STREETLY,
STAFFORDSHIRE MEMORIES
(1936
- 1961)
A WALK UP
THE CHESTER ROAD
(August 1944)
6. On
to Manor Road and Bridle Lane
and Back
to Home
by Chris Myers
|
6. On to
Manor Road and Bridle Lane and Back to Home
As you
carry on along the road on our side, towards
Manor Road,
there are other families. Mr and Mrs
Lyon
at no. 105.
They are very old. They must be at least sixty. Mr
Lyon has retired after working in a shop in one of
the Birmingham arcades for years and he now has a
market garden in his huge garden which stretches for
probably 200 yards, right down to the hawthorn
hedge.
I'll show this
picture again because you can just see his land. (It
was taken from a bedroom window of our house in
1936).
Mr. Lyon's garden stretches all the way down
the left hand side of the field, right down to the
far hedge. Right on the very left-hand edge of the
picture you can see his hen-houses. They are
very rickety and get battered and half blown down if
there's a strong wind. Beyond his land one or two
private gardens are just as long (like Mr Richards's
which is on the far right of this picture). I have
never been in them and don't know what people do
with all that space. You can't grow vegetables on
all of it. Unless you are like Mr Lyon.
Between Mr. Lyon and us is the garden at
no. 103. I don't think anyone was living in the house then.
Their garden is what ours must have been like until
Dad got to work.
Mr Lyon supplies vegetables, eggs and
probably chickens to people like
Roses
who are greengrocers in Kingstanding. I help him a
lot. Taking out a water container which runs on
wheels and topping up the drinking water for the
chickens. Collecting eggs. Running errands. All
sorts of things like that. I think I’m very helpful.
At least he never tells me to buzz off, so I must be
of some use. Either that or he is just a very kind
old gentleman. I helped him load some of his
vegetables one day, into big square empty baskets
which had come from Roses. It was a horrid job
because the baskets stank so much it made me feel
sick. When I peered over the edge into one, I saw
why. The last time they had been used it was to
carry gutted rabbits. The weather was hot and the
baskets hadn't been cleaned out very well. Or
probably not at all. Whenever we went into Roses
after that, I looked at their nice fresh veg. in a
different way.
All sorts of interesting things happen. I don’t
really like the way he kills chickens or ducks. He
uses a very old and rusty pen knife to chop off
their heads. What was much
more fun, and really interesting, was the day he
caught a rat and promised me that we would drown it
in the water carrier. I nagged him for hours until
he got around to doing the deed. And I have to say
that in the end I felt really sorry for the poor
creature as it frantically swam around in its metal
cage trying to find a way out before it finally gave
up its efforts and was still. I think that probably,
as you get older, you don’t like things like that
quite as much as you do when you are six or seven.
I spend quite a
lot of time with Mr and Mrs Lyon. Sometimes we even
play cards in the evening. It’s ever so funny. If Mr
Lyon trumps Mrs Lyon she shouts at him and calls him
a miserable old bugger. Even Mum, who doesn't like
bad language, has to laugh. Dad and Mum never say
anything worse than damn and blast at home. We play
these games by gaslight. Mr and Mrs Lyon don’t have
electricity. The light in the living room comes from
a fitting in the middle of the ceiling with
something called a gas mantle which you have to
light with a match. It glows white hot and lights up
the whole room. And then, when you turn it off, it
goes a loud "pop". I expect they use a lot of
candles as well. And oil lamps when they go to bed.
Because there’s no electricity they have a wireless
set which runs on batteries. Two of them. One is a
dry one like a huge version of the one you put in a
torch. The other one is called an accumulator and
every now and again Mr Lyon has to take it up the
road to get it charged. You just have to have a
wireless set as otherwise you have no idea what is
happening in the war. And there's music and comedy
programmes. My favourite is
Tommy Handley
who is ever so funny. His programme is called
ITMA.
That's short for "It's That Man Again".
I think that Mr and
Mrs Lyon's house is the only one around here without
electricity. Perhaps it was built a bit before the
others. Out in the country I have been to other
houses that use oil lamps and candles. Farmhouses
and cottages and things. But not around here where
most of the houses are fairly new and were built
with electricity in them. I sometimes go to bed with
a candle or a nightlight in a saucer even though we
have electric light. I like a bit of light to go to
sleep by. But I don't like the flickering too much
and it used to frighten me when I was just a little
boy.
Then the
Morgans. At no. 107.
Mr Morgan
is a plumber. It's wonderful to watch him as he
repairs a lead pipe with his blowtorch and to see
how the metal melts and flows where he wants it to
go, all silvery and shiny. Mr and Mrs Morgan have a
son, Eric. Eric is 14 or 15. And he has an air
rifle. Now, my own Dad spends half his life
surrounded by all sorts of dangerous things like
rifles, grenades, pistols and bombs. He is in the
Home Guard. There are three rifles in the wardrobe
and I know he has a revolver and ammunition in the
drawer where he keeps his vests and starched
collars. But he gets very worried when there’s a
teenager living next-door-but-two who spends a lot
of his time shooting off an air rifle in his back
garden. Nothing has happened so far and so let’s
hope it never will.
As we go further
on up the road, the other families who are there I
don’t know quite so well. The
Allums,
the Caultons
and also the
Markwicks. Mr
Markwick is our local air raid warden. His job is to
make sure we don’t have any lights showing. Once or
twice he’s suddenly appeared out of the darkness in
his uniform and tin hat with ARP painted on it and
given my mother a gentle ticking off for having a
torch which is too bright. He does it very nicely
and she doesn’t get upset over it. I’m not sure
whether she realises or not but I know exactly what
she does to avoid this. She tears off a little piece
of newspaper, probably about an inch round, unscrews
the lens of her torch and sticks the paper on top of
the bulb. This reduces the light a lot. Now, what I
like to do, when she’s not looking, is to find the
torch, unscrew the lens again and take the bit of
paper out. Probably that’s when she gets caught by
Mr Markwick. I don’t know whether she knows what's
going on but she’s not said anything, at least not
yet. I think it is rather a good joke. She might
not, though.
As we get nearer
to Manor Road
there are more gaps between the houses. One's
another cart track. There's a cottage on the right
hand side of it, at right angles to the Chester
Road. I think a family called
Heaton
live in it. And I think it's called
Rose Cottage.
Beyond those buildings, down the track, you get to a
gate which opens up on to the
Riding School Field
again. (The main entrance is at the bottom of Manor
Road).
Then a couple of
older houses, a wide gap and finally the row of
shops lying at a slight angle to the main road with
an area of rough grass and a sandy surface in front
of them where cars can park. There’s a butcher's
there, a draper's called
Terry
although the lady who runs it is called Mrs
Moore,
Bailey's
which I think is a dairy where they sell milk and
sweets and things, and one or two other shops.
There's a lady called Joan who lives in an upstairs
flat there who cuts my hair. That's if I can't get
out of it. I HATE it.
The far side of
Manor Road
is a triangle of rough grass in front of the houses
there which are set at an angle, like the shops. On
this grass they built a huge black-painted tank.
It’s a water tank for firefighting. A nasty ugly
thing with mesh on the top to stop children like me
falling in although it would be quite difficult to
climb up high enough to get on top of it. It’s not
had to be used yet. And possibly won’t be, now. We
haven’t had an air raid for a long, long time.
We won’t walk
any further along the road. That's for another
day. Time to get back home, now.
As we turn, let’s
just look out, over the crossroads, towards the far
corner where
Bridle Lane joins
the main road. On that corner is
Puddepha's.
This is a little corner shop which sells tobacco and
sweets and things. Here is Mr Puddepha who owns it.
He's in the Home Guard with Dad. I visit his shop
quite often. Sometimes by myself and I’m always told
to be very, very careful as I cross the main road. I
go there when Dad needs some more Navy Cut for his
pipe or Mum has run out of her Players cigarettes. A
granite floor and a high counter. Shelves beyond
with big sweet jars and other stuff like that. And
in front of them stands Mr Puddepha in his light
brown coat who hands me the tobacco and takes the
half-crown, or whatever it is.
On the other
corner of Bridle Lane, nearer to us, there is a very
tall, wide hedge which doesn’t look as if it gets
cut very often. Behind it is a row of old cottages
but you can hardly see them and I've never seen
anyone who lives in them.
We haven't
crossed over. We are now going back the way we have
come. And looking over the road at that big, wild,
privet hedge. As we walk back, there is an unbroken
row of houses on the other side. One or two of them
are identical to ours. I think they must have been
built by the same builder. Mr.
Brockington.
And probably at the same time. In another of the
houses there, Mr
Horton lives. He
has a grand-daughter who I think lives there as
well. Her name is Evelyn.
Evelyn Ball.
She's a good friend of my sister. They probably went
to school together. That's
Sandwell School
which I've mentioned before. The reason why I know
Mr Horton is that he repairs our shoes for us. If
you are a customer, you go down the side of his
house and he has a little workshop there, with all
his tools and a special thing called a last which he
puts a shoe on to before he starts hammering away at
it. And pieces of leather everywhere. When you go in
the smell of leather hits you. It's nice. And it's
different from the smell you get when you poke your
nose into an American car. As I have told you
before, that's the smell of speed. Not leather.
As you get closer
back to no. 101, where we live on this side, and you
keep looking over the road, you see the houses where
I know more of the people. Mr and Mrs
Grey.
Then Mr and Mrs
Price at no. 150,
another old couple with a married daughter who lives
up the road just by the water tank I was talking
about. I think Mr Price is probably Welsh. Very
occasionally he uses our telephone. He speaks very
precisely. ("Hello, this is PRICE here" he says,
loudly and clearly, to introduce himself. There's no
doubt as to who he is). He's a nice old gentleman.
I ought to say
here that most of our neighbours don't have
telephones. I'm not sure who does. Mum has an
arrangement with our neighbour, Mrs
Bacon
- whom she calls Dot - who lives in the other half
of our semi. Sometimes there is a call for Mrs
Bacon, perhaps from one of her sisters. Mum picks up
the phone and says "Hello...oh, right ho...I'll get
her". Then she walks out of the hall into the lounge
and picks up a clothes brush which lives on top of
the piano. She then uses the hard, wooden back of
that to make four or five really hard raps on the
wall behind. Then looks out of the front window and,
lo and behold, after a few seconds, hurrying through
a gap in the hedge comes Dot who is let in through
the front door and then left in private to conduct
her family business. This arrangement works
regularly and well. Mum is kind and patient. The
only time when she does get a bit fed up, sometimes,
is when Aunty Helen phones to speak to her sister.
Aunty Helen is a tiny bit posh. She wears pearls and
things. She doesn't mean to, I'm sure, but she
sometimes makes Mum feel a bit like a maidservant,
being instructed to summon her mistress to the
telephone. But nobody has fallen out with anyone
yet. Mum is quite patient. Even with me.
But back to
the other side of the road.
On the grass
verge outside Mr and Mrs Price's house is a post,
not very tall, and on top of it is a board, about 18
inches square and facing upwards, at a bit of an
angle so that the rain can run off it easily. It's
painted a funny greeny-grey colour. I keep an eye on
it. It's been there for as long as I can remember.
Dad told me that if it changes colour, that means
the Germans are attacking us with gas. I don't know
what colour it changes to and I hope I shall
recognise it when it does. But people don't seem to
worry too much about all that now. I think they've
decided that it's probably not going to happen. You
sometimes see the same sort of paint on the top of
pillar boxes.
Then the
Milnes
at 148, right opposite our house. Three children -
Jennifer of about my age, Ian and little Keith. The
Georges,
another plumber like Mr Morgan. Next, Mrs
Woodward,
a smart and elegant lady whose husband is away in
the Royal Navy and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.
And then the
Brains who have
two teenage boys who my father thinks are a bit mad
and so I think the same. Naturally. I’m not sure but
I think that Mr Brain owns the Avion Cinema in
Aldridge where we go very regularly on our bikes to
see all sorts of films. I think I've told you that
before. Some of the films I like and some of them
frighten me.
Talking of going
to the pictures reminds me of what Mum very often
says to me when we have been sitting there for a
long time. We have seen the second half of the main
film, then a short
interval, then the adverts,
then the newsreel, then
the B-film. And finally the beginning of the main
film. After about half an hour of that, that's when
she leans across to me and whispers:
"I think this
is where we came in, dear".
And up we get
and off we go. (I hate that, really. I want to see a
story all the way through. Not see the end first and
then afterwards find out what had happened before).
And so, now we've come back at our destination
and as we look across at these houses, on the other
side of the road and at the very top of the hill,
where the Brains live, I can say to you:
"I think this
is where we came in".
Thank you for
walking with me up the Chester Road, from the Park
entrance all the way up the hill to where we live.
And a bit beyond and back again. We'll open the
front gate at the end of our drive and walk through
it and up to the house where we'll let ourselves in.
Perhaps Mum will make us a nice cup of tea when
she's got her breath back. There might even be a
biscuit. Just the one.
We need a cuppa,
don't we, after all that walking and looking and
talking?
Please see INDEX page for
main acknowledgements.
This family
and local history
page is hosted by
www.staffshomeguard.co.uk
(The Home Guard of Great Britain, 1940-1944)
All text and images are,
unless otherwise stated, © The Myers Family 2022
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Streetly and Family Memories
1936-61
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L8F
April 2022
