I No New Jerusalem
The question of housing dominated political debate in the postwar years and preoccupied the minds of many of the electorate. By the end of the Second World War, up to one million houses in Britain had been destroyed or damaged beyond repair, leaving many thousands of families homeless. Some moved into the already overcrowded houses of parents or relatives, living in a back bedroom, getting on each other’s nerves in spaces hardly large enough for one family, let alone two.
The new homes I watched being built were a concrete (actually bricks and mortar) manifestation of the political and social concerns of the postwar years. Housing would continue to dominate debate and form the key plank of both the Conservative and Labour election manifestos until the 1960s. But this time there was no grandiose talk of ‘Homes for Heroes’ as there had been after the First World War. In 1945 Labour had prophesied that:
Housing will be one of the greatest and one of the earliest tests of a Government’s real determination to put the nation first. Labour’s pledge is firm and direct – it will proceed with a housing programme with the maximum practical speed until every family in this island has a good standard of accommodation. That may well mean centralising and pooling building materials and components by the State, together with price control. If that is necessary to get the houses as it was necessary to get the guns and planes, Labour is ready. And housing ought to be dealt with in relation to good town planning – pleasant surroundings, attractive lay-out, efficient utility services, including the necessary transport facilities.
However, despite indications of nationalisation and the control and direction of resources, as had been the wartime pattern, ‘Jerusalem’ (the William Blake poem Labour Party members sang alongside ‘The Red Flag’ at the closing of its party conferences) was not built then, or indeed ever, in England’s green and pleasant land. Frustrated by the lack of homes, some people became militant, staging protests and rent strikes, squatting in houses requisitioned during the war and subsequently vacated, occupying army barracks and military encampments. Since squatting was a civil not a criminal offence, and public opinion was in general sympathetic to the plight of the squatters, the authorities proved fairly complicit about the occupations. Until, that is, the movement became not only about finding homes but more politically motivated: an indictment of the government’s inability to fulfil its pledge. Squatters, organised in some cases by activists from the Communist Party of Great Britain, started to occupy empty flats in London’s West End, invoking threats of prosecution for trespass, while others supported rent strikes in East End tenements that had been a disgrace even before the war.
Some homeless families were moved into hastily patched-up war-damaged properties, but the government’s immediate solution was to build temporary housing, an initiative that had been started during the war for those bombed out of their homes. However, when the 1947 programme of erecting prefabricated houses on site ended in 1951, only 15,623 prefabs had been built as their cost had proved to be greater than the cost of conventional housing, and much of the material needed for construction had gone for export in the drive to pay off Britain’s humongous war debts. Though the prefabs were small, they had an indoor bathroom, a modern kitchen and a small patch of garden, and delighted most of the families who were allocated one. They were intended as a short-term solution – ten years at the most – though in practice most lasted much longer than that and some are still lived in today.
An alternative for those made homeless as a result of the war was the chance of a fresh start outside the big cities in one of the satellite new towns, originally conceived of in Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944, drawn up to get former slum dwellers out of the fetid and devastated urban slums. These were part of what historians have come to call the ‘postwar settlement’, along with the founding of the National Health Service,* greater educational opportunities, baby clinics and funded playgroups, all designed to give the postwar generation a new start, an improved chance in life after the most terrible war in history.
My home town of Hemel Hempstead, some twenty-five miles from London and beyond what became known as the ‘Green Belt’ encircling the metropolis, had been designated in 1946 as the third of the Labour government’s new towns after Stevenage and Crawley. Lying on the grass in the summer of 1951 by that defunct railway line, I watched the new town encroaching week by week, month by month.
The parvenu bore every mark of the time and expectations of its naissance and completion. The centre of the new town was called Queen’s Square; there was a flagpole outside the town hall with the 1951 insignia of the Festival of Britain atop it; thoroughfares were designated Everest Way, Hillary Avenue, Tenzing Road, in honour of the successful ascent of Everest in 1953, news of which was announced on the day of the queen’s coronation. This triumph was taken to mean that even if Britain was fast losing an empire, she was still able to conquer its highest peaks.
These new towns might have seemed like a blueprint for a better Britain to the planners and politicians, but to existing residents of Hemel Hempstead the new town seemed an unwanted intrusion. This was despite the fact that it was designed by the distinguished architect, Geoffrey Jellicoe, who imaginatively included water gardens and generous squares in his plans. The architect and social scientist Judith Ledeboer, who had been praised before the war in the architectural press for wielding ‘more influence – and getting more work done than any six pompous and prating males’, was also involved.
For most of my parents’ neighbours, there was little rejoicing that the country seemed at last to be beginning to get to grips with its housing problems. They were too unhappy that Hemel Hempstead, established as a settlement in the eighth century and boasting one of the finest Norman churches in the country, could no longer be seen as a predominantly middle-class market town.
I was less critical. Since my school friend Janet’s father was an architect employed by the Development Corporation, the family lived for a while in one of the houses I had watched being built, and I admired the clean functional layout and light rooms, the novelty of built-in cupboards and Formica worktops in the uncluttered kitchen. And, not being particularly fond of the old town, I was indifferent to the change. I felt little affection for the pharmacy where the chemist’s wife dressed in imitation of (or perhaps homage to) Queen Mary, in pastel chiffon dresses, with a different-coloured toque to match every outfit, several rows of pearls, and sported a parasol which she tapped impatiently on the ground if she had to wait in a shop queue like everyone else. Nor for Keen’s the butcher, where animal carcasses hung in the shop window, blood mingled with sawdust on the floor, and the blood won out in the olfactory contest. No affection either for the haberdasher that still had wires strung high up with brass capsules that carried payment from the assistant to the cash office, and brought change and a receipt back the same way. Nor indeed for the owner, Myrtle herself, who made a great production of wrapping a packet of sanitary towels in a lumpy brown paper parcel so, she avowed, no one could guess what was inside.
My parents, however, shared the general distress. My father opined that the new town houses were ‘damned ugly’ and looked ‘jerry-built’ to him, and that we could no longer claim to live ‘in the country’ (could we ever?). My mother was mortified to realise that she was now caught in an advancing pincer movement: common at the bottom of the road, now common at the top too. What hope for her scramble into the difficult-to-penetrate middle classes with their oblique differentials?
II Respectable and Solitary
What did my mother mean by ‘common’? It was a word of disdain on her lips with no connotations of normality or ordinariness. Ironically, and I am sure unbeknown to her, ‘common’ was itself regarded as common parlance by the better educated. For her ‘common’ was a distancing word laced with criticism of all the external signs of not trying hard enough to play by the unspoken rules and obey the conventions of ‘civilised’ life to which she aspired. In her vi
ew, women signified their commonness by having peroxide-blonde hair, smoking in the street, or wearing slippers, aprons and metal curlers while out shopping. Both sexes when common ate in the street (especially bags of chips), and the men donned boiler suits to dismantle their motorbikes at the kerbside with a bottle of beer at their elbow. In essence these people, and the mothers who cuffed their children on the pavement, were making domestic life and strife transparent, for all to see; turning inside foibles outside, eschewing privacy, that precious lower-middle-class achievement.
I don’t think my mother regarded commonness as particularly contagious, though I was sent to elocution lessons at Stella Clarke’s, the local ballet school. With separate schools, churches, halls and shopping parades, there was little fusion of old and new towns – at least that was certainly the case in Hemel Hempstead.
My parents had a profound deference born of historic circumstances. Although my father had been too young to fight in the First World War and borderline too old to fight in the Second, both had handed-down memories of the workhouse, the final indignity and institutionalisation of the indigent, the profligate, the sick and the old. Both had lived through the Depression of the Thirties and the seemingly intractable problems of unemployment and underemployment, made profoundly humiliating by the dreaded ‘Means Test’ that pried unremittingly into your home, your family life, your financial circumstances, sometimes even removing objects from your home in full view of gawping neighbours to set against any benefits you might receive.
Living in the southeast of England, neither of my parents had been as directly affected by these indignities as those living in the northeast, the lowlands of Scotland, the valleys of South Wales, the clay-quarrying industrial areas of Cornwall. But this, and what he regarded as the fearful divisive anarchy of the 1926 General Strike, had instilled in my father a fear of the power of the boss class and he kept his head down at work, near-worshipping our kindly local doctor who, in pre-NHS days, was known to be generous to those he suspected could not pay for his services and was prepared to come to a sickbed in the middle of the night if summoned.
The Thirties radicalised some, turning them to communism or at least socialism. They reaffirmed my father’s conservatism – and Conservatism: ‘They know how to govern. That Labour shower couldn’t run a whelk stall’ (or, presumably, a piss-up in a brewery). You needed someone to look up to, to defer to, to respect for reasons of class and position, to be in charge of the country.
Surely one of the saddest things about the attachment to privacy (‘keeping yourself to yourself’ and ‘minding your own business’) and the slavish respect for conventions and anxiety about the opinion of others was how few friends my parents had: hardly anyone ever came to the house. There were the actively church-going Bill and Hilda, friends from pre-marriage days who lived in Ealing (or probably Hanwell), who sometimes brought their Girl Guide-leader daughter, Mary, for tea on Sunday, when my mother would make her signature dish of cream-filled chocolate eclairs. There were Ruby and Stan, who also had an adopted daughter Carol, who was about my age. They owned a hardware shop in Stanmore, but there was a falling-out over some disputed payment for a Cornishware pottery jug, and the matter was never resolved, the breach never healed.
For what must have been at least thirty years, my parents’ next-door neighbours were Mr and Mrs Cushion on one side and Mr and Mrs Glenister on the other. However, there were no neighbourly exchanges over the fence: no cups of sugar were ever borrowed, nor were first names ever used; they all remained Mr and Mrs. The only people we saw regularly were family. At Christmas we went to stay with my mother’s sister and husband and three children in Gloucestershire. Very occasionally my mother’s cousin Horace and his wife Edna motored down from their home in Walsall en route to a seaside holiday. And perhaps twice a year, we would drive to see a rather jolly cousin of my mother’s, Kath. She lived in Pinner with her husband Jimmy, who smoked a pipe and pontificated from an armchair which I never saw him leave, and their civil service typist daughter, Patricia, whose clothes were passed on to me when I was older, though I stuffed them to the back of the wardrobe and always declined to wear them.
One Sunday a month or so we would drive to visit my father’s kindly widowed sister, Rose, who lived with her brother and sister-in-law in Bushey, to watch Sunday Night at the London Palladium since we did not have a television. Though my father was determined that we’d never own one, I was enamoured of the tiny flickering black-and-white screen, though the only time I saw it, apart from these Sunday excursions, was when my friend Susan’s grandfather could be persuaded to let us watch the marionette puppets, Mr Turnip and Muffin the Mule, on his set.
My father, Charles, was a good-looking man whose black hair he would let me style when my stifling boredom reached a pitch on a Sunday afternoon. He was by temperament solitary and stoical, perhaps as a result of a difficult childhood and the loss of his much-loved older brother in the Battle of the Somme. He was one of the millions whom the two wars had left with a deep, unspoken grief for life. Though kindly and domesticated, he was an anxious, private soul: ‘decent’, I think would be the epithet that best described him. He did not enjoy the camaraderie of the pub. His father had been an alcoholic and he regarded all drink as the work of the devil, and every year would stuff a ten-shilling note in the envelope the Salvation Army pushed through the letterbox. The most alcohol that was ever consumed in our house was a small glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream at Christmas.
Charles was something of an autodidact. He was one of five children of a feckless father who gambled as well as drank, and a mother I can recall only dimly as small, quiet and kindly, wearing a rusty black dress and presenting me with a single barley sugar or pear drop sweet when we visited them. There had been no money for education beyond elementary school, so my father, born in 1898, left at the statutory age of twelve. But he was not without ambition and a desire to improve his lot. He had bought the full set of Charles Dickens’s novels (from a Daily Express special offer) and even designed a special niche in the sitting-room wall above the wireless to house them. He read them all in sequence from beginning to end, and then started reading them all over again, since he had forgotten some details he wanted to recall. It was an enterprise somewhat akin to painting the Forth Bridge, and he never read any other books to my knowledge, but he certainly had the Great Boz under his belt.
As Charles’s aspirations towards a medical career were, unfortunately, unthinkable, he had applied himself to home study in order to qualify to become a sanitary inspector, poring over textbooks every evening and copying down rows of figures and chunks of text in a strange, distinctive, elaborate hand which looked almost like Arabic script. He must have worked very hard because he seems to have achieved the certification necessary to apply for a job with Hemel Hempstead Rural District Council, where he spent his working days poking around drains, checking out sewage works and visiting what were apparently appallingly insanitary homes. ‘I could write a book, I’ve got so many stories to tell of things I’ve seen and homes I’ve been to and people I’ve met,’ he used to say. Of course he never did, but I wish he had told me some of those stories. Meanwhile, he never gave up his ambition to be a surveyor or, even better, an architect. He continued to study and is credited with having helped to design a cricket pavilion for a nearby village.
My father had been a Boy Scout leader at one time. I have a photograph of him in khaki shirt and shorts, with his Stetson-like Scout hat and a leather toggle to keep his neckerchief in place; but something went wrong there and he resigned in a huff and we never saw his fellow Scout leader, Reg, and his wife Nancy and their two boys with whom we used to go camping, again. I hope that it was not the kind of misdemeanour that we too often unfairly associate with Scout leaders today, but I simply cannot believe it was, and such a dreadful thing was never even hinted at by anyone. After that, the only people Charles ever spoke of at home were ‘Nother in the office’ and his boss, Mr Lightbody, and h
e never saw them socially. He had no hobbies as far as I can recall, though he made me a swing in the garden when I was a child with wire encased in a cut-up rubber hose, and years later made a shelf for my new house (which unfortunately collapsed a couple of weeks after it was put up, breaking every object on it and nearly killing the cat). On winter evenings and on Sunday afternoons, my father endlessly played patience and solitaire (both rather movingly symbolic) and taught me to play gin rummy. And late Saturday afternoon would be devoted to checking the football pools. The names Preston North End, Blackburn Rovers, Plymouth Argyle still transport me back to the boxy Rexine armchair, with the brown velvet seat and the linen cushion embroidered in lazy-daisy stitch of a crinolined lady carrying a parasol, where my father sat in his grey sleeveless pullover, knitted by my mother, meticulously ticking off the tiny squares with a ballpoint pen.
In his mid-eighties, my father had a series of strokes and the final one landed him in hospital where, when I visited, he looked at me with pleading eyes, but was unable to articulate what he wanted. To go home, I imagine. I knew he was dying but no one could predict when. One day in February 1985 I had to go to Cambridge for work. I rang the hospital from a phone box every couple of hours, and when I rang at four o’clock in the afternoon, the ward sister said: ‘I think you had better come now’, so I drove at reckless speed through the gloaming, but arrived too late. My father had died twenty minutes earlier. So he died in a solitary state, in some way as he had lived. I managed to stiffen my resolve to pay my respects to his body in the hospital mortuary, but when I was handed a plastic dustbin liner, the paucity of his possessions at the end – pyjamas, slippers and toothbrush, with no books, letters, or photographs – caused me to break down in racking sobs. At his funeral a few days later the mourners consisted of me, my children and two unknown church-goers, my mother being too frail by then to attend.
Joining the Dots Page 7