Edmondscote Road
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
It's still there, Edmondscote Road. A crescent of semi-detached council houses hanging on, limpet like, to Princes Drive. Even the field behind the houses is still there. The field that flooded in the winter when the River Leam burst its banks before they built the sluice gate. The field that was once three times the size before they took the far end for a
running track. The field that, when the houses were first built was called " The Dumps." That was when it was littered with large clay mounds that were moated in wet weather and, when dry, served as ideal moguls for racing second-hand bikes before they levelled it to a grass soccer pitch. A group of large oak trees still stand close up to the waterfall near the bridge.
Edmondscote Road was not a typical council estate. The uniform, flat, grey, stippled walls of the houses indicated that this was not privately owned property but because of its close proximity to the river it had a character of its own. The main road curved in the shape of a large D and had three short side roads spiking off towards the field with four houses down each side. Ours was on the first of these spikes.
There was no litter, no shops nearby and barely any traffic unless someone was visiting or delivering. In those days the deliveries were frequent and ranged from the Corona Pop lorry to the Baker's van. On special days the knife grinder on his large blue tricycle would turn up. He pushed his machine onto a stand and, with the pull of a lever, converted his trike into a grinding machine, the gears driving a large stone wheel. It was the nearest we got to a firework display before November, watching the sparks shoot off the blades of our mothers' knives as he pedalled steadily. It was Flash Gordon firing his ray gun at Ming's evil army.
Another treat was the rag and bone man ringing his bell with the promise of a live goldfish for any scrap worth his while. We would scurry round to the shed looking for bits of copper and lead in the hope of satisfying his appetite for such rubbish and owning our own fish.
The nearest thing to heavy traffic that came our way was Mr. Lumbley's removal van. He lived next door. There was the coal lorry and bin men but they didn't count. It was, I suppose, a safe place to grow up in.
The road lies between the towns of Warwick and Leamington which have since merged into one urban development. It is bordered by the river on one side and a high banked local railway line running parallel to Princes Drive on the other. At night I would lie in my bed and hear the steam trains chugging into Milverton Station half a mile away or sometimes catch the sound of the expresses racing along the track on the far side of the river towards Leamington station.
We lived at number eleven. A flat concrete porch rested on two painted steel poles above the front door. It was a useful escape route from my bedroom window when I needed to foray into the night to meet other daredevils who had left their bedrooms by a similar route. A quick scramble from my bedroom window onto the slab, legs over the edge and gripping onto the pole, a twist, some skin left on the sharp edge of the concrete and a quiet slide down to the ground. Our living room was just to the left of the front door and my mother had the ears of a bat.
Regaining entry was easier; a shin up the pole, two, by now filthy, hands pushing down on to the slab, one bare knee over, kneel up and scramble back through the window into my tiny bedroom.
This room was so small that as the door opened inwards it hit the bed at ninety degrees. To the left as you entered was "The Box" which allowed headroom for the people walking up the stairs. It occupied an eighth of the bedroom and served as a support for my Triang electric train set which ran the eight foot length of the room opposite the bed. Beneath the train set and next to " The Box " was the only storage space left in the room. It contained a small brown utility cupboard crammed with my toys and possessions. I had to crawl beneath the train set to open it. This cramped corner was where I felt secure and in control. At Milverton County Infants School, whenever, in assembly, we sang, "Jesus bids us shine with a pure, pure light " I always pictured the spot in my bedroom next to the brown cupboard under the train set. This was, " My small corner"
My only concern with this thought was that if I was, "Like a little candle burning in the night", there was great danger of me setting fire to the house. Spontaneous combustion was not foremost in my mind and I suppose whoever wrote the hymn (wasn’t it the Headmistress?) had a little space in their bedroom too and she hadn't had any problems. I always wondered what she kept in her cupboard.
My bedroom was my sanctuary. It was ice cold in winter and baking hot in the summer. Although my father was a plumber and knew the value of insulation I don't think the materials had been developed to prevent perma frost forming on the inside of the single-paned, iron-framed window which was my only defence against the icy blasts that whipped around the house, rippling the curtains. Admittedly these were not of the heaviest material. They were drab and thin, allowing car headlights to travel across the far wall of my bedroom, gathering speed as a vehicle approached and then vanishing as the engine faded away into the night. I would sometimes count these displays if I was unable to sleep but when I was five ,in 1955, they were few and far between on our road.
Apart from the distant trains, occasional cars and the wind in the trees, the most unforgettable sound of my childhood, and one that struck the fear of God into me, was that of my mother coughing in the living room below. In those days she was a tall, thin, handsome woman and had been smoking heavily since the age of fourteen. I loathed the smell of smoke on her and in the house. My fear in those days was that she would be dead when I woke up in the morning. Her rattling chest and asthmatic wheeze carried through the walls and pierced my soul. When I was very young I was told that my father had been warned to give up smoking or ruin his health and he had managed to shake the habit successfully. It was a cruel irony that he would later die of cancer while my mother continued to smoke into her seventies. The senseless inhalation of toxic substances has induced revulsion in me all my life.
During my early childhood I developed a ritual involving counting and a series of prayers before I could go to sleep. If I said the Lord's prayer and then," As I lay me down to sleep " without making a mistake and then counted to a hundred in groups of ten in one breath with my head under the blankets, then maybe, (just maybe), she would survive the night. She always did. Each night the coughing would start again and gradually the ritual became more sophisticated.
My sister was two years older than me and occupied the larger bedroom at the rear of the house. As we were set at right angles to the rest of the road her bedroom had an uninterrupted view of at least ten of our neighbours’ back gardens. We would often gaze out on a sunny summer's afternoon at the pageant below.
There were no wicket fences on the estate. The boundaries were marked by metre high concrete posts linked by three tight strands of smooth steel wire. Ours was the only garden with a wooden fence. This had been built by my father at the top of the garden to screen out onlookers into our lounge and kitchen. He had constructed it out of packing cases used for shipping cars from the Roots Motor Factory where he worked as a ‘maintenance engineer’, a term my mother used. ‘Plumber’ had not yet acquired an acceptable social standing.
My sister and I often watched Mr.Widkins, our other next door neighbour. After cycling back from the Coventry Arms public house on the Rugby Road, he would drop his machine noisily into a brick shed and shuffle falteringly into the garden to tend his runner beans. His unsteady gait and sweaty brow bore witness to heavy, lunchtime drinking sessions. This scene was played out regularly and I often wondered how my mum would have reacted if my dad had behaved like this.
Fred Widkins was a man of few words and, although I occasionally heard him swearing at his two daughters or having flaming rows with his son, Edward. I can hardly remember him saying more than, " Hullo Doreen " or, " All right Bill? " to my parents in all the years I lived next door to him. As soon as the pubs opened he was off on his bike. When they closed he returned. He worked at the Lockheed factory (at the far end of Princes Drive) but seemed to show no interest at all in his children. After his father's death Eddie bought the house from the council and continued to live there with his mother. His sisters had gone their separate ways. As an adult, returning to visit my mum, I would look out of my sister's old bedroom window and sometimes caught a glimpse of Eddie tending his runner beans. His hands did not shake and his walk was steady. Maybe he had also uttered bedtime rituals for his father once. I never asked him.
THE HOUSE
The living room was at the centre of things. It ran the width of the house with two doors at either end, one leading into a tiny hall beneath my very small bedroom and the other to the kitchen at the back. This door had special significance for me as it invoked one of my earliest childhood memories. I can remember being pushed in a heavy, wooden baby swing built by my father. The huge corkscrew hooks that had held it in place on the door frame remained long after the swing itself had disappeared. I think they were eventually removed when I started catching my head on them at around the age of fourteen. I grew very tall, very quickly.
In the centre of the living room wall was an open hearth that my mother cursed. It was eventually replaced by a glass fronted contraption that heated the hot water supply as well. There were great plans for my dad to organise a central heating system from it but he only ever got as far as putting in a huge, silver radiator in the kitchen. This cut off one third of the entrance to the living room as it was situated close to the door. The theory of central heating fine but unfortunately, when the radiator was on the hot water went cold. My dad calculated that we would have to have the fire stoked up and burning non-stop to do the job properly. We tried it once, taking it in shifts to run to the coal shed with the planished coal scuttle, (dad's handiwork), and heaping anthracite on to the glowing pyre. The living room became so hot that we had to open the doors. The heat then entered the kitchen and there was no need to have the radiator on. We discovered Catch 22 twenty years before Joseph Heller.
The fire breathed life into the place however, and I looked forward to winter evenings. As the nights drew in, paper and wood splinters were laid for the first fire of the year. When I grew older I became more sympathetic to my mother's rather negative point of view regarding open fires as I was entrusted with the task of cleaning out the grate each morning and trying to rekindle the flames from one dull, orange ember embedded in ash and clinker. My dad always felt a sense of achievement if he could stoke the fire up so high the night before that it would not need re-lighting. This did have its drawbacks, however, for if the coal was dusty or the lumps too small the air didn’t circulate, the fire died out, leaving a grate full of half burnt fuel that was infinitely harder to clean out.
My father had built a mahogany mantelshelf and bookcases on either side of the grate. No one else in the street had one and it supported my parent's hardback collection of Reader's Digest novellas. It had been assembled in the back yard, protected from the prying eyes of inquisitive neighbours by dad’s packing case fence. The joints were doweled and glued and it sported three lower book shelves cut and measured with his usual accuracy. He always used a magnificent carpenter's ruler that folded in eight different ways around a central, brass joint. He could flick it deftly from six inches to a yard with one hand. If I tried to do the same I only succeeded in poking myself in the eye or pinching the tops of my fingers.
Unlike my father, the builder who had laid the concrete floor in the living room seemed not to have had the benefit of such an accurate measuring device. The floor to the right of the fireplace was about two inches lower than that on the left. This defect might never have been noticed were it not for my father's long mantel shelf which, ran seven feet across the top of the fireplace and sloped gradually and obviously down towards the television.
The television itself came much later, of course. My early years were spent with "Listen with Mother" (or "Ding-de-Dong"). The radio was on a small shelf next to my father's chair. I sat on the arm facing the beautiful walnut box with its woven material lying beneath a curled, fretwood facia of highly polished wood. A green and yellow light formed a band across the bottom and my sister and I sat in anticipation as the valves inside slowly warmed up. We could smell the dust burning on the hot, glass cylinders as we waited for Daphne Oxenford to ask whether we were 'sitting comfortably.' We often fidgeted a little just to make sure and some uncomfortable middle class voices then sang us a nursery rhyme. We were also treated to a story about a horrible golliwog or a mean toad and reassured when justice was done. I t always was. We were comforted by Jack and Jill hospitalising themselves in the search for a bucket of water or Tom Tom stealing pigs, being thrashed 'til he roared, and then the poor pig being eaten. My experience had already led me to believe that if you wanted to find water you should look at the bottom of a hill not the top and who would want to steal a pig anyway? What was he going to do with it? It wasn't until I was much older that I dared to experiment with the tuner in search of other entertainment. I remember being fascinated by names like "Vienna" and "Luxembourg" and hearing strange languages appear and disappear as the thin red line moved slowly and smoothly across the dial.
Entertainment in my early years was mainly to be found outside the house, however. My pride and joy was a metallic pedal jeep with a white star painted on the bonnet but as I grew very quickly, I soon looked ridiculous trying to squeeze my long legs into a toy built for the "average child". As I pedalled my knees would beat a rhythm on my chest and my shins would scrape on the sharp edge of the dashboard, peeling off fine layers just below the knee as I frantically tried to overtake my sister who was cruising majestically on her deluxe Triang tricycle. Her machine had hand brakes and a modest little boot to carry dolls in. With pneumatic tyres and chain driven wheels her tricycle outclassed my rattling tin jeep with giraffe driver every time. I was a bad loser. My only hope of ever winning was to organise a course in a straight line and have a "there and back" race. My cunning plan was to start on the return journey while my sister was still disappearing into the distance, heading for the agreed lamp post. Even then, with her turn of speed and two year age advantage, I was usually pipped at the post.
VAL
Before moving to Edmondscote Road, my parents had lived in a cellar flat in the centre of Leamington Spa. Just after the end of the Second World War they had applied (along with thousands of others) for one of the many council houses that were being built as part of the reconstruction programme. During their brief stay in this flat my mum managed to fall down the flight of stone steps that led to the front door, holding my tiny sister. Luckily there was no major injury but it came as a great relief when they were allocated the house in Edmondscote Road that our family was to occupy for more than forty years. The wooden staircase there was carpeted. I was not yet born.
As with many sibling relationships my sister was my bitterest enemy from the year dot. I don’t know how this situation developed but it seemed to be a natural state for both of us and we delighted in each other's misfortunes. Beneath the animosity lay something deeper - further animosity. I can still remember the smug satisfaction I felt the day we were both gardening with dad in the patch beyond the packing case fence. Val had managed to push the prong of a garden fork right through her foot and out through the sole of her Wellington boot. I knew that mum had only just bought those boots and would be furious. My parents, unaccountably, took quite another view though and rushed her straight to Warnford Hospital in our motorbike and side car. No mention was ever made of the damaged boots purchased only that week from Woolworth’s. Parents took some understanding.
Since she was two years older than me Val, initially, had the advantage of weight, height (not for long) and experience over me in physical confrontation. I was agile and mean-spirited, using low forms of combat such as hair pulling and biting but battles in the early days usually ended in victory for my sister who, with bulldog tenacity, would eventually off-balance me and, pinning me down with her knees on my shoulders, inflict the most insidious torture devised by woman - the tickle! I would promise her anything to be relieved of the indescribable torment of her probing fingers as she played xylophone on my rib cage or, worse, inflicted the "armpit burrow." These exercises in persecution were formative for bladder control and I eventually learnt that the quickest and surest escape technique was to claim imminent urological disaster. Even Val did not dare to gamble on that bluff and this allowed immediate escape to the only lockable room in the house, safe from the clutches of my sadistic sibling.
Our mutual animosity mellowed as we grew older and we grew to respect, admire and love each other. I suppose we had all along.