Together and then the War came

Mum and Dad first lived in Besley Street in South Streatham before moving to Kettering Street, I think, just before the 2nd WW. The flat was part of a classic up and down and was on the ground floor. View Larger Map The basic width was one room plus a corridor that ran from the front door to the room my mother always called The Kitchen, although it was our sitting and dining room in reality. There were two rooms and the toilet coming off the passage – as it was known. From The Kitchen there were two more small rooms. One was the kitchen, which Mum always called The Scullery whilst the other became my bedroom in the fullness of time. The two front doors, ours and the flat upstairs, were side by side at the front so just inside the upper flat was the stairs. This left a gap under the stairs near to the Kitchen. This left space for two cupboards. One was a straight in but the other went down under the stairs and was used as a coal hole. Mum was very house proud and kept everything spotless. One the day that the coalman was due, there was a general uproar. The passage carpet had to come up and newspaper laid all the way down to ensure that no coal dust from sacks or from boots would mar the polish on the floor. It didn’t matter because she always assumed that it was dirty afterwards and had to clean the passage from one end to the other. We used to have 1 ton of coal delivered at a time, which required 10 trips by 2 coalmen, each carrying 1 hundredweight of coal on his back at a time. Not a job for the weedy ones amongst us. My brother came along in 1935 before they moved. My knowledge of this period is very sketchy. I know that Dad played cricket at a quite good level. One of his regular team mates was his best man – Bill Catternack (not sure of the spelling there). Dad was to be re-united with Bill much later in life having lost touch sometime after the war, probably when he stopped playing cricket.  The war didn’t affect the family as much as most. Dad was too young for the 1st World War and, because of his back injury, was excused from military service in the 2nd. Dad’s occupation is a little confused during the war. My initial thoughts were that he was already working at The Elephant and Castle by the outbreak but then I remembered a story from 1942 that needed him to be still working at Cowes. I think that this version is probably right but why he left Cowes and took a job that required a 45 minute bus ride in each direction is a mystery to me.  The story goes as follows: Uncle Frank was in the Merchant Navy during the war and served on the Russian Convoys. During one of the trips, his ship was sunk and word came back that he had been drowned. Now this is why I think the Cowes story is the right one was because Dad was a Foreman there and he told this story from that point of view. One day, some six months after they all thought he was dead Frank appeared at Cowes asking for Charlie. Imagine the surprise and relief to find out that your brother is still alive and kicking! It seems that Frank was rescued on a ship that didn’t get back to the UK for 6 months and no-one ever thought to send a message. That was the way it was then, of course. Sometime after that Dad ended up with the Castle Equipment Company in Newington Causeway, just up from The Elephant and Castle just 2 miles from London Bridge. His job there was as a leather cutter so I get the impression that an argument had ensued at some time and Dad had lost his foreman’s job with Cowes and was forced into something that was not quite as responsible. It is also telling that the job was a 45 minute bus ride from home. His job was to cut leather according to a pattern. The firm’s normal output was travel and golf bags but during the war, they made military items.  Dad’s contribution to the war before this is not known but for the rest of the war he was a Fire Watcher – a task that involved sitting on the roof of a building during a raid and reporting where the fire brigade was needed or tackling an incendiary a stirrup pump.. Not exactly a safe or cushy job at all. There was an Anderson Shelter in the postage stamp back garden at Kettering Street but the family never used it. As far as I can see, they all squeezed into the coal hole, though what they did when there was a ton of coal in there as well, I never did find out. There were at least three occasions when, on emerging from the coal hole, they found that the front door had been blown off its hinges and was at the kitchen end of the passage. There was also an occasion when an incendiary landed outside and Dad took next door’s potted plant from the front of their flat and dumped it on the fire. Next door was not amused. Presumably, she didn’t want the house to burn but... At the bottom of the street there is a railway line from Streatham to Wimbledon. During the worst of the Blitz, there was always a line of anti-aircraft guns drawn up on the line and banging away all night! Not a lot of sleeping went on. No bombs appear to have dropped on Kettering Street but there were ‘bomb sites’ spotted around. Fortunately, the Germans were going mainly for the docks and central London so there wasn’t the same volume of attack as in those areas. Doodlebugs – V1 flying bombs – were bigger threats because these could drop anywhere as their targeting relied on running out of fuel and the state of jet propulsion at that time wasn’t as well know as now. Although my parents remembered the V2, it didn’t feature in any stories so I assume that these didn’t affect them.