I remember West Hampstead in the ’50’s very well. It’s strange because I don’t have such clear memories of the area around Dyne Road in Kilburn where my mother and I lived between 1964 and 1976. I remember the interior of the house there but not the shops around it, except for the old Jewish man in Willesden Lane who sold fabric remnants. But I can remember almost every shop around West Hampstead Mews.
The Mews is L-shaped and forms two sides of a square which is completed by West End Lane and its tributary, Broadhurst Gardens. There are hardly any pavements, just cobblestones. The old stables had been converted into garages and repair shops by my time, and the cobbles were stained with rainbow-coloured oil slicks. The local boys used to search them industriously for stray nuts and bolts to add to their Meccano kits. One stable was still in use; the local milkman kept his horse there. We children used to go and feed it with sugar lumps, which I’m sure were not good for it! But after a few years, the milkman got one of the new electric floats and the horse disappeared.
The tiny flats above the garages had originally been where the stable boys lived. Now they have been extended and converted into bijou residences for millionaires. But when we lived there in the 1940’s and 1950’s, they could only be described as slum accommodation. Our flat did not even have hot running water until my mother had an Ascot geyser put in because she said she could not manage with an infant in the house and no hot water.
We had three small rooms, a lavatory, and a kitchen equipped with a 3-ring gas stove and a sink, all arranged around a small landing (most of which was taken up by a large floor-to-ceiling cupboard, the home’s main storage space). No bathroom, obviously. Only rich people had bathrooms in those days. We bathed on Sundays, one after another, in a zinc bath which lived in the landing cupboard the rest of the week. It was filled from the geyser, topped up with additional hot water for the later bathers, and then emptied bowl by bowl into the sink. Later my father bought a siphon to empty it more conveniently.
You reached the flat by climbing a steep, narrow staircase onto which the bright blue front door opened directly. As you entered the building, there was a rickety wooden door to the left that let you into the garage, which was rented as storage space to a company called Primol Oil Refinery. The front of the garage consisted of a roller blind for commercial access, also painted blue with the name of the company on it.
The flat was cold. The two larger rooms had open grates for coal-burning fires, but in my early years we mostly used a couple of electrical bar fires and a small paraffin stove. The electric fires had completely exposed helical resistance elements, which would certainly not be allowed today because of the risks of fire and electrocution. In those days, the attitude was very much that people mostly had sense and knew better than to stick their fingers into red-hot electrical elements, and therefore did not need extra protection. We used steel mesh fireguards and never had any accidents.
Eventually my parents bought a couple of Swedish stoves, a larger one for the front room and a smaller one for my room, which were lit ceremonially by my mother in autumn and burned through until spring. I think my father got them cheaply because most English people had no idea how useful they were. They were plumbed into zinc sheets that closed off the old fireplaces; one of my father’s workmates fitted them. They burned anthracite, which was stored in the space under the stairs that we called the cellar, accessible via the garage. I usually went down with my father to help him fill the two scuttles.
The stoves had doors with translucent mica windows through which you could see a cheerful red glow. They were opened to set the fire in the first place and then periodically through the winter to remove clinkers. Fuel was added through a porthole in the top and the ashes raked mechanically into a tray at the bottom which was emptied every day. You could control the draught with an air valve at the back and I remember the fires being tamped down in this way every evening.
There was no heating on the landing or in the kitchen, and they were freezing on a cold winter morning. My mother used to light the gas oven briefly to heat the kitchen. Central heating of course was another thing that only the rich possessed.
At the back of the flat, the garage roof extended further as a flat, tarmacked area that ended in a sheet of pitched glazing, a skylight for the space below. Low walls separated each flat’s space from the next. This was my playground. I could step out onto it through the window of my bedroom. Occasionally I stepped over the wall into the next door area, though I never went further. Occasionally too I crawled up the edging of the pitched roof, which was a broad, bench-like beam, easily climbed by a child on hands and knees. I knew there was a garden on the other side because I could see the tops of the trees that grew there. But I was never brave enough to go down the other side of the roof and look down at whatever was there. I wonder if any of our over-protected children today would be allowed to play in such a place.
The roof, as we called it, was also our cat’s link to the exterior and we always left the kitchen window slightly open so that she could come and go. Her name was Polly and she was a small, sleek, undistinguished yellow tabby. My parents originally bought her to deal with the mice. Polly was not spayed because spaying was a major operation that was carried out only by professional vets. People like us did not go to vets. We went to the PDSA clinic on Kilburn High Road, where they would “doctor” male kittens for free. Polly was a kind of second mother to me and I was told that she taught me to crawl in the same way that she taught her kittens — by moving slowly ahead of me using her twitching tail as a lure.
Because she was intact, Polly would have kittens about three times a year. When she was due, she would wander restlessly about the house, and my mother would normally take the hint and pull down the cardboard box that we kept on top of the landing cupboard for such occasions. It would be placed in the kitchen and lined with newspapers while Polly purred gratefully. Then she would be left to get on with it. When she was finished, she would call us and my mother would pick up the kittens one by one to sex them. It’s easiest when they are newborn and don’t have a lot of fur. The litters were small, usually only three kittens. If there was a fourth one, it never survived.
I always loved it when there were kittens. At first they were blind with sparse coats, round heads and folded down ears. Then, as they grew, they became fluffy, their blue eyes opened, their ears pricked up and they started trying to climb out of the box. Once they had the freedom of the flat, they became a thorough nuisance. They would get into all sorts of places where they were not supposed to go and Polly would have to call them out, or reach her head in and pull them out. Fortunately she had a local reputation as a good mouser and her kittens were in demand in the neighbourhood. People would come to see them and go away cuddling one. Often we were able to get rid of the whole litter in this way. Any that remained were put in a box and taken to the PDSA. My mother told me that they would find homes for them there and I believed her at the time. Now I think that the clinic probably put them down.
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