The main title of this Topic is the incentive for this post but I expect to go way beyond just the dozens of places I have lived over the years and tell of what I learned from school, work and life over the years. The choice of title for this thread will become clearer as we get to later years. It is as much to pass the long hours sitting here alone for much of my day as anything else so I hope I will not bore you all too much so jump in with recollections of your own life if a bit of mine brings back thoughts of your own. My earliest recollection is watching my mum cutting a round of cheese in the back room of the grocery store in the little village of East Meon in Hampshire, England, I would have been about 3 at that time. I do know that prior to that we lived near the town of Sale on the outskirts of Manchester, where we lived with my aunt who was active in the early vegetarian movement and wrote the book 'Vegetarian Recipes Without Dairy Produce' brought on by the shortage of these things during the war years. My mother looked after children at the Vegetarian Home for Children at this time, this led to me becoming a life long vegetarian, not however a vegan that being a step too far for me, I cannot imagine doing without my eggs and cheese but thats a whole different discussion! At age about 5 we moved in with my grandparents on the south coast due to the logistics of my starting school which is where I will pick up a future post.
My early school years were spent living with my grandparents just across the road from Alverstoke Creek, near Gosport in Hampshire, which at that time was a tidal extension of Portsmouth Harbour, I believe it now damed up again as it was during the war years (WW1) to retain a certain amount of water at all times. My grandparents house was one of the round fronted houses that overlook the creek which during exceptionally high tides not only covered the road but started up the garden path. At those times the only way out other than wading down the road or waiting for the tide to go out was over the back wall into the allotments behind. As a child I spent many hours in the water out front AND in the mud left behind when the tide went out catching crabs and eels, my mother was startled one day to see me and an equally young neighbour paddling a makeshift raft out in the middle of said creek. During those years my whole life revolved around whether the tide was in or out and if I had to rush home from school to swim or mudlark! My walk to school each day took me across the old railway tracks and round the corner past the park and over the bridge to Stone Lane School, its a walk of a little less than a mile but seemed much longer at the time...... My grandfather was a retired policeman and a very stern and unforgiving man but in my early youth I was permitted to stand well back in the hallway and watch him wind the grandfather clock which now sits in my back room having traveled across the ocean with me in later years, but that is a part of this story yet to come. Although at age about 9 Mum and I went to live with an aunt in Hertfordshire the family children gathered at grandmas over the summer holidays each year to visit with Grandma and play in that creek and it is there where my fondest memories still reside. Here is a more recent view of the bow fronted houses where my grandparents lived taken from the old iron railway bridge under which I used to search for crabs at low tide! The rail line from Gosport to Stokes Bay was completed in the 1860s and used during the war years to transport military equipment to the coastal fortifications but then abandoned and the lines were torn up in the 1930s. I remember it in the 1950s as an overgrown bramble gravel track and an alternative walk to the east part of Gosport. A little more about Gosport and the ferry to Portsmouth in the next ramble from my past.......
Before I move on from my time living in the bowfronted house on 'Little Anglesea Road' I must relate what I remember of nearby Gosport and taking the ferry across to Portsmouth in the early 50s. The single thing that stands out in my memory is the ferry across to Portsmouth and the floating landing docks and the ramps leading to them, it being a tidal estuary at time the ramps would be almost level but at low tide with the dock 10' or so below the harbour wall be quite steep down to where the ferry awaited. Fellows a little late for work on the other side would run down the ramp, often with their bicycle over their shoulder, and leap across the gap to the departing ferry as it pulled away, there were at least two ferries constantly going back and forth across the harbour so they would not have had to wait more than a few minutes but that was too long for some folks. Close alongside the ferry dock was the old car ferry which during my youth was still in operation it ceasing operation in 59. It was a chain ferry winching itself across the bay by picking the chains up off the bottom and dropping them off the back as it crossed. “One of the vessels, The Alexandra, ran most services during the 1950s – no mean feat as she had started crossings in 1854.” Over on the Portmouth side was a similar arrangement for the passenger ferry however there was a long walkway alongside the rail terminal leading from the top of the ramp to the shore properer, it was here where the Mudlarks provided some entertainment for passengers and visitors passing by. Local kids would gather in the knee deep mud below and get passerby's to throw coins down into the mud just to see then scrabble around in the mud to find them, whilst I did my fair share of wading in the mud searching for eels and crabs but I never made any money at it like those kids. Just to the north is Portsmouth Dockyard home of the British Navy and where the HMS Victory, Lord Nelsons ship, is dry docked and available for all to tour, and where both my grandfather and a couple of other relations served in the dockyard police force. Any one else here know of Portsmouth and the dockyards, the Gosport submarine base and the wartime fortifications out near Stokes Bay? Next up 3 more places to live and 3 more schools attended before training as an electrician.......
Hardly an enthusiastic reaction thus far but dont worry I have many more years and places to bore you with yet..... Moving on to the the next three 'places where I lived' in the long list till I left for Canada in 69 the first being in in Smith End, Barley, Hertfordshire where we lived with my Aunt and Uncle for most of my remaining junior school days. My uncle operated the local milk round, that being back in the days when milk was delivered door to door around the local villages, in the following years my mother operated other milk rounds for my uncle in several other nearby villages. At one time the delivery was made in an old Bedford van with sliding doors and when helping deliver to each house in later years this enabled me to simply hop out with couple of bottles to hand whist mum slowed right down and then continued on to the next stop, hardly recommended but saved a lot of stopping and starting! The first of these was in and around Clavering in Essex where we move into a very old thatched cottage not too far down the road from the village green which I walked past each morning to catch the high school bus into Saffron Walden Technical and Modern School. I remember walking home from the top of Wicken hill one winter when the school bus got stuck in the snow (a distance of around a mile and a half but it seemed much further at the time) and it was here where I first joined the Boy Scouts where in later years I became a leader both in England and for a while in Canada. After I was done with high school we moved to the nearby village of Langley Lower Green where Mum continued with the milk delivery to many of the nearby villages and I spent quite a few months traveling weekly to Hornchurch for my initial screening to become an electrician with the Eastern Electriciy Board. Once again it is a snow storm that sticks in my mind but this time I had to get back on the train at Bishops Stortford and return to the folks that were providing the accommodation and meals while at the EEB 'school' as roads home were all but impassable.. Any of these places strike a chord with the Brits or exBrits here? Next up delivering milk in the big snow storm of 62, my first working years and and leaving for Canada.......
Welllllll, I am not a Brit but I did milk cows, as one of my first grown up jobs, for quite a while. And I am quite familiar with snow.
Well Mary I never did get to MILK one but sure delivered my fair share to the doorstep but here in SW Ontario I get more snow than I ever did in SE England most winters....!
Yes you do. The Great Lakes cause that, I hear. We both have contact with them where we live. I am in Wisconsin. I personally am glad I don't live in Marquette, Michigan or Buffalo, New York. There are pix from Buffalo of snow up to the roof tops and people have to figure a way to get out of their houses to the streets a couple of recent winters.
Briefly mentioned at the end of the last ramble through places and times from my past is the snow storm of Dec 29/30 1962, I must have been home from the EEB training school age just 16 then as I recall the milk delivery to us from the retailers not arriving and getting some milk directly from the farmers and delivering it door to door in their jugs, those that we could get to. Some narrow roads with tall banks and hedges were level across the top at wall over head heights including the narrow lane with high hedges down from Langley Upper Green to the PUB at the Lower green where I lived, it got largely shoveled out by hand, as did many other similar roads on out local milk route! At least I think that was the occasion when it got shoveled by hand because as I said before I was not home for another big blow later in February and had to return to my EEB landlady for the weekend as my mum was unable to meet the train. This being about places and there are so many little villages where I walked up to the door with that bottle of milk and for those not familiar with the typical rural area that would like to see a map of my old stomping grounds here is a picture. The attached map is taken from the 1961 edition of the Newnes Motorists Touring Map and covers both the milk round and my later stomping grounds around all the local pubs! It is no doubt be a little different today in this part of England now, or maybe not? I just know that one of the old boy scout places where I once camped is now part of Stanstead Airport the fourth-busiest airport in the United Kingdom Moving on from the big storm, for the next 5 or 6 years I worked for the EEB mostly with a wonderful old fellow (Frank?) from Buntingford who like myself did much of his work from our local two man depot with me biking along behind with HIS tools on my bicycle carrier. In addition the the local area around there I also worked out of Royston which was a goodly bike ride morning and night and up a steep hill on the way home. I also worked out of Ware (I think (it is 60 years ago!) but got driven by the company from one of the other two depots to there. In the last few years there I was working on household repairs at 'new town' Harlow. Around this time I got my first motorised wheels the first being a 125cc BSA which I regularly put in the hedge followed up by and old Jowett Bradford van with a horizontally opposed engine. My last British car was a wonderful Austin A40 Somerset and my all time favorite wheels across two continents. After leaving the EEB I worked for Fife Wilson in Bishops Stortford and among other things installed their first semi automatic telephone system and worked on automating the match box making machines at the factory there. It got 'interesting' there if any of the non-safety match sticks that scattered the floor got 'stuck', but the place was built for it! My next major move was much further away across the ocean to Canada, I will leave that for the next time around.
It seems that this ramble through my life has gone way beyond just the places that I have lived and touched upon what I was doing in those years and what new things that life laid in my lap, as I mentioned above the next place I 'lived' was just for a few days out in the Atlantic. Early in 1969 having been encouraged and sponsored by my Uncle who had emigrated to Canada with his family a decade or so earlier I boarded the Polish ocean liner TSS Stefan Batory for the voyage across the seas to Canada. The ship originally sailed under the name of SS Maasdam was bought by the Polish government in June 1968 and began service as a Polish ocean liner on 11 April 1969 as a replacement for the then obsolete MS Batory. The ship was rechristened the TSS Stefan Batory. This then was her first voyage under that name and ownership and as I was to find out shortly had many polish emigrants already aboard when it stopped in Southampton, England to pick up more passengers one of which was myself. The list of items that I took with me was quite short but rather unusual, besides a trunk with a few personal items and my tools packed in a toolbox made by myself during my apprenticeship training there was a Bicycle and a Grandfather Clock! The clock was a family heirloom inherited by my uncle (which recently came to myself and will eventually go to my daughter), the bicycle was requested by my uncle who could not find a lightweight good quality bike in Canada it that time. The story of the items I came to Canada with still causes some amusement when freshly related to someone who has not heard of it before. I dont remember much of the voyage across having met up with a friendly group of Poles shortly after waving farewell to a small group of friends and my mother standing on the dock as I sailed away, all I am going to say about that is that they were quite generous with their bottle of Polish Schnapps! I later spent some considerable time out on the open upper deck 'clearing my head' and some days later we eventually entered the St Laurence and I got my first sight of Canada. This being early in May it was NOT an inviting sight as I peered through the mist on a cold and dreary morning to see a snow covered shore as the crew practiced launching a lifeboat which was not a particularly pretty sight either. I am just glad I did not see their efforts before I left rather than when almost there! There is not much more to tell of these places I 'visited' on my way to my new home, the stopping briefly in Quebec for passport control then on to Montreal and by train to Kitchener to be met by my uncle my belongings to follow later so no I did not have to do the last step of this new adventure riding a bike with toolbox to hand and a grandfather clock over my shoulder but that picture somehow sticks in my mind when relating this move to my new Country. There are many more moves to relate before I settled here in my forested hideaway in what will be the last stop for this old fellow, but as some of my fellow seniors will know sometimes the stuff from our youth is easier to recollect than more recent times.......
Maybe you could use AI to create a picture of you riding the bike, toolbox in hand with the grandfather clock over your shoulder. It made me chuckle, the thought of it.
The thought had crossed my mind Mary but such creativity is way beyond my ability's so will just have to be content with making word pictures which I am not particularly good with either.