VE and me

8th May 1945—8th May 2025

Could it be that The War was over?

As a youngster I did an evening paper round, delivering the ‘Evening Argus’ to houses near our home in Hollingdean, Brighton. 8^th May 1945 the round started in the usual way just walking up and down front paths, pushing the paper through the letterbox, giving a knock on the front door. Then it began to dawn on me that there were more people around. Folk were coming out the doors, talking, waving arms. Excitement was building.

Could it be that the war was actually over? We knew that it was really, although fighting was still happening. What was uncertain, what we were waiting for was the actual surrender. I walked the rise up from The Dip and turned the corner. Yes, they were putting out the flags!

My parents were in the front garden, and already were excitedly fixing flags on the wall beside the front door. I can’t remember what they actually said. It didn’t matter. The war was over. The relief, the euphoria. The weight off one’s shoulders. Radio only, no tv then, brought us the news as also daily morning national newspapers; ours was the ‘News Chronicle’; and maps pinned on the wall of the dining room.

Going back home

And so, 80 years on, I decided to return to the old home and stand where I had stood and seen the flags pinned up and the parents so joyous. My father had not been called up partly on account of me and my sister, partly because he was the manager of a brush factory in Trafalgar Street.

Today, 8th of May 2025, I was glad I had left it to the bus to negotiate the ‘Vogue Gyratory’ and was safely put down outside Sainsbury’s. Then, in VE times my father was able to garage his car at Tilley’s Garage on the Lewes Road and straightforwardly cross the road to the Gaiety Cinema, turn into Hollingdean Road and begin the walk home.

Was this a company car? I’m not sure. But certainly the car, a Morris 10 (and I still remember the number; it would make a good passcode), was very precious. You wouldn’t leave it just outside the house! And there was of course no garage attached to the terraced house.

However, garaging it at Tilley’s meant my father had to walk back after putting us down at the house. I remembered the walk as long and dreary but decided to do it as homage to my father and the care the parents took for me and my sister, especially in wartime. It was quite a surprise to find it took only10-15 minutes – on a sunny warm afternoon. And I had completely forgotten the rail bridge across the road at a most awkward corner – the Brighton to Lewes line. This little bridge was never touched during the war but the high viaduct which crosses the London Road was blown as a defensive move. As I recall when taking that line to Lewes or beyond.

I’m not sure what Hollingdean Depot does now, just beyond that rail bridge, but in my childhood there stood the Dust Destructor, the tall 200 ft chimney which burned the refuse of Brighton. It was demolished in 1960 or so. It survived the war because, it was thought, it was a landmark for German bombers and fighters trying to locate the army barracks in the Lewes Road. New roads and homes had been built on the steep cliffside on the northern side of the road. But hadn’t they been preceded by prefabs soon after the war ended?

A Pub! I had no memory of there being one such at the corner of Roedale Road. In those days we were all strictly teetotal. Today at Brighton Marina, at my sociable lunch with friends and fellow members of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows I had indeed enjoyed a glass of wine.

My father had been a member of the Oddfellows in pre-NHS days and so it had most likely contributed funds for my coming into this world, and almost certainly for the operation my mother had thereafter. It has adjusted since to the welfare state and continues to support members’ care and welfare.

I was pleasantly surprised by the well-kept houses along Roedale Road. It had not been a well-regarded area in my days. In fact, I just disliked walking through it, but doing so meant the bus fare from the Ditchling Road into the town centre was cheaper. Now the No 50 bus runs down it and up to the Ditchling Road. Better still.

So I turned into Dudley Road, though this was not the usual access road to my house. I’m not sure now why. For me, out of practice with almost any gradient after living in Worthing for years, it was quite a puff, but I think that the reason as a child was again something to do with the way that end was regarded. Nevertheless, my friend Sheila lived along there.

They all seemed good decent 1930s houses and I could not possibly identify hers. All of course had double-glazing windows, some trying to be authentic using small panes of glass. Others fitting large panes, as I would have done, irritated by this constant blockage to one’s vision.

Then to The Twitten, my usual access road from Roedale Road; possibly less steep, less long, less effort, and then I stood at where I had stood so many years before. The same number house, with the actual number fixed much where the flags had been fastened.

Going in

I knocked on the door and the kindly couple now living there invited me in. Radiators! No coal shed now at the back of the house from which my father collected the daily requirements and then with his load climbed the several steps up back into the house. Chiefly it was to feed the fire in the dining room. On Sundays the fire was in the front room. Only if one were seriously ill, was a fire lit in a bedroom. We did sometimes have warmth from a paraffin stove in the bedroom. Shadows and light from it moved around moved magically on the ceiling. And sometimes my father told us stories he’d made up, especially about the Little White Horse.

As we sat round the fire of an evening. we listened to the radio, the one radio in the house. As well as the news with Richard Dimbleby, notably as a war correspondent, there was plenty else besides. ‘In Town Tonight’ on Saturday evenings, a magazine programme of shows and gossip around London. ‘It’s That Man Again’ headed by Tommy Handley cheered us up and kept us going, to paraphrase a saying of the lugubrious Mrs Mop, one of the characters in the show. Wilfred Pickles was famous for his Yorkshire accent among southern-speaking (BBC-style) folk.

My mother knitted 3in. squares in whatever colour lengths of wools came to hand, which were sewn together to make blankets or throws, and Nana would cut lisle stockings into strips to knit similarly on really big wooden needles, for bombed out and displaced people. My good friend Gwen who lived across the way, her mother never got the hang of turning the heel when knitting socks on four needles for the troops so would ask my mother to do that part for her. I’’ve not inherited any talent for knitting, sadly, and the kindest thing anybody ever said about my sewing was calling the stitches, ‘homeward bound’!

The coal was delivered by horse and cart, and strong men carried the heavy sacks on their shoulders down the path that ran along the back of the houses. Meanwhile the waiting horses delivered free manure for the garden!

The parents used most of the garden to grow veggies, but the end was for the chicken coop and chicken run. My mother kept a record of the eggs each chicken laid, Dot and Carry being the names of two of them. Come Christmas though…the butcher was called in. Plucking feathers is a messy job!

No mangle now in the kitchen! Modern appliances, washing machines, refrigerators and fridge freezer. Hurrah for progress. So fresh milk is not now delivered 6 times a week in 1 pint bottles and the empties duly put out for return and re-use. The bottles themselves were round, not as today square-ish to fit into refrigerator doors—no fridges! And carried in metal crates, 20? bottles to a crate, on a battery powered electric milk float; very quiet, very slow. The milk float may have been quiet but glass bottles rattling around in metal crates makes for a harsh noise!

Once a week the milkman himself called for his payment, and my mother paid in cash. Pound, shillings and pence; 20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling, halfpennies (ha’pence) and farthings. What else was there? Cash was king.

The bottle was capped with a cardboard top so the cream, risen to the top of the milk, was an easy target for birds.

Our cat, Timmy, all black but for a triangular white patch on his chest, drank his milk in a manner suitable for an elderly gentleman, from his saucer on the kitchen floor.

Still recognisable today in ‘my’ house was the understairs cupboard into which we had squeezed when the air raid sirens sounded off its blood-chilling wail. My father was a member of the Civil Defence Force and served at night as an ambulance driver. Later we had a Morrison shelter in the dining room, a metal framed structure with metal top, under which was sleeping space for several people. My father was most reluctant to get under it with us. It worried me.

The house had certainly enjoyed the benefit of skilled home improvers. Had that industry come out of the need for all the repair and rebuilding post-war and the shortage of skilled craftsmen? Thanking the present owners and complimenting them on the work they had put into the house, I walked on up the street.

Down The Dip

It had more of a slope than I remembered! At the junction with Hollingbury Place I paused. Coming back from the opticians’ wearing glasses for the first time I turned into our road and saw the houses at the far end of the road so clear, so sharp. I had not been aware till that moment how poor my sight had been.

Nana’s house was bigger than ours and older. In the garden was a prolific apple tree. To store the apple for winter use they were laid out in the big back bedroom facing north, cold and sparsely furnished, and regularly turned. Apples from my apple tree are simply stewed and into the freezer. I assumed Nana’s were Bramley apples and that mine were the same, but mine redden, and I have recently discovered they are probably another popular Victorian apple—’Queen’.

Nana cooked lunch for us 2 or 3 times a week in the war as my mother had taken over Uncle Leslie’s Liverpool Victoria collecting round when he was called up and drafted as ground crew (electrician) at RAF Driffield, Yorkshire. He went back annually for reunions after the war but never talked about his experiences.

Nana’s culinary masterstroke was ‘flapjack’; a sort of shortbread sandwich with dried fruit as the filling. But the shortbread was so crumbly with butter and the filling rich, sugary and spicy. Nana must have saved her butter ration and lived on margarine and saved points for the sugar and fruit for months! All for Sunday Tea after Sunday School.

Nana’s dog was called ‘Nipper’, glossy black smooth hair. But no tinned dog food to feed him on, and no rations for pets!. We went from time to time to a place in the Edward Street area, with the most hideously horrible smell, black and red the definitive colours, to buy horsemeat, bluey purple to distinguish it from meat for human consumption.

A healthier smell came from the blacksmith’s forge in The Open Market, off the Level, as horsehair was singed when the blacksmith applied the shoe to the foot. The sound of hammering , the red of the fire, the big horses moving around. I suppose my mother went there for sensible food shopping. I didn’t.

I walked down The Dip. The corner shop was no longer the Grocer’s. Very little came pre-packed then, most items were cut, weighed, measured as you watched and waited, including the cheese, cheddar cheese, and only cheddar cheese. Cheese came in ‘tubs’ seen these days only on tv! Say 1 foot high and 1 foot in diameter weighing several (many?) pounds with a rind on the cheese.

My sister was registered as a vegetarian so she had no meat ration, but her cheese ration was increased to 12oz. a week. She wasn’t much of a meat eater; what she wanted of meat was easily managed while we could all share in the increased allowance of cheese.

But Nana lived by herself, so her ration of cheese for the week was 1oz. How to cut 1oz from one of these great tubs? The grocer refused! But would allow Nana to have 2oz cheese every fortnight. I think of this still when making myself a cheese sandwich. We had a sweet ration, but my mother would not let us use it on ‘sweets’, only chocolates, a preference which has stayed with me.

The shops in general were the same, only different. No butcher. Takeaways. No greengrocer. Convenience stores. But the red postbox was still there, standing on the pavement edge a bit rusty, marked GR. So almost certainly the one we had used to post our letters in, particularly to Uncle Leslie. My mother wrote the letters and read his to Nana as she could neither read nor write.

I think there were at least 2 deliveries to the houses and 3 collections daily from postboxes; a collection on Sunday and, most exciting, a Delivery on Christmas Day! We didn’t have a phone in the house until after the war, and the only telegram we received was, thankfully, from Uncle Leslie to say he was demobbed and coming home imminently.

I looked for a bus to take me up the other side of The Dip to Ditchling Road. No such. It was a one way route downhill that the bus now followed. I looked up sharply at the skyline. Was that the church to which school had been ‘evacuated’?

We had had evacuees from London billeted upon us briefly, and so our school premises, Hertford Road Elementary, were shared; one week we had the use and the next the evacuees. The alternate week we were sent to the church on the Ditchling Road. A big rambling building. We wandered all over it. We just went there by our little selves. There was a lovely scramble down through woods I recall.

We had evacuees for a short while; a mother and son from London. I think they had the parent’s bedroom, so the parents must have squeezed their double bed into the small back bedroom. The son had a cockney wit. If he thought he was being put upon, his retort was ‘Lie down and I’ll breathe for you’. He got on well with Nipper. The lad would say ‘Gis [give us] your paw nice’. And Nipper duly raised a front paw and put it in the lad’s hand. They found it too dull and quiet and soon went back to London.

Up the Hill

No bus today up the fearsome Hollingbury Crescent. I started up, pausing more often than I had done those many years ago. Even then, I had been glad of the handrail to get round the impossible corner at the junction with Hollingbury Road. How ever did the no.14 double decker venture it regularly, with the camber of the road against it? If I were feeling brave I did go upstairs, relying on the weight of the heavy engine to stop us toppling! No wonder the bus now takes a devious route to avoid such perils.

A good moment to pause and look back at the skyline above Hollingbury Place. Barnett Road, just above Nana’s house, had been the last road; beyond lay the allotments where Sheila’s brother had kept his goats. Now and since the 1950s, I guess, 3-storey buildings towered above. We walked through those allotments then, and over the golf course and up to the ‘Roman’ camp as we called it.

The real difference was the number of cars. A few other people had cars in our road. Gwen’s father was a builder and had a truck. Now cars were everywhere, parked nose to tail both sides of the road. No wonder traffic control signs were needed, marking who gave way.

I certainly would not want to play in the road as we children , and definitely ‘children’ not ‘kids’, did so freely. I remember D-Day June 6^th 1944 for that reason. I had come home from school for dinner intending to play in the road with the others until it was ready. But Nana wouldn’t let me! The news of the Normandy invasion had come through on the radio and she feared reprisals from tip and run German airplanes. I was cross!

We went to the cinema to see the newsreels and certainly for the films – Dumbo, Bambi, Snow White, Fantasia. And Mickey Mouse, of course. Rather than the Gaiety Cinema, we preferred the Regent, near the Clock Tower in central Brighton. On visits to the Theatre Royal New Road, in the interval, tea was served to us on a tray as we sat in our seats. Boots on the Western Road, behind its splendid 1930s façade, had a café where afternoon tea was waitress served, and music played by a string quartet. There was an attendant in the Ladies’ – Nana’s cousin, Aunt Jessie.

Going home

I passed Gran’ma’s house as I approached ‘Five Ways’, as now called. I’m sure the area did not have a name when I knew it. You only went there to go somewhere else; to take one of the 4 other roads that conjoined yours!

I do not really remember the interior of Gran’ma’s house for she moved to live with her daughter, my father’s sister, in Hove. But it looked in good order I was pleased to see. My parents and I cycled over to see Gran’ma and Auntie

Elsie and family. No gears on the bikes, just push, or push harder. Today a cyclist was cycling up Hollingbury Crescent. Very slowly; much pedal turning for little height gained, but still sitting down. Remarkable!

The no.14 bus may have gone, but familiar bus numbers remained. The 26 and 46. It was the buses had changed. Then they, or at least one of those services, were trolley- buses. Quiet, smooth, comfortable. Good for the health? We were not too bothered in those cigarette-smoking days. Good for the climate? Not bothered about that either with our coal-burning fires.

The problem was the arm that transferred power from the overhead cable. It could become detached if the driver swung out to avoid an obstacle. Whereupon the conductor, who rang the bell for the bus stops, collected fares, gave change, clipped and issued the ticket – different-coloured tickets for different values according to the length of the journey, would cease patrolling the bus. He or she would wield a long pole to return the errant arm to the cable.

But today little green lights flashed over my OAP bus pass. I could speak to the driver. Disembodied voices told me the next stop. I pressed the bell!

And next week is My Birthday; again. I like to celebrate it by doing something unusual, going somewhere new. This year my outing to the unusual has been to the past. I’m glad to be back in the present. And very grateful.

 

Wendy Funnell