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Growing Up In Feltwell in the 1950s & 60s – Part – 8. Family Life
We were a family of 6 children: by the time I was 5 my eldest sister was 14. Meal times could be chaotic especially on Sundays when we always had a Sunday roast and mother would be rushing to feed us all so we could attend Sunday school. Mother of course specialised in “meat and two veg” and the cold leftovers from joints of mutton or beef would be minced on a Monday using a hand mincer, clamped to the kitchen table. Chicken was a luxury reserved for Christmas or Easter until the early sixties when Mr Hopkin would place one in his basket and point out that it was actually cheaper than a joint of meat. We were not avid gardeners but did grow potatoes, peas, broad and runner beans, onions and carrots. I have happy memories of placing freshly dug potatoes in a bucket of water and swirling them round with a stick and watching their skins fall away while the Huggetts (with Jack Warner) were on the radio. We also relied heavily on tinned vegetables: carrots and “garden” and “processed” peas. I once begged mum to buy some tinned spinach after watching the cartoon character “Popeye” on a neighbour’s TV. She eventually obliged: it had the appearance of a khaki coloured sludge and was revolting.
Fish fingers were invented in 1955 here in Norfolk (Great Yarmouth), but sales did not take off until a decade later when people actually owned a fridge with a small ice compartment. Similarly, adverts for Blueband margarine, “it spreads straight from the fridge!” meant little until people had a fridge. Meanwhile, opened jars of jam would grow “white whiskers” on pantry shelves, but remained quite edible once the offending mould was removed with a spoon.
Until 1960 we relied on the radio for entertainment. Mum and Dad listened to the Archers (15 mins every weekday at 6.45pm) while older siblings listened to Radio Luxembourg (208m Medium Wave) when reception was clear enough – often it wasn’t! There was also “Dick Barton – Special Agent” (which would have children scurrying indoors early evening to hear the latest episode); Paul Temple (with its wonderful “Coronation Scot” theme music) and “Journey into Space”. The latter was broadcast from the early 1950s when Yuri Gagarin was yet to become the first man in space and was set sometime long into the future: I am sure its writers had no idea that man would be standing on the moon within 15 years! I remember the fuss of pleasure when dad had a bakelite radio fitted in our old Morris 8 (it had to wait another year or two for a heater) so we could listen to “Sports Report” on a Saturday afternoon if we were out and about. My older brother dabbled with the cheaper Vernons Football Pools for a while. Names like Accrington Stanley and Bradford Park Avenue remain in the mind like those strange names relating to the fishing areas. East Fife 5 – Forfar 4! Our first “Ecko” TV also included a radio and dad insisted that the man from Woollatt and Mitchell had told him that when switching from radio to TV the set had to be allowed to cool down for a few minutes first. This was most annoying as Rawhide (featuring a very young Clint Eastwood and the excellent Eric Fleming as the trail boss) started when the Archers finished and so we always missed the first few minutes, not to mention the all important opening theme music. It was several years later we discovered Dad had got it wrong: the set was supposed to be allowed to cool down when switching from TV to radio! Gradually however the TV moved in the ascendency: after all, the Archers omnibus could be heard on a Sunday morning when Tom Forest finished his monologue with “Well I suppose I’d better tell you what’s been going on in Ambridge...”
We were in the minority of those who had a telephone (Feltwell 321) and shared our line with Mrs Thompson down the other end of Munson’s Lane. This meant hanging-up on those rare occasions you heard voices talking when lifting the receiver and waiting for their call to end. Telephones were still rare and hence there were fewer reasons to make calls. Dad did a little informal weekend taxi work until about 1955, mainly ferrying US army personnel back to Lakenheath base. Sometimes they called in and waited while dad ate his lunch. One afternoon mum had plonked me down on my pot (I could have been no older than 3) and made me sit quietly in the kitchen while dad ate and the Americans cracked jokes in the living room. There was a prolonged silence and I, hoping to be released from my prison, called out: “Dad! Have those yankee doodles gone yet?” There was a roar of laughter from within and this big American opened the door and scooped me up off my plastic seat and into his arms, laughing in my face!
I was 12 before I was allowed to wear long trousers to school and I was not alone. Mothers obviously thought grazed knees healed more readily than grazed trousers. But little brother, 4 years younger, was allowed long trousers before he had even started Grammar School.
Our summer holiday was always to Brecon – my mother’s home and where her father, brother and sister still lived. In a Morris 8, Morris Minor, Hillman Husky, Austin A40 – or even a Morris 1100, the 220 mile journey with 3 children was quite an expedition. More than once we left the house unlocked but we had nothing worth stealing. There was no upper speed limit then but neither were there any motorways en route so allowing for stops, it usually took us over 7 hours. And in a car with no air conditioning or in the early days, no heating, radio or seat belts! We took sandwiches and a Thermos: cafés were too expensive. The relatives lived in a first floor flat which was level with an elevated railway line close to the kitchen window and the steam engines’ crews would wave gaily to me as they chuffed by. And a few doors away was Woolworths, with its seemingly unlimited supply of Airfix model aircraft kits. Until my Nottingham college days began in 1969, it was my only experience of residing in an urban environment.
My father died when I was 19 and a few days after the funeral it fell upon me to drive the 220 miles with Welsh uncle back to Brecon in dad’s new Ford Cortina. Shortly after 9pm uncle telephoned mother to say he was very sorry but after a quick bath and a meal “the silly young thing” had insisted on driving back to Feltwell the same day - “so I’ve no idea what time you should expect him home again...” My mother managed a laugh. I had arrived home half an hour earlier.
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