy chairs, a dining room table and four dining chairs. It was not a terribly large room so was always a bit cramped with furniture. When we were using this room we would have tea brought in by my Mother on a trolley on wheels, always with matching cups and saucers, tea pot, milk jug and sugar basin with sugar lumps and tongs to serve them, she never ever, even in later life, served tea in mugs or had a milk bottle on the table. The two larger bedrooms both had electric fires on the walls. The best thing in my bedroom as far as I was concerned was my dolls’ house. This was made by my Father, was very big with lots of rooms and with lights that worked. My parents’ bedroom which was always decorated in blue with blue covers on the bed, at first an eiderdown and bedspread, later a duvet, had a wardrobe and dressing table and a chest of drawers in it and a blue Lloyd Loom type chair, plus a blanket box. The bathroom had a modern white suite – bath, sink and toilet. Because there was no central heating, the bungalow was quite cold except for near the fire. On cold winter mornings I was often known to try to get dressed under the covers of my bed to keep warm. When I was very young Mum used to warm my clothes on the guard in front of the fire.

My parents took great pride in both the house and garden, there were no fitted carpets when I was a young child just carpet squares and a carpet runner in the hall. All around the carpet was linoleum which had to be first dusted and then polished and I used to enjoy helping my Mother do this. Mum had a Hoover cleaner to do the floors with, I was a bit wary of it when I was little as it was black, made a loud noise and sucked up everything in its path. It used to ‘live’ in my bedroom behind the door and at night I found it very frightening. To do the washing on Mondays - and what a performance that was - my Mother had a boiler in the kitchen and a mangle in the garden, clothes would be boiled and a blue bag added to keep whites white. Robin starch was used where necessary, a powder mixed by hand first making a smooth paste with cold water, then adding boiling water until it became a thick jelly, then diluting with cold water before dipping the clothes in. It had a sweet scented fresh smell. Washing was hung on the line in the garden in all but the very worst weather when it would be draped around the fire. Washing seemed to take nearly all day and lunch on that day was always cold meat and mashed potato and gravy, or shepherds pie and it had to be ready for when dad came home for dinner at 12.30. It wasn’t until the sixties that my parents bought a twin tub washing machine, and they never had an automatic. The garden was quite long and had a path running down the centre. When I was younger the lower end of the garden had fruit trees, a pear, a cherry, and a couple of apple trees. My Dad also grew vegetables. Later, this end was put to lawn and flower beds, although the Bramley Apple tree was retained. And later still, when he was seventy, my Dad had a greenhouse where he pottered and grew tomatoes which he liked to give away to people. The top end of the garden near the house was at first two lawns and a large shed and a concrete square outside the back door. Later, one lawn was to go to be replaced with a patio for flower tubs. When I was young, there was a very large coal bunker also outside the back door, this was later demolished. It is strange that I can still remember the sound of coal rumbling into the bunker as the coalman emptied his sacks. The shed was my Father’s refuge, he built it out of planks of wood and there it stood for nearly sixty years, and was still there when he moved out to live in a Nursing Home in his late eighties, each tool in its allotted space, with screws and nails neatly stored in jars. I used to spend a lot of time with Dad in the shed while he made all sorts of things, he loved woodwork and when I was younger he made me a table and chair, a desk and the aforementioned dolls’ house. Later he made me frames for my buttonhook collection. He was very clever. To this day the smell of linseed oil takes me right back to the days when I would soften the putty for him by working in the linseed oil. By the side of the shed in the forties and early fifties was a chicken run where we kept a couple of chickens. These my Dad got the butcher to kill at Christmas for us to eat. I don’t remember it bothering me at all that we were eating ‘Henrietta’! I loved to play in the garden with my friends and my Dad would build us a tent very cleverly using a step ladder and odd poles that were around the garden. Here we would play for hours and have our meals. We had a stray cat that adopted us and I used to push her around in my doll’s pram, Mum and dad didn’t really want a cat but they let her stay for a while until one day she produced kittens in the old chicken run. We eventually found all the kittens homes and suddenly the cat disappeared again, I was told she had run away. The kitchen is the room that stays most in my memory, I had my toy cupboard there and it was here that I played. One of my favourite games was to have my little table and chair and my dolls tea set, a china one that my Mother had queued and fought for during the war, it had Pinocchio on it and our daughter still has it in her loft, having also played with it as a little girl. With this tea set I would have parties for all my dolls. Until I was seven years old, I used to be bathed in a tin bath in front of the fire. Later, it was to the kitchen that I came after a bath and hair wash to dry my hair in front of the fire as I got older, before the days of domestic hair dryers. To wash my hair we had to mix a solution from a powder and to rinse it I would stand at the sink while my Mum poured water over me from a jug, no shower attachments or nice bottles of shampoo. I would curl up on the rug and listen to Dick Barton, Special Agent, Much Binding in the Marsh with Kenneth Horne, Have a Go with Wilfred Pickles or Billy Cotton’s band as he shouted “Wakey Wakey”. Other programmes during the day were Workers’ Playtime and Family Favourites or Housewives’ Choice. We always ate in the kitchen, there was a table and chairs there and the front room was a long way from the kitchen and cold if the fire was not lit. Before the meal when I was little I always had to say grace “for what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful”, this did tend to lapse as I got older but I always had to ask permission to leave the table. In the fifties the coal fire in the front room was replaced with a gas fire so we used to use it more often. And after 1953 when we had a television, one of the first in the road, we used the front room every evening. Around this time we also had a telephone put in as Dad needed it for his work as a salesman. At first we were on a party line and often we would pick up the phone to hear the other people talking; later, as they got more lines, they did away with party lines.

It was also in the kitchen that Tony and I would do our courting in the fifties, with the occasional ‘visit’ from Mum from the lounge (as it was now called) to make sure we were behaving ourselves. I always used to sit on his lap in the bigger of the two wooden armchairs listening to vinyl records Long Playing (LPs) and 45s. Some of our favourite artistes being Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Chris Barber, especially The Old Rugged Cross featuring Monty Sunshine, and Fats Domino, especially his Blueberry Hill. When I was sixteen until I married Tony at aged twenty, he used to spend evenings with us at home, he would arrive on his motor bike, a 250cc BSA, and he would leave his leathers in my bedroom. My mother was extremely narrow minded, and objected to me going into the bedroom with him when he got dressed again (remember he was already fully clothed, he was only putting on outer garments.) One day I was in there talking to him as he dressed (we were engaged to be married by now and I was eighteen), and the door was not fully open so Mum, just happening to go past, pushed the door open and peered in. Tony jokingly said to me ‘who’s your friend?’ That was it, Mum didn’t speak to either of us (or my Dad for some reason, I suppose he must have stuck up for me) for two weeks. My Mother could sulk for England!!

Ann,, this is wonderful...--- I am sitting by the fire in your kitchen ,,,,,,,,))))

Ann , i can relate to your story , it's as though i was reading about my own life . You should really write a book Hazelx

I think I probably have although it is not published. Ann Glos

Ann, enjoying your memories, know that part of Fareham and remember Tom Parker milk rounds xx Jill

Well when it is published i'll buy a copy Hazelx

Stella, I am blushing now, I always liked to scribble. Ann Glos

Ann, this is so lovely to read, warm and comfortable, Thankyou so very much Caz xxxx

Ann. I have done the very same as part of tree research,,,what paths each search took me down,,and where I ended up,,,,its makes it all so worth while,,,

It took me a long time and is not really finished yet (when do you finish writing your life history?) But I thoroughly enjoyed writing it ad hope the grandchildren will appreciate it one day. Ann Glos