A colourised view of Town Street, c.1910s[/caption]
Somebody suggested we called on Sid Lingham’s office in Town Street Road, Brandon, who was building low cost bungalows there. We located the road a mile from the town - the Town Street Road sign pointed right. The road beyond the first bend turned into a rough track – no footpaths, a flint wall bordering an open field on the right hand side and further down you entered Crown Street, and of course The Crown Pub. Opposite was the Tip Football Ground (as it was called). Behind the Crown Pub was White Horse Street, at the end was the chapel and TOWN STREET. Thus Town Street road was the road leading to TOWN STREET.
We bought one of Sid’s new bungalows which was built six months later on that open field in Town Street Road and within a year the Road leading to TOWN STREET was renamed Crown Street, as it is today. A little bit of local history was lost with these changes we feel, apart from another resident - AJ Rolfe who retired there from his VG Stores in Hockwold and had paid good money for his letter heading embossing machine that became defunct before he had time to use it! AJ was less than pleased one has to say."
Cherry's mother with the bath[/caption]
it, it couldn’t have been daily because he did all of Brandon.
We eventually got a flushing toilet which was tagged on to the back of the main hallway, so basically it was still outside and only the door to it was inside, but was a vast improvement on what we had. There was no hand wash basin and no hot water, just a toilet. We still had to boil the copper for water for baths and laundry. My Dad would come home from the fields working in the dirt and chopping out sugar beet or working on the harvest fields where dust was flying, sometimes black with dust. Water was boiled for him to wash, we couldn’t heat enough for a bath every evening, it had to be filled and then emptied. You needed another bath by the time you had finished! But my Dad was never dirty and our house and washing was spotlessly clean, I can’t imagine how hard our parents and grandparents worked.
Anyway because we had to come down a dark winding stairway into a long corridor, through the living room to the front hallway, if the toilet was needed in the night a chamber pot was kept upstairs.
My mum and dad were on the council list for a house when I was born in 1944 and had no luck. My mum who was not backward in coming forward had badgered the councillors for years and was once chucked down the rectory steps. When I was about twelve, I came home from school one day and my mum was in a high state of excitement. She grabbed me and danced about a bit and said, "We have got a house!" She said it several times. She hadn’t been able to tell anyone all day, no mobile phone, so she was bursting with it. When my dad eventually came home, he just stepped into the yard and mum leaned out of the bedroom window and hollered at the top of her voice "JACK! WE HAVE GOT A HOUSE!" She then hurled the chamber pot out of the window. It broke into a thousand pieces about four inches in front of him. I do remember the handle being in one piece. My dad looked up at her and said very quietly, "Bloody sorft thing to do" and then we all fell about with laughter. What luxury when we moved into 29 Elizabeth Road."
Cherry Rogers[/caption]
The Cinema had a change of programme three times a week and a special programme on Sundays. It was well sprayed with disinfectant by Jack Coote before every performance and was ruled by him with a rod of iron. He always dressed for the part bow tie etc. At the interval everyone used to tear across the road at breakneck speed to Ronnie Mackender’s shop. Cinema-friendly snacks were bought - crisps with paper that made one hell of a row, monkey nuts (we always called them monkey nuts) in shells so they would crunch underfoot and bags of cherries with pips that could be spit like missiles if the film was boring. As a child I always went to the cinema on a Saturday afternoon. I think it was sixpence and my Nana gave me the money to get rid of me for the afternoon. I had my dinner at hers (called dinner then, it was the main meal, lunch was not a word in their vocabulary) and after dinner I went out of the house like a rocket. I had to get to the cinema early to swing round the railings outside and had to be among the first in. There was always a cowboy, "Jesse James Rides Again" was one I remember, a cartoon and a main film.
The kids were given a free show once a year and the information went round like wildfire, free pictures, on Saturday. I reckon every kid from Brandon, Weeting and Tip turned up. It was mayhem, with kids flying about along the Avenue in both directions. We were given a free ice cream or lolly and war was waged with them. Cowboys against Indians was one of them. Ice creams were hurled in the air and bits stuck to the screen. I am sure we were not intentionally naughty, but we were all so excited.
Poor white-haired old Mr Knight was an usher and had no control whatsoever. He seemed old to us but perhaps he wasn’t more than sixty. Mrs Brown was the usherette and she was lovely but a little dodgy on her feet. Between them they had no chance. The appearance of Jack Coote for one second, commanded complete silence and you could have heard a pin drop, until he walked away and then the noise was deafening.
Just as an afterthought. I do remember it was not unusual for the film to be stopped two or three times, so that some kind of order could be regained. The walk home with all those kids was an experience not to be missed.
Peter Woods as a child[/caption]
"Our ‘front room’ looked out onto the market square and in one corner of this room stood a Morrison shelter. This had a flat top with a cage like construction underneath. When the siren went dad would remove the detachable side of the cage framework and we would crawl into the shelter. Once inside we would settle down into the bed which was always made up in readiness. My father would replace the wire from the inside and we would wait anxiously for the ‘All Clear’.
The front, or shop-end, of the house was connected to the back – where the kitchen was located and where we had our meals – by a long corridor. This was covered with a veritable river of coconut matting. It was so long that it had to be rolled up by my mother and steered along the remaining stretch of passage and outside the back door. Today, whenever I see a field with round bales of hay I’m reminded of the Woodrow house rolls of coconut matting. This then had to be dragged and man-handled over our heavy-duty washing line, draped in a series of fancy, pelmet-like, curves. Thus suspended above the yard my mother would attack it from both sides with a sturdy yard brush. The much flimsier wicker carpet-beater was totally inadequate for the coarse, and surprisingly heavy, coconut matting. Boudicca could not have attacked the Roman legions with more vigour than my mother expended on this thankless task! The very first glimmerings of an aesthetic awareness came into play at that time when I became fascinated by the intricate patterns formed by the dust that had worked its way through the matting. This residue from countless footfalls would be carelessly swept up and removed with a dustpan and long-handled brush. I can recall thinking, albeit in a very simplistic and ill-defined way, t
hat that it was wrong that such beauty had to be destroyed in the name of cleanliness. It’s amazing what kind of memories are stored in that reference library we call a mind.
Because of the size of the property we had several Land Army girls billeted with us. My mother had the very demanding job of feeding and generally keeping an eye on them. She must have done a reasonably good job because several of the girls continued to correspond with her when the war ended.
As described above, the Woodrow house filled the right angle created by the intersection of the London Road and Market Hill. Sometimes the large U.S.A.A.F trucks that plied to and from the railway station, where they collected munitions destined for a large dump over towards Elveden, would break their journey on the main square close to Woodrow’s corner. These trucks were a magnet both for us children and for the local girls. Our interest lay in the sticks of chewing gum and more exotic commodities like pieces of chocolate and small squares of dates which our colourful allies dispensed from their ration packs. The older girls were more interested in dates of a different kind and if they were especially lucky, or perhaps particularly accommodating, a pair of nylons – the most cherished of all gifts – might be produced from the dark, inner recesses of one of the tanks. Our engaging transatlantic compatriots were viewed with suspicion and not a little envy by the locally based British servicemen. The aphorism of them being, “Over-paid, oversexed and over here,” was frequently applied. For my part I can certainly recall a certain buzz amongst our Land Army boarders whenever the Americans were in town. At such times I think my mother reluctantly accepted that on such occasions her role as guardian of the morals of her newly liberated charges was a virtually impossible task. I still have the mental image of a near-demented mother hen desperately trying to gather up and protect her chicks in a henhouse that has been penetrated by a family of foxes.
When we were living in the Woodrow Shop house I sometimes encountered Mr. Woodrow’s sister, Doris Rawlings. This was particularly so when I had my after-school job in the ironmongers. Doris had a small hat shop in the same building as the ironmongers. Her shop window was just round the corner from the London Road and looked out onto Market Hill. She also sold hosiery and other articles of female attire in her shop which I believe was rather unimaginatively called The Hat Shop. The pragmatism of this name was somehow very much of its time and reflected the austerity and highly focussed vision of the war years – no looking back to the past and a name like The Hat Shoppe or a more futuristic name like The Hat Box or Mad as a Hatter. No, this was plain, unadorned, straight-down-the-line The Hat Shop for middle class ladies who wanted to forget the war with a little indulgence in the local milliners. After Doris was widowed Reggie lived with his sister in a bungalow in Church Street. But it was not really Doris or her hats and hose that interested me, but her little black and white dog called Scamp. Scamp was very playful and I spent a lot of time making a fuss of him. We became real friends. I really loved Scamp and he always seemed pleased to see me when he came into the shop. Perhaps my love of dogs started during these sessions."
Jack Mackender and Alec Rolph. Photo courtesy Cherry Rogers[/caption]
Dad also kept a large number of hives on the Elveden Estate where he worked. I remember going out with dad in his first van to collect bees which had swarmed. My Dad scooped them into a box, or shook them into it if they were in a tree, and I sat in the back of the van holding the lids on them. Would I do that now? I might do! I think before he got the van, he balanced the box of bees on his motorbike and transported them balanced on the tank. The van was great, two or three boxes could be moved at once. Dad took the swarms to a new hive and shook the bees on to a piece of sacking spread in front of the hive and the bees just marched in.
When my grandad died in the late fifties, (1958 I think) my Dad became the owner of grandad’s bees. Although he had looked after them for many years by that time, the bees had to be told that grandad had died and that dad was now the new owner. I remember my nana and dad going to each hive, putting a black cloth on the hive and telling the bees of my grandad’s death. They missed a hive and they did die. Coincidence? Probably, but it was the country tradition.
In the spring we put frames in the hives to which we attached a thin sheet of wax, a starter kit for the bees, so we didn’t get odd shaped honeycomb which we couldn’t harvest. When the bees had done their work all summer my dad removed the combs and they were put in an extractor where they were spun until all the honey was in the extractor. It was then passed through muslin into a ripener and from there was put in jars. My Dad used to make fondant candy to feed to the bees in the winter and of course leave them some of the honey they had worked so hard for. We always had a sweetener for puddings and cakes even when sugar was rationed.
I think my happiest memory of my dad was him in a long white apron quietly putting honey into jars while I sat on the steps of the honey shed in the late afternoon listening to the bees and eating a large piece of honeycomb."
