Open Writing

Dad would take me out to see what was going on in the wide world of the 1920s, and I have an early memory of sitting in the front seat of an open-topped horse bus, high above the horses, watching their heads nodding, and hearing their harness jingling as they trotted up to Stamford Hill where we went into the park to watch the boys sailing their model boats on the pond.

Dad tried bringing home various pets for me. On one occassion a black and brown Manchester terrier, tucked into his overcoat pocket. Another time a tabby kitten. Mum was never keen to take them on.

At the back of the house there was only a small concrete yard with a high wall, covered with Virginia creeper that turned bright crimson every autumn. This wall separated us from the factory right behind us, and for a while I had a pet tortoise in the yard in a little wooden box-cum-shed in one corner. I also had a white rabbit, and Dad showed me how to get hold of him - "By the ears, with a hand underneath his tail, then bring him up against your chest.'' I managed that.

Along the side of the dividing wall from Great Aunt Emma’s yard next door my Great Aunt Annie had a chicken run with a little roosting house. There was another chicken shed on the other side of the wall in Emma’s garden.

In the end we had a canary which sang beautifully and a pet black and white cat, one of a neighbour’s litter, not from Dad’s newspaper warehouse.

Dad would take me out to see what was going on in the wide world of the 1920s, and I have an early memory of sitting in the front seat of an open-topped horse bus, high above the horses, watching their heads nodding, and hearing their harness jingling as they trotted up to Stamford Hill where we went into the park to watch the boys sailing their model boats on the pond.

Later the General Omnibus Company introduced motor buses with solid hard rubber tyres. Inside, downstairs, there was the notice DO NOT SPIT, and the windows did not open, so we always tried to go upstairs. The conductor came round with tickets of several colours, held in place behind a wire on a wooden block. On a leather strap round his shoulder was a small metal box in which he pushed our tickets to clip them, and that made its bell ring. These small black boxes were manufactured at the Bell Punch Company in West Drayton, where Uncle Arthur worked.

This was when we lived upstairs in my Great Aunt’s house in Stanley Road, off the Balls Pond Road, and every day I would be pushed gently into their downstairs front room to be greeted by my great grandmother Anne Francis Pearson who always wanted to see her Little Two Shoes, a character from a Victorian childrens’ book.

Great Aunt Annie would go to church on Sundays, but Great Grandma never went out. When she passed on, aged 91, I recall being taken into the back bedroom where she lay in her coffin, but I was more interested in looking at the little stuffed birds under their glass dome on the sideboard and the various long hat pins stuck into a small velvet cushion beside it.

On her funeral day the hearse was drawn by black horses with black feather plumes on their head harness.

In those days, the baker called, pulling his cart behind him, and the milkman pushed his barrow, halting outside our door, selling milk by the jug-full from a galvanised milk churn. Several times a week the greengrocer’s horse and cart came down our road.

The firewood man came with his barrow, and the coal man came on his heavy horse-drawn cart. He would carry sacks of coal into the house on his shoulder, to tip into the coal cupboard beneath the stairs.

In the gloaming of a Saturday evening, the muffin man, his tray of muffins balanced on his head, came down our street ringing a bell, just as the lamplighter came round with his long pole, turning on the gas lights at the top of every lamp post.

Shouting on our corner "Water-creeses, shrimp, winkles,'' on Sunday afternoons, came the watercress man, and Mum would buy shrimps, watercress and winkles for our tea.

We didn’t stay in. Every day Mum took me out in my carpet-seated wooden pushchair when she went shopping, or she would take me to Clissold Park. I remember the mound there, with its beds of red geraniums. On top of it children would be standing on the steps of the pink granite obelisk of the drinking fountain. When I reached up to press the brass button for water, holding a heavy metal cup under the spout, I smelled iron. Then, as I bent my head to check whether the smell came from the water or the cup, Mum called out that I was not to drink it.

Children left the cups dangling by the chains. These clanged against the stone sides of the bowl as the water ran away down the steps into the flower beds.

At every step towards the animal enclosure Eileen’s new brown sandals squeaked, but Mum said they would soon wear in.

Behind a high wire fence was Old Bill, the so-called reindeer, standing chewing the cud. All manner of creatures were kept there, rabbits, a wallaby, a peacock, peahens, black and white speckled guinea fowl, pheasants and guinea pigs.

On we went, past the green metal slatted chairs set out under trees round the tea kiosk, out through the gate where a Wall’s ice cream man was usually waiting on his three-wheeled bike-trolley, Proffering my penny, I would choose a strawberry Snofrute while Mum had a tuppeny briquette in a wafer. If the Snofrute’s chequered blue and white card wrapper stuck fast to the triangular rosy water-ice, Mum would take it and squash it a bit in her hands until the wrapper cracked away, and the ice could be pushed out at one end.

Sometimes we went by bus to Crouch Hill to see Aunty Alice and cousin Vera, or take the bus to Kings Cross, then on the Circle line to Paddington and go down to West Drayton on a Great Western Railway steam train to visit Mum’s older sister Flo, her four children and Uncle Arthur, who always said I could pick flowers from his garden, "so long as you only pick pansies.''

One afternoon at Aunty Flo’s, my cousins Stan and Arthur put me into their soapbox on wheels and pulling it along the roads, went round to the back of a property with an orchard. They pushed me through a hole in the fence into an orchard, where they picked up lots of apples and plums, telling me to beware of the wasps. The buckets of fruit were loaded onto the cart, and I had to walk back home.

That day Mum returned home with arms filled with rhubard and a carrier bag filled with apples. I carried a bunch of flowers.
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