Home life in the post–war years: I

I have written about my childhood before. Perhaps too much. I don’t know. But I think at least that there is more I can say about our living conditions. To situate this in time and place,  I am writing (talking?) about the late 1940s and early 1950s in St Leonards–on–Sea, in East Sussex – in Pevensey Road, to be precise. We lived in the basement flat of a four–storey semi–detached house, built, I would imagine, between the wars (I and II, for as long as that will make sense to people). And I further imagine that we were living in what had been the servants’ quarters. And yet, can that have been true? It seems questionable, because each floor was a self–contained flat, with a very public and utilitarian staircase running up the centre. But perhaps each of the flats was served by the same servants. Certainly the coal was delivered – by horse–drawn lorries – to our capacious cellar; and so was presumably carried up to the other flats (we bought it by the sack load, and the work must have been as back–breaking for the men as the old metal dustbins). However, we did not supply the other flats, and I presume that they used electric fires (with one, two, three, or four bars).

Mum, dad, and me in front of the steps
leading to the entrance hall

Our flat was surrounded by an ‘area’ which took the form of what might be described as a trench, with concrete walls and base – about four feet deep and three feet wide. So that when you looked out of the sitting room windows at the back, your eyes were not far short of being on a level with the lawn. Quite why the house was built like this I do not know, but it had one great disadvantage: we were flooded beneath the floorboards after heavy rainfall – which in turn forced slugs to take refuge through the cracks. . .   

We had only one bedroom, and when I was too old for my cot, I had a bed in a corner of the sitting room – which also served as our dining room. Neither I nor anyone else thought there was anything strange in this arrangement: we did what we could in the space that was available.

Our kitchen was not very inviting. As I remember, it had pale green distempered walls and brown floor lino (I do not think any other colour was available at the time). Probably we had a larder, but I cannot remember. We did not have a fridge, and so shopped most days of the week. The pipes were of course lead, and seemed to favour the kitchen as a place to burst in the winter. We had a gas cooker, and my mother quite often used a pressure cooker, until one day it blew up and splattered its contents onto the ceiling.

Clothes airer: on pulleys, so
that  it could be raised
to the ceiling

Our bathroom was even less inviting than the kitchen. There were no niceties: just a gas boiler (geyser), a galvanised tub, a mangle, and a clothes airer. Washing machines and tumble driers were unknown to us; so my mother had to use the galvanised tub (which also served as our bath), and washing tongs to ‘agitate’ the dirt out of the laundry, by a kind of gentle pummelling – up and down in the water. Then: through the mangle, and onto the clothes airer; this was then hoisted up to the ceiling.

Our toilet was one of the old fashioned chain–pull types, and quite efficient given that the tank was very high up, so giving    a full flush. I used to give the chain three gentle pulls before the full pull – one of those odd, slightly superstitious things that kids tend to do.

One, quite small, room was given over to my father’s workshop (metalwork), in which there was a lathe, a drilling machine, and a grinder (as illustrated in the photo). Before that, he had rented a workshop in Hastings. He was a very fine engineer, and could make components that were accurate to within a tenth of a thousandth of an inch. (A book he wrote about screw cutting in the lathe has never been out of print since he wrote it thirty years ago, and an invention of his – the swing–clear boring tool holder – is still on the market today.) He also made a model cable car, which travelled from skirting board to ceiling in our sitting room. Such was the nature of our home!

I was happy in this home, but happier still when we bought a semi–detached house in 1958: for £1,750. It was not until a few years later that my father earned the then magic figure of £1,000 per annum.     

My mother and me, pre–St Leonards’ days.
Place unknown