21. Not Forever, After All

We didn’t stay for very long with my parents’ friends, just a couple of months, before we moved to Edmonton in north London, to a furnished rental house which I think belonged to some distant cousin of my father’s. This meant yet another change in schools for us children. I had been attending Plashett Secondary School, which I remember as much for having lots of windows as for the fact that one of the students asked me where we’d got our milk in Southern Rhodesia (My answer: delivered in a metal gallon-urn to our back door by a local farmer), and another enquired how we had coped with the tigers there. I tried not to be shocked at such ignorance as I explained that there were no tigers in Africa.

What I recall most of all about our new lodgings, a simple “two up, two down” terraced house, like our previous place in a long road of identical homes, was that the bathtub was in a cupboard. I could hardly believe this. It was a very small tub, into which one stepped immediately upon opening the doors. There was no space for shelving nor for anything else, in fact; just that tub standing alone, but it was functional and was all that counted. Coins had to be fed into a gas meter so that the tiny gas boiler fired up and produced a thin stream of hot water from its narrow pipe overhanging the tub. I remember that we children had a bath only once a week, on a Friday evening. (The rest of the week it was “a top and tail” wash, as it was called, using a facecloth.) Of course, we children went one after the other into the same bath water.

So, we had been back in England for a few months by now, but I can’t say that life was particularly easy, though we made small steps towards bettering our circumstances. We couldn’t afford a car, so my father bought a second-hand motorbike with a sidecar. It was not the most comfortable of vehicles, but it was a sensible, inexpensive choice since both my parents were motorcyclists. My father would drive with my mother seated behind him as pillion. The sidecar, which its thin black sides and small Perspex windows, had a door opening at the front. Inside the car was one small seat. John would squeeze into the back behind that seat, and I would be seated in the front with Peter between my legs. It was a tight squeeze, but we managed somehow. Once and only once, and it was a huge treat for us all, we all went to a cinema in central London to see the musical “South Pacific”, starring Rossano Brazzi and Mitzi Gaynor. I have never forgotten that film. I loved the music, the scenery, the singing, and the romance of it all.