[2005] POST-WAR YEARS
[2005] POST-WAR YEARS
0043 – The House at Bromborough Pool
In 1945, after the end of the war when I was just five years old, we moved to a new house. This is where most of my memories start. It was on the factory village owned by Prices, who by then had become part of Unilever. The village itself was made up of three parallel roads about half a mile long, each of which was lined with houses for the workers. Two of the roads, originally meant for the ordinary workers, were made up of terraced houses facing each other. The other was lined on one side by semi-detached houses of slightly better quality, for supervisors, with a view over the allotments on the other side. That was where my nana (grandmother), on my father's side, lived.
In the far corner, away from the road that led to the village and the main part of the factory, there was the cricket/recreation field. The field itself was big enough to contain a full-size cricket pitch and two football pitches along with a sports pavilion. Beyond this, at the bottom edge nearest the river Mersey, was Bromborough dock. This was where Unilever’s imported raw materials were unloaded. Alongside this were the grounds of the factory itself. On one of the other sides of the field were the village hall, the church and the village school; the company provided for its workers almost from cradle to grave – it once even had its own nursing home, which was where I was born.
On the remaining side were the best houses; originally for use by the senior managers. These were large Georgian semi-detached villas, built in the 1850s. It was in one of these that we then came to live.
It was owned by the company, and as such we paid rent for it -- all of 25 shillings a week! Each of these large houses had an extensive garden which was probably something like a quarter of an acre in size. There were two blocks of houses, in other words four semi-detached houses. Two were still houses but the two nearest the river had been converted into flats, with an enclosed outside staircase built for access to the upper flat.
Number three ‘The Green’, which was our house, was -- as I have said -- a Georgian villa. It was built around 1850, and was fairly typical of that period. Thus on the ground floor it had quite an elaborate vestibule, on the side of the house, through which you entered; and then a hall which was typical of that period, with decorated plaster coving. At the far end there was a staircase going up to the second-floor which had a wonderful mahogany handrail down which I loved to slide.
On the ground floor there were three main reception rooms. One of these was used as the ‘front room’, only to be used – as was the custom in those times - for special occasions. This contained the good furniture, including our most expensive carpet square (fitted carpets were then an unknown feature, and black japanned floorboards were the norm) and three-piece suite. The other room on the front of the house was the dining-room with a heavy oak dining table and sideboard. In it there were also a couple of easy chairs and ultimately this was where the television was. So, although initially we rarely used it - eventually we spent our evenings watching television in there. The final reception room, at the back, was only used as my playroom. It was big enough, though, to contain a table tennis table - with enough room to play a fairly vigorous game. Later this was interchangeable with a small pocket-billiards table as well.
That main living room was, paradoxically, what would originally have been the servants hall; though we used it as our main room (and called it the 'kitchen'). In it we had another dining table with chairs etc and this was where we had the radio; which in the early days was the main source of all our entertainment. As television was only broadcast in the evening, in essence this was where we spent most of our time; much as the servants originally would have done. When we first got there this room had a wonderful array of bells. These had been linked to bell pushes in all the other rooms so that the servants could be summoned to wherever the family required their service. It also had a wonderful built in dresser, reaching nearly up to the ceiling and covering a whole wall, which I guess was contemporary with the house itself; because, when it was taken out to make more room, they had to put new floorboards down – since there was nothing underneath it. Behind that room was the actual kitchen. I guess that was where the servants originally cooked all the food. It was thus a smaller room, and we used it as the standard kitchen with a cooker, sink and the usual array of features; which initially included a large food safe made of perforated zinc, which was - much later - replaced by a small refrigerator.
The 'kitchen' (living room) was also where I had my desk, around which my homework revolved! This was a sloping clerk's desk – in beautiful polished mahogany - sourced from Price's.
The house had been used, during the war, by the ARP. So, when we first arrived, half of the kitchen was taken over by a shower which was meant to be used in the case of gas attack. Again Prices’ Estates Department had to take all that out. One of the joys of living in rented accommodation, especially on a factory village, was that every little problem could be solved by calling in the ‘landlord’s’ work force!
Off this there was a pantry, where my parents stored all crockery and other things. It led down to a backdoor and then out into a little patio; presumably where the servants were in earlier times allowed to sun themselves out of sight of everyone else. This was, though, never opened up in my time and was just a used as a something like a rubbish tip.
Outside the main backdoor was a backyard with high lime-washed brick walls, again presumably for the servants to work in. It had its own outdoor lavatory, so the servants would not need to mix with the gentry. This was, in our time, used mainly by my father who seemed quite happy with the cold! It also had a store, in which was kept the coal and firewood, Part of this was sectioned off and used to store the apples over the winter. I should mention, of course, that the whole house was heated only by coal-fires. There was no central heating at all. Even the hot water came from a boiler behind the fire in the kitchen. That fire, in the kitchen, was in effect a range and had ovens alongside the fire; though they never got hot enough to cook in, and all we ever did was put our clothes in them to keep them warm ready for the freezing cold of the morning.
The front garden was laid to lawn and flowers, and a part of the back was too. But most of the back was laid to vegetables and these were the joy of my father. He used to provide us with fresh vegetables throughout the year. Interspersed with the vegetable areas were old apple trees which were twenty or thirty feet high. These provided cooking apples, with just one eating apple tree. But this soon ran out, each Autumn, as we picked its – deliciously juicy - apples to eat them straight off the tree. For the rest the year these trees were used by us children as wonderful climbing frames.
Outside the back of the house tacked onto the back of the kitchen, but only accessible from the garden, was what we called the wash-house, because that is what it had been when the servants were around. It contained a clothes-washing boiler, though we never used this. In practice it was used by us as a garden store. We certainly used it for all the gardening equipment and as a general storehouse. To be honest it was a pretty chaotic dump of abandoned bits and pieces.
The upper floor was more conventionally arranged, with four large bedrooms. One of these was my parent's and one was used to store all our junk. One of the other two was the guest bedroom (at the front), with a modern (post-war 'utility') bedroom suite and the other, at the rear, was mine. This was furnished with an old (Edwardian) bedroom suite. It was comfortable enough, with a bed which had a conventional mattress on top of a wire mesh sprung support.
All in all it was a self-contained world, even without the servants, and I spent a very happy decade and a half there.
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