FROM THE MEMOIR: ‘TALKING TO MYSELF’

 

 

Both my parents’ families had their homes around Peckham and East Dulwich. When they first married, my mother and father lived in Penge, near Crystal Palace, and I was born there. (Twenty or more years later, I found myself living in a flat up at Honor Oak, close to the old family patch). My father’s two younger brothers remained in SE21 or SE22 for most of their lives, for a long time in the very same road. Their sister lived in Clapham for years, moving eventually to Wraysbury, still on the ‘proper’ side of the river. My mother’s brother and sister both lived in the locality as well.

 

Mother’s side of the family had the more exotic components. Her father’s father was a Russian-Jewish tailor who fled to England to escape a wave of purges during the 1880s. Their Russian name was something like Markovitch, which they anglicised to Marks. My grandfather Maurice married Katherine Mitchell, who was Irish, and whose surname eventually became my second name. When I was born, both my grandmothers wanted their maiden surname to be my middle name and this caused a small family fight. My parents settled it by declaring that I would not have a middle name at all. The matter waited until I was twelve or thirteen. I had complained at home that nearly everyone in my class at school had more than one name, while I was just plain ‘G. Brown’. That’s when they told me the story and, now that only one granny was still living, awarded me the ‘Mitchell’.

    

My grandfather was generally known as ‘Pop’ - or ‘Mr Pop’ to the grandchildren - but my grandmother always called him ‘Maurie’ (not ‘Morrie’). For reasons buried forever, she was called ‘Marty’ by everyone who knew her, both inside and outside the family – except for Pop himself who always called her ‘Kate’. My mother’s brother Mannie (Emmanuel Richard, widely known as ‘Dick’) was the eldest of their three children, born (like Louis Armstrong, we believe) in 1900. He married Mabel, they had no children and lived in Ondine Road, on the other side of the block from his parents. Hardly anyone in the family ever saw Mannie, or rather Mannie ‘n’ Mabel as they were usually called. You could stand in Marty and Pop’s back garden in East Dulwich Road, look across at the gardens that abutted the end of theirs, and you were looking at the terrace of houses that formed one side of Ondine Road. They were as close as that and yet Mannie was rarely seen.

​

My cousin Shirley tells me the main reason was that Mannie ‘n’ Mabel were committed to caring for Mabel’s invalid mother who lived with them. My mother has confirmed this, though ‘We never really kept up, apart from Christmas cards’. She added that he was an excellent violinist but she feared he must have died through what she called ‘over-drinking’. Mannie ran a jewellery and watch-making business in Praed Street, Paddington. When I was twelve or thirteen, he gave me a present of an Ingersoll pocket watch, out of the blue, perhaps attempting to restore the family contact. I know I kept it long after it had become uneconomical to repair it following my persistent over-winding. (Coincidentally, in my early twenties I lived for a while in Craven Hill, Bayswater, directly linked to Praed Street by Craven Road.)

 

Dora was the middle child, and another very accomplished musician, often playing violin or piano in recitals with Mannie.  She married Bill Faux who worked for the Port of London Authority. They lived nearby until the war began when PLA activities were moved up to Greenock in Scotland. Dora and my mother more or less hated one another all their lives. Shirley, her daughter, says Dora was a ‘troubled woman’ all her life and that mother and daughter got on no better than the sisters had. My mother thought it was certainly linked to Dora’s jealousy of her being the youngest and clearly favourite daughter. It was never resolved throughout their entire lives. Despite that, Shirley worked with her mother in a thriving secretarial services partnership for many years – and despite the fact that Dora totally rejected Shirley’s choice of a husband some ten years older than herself. The marriage took place regardless. Returning to London some time after the end of the war, Dora resettled locally somewhere off Peckham Rye.

 

Marty and Pop’s third child was my mother, Rose Margaret, born in 1907. She was known to her parents as ‘Rose’, a name she hated, and to anyone else all her life as ‘Peggy’. Unlike Mannie and Dora, she had no special musical talent though she was provided with her own violin and given lessons. She eventually gave the instrument to me and I probably destroyed its musical potential completely. Until the beginning of the war, she and my father lived in Royston Road, Penge. She worked for the toiletries company Parke Davis in their offices in Southampton Row and he for the Post Office Telephones at St Martin-le-Grand in the City.

 

*

 

The Irish-Russian-Jewish mixture of Marty and Pop had produced three children who, between them, had only two, my cousin Shirley and me. The Brown grandparents, as far as I know, were a straightforward and completely English family. Their five children together produced only three more. As the only male on the male side and with two female children, I am now technically ‘the Last of the Browns’.

 

My grandfather William George Brown spent his short adult life in the Royal Navy. He died in 1919 when my father was only twelve. I had never really known anything about him except that single fact and, as it happened, my father only told me the story of his death a few months before his own. We were sitting together over a Sunday lunchtime beer in the Prince Regent, Cambridge in late 1989 and somehow the subject came up. I asked for the details. ‘Oh’, said my father, ‘I always thought you knew’.

 

Parents often think this. Many tell their children very little about their own pasts, probably not even thinking that there’s much to be told which the children themselves haven’t asked about. The children probably have little idea of what sort of questions need asking. In any case, there’s often far too much going on in the present to attend to, without stopping, sitting down and talking about even quite recent family history. Our children remain unaware of how much they’ve never known about us, especially about the period of our own childhood or the time before we became their parents. When interesting details do come to light, it mostly happens quite by accident, triggered by a chance comment about something else entirely.

    

So I heard this bit of family history just in time. My father sipped his beer, now only taken in halves, and told me:

 

‘After the end of the First World War, my father was put in command of one of the fleet of old Clyde paddle steamers they were grouping together at Harwich Harbour. They were going to do minesweeping in the North Sea. As they were all arriving and joining ship, he recognised the bloke who would be Chief Engineer of his vessel. He was an old shipmate he’d served with before, so they had a very thorough celebration on board that night. What probably happened is that, at a late stage, William George went out, as they all did, onto the wooden decking near one of the paddle wheels to have a pee over the side. No one particularly noticed his absence at the time but the following morning it was obvious that he was missing. The others naturally thought he could have fallen overboard, so they dredged the Harbour and found him there, drowned.’

 

     ‘William George’ is the first name on the Brown family gravestone near the entrance to what they now call the Old Camberwell Cemetery, by the number 63 bus stop at Honor Oak. Beneath a relief carved anchor and chain in a circular lozenge we read

 

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

MY BELOVED HUSBAND

LIEUT. WILLIAM GEORGE BROWN, R.N.R.

LATE IN COMMAND H.M.S. DUCHESS OF ROTHESAY

ACCIDENTALLY DROWNED

IN HARWICH HARBOUR

MARCH 8TH 1919, AGED 36.

 

GOOD-NIGHT, DEAR HEART

WAIT FOR ME AT HEAVEN’S GATE.

 

 

Immediately to the right of the cemetery entrance is the large, semi-circular war memorial in white stone known as Heroes’ Corner. Although the war was over, my grandfather was still officially on active service, and so his name is also listed there.

    

His wife’s is the second name on the gravestone: Florence May Brown, the grandmother I can only dimly recall seeing during the war at Mrs Phillips’s house in Shrewsbury. My mother told me she was rather keen on drink at home and used to send one or other of her young sons across the road to the pub to get new supplies in when needed. I now have a couple of old photographs that include this grandmother, very elegant in both dress and hairstyle in a distinctively 1930s way. She died on March 7th 1942, aged 61.

    

William and Florence’s five children have a variety of names between them, some very conventional and others rather more unusual, grand even. The eldest of the five was Sidney William, my Uncle Bill, clearly named partly after his father. My father came second and was named Wallace Desborough, known to almost everyone as ‘Buster’, except to Marty who always called him ‘Wallace’, and Pop who called him both ‘Wall’ and ‘Buster’. Desborough is indeed a grand name with an aristocratic flavour, but I know nothing about its origins, nor what it meant to my father’s parents.

    

Their sister Jessie May was third. She married Jack Brown, also a naval man, and they lived in Cedars Road off the north side of Clapham Common. The last two children were Edgar Tritton, known to everyone as ‘Ted’ or ‘Teddy’ and Cyril Beatty, universally known as ‘Bob’. ‘Beatty’ is a sound British naval name but I don’t know where the ‘Tritton’ comes from. There’s actually a Tritton Road in the East Dulwich-Sydenham locality but it seems unlikely that Uncle Ted was named after a suburban road. Both son and road were doubtless named for someone of major importance. He did cause a family flurry once when he said he was thinking of hyphenating his names to turn himself into Edgar Tritton-Brown. The rest of them took a dim view of this, and he decided to leave his name as it was. My ‘Brown’ cousin Christine (Cyril’s daughter) told me quite recently that Ted’s widow of many years, our Auntie Binnie, used that double-barrelled surname herself among the people she knew where she lived down in Kent. She died in hospital under that name in 2004.

    

Bob and Ted maintained the south London tradition over the years while I was growing up, living in next-door flats at 16 and 18 Overhill Road, behind the cemetery that contains the family grave. Uncle Bob eventually took a dramatic decision, and moved as much as a mile away to halfway up Sydenham Hill, SE21. Ted finally broke loose completely and moved out to Biggin Hill in Kent.

 

*

 

FROM AN ARTICLE FOR ‘LONDON SUBURBAN STUDIES, VOL. 39’

 

Modern London folklore claims that taxi drivers are notoriously reluctant to cross the Thames, particularly from north to south: ‘What? South of the river, at this time of night?’ It’s also true of people born and bred on one side or the other that, knowing their own side, they tend to keep to it, regarding the other and its people as different and foreign. ‘Oh, I go north to work, but I’d never want to live there.’ Generations of families have come and gone as unmodified north or south Londoners, often remaining in or near their postal district of birth all their lives.

 

The foundations of this attitude are deep. For centuries, London was the City of London, followed by later developments to the east and the west, still always on the river’s north bank. There was no such thing as ‘south London’. When Southwark began to have a substantial existence, its chief reputation was for base pleasures, entertainment and licentiousness, activities which City officials preferred to keep outside the walls. Late sixteenth century maps show this strip of river bank east of Blackfriars as dotted with prisons, dodgy beer houses, bear-baiting pits, theatres and pleasure gardens frequented by prostitutes. This environment was alleged to harbour thieves, cut-purses and every other kind of ne’er-do-well, and it probably did. Peter Ackroyd comments in London, The Biography: ‘the southern bank . . . a boundary zone to which London could consign its dirt and rubbish. Hence in the early eighteenth century it became the repository for some of the ‘stink industries’ which had been banned from the City proper.’

 

None of this discouraged further development and settlement. In London: A Social History, Roy Porter points out:

 

South London began inexorable expansion after 1750 thanks to the building

of Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges and the new toll-roads . . . Improved

access made south London an attractive, or at least affordable, place to live.

Clapham was classy . . . Camberwell too developed a genteel reputation . . .

Brixton developed after 1800 as an eligible suburb . . . City businessmen set

up in spacious villas on the slopes of Denmark Hill and Herne Hill.

 

Ackroyd fills in more of the details after 1750:

 

Highways led from the newly established bridges, and moved towards Kennington

and the Elephant and Castle; in addition roads were laid across open fields to join

these main thoroughfares. The new roads led to fresh industrial development,

so that the vinegar and dye-works were complemented by potteries, lime kilns a

nd blacking factories. By 1800, Lambeth had assumed all the characteristics of a slum.

 

Yet the area still grew; it expanded and developed, acquiring its shape along with

the other ribbon developments which snaked southwards. The process acquired

irresistible momentum in the first decade of the nineteenth century when three toll

bridges were completed. Southwark Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge

opened the way for the extensive building programmes which created south London

in its present form. The increase in London’s population, and the exertion of the

new industrial forces, drew the city over the Thames at an ever increasing rate.

The streets around St George’s Circus were soon thickly inhabited, with houses

covering all the adjacent fields, but soon the shops and houses and businesses

began to travel down the roads which radiated from that neighbourhood.

Newington, Kennington and Walworth were directly affected and by the 1830s

the whole area of the present South was being covered in roads and houses.

The suburban development soon expanded to include Peckham and Camberwell,

Brixton and Clapham, even so far as Dulwich and Herne Hill. It was not

long before Sydenham and Norwood, Forest Hill and Honor Oak, became part

of the same urban diaspora.

 

But it was not all ‘noble houses’ such as Pepys lived in at Clapham in his later years. Nor was the whole of south London ‘a pleasant retreat of those citizens who have a taste for country whilst their avocations daily call them to town’, as Priscilla Wakefield described Camberwell, neatly combining the twin concepts of suburb and commuting. As Ackroyd reminds us, ‘the colonisation of the southern bank was entirely driven by the need for industrial expansion and exploitation’:

 

There were glue factories and wool warehouses, while Charles Knight’s Encyclopaedia

of London notes that ‘chimneys shot up at intervals of a few yards, towering above

a very maze of red roofs, and furnishing their contribution to the smoky atmosphere

of the neighbourhood.’ The district, once characterised by its priory, was now

celebrated for its protean quality; it ‘may be regarded as a region of manufacturers,

a region of market-gardeners, a region of wholesalers, and a maritime region,

according to the quarter where we take our stand.’ Just as there were various

trades in Bermondsey, so there were heterogeneous odours. ‘In one street strawberry

jam is borne in upon you in whiffs, hot and strong; in another, raw hides and

tanning; in another, glue; while in some streets the nose encounters an unhappy

combination of all three.’ Between 1916 and 1920 the London novelist and

essayist VS Pritchett worked for a leather manufacturer; he also recalled the

odours of Bermondsey . . .[concluding his list with] ‘the sharp stink of poverty.

That last is of course the most penetrating and significant odour of them all,

compounding the noisome reputation of south London in general.’

 

Ackroyd quotes a London newspaper reporter in 1911 saying that, in crossing London Bridge, you crossed ‘that natural dividing line of peoples’. He went on to ask whether ‘the very streets changed in some subtle and unconscious manner, to a more sordid character; the shops to a more blatant kind – even the people to a different and lower type?’

 

                                                                  *

​

East Dulwich Road runs from the King’s Arms (no longer there) on the corner of Peckham Rye, up and over a slight rise and down to the junction with Lordship Lane and Grove Vale. Goose Green forces the right-hand side of the road further away to the right where Adys Road comes to East Dulwich Road. This is where they meet Crystal Palace Road which was merely a country footpath up to The Plough on Lordship Lane before East Dulwich took shape. The children’s playground and St John’s Church (built in 1865) are at the top of the Green. At the bottom end stands the horse trough, opposite the East Dulwich Hotel, a typical old Charrington corner pub.

    

Only five miles from Whitehall, Dulwich (in Old English Dilwihs, Dylways, Dullag, meaning ‘meadow where dill grows’) had grown as a genteel residential location with some very grand houses, but East Dulwich itself was still farms, fields and market gardens until the mid-nineteenth century. This part of south London escaped the industrial development that had blighted Southwark, Bermondsey and the south bank of the Thames further to the east. Instead, it was a rural area supplying fresh vegetables and milk to the City and the West End. Writing in 1905, Walter Greening describes it as ‘only a few scattered cottages and a farm house, the only occupants of the [Goose] Green being the geese belonging to the cottagers.’

​

Mary Boast’s local history booklet The Story of Dulwich tells us that the coming of the railways transformed places like East, North and West Dulwich, Sydenham Hill and Herne Hill. It began with a service to take people, not into central London to work, but out of it in huge numbers on pleasure trips to see the Crystal Palace, relocated on Penge Hill in 1854. Later, during the 1860s, commuter routes were established with lines to Blackfriars and London Bridge serving those who worked in the City. Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament, lived on Sydenham Hill. He designed North Dulwich station and many other significant local buildings, and oversaw the overall planning of development in the Dulwich area. His own house ‘Lapsewood’ has since been demolished.

 

Following the arrival of the new railways, many people realised that they could comfortably live here and work in town. Nearly all the East Dulwich streets ‘were laid out between about 1865 and 1885’, and Mary Boast continues:

 

The same streets are there today and the streets are mostly lined with the same houses, unlike many parts of London where streets like these have been swept away to build big housing estates. East Dulwich is an almost perfect example of a Victorian suburb . . . All the streets between Wood Vale, Lordship Lane and Barry Road were built on the old farmlands . . . before the streets were numbered, houses or groups of houses had names. You can see these names high up on the front of some of the houses, together with the dates the houses were built.

 

While major manufacturing industry never touched the locality, some of the essential building materials were made nearby:

 

The builders of East Dulwich did not have far to go for bricks made of local

clay. Before the streets were built there was a brickfield in Lordship Lane

between Northcross Road and Whatley Road. To the south was Dawson’s

Patent Tile and Brick Company. With its tall chimney it was as noticeable

on the skyline as Dawson’s Heights flat are today. There was never much

other industry. East Dulwich has kept quite well to the agreements, made

when building began, that the land should only be used for dwelling houses.

‘Offensive trades . . . tan-pits, factories, steam-engines and gasometers’ were

strictly forbidden.

​

                                                         

​

  

FROM THE MEMOIR: ‘TALKING TO MYSELF’

 

My grandparents’ flat occupied the basement and first floor of 72 East Dulwich Road on the edge of Goose Green. From the front garden, you could see across the Green to the East Dulwich Hotel, Pop’s local. Outside it on Sunday lunchtimes you would usually see a flower seller, a newspaper stand, and a stall with jellied eels, cockles, shrimps and winkles.

 

The basement of the flat contained a hall, the lavatory, one bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and living room. Upstairs were two large bedrooms, the back one with a balcony not safe to stand on and a view of the back garden and the backs of other houses opposite. A widow Polly Chapman and her daughter, referred to by Pop as ‘young Lil’, lived in the rest of the house above them. As it happened, when I changed jobs in 1959 young Lil turned out to be ‘Miss Chapman’, the slightly-to-be-feared supremo of all the typing pools of my new employer’s London office. She retired within the next five to ten years demonstrating, not for the first time, that terms like ‘young’ are relative. Once, in my early twenties, Pop told me that ‘young Simpson’ would be out of hospital soon, providing someone nearer my own age to talk to when we went to the pub together. Pop was then in his very late eighties and ‘young Simpson’ turned out to be a mere seventy-five, and had known my mother when they were kids.

 

We were mainly here at Christmas time, though my mother also took me down to London at different times on our own, during school holidays when my father couldn’t get away from work. On one occasion when I’d been parked in Shrewsbury with Mrs Phillips or Mrs Freeman for a few days during the war, she had met a charming man on the train, who was a specialist at a hospital dealing with artificial limbs. In her late 80s, she revealed to me and our family, after a couple of glasses of white wine at lunch, that this was the man I knew of later as ‘Uncle Robert’:

 

‘You wouldn’t remember Uncle Robert, would you, dear?’

 

‘No, but I know he used to send me presents for Christmas and birthdays.’

 

‘Oh yes, he always did. He’d never married, and I think he looked on you, in a strange way, as his own son . . . or wished you were.’

 

‘Did you meet very often?’

 

‘Whenever I went to London on my own, or only with you. You met him once. You can’t have been very old then. I’d arranged that we would meet ‘accidentally’ one afternoon along Birdcage Walk. The three of us went off for tea somewhere round Victoria.’

 

‘Sounds like one of Graham Greene’s short stories.’

​

‘Yes, and it’s just the right sort of time . . . and his sort of situation. Wartime, people separated, the unsuspecting child . . . actually, at one stage Robert wanted me to divorce Buster so that I could marry him. But I couldn’t possibly do that. We just went on meeting now and again when I was down in London without Buster. We corresponded for years and years . . . long, detailed, loving letters . . . deep conversations. When we lived in Staffordshire, you used to take them to the post-box for me.’

 

‘Now it’s more like The Go-Between. Yes, I remember that, very thick letters. He didn’t have a real address. It was more like a code number, a PO Box or something, and then just ‘London’.’

 

‘That’s right, dear. As you know, I’ve never mentioned this before, but there’s no harm in your all knowing about it now. It’s well over fifty years ago, and the main thing is that no one [meaning my father] was hurt by it.’

 

And that was it. She had spilled the beans. ‘Uncle’ Robert died many years ago, and the unasked question of how much or how little my father ever knew about it will never be answered.

*

​

Goose Green presented the typical ‘Christmas problem’, experienced by families almost since we began celebrating it. Without anyone saying it in so many words, there was an implicit invitation, a requirement even, for my parents to spend Christmas with Marty and Pop. Dora and family were in Scotland, Manny and Mabel, though only round the corner, weren’t involved and my father’s parents were both dead. We probably went there every other year and, while it was exciting for me to be away from home, and in London, my parents always found Christmas Day crushingly dull. Like so many others, however, they responded to their sense of duty without complaint. Boxing Day was quite different. In the afternoon, we all boarded the No 12 bus, sitting upstairs at the front ‘for the boy’ (Marty’s words) and went to the pantomime at Camberwell Green. It was not unknown for Pop to sleep through at least some of it. In the evening, without fail, my father’s brother Cyril, my Uncle Bob, held a family party where he led us enthusiastically through a stunning variety of paper-and-pencil games. Uncle Ted’s wife, Auntie Binnie, would sing to us, always after profuse assurances that this was the last thing she really wanted to do.

 

A strong background smell accompanies my memories of Marty and Pop’s basement rooms. They always had one or two cats, one usually called Bobby. This resulted in conversations about pets from the past called ‘Bobby’, ‘the other Bobby’, ‘the last Bobby’, ‘the previous Bobby’ and ‘the Bobby who died before that one’. The pervasive smell was of boiled fish, for Marty fed her cats on fresh whiting that stood and simmered on the stove for hours every day and seemingly for days on end every week. Mingled with the smell of Pop’s St Julien pipe tobacco, the odour was both special and repulsive, a pale mist that seeped into the very fabric of the living room. Fortunately on Christmas Day there was other, more important, cooking going on whose gorgeous smells beat back the mild stink of their day-to-day living.

 

Watching Pop eating a good dinner was one of the joys of my childhood. No one I have ever seen at a meal since could invest every movement with such sublime and unconscious enjoyment. When the plate was placed before him, he would sprinkle everything liberally with pepper, then with salt, and finally pour a miniature pyramid of salt at the side of the plate for later use. He used large cutlery, cutting and moving around on the plate everything he wanted and then piling a well-organised and varied consignment onto his fork. The knife would dab into the salt pyramid, deposit its crystalline load on the forkful, and the climactic moment arrived. Fork moved towards opening mouth and the whole thing was carefully laid inside. Pop then put the knife and fork down at each side of his plate, and folded his hands together with his elbows resting on the arms of his high-backed chair. With his eyes focused but unseeing just beyond the top edge of the plate in front of him, he gently but seriously chewed and chewed and chewed. When he had finally swallowed the last of it, he would wipe his mouth and small moustache with his white serviette (generally called a ‘napkin’ then) and reach for his glass of Guinness. With a satisfied release of breath and an audible smacking of lips, he began the procedure again. Long after everyone else had finished, he would lay down his cutlery, apply the serviette for the last time, lean back in his chair and pronounce ‘Very nice, Kate’. He had enjoyed every moment of his meal as much as anyone possibly could.

 

He must have been slightly puzzled once when my mother decided to modernise things a bit, and placed a small heap of potato crisps on everyone’s plate. Pop had probably never eaten crisps before in his entire life. The rest of us just picked them up in our fingers and ate them, but Pop, perhaps not imagining that this particular food needed to be treated differently from everything else on his plate, proceeded to attack the crisps with his big knife and fork. It’s impossible to spear a crisp on the tines of a fork and each attempt rendered the crisps into smaller and smaller fragments that jumped about on his plate. For his grandson aged about nine seated beside him, watching this performance produced an extended agony of barely suppressed giggling, which my mother also fell into once she realised the source of my hilarity. I left the table and made quickly for the hall. I shoved a handkerchief in my mouth and laughed uncontrollably.

​

Marty, according to my mother because she was Irish, was given to telling people what she thought they wanted to hear, or giving them what she thought they wanted. So it was that, when she’d forgotten to prepare and cook the sprouts for one Christmas dinner, and no one had commented, she suddenly announced ‘Oh, I forgot to do the sprouts. But then we’re not all that keen on sprouts anyway, are we?’ From time to time this happened to the roast potatoes, the bread pudding, and practically any other ingredient except the meat. So it also was that, when my father lodged with them while working in London for a period after the war, he made the mistake of saying that he quite liked smoked haddock for breakfast. Smoked haddock was what Marty gave him every single morning after that.

 

Going to bed while the adults are still up is one of the great moments for a small child. Initially you feel you’re being shunted out of the way and that some enticing and unknowable pleasures will take place in your absence. In reality, it’s usually a glass or two of something and some conversation that would mean nothing to you. How much better, once settled in your bed, to inhabit your own private world in the darkness, alone with your imagination. I slept in the front bedroom upstairs in Marty and Pop’s flat, looking out over Goose Green. This huge high-ceilinged room was mainly used as a storage place for junk. A massive, heavily framed print of the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ occupied one wall above an old piano. The wall opposite my bed had another great framed thing: the certificate of Pop’s long-lapsed membership of the Ancient Order of Buffaloes. Mysterious cardboard boxes tied up with string and a trunk of old books occupied most of the floor space. The bed I used was almost incidental to the general impression of being in a neglected second hand shop. One year, Pop said I should have a look through the trunk and take any of the books that appealed to me. I ended up with one or two early HG Wells novels, recommended by my mother, and with the first publication of the English translation of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I still have it and still haven’t read it, though I did see the film with Slim Summerville years ago.

 

The big thing for me in that bedroom was the sound the trams made. Electric trams had first appeared in East Dulwich in 1906. In 1907, the year my mother was born, they ran from Goose Green along East Dulwich Road to Peckham Rye. Goose Green held the key position as the tramline junction between East Dulwich Road, Lordship Lane and Grove Vale leading to Dog Kennel Hill. The Streatham Guardian of 31 January 2002 reports that a local resident Lilian Burden ‘who died in 1999 aged 98, remembered seeing a horse helping to pull electric trams up the steep Dog Kennel Hill.’ Four lines were laid on the Hill to prevent two trams being together on the same line in case one should slide backwards. The same article records that ‘The trams ceased running on 6 October 1951. Some time after that a roundabout was constructed at the junction of Lordship Lane and East Dulwich Road using concrete tram setts which still exist today.’

    

As I lay in bed hearing the sounds of the night outside, along would come the clanking tram, slowing down to a stop as it approached the junction. The conductor jumped off and pulled a lever to change the points. Then came the whining sound as the tram started off again, clickety-clicking over the points, and picking up speed, rattling away into the distance and the night. Sometimes, when the huge room was not too cold, I would get out of bed and watch the trams, seeing their lit windows passing through the dark on the far side of the Green. This experience is linked in my childhood memory to another magical night-time noise, the steam trains leaving Shrewsbury station. By the time I went to bed there, Radbrook Road and Roman Road were quiet. Up the hill from the town came the sounds of the trains leaving for the south or, more excitingly, for places to the north-west with names like Ruabon and Wrexham, Llangollen, Berwyn and Corwen and the rest, eventually to the coast of north Wales. A sudden BOUFF-BOUFF, a pause and then BOUFF-BOUFF-BOU-BOU-BOU-B-B-B-B-B with a tremendous clattering as the carriage couplings were jerked up from their resting position, the pistons and connecting rods made their clamour and heavy metal screeched as the huge wheels skidded on the rails. Then BOUFF-BOUFF-BOU-BOU-BOU again as it gathered strength and speed and slowly, slowly moved out of my hearing. That was the kind of sound to send you to sleep with dreams already forming.

​

*

The biggest novelty of those London visits for me was that Pop owned, of all things, a television set. I believe he even had one of the earliest sets just before the war. Television had a very restricted coverage during the late 1940s and early 50s and, like many other products in the immediate post-war years, was largely available only in London and a few other places. The set came from the locally famous department store, Jones and Higgins, at the bottom of Rye Lane. I was content to watch it whatever was on, simply because it was there. We arrived one notable Christmas Eve to discover that the thing had broken down.  Pop messed about with it, trying to control what was happening on the screen by twiddling knobs that were all inconveniently located on the back of the cabinet. Marty simply said that something had to be done about it ‘for the boy’, and I remember Pop and I walked round several of the nearby streets, enquiring of people he knew who might have some idea about making it work properly.

 

To my parents’ relief, we managed without it on Christmas Day, but someone managed to come round on Boxing Day and sorted it out. There was one channel, the BBC, in black-and-white, broadcasting for only a few hours each day and closing down about ten o’clock in the evening. The opening sequence showed a map of Britain with a handful of transmitters on it, each with concentric rings of televisual energy coming out of it. They added a new one to the map each time a new transmitter went into service, until there was no room for any more.  As the map faded away, Sylvia Peters came on to announce the start of the day’s broadcasts. Children’s programmes were extremely limited and the only one I can recall now is Muffin the Mule, a creaky puppet on strings. It clonked about on top of a piano, nodding and dancing to songs played by Annette Mills, who spoke, as they all did on television then, in a very severe Received Pronunciation accent.

 

The television’s massive wooden case stood on a huge, old, disused gramophone cabinet with curved legs. The screen was tiny, with a nine-inch diagonal at the most, possibly even smaller. After some time, Pop bought a magnifying lens, a huge Perspex thing filled with fluid that fitted over the screen. If you were sitting at the side rather than directly in front, which meant all of us except Pop, it created remarkable distortions of the picture, to the point where it was hardly worth looking at it.  The other factor that interfered with it was the mellow tone of the Westminster-chiming clock on the sideboard which gave us the progressively longer chimes at every quarter and the full performance on the hour. To my knowledge the chimes were never turned off except when Pop went to bed, and they would have been turned on again at crack of dawn when he got up.

 

Pop rose early to travel right across London every day to his job. He worked for a man named Gilbert in a shop called Piccadilly Tailors in Fore Street, Edmonton, N18, now the central north-south artery linking Lower to Upper Edmonton, crossing the North Circular Road. The Edmonton enclosure map of 1801 ‘shows Lower Edmonton as a well established settlement . . . southwards there was patchy development along Fore Street.’ By 1867 there was ‘ribbon development along Fore Street . . . virtually closing the gap between Upper and Lower Edmonton.’ In 1881 a tramway was laid along the street and the Hertford Road, and the attraction of ‘exceptionally cheap workmen’s fares’ on tram and train services led to tremendous expansion of working class housing by the end of the nineteenth century. Pop must have seen many of the developments that followed, including the replacement of trams by trolleybuses in 1938.

 

Every morning except Thursday, his day off, Pop put on his black homburg and heavy overcoat and took at least two buses up to north London. When he returned in the evenings, he unbuttoned his overcoat, withdrew a folded copy of the Evening News from the inside pocket and handed it over to Marty. No stranger to travel, he’d sailed over to America during the very early years of the twentieth century. His brother was said to be part of a deal there which would bring him and Pop unimagined wealth through oil or gold or something. In fact, Pop returned without whatever money he had taken with him, and that was the end of that. On his Thursdays off he and Marty often went for ‘a day out’, to the races or down to Brighton, when Pop was known to have a few drinks.

 

He once made me a pair of short grey trousers that were far too tight ‘in the seat’. Since he was a cutter, we had to assume that he wasn’t terribly good with the measuring tape. When Gilbert finally retired, Pop, by now about 80, bought the shop he had worked for through most of his life and took on the mortgage. He was most put out some years later when, now getting on for 90, the building society said they would only renew the mortgage for maximum five years at a time.

 

My mother and my cousin Shirley, who is a few years older than me and lived with Marty and Pop for a while when they returned from Scotland after the war, have both given me this little snippet about Pop. He always had a small dark moustache but apparently noticeable grey streaks had appeared in it that particularly offended his vanity. Beside the fireplace he kept an old toothbrush and if he were going out somewhere special, like a party or to someone else’s house, he would rub the toothbrush against the inside of the chimney to collect a bit of soot on it. This he applied to the moustache, inspecting it closely in the mirror that hung over the fireplace. My mother recalls New Year’s Eve parties in her youth when Pop went round to kiss all the women present as he arrived and left a small black smudge on every face. Other small things I can recall include his liking for Camp Coffee with its very colonial label, and his bath ritual. Pop had a bath on Sunday morning, every other weekend. This involved getting the geyser well heated up, with a restriction on the use of hot water by anyone else until Pop’s bath was finished. In this way, everyone in the flat would be made fully aware that today was Pop’s bath day. At least it meant other people could have a look at the Sunday paper before he appropriated it.

 

*

​

LETTER TO MY COUSIN SHIRLEY, 2003

 

                                                                                                       King’s Lynn, Norfolk

                                                                                                       May 2003

 

Dear Shirley

 

Thanks for the chat on the phone the other day. I’ve included the moustache story and you probably don’t need to be reminded about Pop’s fortnightly bath routine on a Sunday morning. I remembered later that Pop once made me a pair of trousers that were much too tight. As you said, Gilbert sold out to Pop when he retired. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pop spent most of the day asleep in the shop during the week. He certainly didn’t seem to need much sleep at night.

 

A few other things have come to the surface since we spoke. I started work in London at 19, and went over to visit Marty and Pop, and Pop on his own after her death, every three weeks or so. The last stage of my journey was always the No 12 bus, dropping me at the King’s Arms, followed by the short walk to Goose Green. For my 21st birthday Marty had bought me a maroon Parker 51 fountain pen with brushed aluminium cap. I still have it and still use it. As I unwrapped it, Pop said ‘Oh, a pen. How much was that, Kate?’ ‘It was five pounds,’ she replied. ‘What,’ he said, ‘five pounds for a pen?’ ‘It doesn’t matter what it cost, Maurie,’ she said. ‘It’s for the boy.’  That was enough justification for her.

 

Partly inspired by Pop’s example, I’d decided to start smoking a pipe about this time. I came to see them one evening and proudly got it out, filled it with tobacco and lit up. Observing Pop’s technique, I had gathered – mistakenly - that you just filled it up, smoked it hard until it needed filling again, refilled it and kept on going like that. This is what I did and before long felt groggy and sweaty and tingly and had to go out to the lavatory to be sick. When I returned pale and sheepish to the living room, Pop said ‘That’s better. Now you need something to eat. Fancy a bit of cold fish?’ Typical. What I should have noticed earlier was that Pop spent most of the evening dozing. He lit his pipe but it went out almost immediately. When he awoke, he scraped off the ash from the top and relit it, only for it to go out as soon as he dozed off again. In fact, he probably never refilled it at all in an entire evening. It was more of a dummy than a pipe.

 

In the later years of his life after Marty’s death, he was still going up to Edmonton every day to within about six weeks of his death at 90. I would arrive about half-past seven in the evening. He let me in, told me what was on television, sat down, lit his pipe and nodded off. Then I was stuck with programmes like Emergency Ward 10 and Gun Law and other regular things that I probably wouldn’t have chosen to watch. At nine o’clock exactly he would wake up and turn it off just as The News was coming on, which I wouldn’t have minded seeing. ‘We’ll go over for a drink now, shall we?’ We walked over the Green to the pub where he and a few other elderly folk occupied what was called the Private Bar. This was the small snug area with a couple of tables and a few chairs between the Jug and Bottle to the left and the big Saloon Bar to the right. From where we stood  – Pop never sat down in the pub, that was for ‘the ladies’ - we could see across the serving area to the big, sparsely furnished Public Bar. Were you ever taken there? There’d have been some good old south London history and characters in that place.

 

Every evening of his life, at least for as long as I knew him, he drank three neat double gins, finishing up with a small barley wine on top. He didn’t expect me to buy his drinks and I just had a couple of halves of bitter. We stood and said relatively little to one another. I do recall one evening, during the early 60s, when he looked across at the Public Bar and said ‘Seem to be getting more niggers in here these days.’ It wasn’t a racist comment, simply for him a factual observation using the standard vocabulary for those days, long before we developed any general sense of inter-racial protocol or awareness. None of our sporadic conversations really added up to anything much at all and by ten o’clock at the latest he was ready to go home and to bed. I walked him back across the Green and went off up the road to catch the bus.

 

One of my real regrets is that I never had proper conversations with him about his past and the family background. I might have discovered something about the Russian-Jewish connection, the experience in America, Marty’s own background, how they met, how they managed during the war and other mysteries that are now lost forever. I suppose I was just less interested in all those things at age 20 or so. I’ve found out since that neither Peg nor anyone else had ever found out very much about their family past. The one thing I know about any other member of his family I got recently from you. Pop’s sister Rose, whom you knew as Great-Aunt Rose, lived at Golders Green and Pop went to see her on a kind of duty visit a couple of times a year. You went with him once or twice on the bus and reported that, at this period of her life, Rose spent all day sitting on a commode. Nothing more is known about her now.

 

As a postscript to that, I went on a bus with Pop once when he took me up to the City one Sunday morning to buy some special buns from a baker he knew there. We sat on the front seat upstairs. On the way there, the bus stopped and, for the first time in my life, I saw Tower Bridge go up. When we got back to Goose Green, Peg was livid. Born and bred in London, she’d never seen it happen.

 

I expect you know that when Pop died in 1967 (born, I now realise, in 1877), there was nothing left in the kitty. His grandly named tailoring business had been making just enough to cover the mortgage on the shop, the rent and rates on the flat, his bus fares, and daily food and drinks. The cupboard was bare and when the contents of the flat were disposed of, they had no value. It sounds like the sort of way our grandfather would have liked to leave things: all bills paid and nothing in the bank. Peg’s sole inheritance from her parents’ empty estate was Pop’s most recent television set.

 

Do let me know if anything else of interest occurs to you about the old East Dulwich days of our childhood. Meanwhile, I’ll carry on dredging away at my memory and moving slightly forward in time.

 

Best regards to you and Ray,

Graham

​

*

​

​

MORE FROM THE MEMOIR    

My experience of my father’s family is a reverse image of that of my mother’s side. I knew my mother’s parents, Marty and Pop, but hardly ever saw her brother or sister. By contrast, both my father’s parents were dead by the time I was four but I had relatively more contact with his sister and brothers. Even so, I saw much more altogether of Marty and Pop than I ever did of my father’s several siblings.

 We rarely saw my Uncle Bill, the senior brother. He was away for months at a time as First Officer and later Master of merchant ships in the Clan Line fleet plying to and from Australia. He had married Auntie Kit, one of a large family of sisters all living in and around South Shields, Co Durham. She ran her own millinery business there, and their home was a bungalow in Summerhill Road. Uncle Bill died on board ship in Durban harbour in 1960 but Auntie Kit lived on for more than thirty years after his death, dying in the first week of the millennial year 2000, aged 98.

​

Uncle Bill was a big man in both physique and character. He loomed over everyone else, most especially over his own wife who was a remarkably small person. His personal style, albeit somewhat patronising at times, commanded immediate respect. As I heard it, he had left home at fourteen to join HMS Worcester (‘Union is Strength’), the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College. It’s thought that his mother disapproved, and ‘ran away to sea’ may be the most accurate way of expressing it. There was a very strong bond between him and my father, the next eldest, similar to that between the two youngest brothers, Uncles Bob and Ted. My father corresponded regularly with Bill during his long voyages and was a joint executor of his will.

​

On the rare occasions when the two brothers were together, their closeness was evident. I believe Bill was my father’s ‘hero’ to whom he gave all possible admiration and respect. Uncle Bill wrote to me from exotic places during his trips, covering the envelopes with as many foreign stamps as possible for me to add to my fledgling stamp collection. He and Auntie Kit never had children and I was the only nephew in the whole family, so perhaps he felt it appropriate to maintain family contact with me. In any case, he had plenty of time on board to sit and write letters. The trouble was that his handwriting, while very smooth, regular and even, was practically illegible. My father and I would pore over his letters to me for ages, trying to decode his idiosyncratic writing style and get some meaning out of it. I wish I had kept those letters. I do still have the HMS Worcester Bible he was given, probably to mark completion of his training.

 

Away most of the time, Uncle Bill was only occasionally home for a family celebration of Christmas. In 1955 he succeeded, and my parents and I went up to South Shields in bitter cold. After exchanging presents and meeting all sorts of relatives from Auntie Kit’s side, we had Christmas lunch at the Sea Hotel. My present from them, which I still have, was a book I’d asked for called Our Moon by H. Percy Wilkins FRAS, who was really the forerunner of the astronomer Patrick Moore. Boxing Day lunch was at home in the company of Auntie Kit’s sister May and her husband Stuart Winder. Stuart was something of a clown, and not Uncle Bill’s type of man at all. Aware that there was a fifteen-year old boy to entertain, Stuart was in his element, telling jokes and making funny remarks for my benefit throughout the meal. I could see Uncle Bill, imperious at the head of the table, taking a very dim view of all this, but saying nothing. The climax came when Stuart left the lunch table and returned, unknown to anyone else, with a clothes brush from the hallstand stuffed down the front of his trousers. At an appropriate moment, he produced the brush and he and I collapsed in giggles. Uncle Bill was not at all amused. He probably saw Stuart’s behaviour as worth even less attention than a child’s. I forget exactly how he reacted but May had to say ‘Stuart Winder!’ very loudly and sternly. I think Stuart was pretty close to being told to leave the table, and wonder now what Uncle Bill might have said to him if women and a child had not been present.

​

Uncle Bill’s favourite music was the Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. To a teenager recently introduced to traditional jazz as well as to Bill Haley and his Comets, this was weird stuff. In fact, it was almost unbearable and I’ve never managed to bear it since. At the same time, I greatly coveted their huge polished radiogram. I even asked Auntie Kit if she would leave it to me in her will so that I could reproduce my preferred music more splendidly than on my portable Dansette record player. How much my parents actually enjoyed G&S was unclear, but once Uncle Bill had put it on the turntable, they listened with respect for as long as they had to, and laughed at him as he performed for them to one or two of the more well-known lines and verses. I would have said Stuart Winder was a good deal more entertaining.

​

Some time later, they came to stay with us for a few days when we were living in Staffordshire. One afternoon my mother suggested that I bring the Dansette from my bedroom and play one of my records for them. I selected The Glenn Miller Story, the soundtrack from the film and my very first 10-inch LP. It only took a few bars of ‘String of Pearls’ or ‘Little Brown Jug’: Uncle Bill found it so rebarbative that he got up, left the house without a word, and went off for a long walk.

​

When I was about fourteen, my father took me by train to Liverpool to see Uncle Bill on the mv Clan Sutherland, his latest command. This was a serious treat for both of us. Uncle Bill summoned his First Officer and handed me over to him for a comprehensive tour of the ship. I saw the officers’ and crew’s accommodation, the cargo hold and all the shining complexities of the engine room. While I was doing this, as I later realised, the two brothers got down to a man-to-man conversation which included the very serious consideration of duty-free bottled goods. We had a marvellous lunch on board and I came away with a print of a painting of the vessel, an annual commission by the Clan Line, which Uncle Bill had had framed for me in a plain oak frame. I still have it.

​

I first heard of his death when I was working in an export office. Someone at a nearby desk was reading out odd bits from Lloyds List, the shipping newspaper, and casually asked me whether I was related to Captain SW Brown.  I was about 21 then and living in a flat in Marmora Road, off the top end of Forest Hill Road at Honor Oak. Invited to the funeral to inter his ashes, I was slightly amazed to discover for the first time that a Brown family grave existed, and that it was in the Camberwell Old Cemetery whose gates were directly opposite the end of my road.

​

Auntie Kit took a very long time to accept his death, imagining - not surprisingly - that he was still away on a long voyage. When it did sink in, she more or less decided that she no longer wished to remain alive without him and went into a self-induced physical and psychological decline. She was revived, and regained her will to live, through the ministrations of the Christian Scientists, to whose religious approach she had subscribed all her life. When she did die, I inherited a superb bookcase made from silky oak which Uncle Bill had had made on board ship from timber bought in Australia. It was accompanied by seven small cartons of books. They turned out to be rather disappointing to a bibliophile fondly imagining a stack of interesting and valuable first editions from the earlier part of the twentieth century. There were some first editions among them but nearly all were neither interesting nor valuable. Derek Oldfield, an obsessive collector, took most of them away, mostly at £1 each.

​

Reviewing the contents of the cartons, I found that Uncle Bill particularly liked books about adventure and travel in foreign parts, essays and some, but not too many, novels. One book I did keep is George Orwell: Animal Farm, in its first US edition published by Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, copyright 1946. Inside the front cover is a rubber stamp: ‘Cochin Club Library, Cochin’ and a label saying: ‘This Book is to be treated as a New Book until 14th February 1948’. The borrowing label is still there, with four issuings shown in late 1947 after which, presumably, Uncle Bill sailed away with it while it was still officially ‘a New Book’.

​

I also kept a few early Everyman volumes from the 1910s and 20s, none with a dust jacket, one stamped inside with ‘DURBAN MUNICIPAL LIBRARY Books for the Troops’, several inscribed ‘SW Brown, Egypt 1940’, one ‘Xmas 1939 “Peebles” ‘(his house in South Shields) and one mysteriously stamped ‘Eastnor Village Club and Institute’. Others include JBS Haldane’s paper Daedalus or Science and the Future, given in Cambridge in 1923 and published in 1924; and four early volumes in the Thinkers Library series, under the aegis of the Rationalist Press Association, including No.1 HG Wells: First and Last Things (Second Impression, July 1930) and No.17 TH Huxley: Lectures and Essays (First published in this Series, March 1931). The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History in a 1903 edition, published by Dent, is now on my shelf. So too The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, including ‘Religio Medici’; a few of Trollope’s novels in a pocket edition; and two books of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s essays which I shall probably never want to read.

​

There are also some oddities: a pamphlet ‘Souvenir of St Helena’, where Uncle Bill presumably went on one of his voyages. It tells us that the island is a Crown Colony some 4,400 miles from England and that steamers of the Union Castle Line call in once a month. The other is a book by one TW Venn called Cochin-Malabar: Palms and Pageants, printed by Pierce, Leslie and Co. Ltd of Calicut. No publication date is shown but the author’s prologue indicates his intention to ‘extend the further happenings of the place [Cochin] up to the present day, which, as it has transpired, coincides with the closure of British Rule in India.’ I will certainly have a look through this one sooner or later.

​

And, looking for any more odd items, I came across an old booklet of postcard photographs called Diksmuide: Before and after the war of 1914-18. I imagine Uncle Bill visited it during one of his home leaves. By yet another coincidence, I visited this small Belgian town only recently, quite by accident, when we were staying in Bruges. Standing on the River Ijzer, the town was on the front line throughout World War I and so entirely demolished while being taken first by one side and then by the other. It was more or less completely flattened. We knew nothing of its history until we saw the photographs of the destruction inside the rebuilt church of St Niklaas. When we came upon it at the beginning of this new century, nearly 100 years later, the place was again complete, looking like a medieval town that had been recently restored and cleaned. Dates on buildings were mostly 1920, 1921 and 1922, the years when they rebuilt the entire town using vernacular materials and precisely respecting the architectural style and features of the destroyed originals.

​

*

​