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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 23. Some Reflections…
These articles began as an attempt to provide an account of my childhood in Feltwell for my 2 sons. My father, grandfather, great grandfather and great, great grandfather had all lived in the village and direct ancestors had lived here since the 1600s and yet my boys (now not-so-young men) know little about it. Paul Garland suggested my recollections could be of interest to a wider audience but I never expected them to run to over 20 instalments.
Some have asked how I recall such detail or remember some events at all. I would say firstly, we all remember different things and I have forgotten many things of which some of my contemporaries have perfect recollection. Secondly, my life was divided into convenient segments: attending the village school during the 50s and secondary school during the 60s. I lived in Munsons Place in the 50s, Cambridge House in the High St until ‘65 and in Addisons Close until ‘70 when I left for college. Such changes can act as helpful markers when memories are a little muddled. Also I think being the second youngest of 6 children helped: I was quite an observant child and the activities of older siblings in particular were always of interest.
For me, the great thing about the so-called swinging sixties was that they followed the fifties and of course both followed the austerity WW2 years. The invasion of colour and especially plastics in their various forms and the increasing availability of new ways of listening to music, reinforced the declaration by the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1957 that we had “never had it so good”. I am only too aware that my own generation was especially fortunate: no wars, no national service and no enforced redundancies or unemployment which those just a few years younger than me, did experience. I bought my first house in Norwich at the age of 24 with just Ł40 in my bank account and with no financial help from family or friends. We had the contraceptive pill, colour television, modern music available for the first time to all, men in space and shortly thereafter, on the moon. Cars became safer and better and life expectancy increased steadily during this time, thanks in no small part to the introduction of the National Health Service. Changes that were just as striking as say, the more recent introduction of the internet and social media.
In particular, the production, marketing and cost of food has changed dramatically, which given an ever increasing population is perhaps very fortunate. People moan now about rising prices of food in our shops but despite even the current price increases, it is still very cheap compared with 60 years or so ago; at least as a proportion of family income. And the housewife (I use that word deliberately) of the 1950s would have welcomed in disbelief the range of food in our shops and especially the “almost ready to eat” convenience meals. Families set aside first rent and rates from their income and then food; after that, for most weeks there would be no surplus. No wonder children wore hand-me-down clothes and darned socks and had holes in elbows patched. For many, yogurts, burgers, pâté, fresh fruit juice – anything that needed a fridge or a freezer, did not appear until the mid 1960s. Meals were prepared from scratch, or from tins.
Television took food advertising to a new level: the canning factory at Lynn (“You’ll come again for Lin-can – the food with the come again flavour”) or our local pubs (“The Three Tuns at Necton – It’s a Morgan House! All your friends keep on repeating they enjoy the cheerful greeting and that is why they keep on meeting at a Morgan House!”) and Three Bears Porridge (“It’s the porridge from Norwich!”).
One sound from the 1950s I omitted to mention was the fire brigade siren at Methwold - heard clearly at Munson’s Place and no doubt throughout the village. In the days before pagers or mobile phones it was a way of summoning firemen to a call-out. The facility almost certainly dated from WW2 and the sound was identical to those air-raid sirens which featured in so many war films: a long, mournful slow drone which got louder and louder until finally fading away.
A further recollection: on Wednesday afternoons we stayed down in the old school and Mr Feltwell took us for basket work. Both girls and boys enjoyed that. We inserted and wove 1/8 inch thick canes into pre-drilled ply-wood bases as posts or uprights and then used thinner canes to weave in and out the uprights. If the basket tended to spread out as you worked upwards then you were making a fruit basket. If your basket took on a perfectly vertical profile then of course you were making a waste-paper basket. I knew no households which had waste paper to put in a basket (newspapers were kept for lighting fires or for swapping at the chip shop for a free bag of chips) – nor did I know many people who kept fruit in a basket. But like many childhood activities, the fun was in the doing, not in the final product. And in our final year, perhaps to save cost of materials, instead of making baskets we could bring in our own plastic “Airfix” model aeroplane kits to construct. We really enjoyed that!
Another personal memory: at the age of 9 or 10, Pauline and I made a cocoa tin telephone. By threading and pulling taut a length of smooth string between 2 empty tins, if one person spoke into one tin and another listened at the other end you could hear speech very clearly. Pauline’s family’s house backed onto ours at Munson’s Place and we constructed such a device which stretched from our landing window to her bedroom window, a distance of some 50 yards. I remember it took 3 balls of string from Lister’s shop at Crosshill to link the two and we kept the joining knots as small as possible. It remained in situ for some weeks until a violent thunder storm prompted my mother to throw our end out of the window in case it was struck by lightening! I remember constructing another to impress my young sons in the 1990s – and failed to do so miserably. In our modern age they declared the entire exercise quite pointless.
Thank you for staying the course. I hope the pieces have jogged a few memories. Even better if they jog someone a decade or two younger than my 70 odd years, to compile a series on growing up in the 70s and 80s. (Just a thought…) RW
Thank you for staying the course. I have enjoyed compiling the pieces (but next time I do something like this I’ll make a point of keeping a detailed diary beforehand!) RW
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