Our English Adventure #4

5a Brandreth Rd was a new experience for us all. We had the upstairs, with the entrance hall at the back down a flight of stairs and road access via a cobbled lane. Underneath us, in the ground floor flat, lived a young Royal Naval officer and his wife, a nurse, and I remember spending many afternoons in her kitchen, chatting to her while she made tea before her husband came home. I don’t recall what we talked about, but perhaps she was a replacement for the old couple who lived next door back home in Clovelly, who I also spent a lot of time with. Egg and chips was often on the menu. Many years later, they emigrated to New Zealand and came to visit us in Clovelly when they stopped at Cape Town.

We all shared a room at home, and so the prospect of having her own room was a source of great excitement for Alison.  We soon realised that the house had absolutely no heating system except for two contraptions which heated bricks in off-peak hours (middle of the night when no-one was up) and I can only think their purpose was to ensure that the place didn’t get so cold that we froze to death in the night. A one-bar infrared heater on the wall in the bathroom enabled us to keep water flowing from the taps. Coming from a warm climate where heating is seldom required even in midwinter, the severe cold was an unwelcome experience and we must have worn many layers of clothing just to survive. The ‘cosy’ room Alison had occupied with such enthusiasm was actually built outside the main house above the entrance hall and was the coldest place at any given time. She acquired chilblains during the six months we stayed there and has never recovered completely.

Another unfortunate event took place on board ship, during a games afternoon arranged between the First Class and Tourist Class children (I suspect to give us someone to play with – they weren’t allowed into First Class). Alison’s finger was trapped between the rope and a metal support holding up the roof during the tug-of-war, and was broken. The ship’s doctor, who apparently had a more pressing affair to occupy his interest, set the finger in an L-shape, and so she had to go to the Plymouth hospital to have it broken again and re-set, followed by lengthy physiotherapy. I doubt that today’s treatment is so laborious. So her memories of that time are somewhat on the jaundiced side.

It was a revelation to us that there could be rows and rows of houses all attached to each other, with different families living on each floor. We had come from the relative space and freedom of a seaside town and it was not easy to adjust to this new way of life, particularly when you are only 8 years old. The daylight hours were few and sunshine almost a thing of the past, and as for the rain…