STREETLY, STAFFORDSHIRE MEMORIES  (1936 - 1961) TOBOGGANING on the CHESTER ROAD  (1947) by Chris Myers

WINTER 1947 Here are we - I and a couple of friends - on the Chester Road in Streetly, on the hill leading up from the Parson & Clerk towards the Manor Road crossroads. (I'm on the right, in BVGS black-and-white scarf and short trousers). It's January or February 1947.  All great fun and such an improvement over the normal venue which had always been Manor Road. Only interrupted by the occasional vehicle for which we of course had to keep a look out and give way to. Very little going on, though. At one stage, up from the Parson & Clerk, came roaring an open military jeep, the driver huddled in gaberdine, muffler and large gauntlets. An angry man with a swarthy complexion and a strange accent – he didn't look British at all and may have been, possibly, American or European. He harangued us for several minutes in no uncertain terms, pointing out the dangers and so on. We absorbed his message, looked suitably remorseful, watched him finally roar off on his journey northwards and then of course returned to our fun. Over the following days and weeks snow and ice remained everywhere but the traffic on the Chester Road slowly returned and the wonderful white, compacted surface grew harder and grittier and blacker. Finally it was 2 or 3 inches thick, like a layer of sooty, impenetrable concrete. And of course wholly useless for toboganning. Eventually a team of POWs appeared and inched their way up from the Birmingham direction, wielding pickaxe and shovel, prizing slabs of this horrible material off the road surface and loading them on to a lorry. Day after day, a couple of hundred yards at a time. These men, in their drab winter clothing with POW stencilled on the back and their strange headgear - Afrika Corps, perhaps, or later - were viewed by us with vague curiosity but no particular affection or sympathy and certainly little apprehension. They were just a carryover of that strange wartime world we had all grown up in, for almost as long as we could remember, and which was normal to us. Some may well have been in England for years already, with families scattered in a ruined country. I have often wondered, over the many years since those days, what those men were feeling, far from home and those they held dear, as young children like us walked by and idly glanced at them before entering our comfortable, welcoming family homes. And then forgetting all about them. ************ A footnote about the houses in the background of the photograph. I knew the family in the house in the immediate background. As the house was then..... .....and as it became, 75 years later..... The father was a survivor of Dunkirk; they had moved in during the previous year, probably not long after he was demobbed. Now, like everyone in that row of houses which included my own, they were no doubt desperately trying to keep the chill out of their homes: struggling with condensation on their single-glazed windows which at best just streamed down the glass every morning or, more probably, was wholly iced up. Virtually no loft insulation, no snugly fitting, double-glazed windows, certainly no cavity wall foam, no central heating, just open fires or paraffin stoves or electric fires - if you could afford to keep them running. What an ordeal it must have been at that time for the grown-ups everywhere, especially the old or the poorly or the hard-up. Not for us kids, though. Or at least, not on that day. Clear sky, sun and sheet ice everywhere. That house may well have shared an interesting little quirk with our own home, a bit further up the road. The rear of all the houses up that side of the road faced east. So they were vulnerable to easterly blizzards . The killer blizzards were those which were icy, when the snow they contained was dry and hard and fine. Today such "weather events" would hardly be noticed, but then...... As I mentioned above, none of us had much of the protection which is regarded in modern life as essential for our well-being in winter and is largely taken for granted. What we DID have, in our case at least, was a roof which lacked flashing and had almost nothing in the way of mortar to plug the gaps between the tiles and to keep out whatever was being hurled at us all the way from the Urals. The result was a pile of snow in the loft, on top of the suitcases and cartons, just waiting for the warmer air from below to melt it and send it cascading down through the ceiling. Thus arose an essential chore for my father in most winters and he would keep a tally of how many bucketfuls of snow he would bring down. Up and down the stepladder, in and out of the loft, time after time. Sometimes it was dozens. We were by no means alone in all this, of course. In fact, one year - I don't know if it was 1947 or another year - there developed a bit of a competition between various correspondents in the "Readers' Letters" column of the "Post" or the "Mail" where various claims regarding to the number of bucketfuls removed from above were made. My father contributed; but I don't know if he was successful in claiming the record. In the end, Dad resolved the problem by tacking roofing felt - when such materials again became available - to the underneath of the rafters; and I lost a regular source of winter entertainment for ever.

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