ABB                            A little of my early days

 This chapter relies heavily on the things told me by my mother.  In many areas my memories are vague.

 It may seem that I am labouring the point about my father, but I feel that this is a most pertinent part of my history.

 When we were first at 21 Cross Deep Gardens, my mother noticed that whenever she went out and left me with my father in charge, I was always grizzling when she returned.  It came to a head when my mother's mother was in the house and my old man gave her a clump when she intervened in him hitting me.  My Uncle George lived across the road at 50 Tennyson Avenue and my gran ran across and told him what had happened.

 My Uncle George, although a small man, was no coward and he went across to 21 Cross Deep Gardens to take my old man apart for hitting his Old Lady.  It seems that Satan (my mother's name for the old man) held me as a shield against George who would have put my father in hospital had he had the opportunity.  The old man wouldn't venture out while George was around after that.

I was told by my mother that when Satan held me outside in the front garden the weather was bitterly cold.  I went down with pneumonia soon after that.

Somebody notified the NSPCC. My old man blamed my gran, but my mother thinks it was her other brother Bill (William Blanchford Melleney, to give him his full title).  My mother was asked by the NSPCC inspector to be present while they interviewed the old man.  She refused saying he'll only tell you a tissue of lies and you've only got my word against his.

Not long after that Satan left my mother.  The only memory I have of this was when my father came back to collect something and he forced the back door that my mother had bolted.  I remember him stretching through a window to undo a bolt.

I have another memory of my father's brutality.  We had a mongrel dog.  Like most family pets it wasn't always perfect.  It once dug up a bit of the front garden.  The thrashing it got from the old man terrified me.

My mother told me of an aunt of my father who my mother nursed for a week at number 21 Cross Deep Gardens.  At the end of the week she said to my mother that she would never darken this doorstep again "all the time that you've got that husband of yours".  She had witnessed some of my old man's behaviour.

It was at 21 Cross Deep Gardens that I started school.  It was a long walk four times a day with my mother.  The infants school in Briar Road is still shown on a recent A-to-Z map although the building is no longer there.  I remember we always walked down Heath Gardens past the Crimony marzipan factory.

About the only thing I remember about that school was one of the teachers used to read fairy-stories out of book twice a week.

Apparently I was a very tidy child and I would always insist on closing the front gates of gardens as we passed.  It became a family joke.

Where Tennyson Avenue joins Cross Deep Gardens, there is a large traffic island.  My mother and father took out a mortgage on the house for £1,100 in 1930 on the newly developed road of Cross Deep gardens.  House prices fell a long way later in the 1930s.

Tennyson Avenue was made up, but the road around the traffic island was very badly potholed.  I remember a milkman pushing a float, one of the old-style ones with a castering front wheel and two large side wheels.  The front wheel lurched into a pothole and the loaded float tipped on its side with the milk bottles being scattered across the muddy ground.  I expect the milkman got the sack for the waste of milk.  It was like that in those days.

My father walked out on my mother and we two kids at number 21; this was shortly after Len was born.  Although my mother took in tailoring, her money was just not enough to keep the mortgage and the rates etc going.  She often recalls when she fell into arrears with the rates she wrote to the Council explaining her problem.  She had a most courteous letter back asking her to pay as much as she could.  It couldn't last and she had to go and live with my uncle Bill at 10 Lisbon Avenue and let the building society re-possess the house.

I remember a couple of stories my mother told of her time at Cross Deep Gardens.  Outside a house a few doors down the road was seen a furniture van.  The occupants of the house were friendly with a neighbour who told my mother that she wasn't told by other people that they were moving.  They weren't ! They'd been away for a few days and when they returned they found that all their furniture had been stolen.  Crime has been around for a long time !

The second story was a demonstration of the snootiness of the occupants of the road.  My father was a tram conductor and used to go to and from work in his uniform.  A group of the neighbours got together and made up a round robin and presented it to my father.  The request was that as his uniform lowered the tone of the street, would he please travel to and from work in mufti.

A third memory: the house on the left (as viewed from the road) had a young woman there who used to sunbathe in a swimsuit in the back garden.  I remember that she was visible from one of the upstairs windows of our house.  Very daring in those days !

My mother’s marriage was sort of patched up and we all moved into a Council House at 146 Kingston Lane.  The house was on the very end of an estate that had a reputation.  A council workman came to number 146 to do some job, and as the weather was warm he wanted to take his jacket off.  He went into the garden and hung it on the fence.  My mother said "it might rain, hang it up in the hall".  The workman obviously a bit embarrassed said "I'd prefer to leave it out there madam".

In my mother's younger days she knew all about bugs and immediately fell in.  "There's no bugs in this house."  The workman's response was "if that's so, its the only one on the estate".  My mother said "OK, I'll keep a lookout for the weather".  That whole estate has now been demolished and totally rebuilt.  I wonder if the present residents know its history ?

The new 146 Kingston Lane is on the exact spot where the old 146 was.  I had cause to call at the house a few years back.  Facing the house from the road, on the right is a block of flats.  When I was at 146, this was a pig farm.  You've never seen so many flies in your life as that area saw.

The structure of number 146 (and I expect the rest of the estate) was typical pre-war council building.  The ground floor was of concrete.  It wouldn't have been too bad had there been a damp course below the screed.  We were there some months and congolium (a sort of cheap lino) was put down when we moved in.  When we moved out we were going to take it up, but there was a layer of water between the lino and the concrete floor.  We left both the water and the congolium behind.

We moved to 83 Victor Road; I don't know why.  The woman next door was presumably a bit of a tart.  According to my mother, my old man spent more time in next door than he ever did at home.  The woman's husband was one of the inoffensive breed of men that fitted the old music hall song to a tee: "they weren't married not a month or more, then underneath her thumb went he, ........"

Whilst I was living there we went to Sussex (not Kent) on a hop-picking holiday.  It was a hop gardens near Robertsbridge.  We were very naïve and made very little money at hop picking.  To say that the accommodation was rudimentary was to exalt its status in the extreme.  We slept in a wattle-walled house that quite unashamedly was repaired from time to time by cow-dung.

My brother, five years my junior got a very bad wasp sting while in the hop garden.  At the garden manager's suggestion my mother took Len to a local doctor's house and saw the doctor's wife.  My mother explained the situation to the woman and she said in an embarrassed voice "you don't seem ----- quite the sort of people one gets at a hop garden".  My mother's speech isn't refined, but she didn't use "gis" and "garn" and all the other corruptions that emanated from the East End of London.  We were gentry compared with those we were mixing with.  One or two of the other hop-picking women treated my mother with deference, her voice was so educated by comparison.

We moved from 83 Victor Road to 146 Clonmel Road.  Again I don't know why.  The first I knew of my father knocking my mother about was at 43 Clonmel Road just before she left him for the second time.  He left her the first time.  I was a frightened and timid child and was in bed in the morning when I heard shouts and banging downstairs.  I was too scared to come down until peace had resumed.

My mother told me much later that the old man had thrown his meal at her and she responded in the manner suggested by a neighbour and hit him with the plate.  I remember the piece of sticking plaster on the old man's forehead.

I remember another instance of Satan's brutality.  Something I was doing displeased him and he told me to do something else.  I said "all right".  It was an expression I picked up from somewhere, as kids do.  "Stop saying 'all right'".  Not being the brightest of children, I responded with my stock reply: "all right".  I came to on the floor after getting a clout across the head.  My memory is of a window above where I recovered consciousness. 

It seemed as if the old man only knew one response, to what he saw as disobedience.  Apparently he got a lance-corporal’s stripe in India and it must have gone to his head.  My mother told me that he lost the stripe as a result of being caught in the red-light district of where he was stationed.

 My mother tells me that he was a dreadful sulk.  Satan would go for a week or more without saying a word, and often my mother had no knowledge of what had upset him.  He didn't only sulk at home.  He was a trolley bus conductor then, having moved on from the trams when they were replaced.  My mother met a man who used to be his regular driver and he told her that he had asked for a transfer because he couldn't stand the old man's sulking at work.

Up until I was about ten, I was ill and off school on a regular basis.  My name is Colin Douglas Campbell and I have the initials C-D-C.  Someone in the family dubbed me 'Seedy C'.  If you're not familiar with the term, "seedy", it was used to mean off-colour or ill.  The name suited me perfectly.

 At the age of two, I had two bouts of pneumonia within a few months.  Born in 1925, this would been about 1927.  One of the times when I was so ill I was put into the old Teddington Hospital (that's the old building in Elfin Grove and had oxygen sprayed on me -- I fought a mask, so if I was to survive it was the only way.  In those days oxygen was EXPENSIVE.  The hospital matron was perturbed at the cost.  Teddington Hospital is now called the Memorial Hospital, and is on the  corner of Queens Road.

I had my tonsils out at St John's Hospital Twickenham when I was about 7.  I was one of a batch of kids all done together.  One of them was sick down my back.  A couple of weeks later I went down with scarlet fever.  In those times it was an isolatable disease and I should have gone to an isolation hospital but it wasn't diagnosed until I was almost over it.  I can still remember the downstairs rear room at 21 Cross Deep Gardens looking out into the garden.  My mother had a Lysol-soaked sheet across the door into the hallway.  It was the way then that isolation was carried out in private homes. 

Another story long before I have any conscious memory.  I don’t know what age I was but my mother told me that I had my adenoids removed at home by the visiting GP (only they weren’t known as “GPs” then.  The only reasonably flat surface was a bare wood kitchen table.  What sort of anaesthetic was used (if any) I do not know.

 When I was living at 10 Lisbon Avenue, I had a very sore throat.  Mum called the local doctor who visited me.  He took a throat swab and well over a week later he diagnosed diphtheria.  I was sent into Mogden Isolation Hospital.  It appeared later that I was at death's door.  Visiting was not allowed except through a glass screen.  On the first visit my mother made, the matron went for her saying: "You leave these children until they are close to death and then we get the blame for death on our premises".  "But what more could I have done ?" my mother said.  "It was ten days ago when I first called the doctor."

 The matron suddenly softened and said "Is that so.  What was the doctor's name ?  Will you give me all the details".

 What happened behind the scenes, we never knew.  But when the doctor submitted a bill my mother didn’t pay it.  A debt-collector came round a couple of weeks later and my mother told him the full story.  My mother told him that she would loved to be sued by the doctor.  “I could then expose him in open court”.  The debt-collector listened and said that he understood why my mother had refused to pay the bill.  It was never re-submitted.

 During my childhood I had mumps, measles, German measles, chicken pox, and almost everything that was around.  You can see why the nickname of 'Seedy C' became established.  I have since thought about that aspect of my life.  It is a well-established theory that many modern children suffer from things like eczema because their immune system was not primed properly as a baby by general filth and disease-carrying muck.  My mother was clean, but I met the required diseases by mixing with other kids at that time.  This is probably why I do not seem to have any allergies.  I don't go septic easily.

It's a funny old world !