Some Memories of Living in Thornton Heath.

Visual memories start to become more numerous after we moved to Saxon Road, a residential street in Thornton Heath, which ran between Selhurst Road, the main road leading from Thornton Heath to central Croydon, and Selhurst railway station, a station on the suburban line from East Croydon to London Victoria and through which rattled the fast trains coming up from Brighton on the South Coast. On our side of the street there were 2 up/2 down houses, built in the 19^th Century, and on the other, slightly bigger and more modern dwellings.

Our house was semi-detached, separated from the house on the right by a communal alley, the front doors opening onto the alley and facing each other. The alley ran to our back gardens which were quite long, where my father grew some vegetables, we had a small grassy play area and then, attached to the house, there was an outside tool shed and toilet and bathroom. These latter could not be entered directly from the house and were cold and damp. This meant that, in winter at least, they were used as sparingly and quickly as possible.

My sister and I in the back garden in our Sunday best.

Downstairs, to the left of the front door was the sitting room. It had our best bits of furniture, particularly a china cabinet and a piano. This room was for receiving visitors or, for us children, practising the piano. We were both started on the musical path very young, at first attending lessons at Mather’s School of Music, at the far end of Thornton Heath High Street. Until quite recently I still had a framed copy of my Grade 2, Royal School of Music, Piano certificate, which I seem to remember I obtained in 1954 when I would have been just 6 years old. It was all learning scales and arpeggios and reading simple forms of well-known classical airs and involved 30 minutes practise very day, even Sunday (as it was classical).

Other than that, we knew if a visitor was someone important, because we all sat in the front room and mum would bring in a pot of tea and some biscuits on a tray. And, often, such a visitor would be for dad and his work. Then we were not invited in and were told to play quietly in the living room. This, the other downstairs room was exactly that, a multi-purpose room where we all spent most of our time. We played there, we ate there, mum cooked there and we even bathed there, particularly in winter. Upstairs, the stairs running straight up from the front door, were mum and dad’s bedroom at the front and me and my sister’s at the back.

We got to know that not all visitors were allowed in the front room, that there were important people and ordinary people. For instance, we had quite a lot of one-off visits from men, uncle this and uncle that. They would turn up and tea would be made and a packet of biscuits got out or maybe a home-made sponge and they would hang around till dad came home and then disappear off with dad never to be seen again.

Myself and my sister in the front room with the piano.

I particularly remember one of these because he decided to help me with my train set which was my favourite toy at the time. The one rule about setting out the track was it had to be packed away when I was told, everything put back in its boxes and the boxes put back in the cupboard under the stairs. So this uncle helped me as I set out the usual oval circuit and positioned the station along one of the longer sides. When we’d finished, he said that we needed something to make it more interesting. I had to go off to the loo and when I came back he said proudly, “Look, I’ve made a tunnel.” He couldn’t understand why I burst into tears but he’d used one of the boxes the track had to be put back into. He’d cut a tunnel-shaped hole in each end of the box but now all the tracks would fall out of the box, I wouldn’t be able to pack them away as I should.

It was many years later that I discovered that all these 'uncles' had just been released from Brixton prison where my dad was a part-time volunteer chaplain. My dad, in his goodness, would give his prisoners his home address, in case they needed help, so, of course, they would turn up hoping for a handout or something. My dad would then take them round to the Memorial Hall, the back street mission he was in charge of, and talk with them about their hopes and possibilities, and no doubt give them some small change so they could get to their next destination which my mum said would be the Whitehorse Arms, the pub opposite the mission hall. She tended to be more realistic than dad we discovered.