An Ipswich Childhood

 

            Searching for some papers recently, I came across three documents that had belonged to my father, all dating from World war I.   There was the Royal Warrant  confirming his appointment as Warrant Officer Class I (Regimental Sergeant-Major) from 2^nd May 1917.  There was a certificate recording that he had been mentioned in despatches by Lieut.General Milne in March 1917, for 'gallant and distinguished services in the Field', and expressing the appreciation of HM the King.  It was dated 1^st March 1919 and was signed by the then Secretary of State for War- Winston S. Churchill.

 

            Finally there was a certificate from the French Foreign Ministry declaring that Monsieur Hall, Frederick Charles, Regimental Sergeant-Major of the British Royal Army Veterinary Corps, had been awarded the Médaille d'Honneur en Argent avec Glaives (The Medal of Honour in Silver with Swords) by the President of the French republic. In my earlier article about my origins I have written, incorrectly, that the medal was 'in silver with laurel leaves'- which demonstrates how unreliable memory can be!

 

            Mind you, I didn't need certificates and medals to tell me that my father had been a man of courage and resolution.  One of my earliest memories is of his walking with me the half mile from our home in Bramford Lane, Ipswich to Springfield Infants' School.  I can have been no more than six years old at the time.

 

            As we approached the railway bridge near Cromer Road, there was a clattering of wheels and thundering of hooves.   Towards us, down the middle of the road, charged a two-horse delivery van.   The horses had panicked and bolted.  The driver had lost his reins and was cowering, ashen faced, on his seat.

 

            Without hesitation my father ran out into the road in front of the two bolting horses, seized them by their bridles and- with his heels dragging along the road surface- brought them to a halt.  At the time I took what had happened for granted.  It was only years later that I realized what a dangerous and courageous act it had been and how few men, other than my father, would have had the knowledge and experience of horses to have carried it out successfully.

 

            We hadn't lived in Ipswich very long at that time.  My parents both came from the Hampshire/Berkshire border country and my father had left the army after completing 21 years army service in 1922, the year after I was born.   He had a number of civilian jobs and was working as a clerk at Woolwich Arsenal in 1926, when the job cropped up that was just what he wanted – Permanent Staff Instructor (including riding instructor) to the Territorial Army in Ipswich.

 

            The 'in Ipswich' was something of a worry.  Nowadays it is difficult to appreciate how remote and 'foreign' in those pre-television days, another part of the country could be. East Anglia was terra incognita to my parents.  I remember them finding Ipswich on one of those maps of England that used to be printed inside the back cover of cheap exercise books.  It seemed a long way from Woolwich and even further from their familiar southern down-land.

 

            We first had a furnished flat above a flower shop opposite Woolworth's in Carr Street.  The street seemed very narrow to my mother- and it certainly was noisy!  Ipswich Corporation was switching from trams to trolley buses or, as we called them at that time 'trackless trams'.   In parts of the town the process had been completed. There was already a single decker trolley bus running from Ipswich Station to Cornhill with an open 'observation area' at the rear, rather like those we used to see on American railway trains in early 'westerns'.   Carr Street was in the process of conversion.  It resounded from dawn to dusk with the noise of workmen digging up and removing the iron tracks and resurfacing the road.

 

            Eventually- I suppose that it was a matter of a few months- my parents managed to rent an unfurnished house.  It was one of a long row of 'working class' terraced homes built along Bramford Lane between the railway bridge and Wallace Road.  We moved in as the row was completed.  My father, a keen gardener, particularly wanted the tenancy of the end house, no 389, which had an extra large garden.  He was unlucky and perversely, was given the next door house, No 387, with a particularly small garden!   He made up the deficiency by renting an allotment which supplied us with most of the vegetables we needed throughout the year.

 

            We lived at 387 Bramford Lane for nine years, from the time I was five to the time I was fourteen.  By today's standards the house was agonisingly small, uncomfortable and inconvenient.   It had an outside lavatory, entered from the back yard.  The bathroom, with nothing in it but a bath and a cold tap, was on the ground floor at the back of the house.  There was no running hot water.  Water for baths had to be heated in a gas boiler and for washing and shaving- at the kitchen sink of course- in a kettle on the gas stove.

 

            When we first moved in there was no electricity.  Gas was used for cooking, lighting and water heating, and there were open coal fires for space heating.  The gas lights had a 'mantle' that glowed to give a white light when gas passing through it was ignited.   The mantle was enclosed in a round glass globe and the gas was turned on and off by two thin chains hanging down on either side of the light fitting.  We paid for the gas by means of a shilling-in-the-slot gas meter (it was in a kind of pit just inside the front door!).  When the shilling ran out, the gas light would dim and there was always a rush to find a shilling and feed the meter before the light went out altogether.

 

            We didn't, except when ill in bed, use the gas lights in the bedrooms.  Candlesticks were standard domestic equipment.   While I was very young I had a candle night-light burning all night in a saucer of water by my bedside.  As I grew older, I would light my candle in its candle-stick holder, take it upstairs to my bedroom at bed time and blow it out just before turning over to go the sleep.

 

            The house was cold and draughty with hollow boarded floors through the cracks of which the wind would lift the meagre square of carpet that we had in the front sitting room.  In other rooms my parents could afford only linoleum floor covering (we used to call it 'floorcloth') with a few thin mats and rugs.  Getting out of bed into an unheated room in mid-winter was an ordeal.  The floor would be bitterly cold and ice would have formed from condensation on the inside of the sash window.

 

Not only was the house far from draught-proof, it was far from sound-proof too.   If our neighbours raised their voices we could hear every word they said and my parents claimed that, in their bedroom, they could hear when our neighbour took his boots off and dropped them on the floor!

 

            I wasn't conscious of all these deficiencies and I doubt if they seemed as awful to my parents as they do now to me.   No 387 Bramford Lane was the first real home that they had had since giving up their army married quarters.   It was the first real home that I can remember.

 

            There were compensations.   We were living almost in the country, with a meadow immediately behind our back garden.  In it was a large pond containing frogspawn and tadpoles in season and large crested newts.  These could be caught by dangling a worm tied to a piece of string in front of them.  They would sieze the worm and could be lifted out of the water before they realized what was happening to them.

 

            What's more, the real country was within easy walk or, as I grew older, cycle ride.  In those days the tarmac surface of Bramford Lane ended at its junction with Wallace Road, a few dozen yards from our front door.   There was a hard, if uneven, surface as far as Shafto Road, a quarter of a mile or so further on.  Beyond that point the lane degenerated into a narrow rutted track, a swamp during the winter months which, with hedges closing in on either side, descended into the main Bramford Road, on the outskirts of the village of Bramford.

 

            I soon made friends.   There was a language problem at first.   I can distinctly remember informing a teacher at Springfield Infants School, that 'I'm five yurs old and I come from Burkshur'.   However it's easy to learn a new language when you are young and it wasn't long before I knew the meaning of 'a hobnedob', 'a slummocky little owd mawther' and a 'hoolly rafty owd day', as well as any of the Suffolk-born.  My parents never completely lost their south-country accents – and I have never tried very hard to get rid of my Suffolk one!

 

            As I grew older I roamed with my friends – climbing trees, birdnesting in the hedgerows, catching tiddlers in the ponds over the meadows and fields that are now the White House residential and Industrial Estates and along Sproughton Road to Boss Hall farm, then occupied by a relative of one of my friends, and the River Gipping.  Now I see there is a Boss Hall Industrial Estate!   Sometimes we would go up to my father's allotment- it was on the site of what is now Westbourne High School- to give him a hand or, more likely, to interrupt his work and make a nuisance of ourselves.

 

            Our parents, I have little doubt, must often have worried about the possibility of our falling out of a tree and breaking our necks, falling into a river or deep pond and drowning, or getting into trouble for trespassing on a farmer's land.  I'm quite certain though that, never for a split second, did they consider that we might be abused, abducted or even murdered, as conscientious parents undoubtedly do today.

 

            As L.P. Hartley remarks in the prologue to his best-selling novel 'The Go-Between';  'The past is another country; they do things differently there'.