Journals (again)

Following on from yesterday's note, and what my Californian friend wrote on his blog, this is what I posted as a comment:

It did occur to me that a blog could be an ideal place for a journal - but then I decided that I really don't want too much personal detail being available to all and sundry. Besides, if I just start a journal now, it would take a lot of explanation to give any reader sufficient knowledge of the background to appreciate some of the comments. I think that means that if (a big 'if') I decided to start a journal for the sake of my descendants, I would really have to make it autobiographical, at least to start with.

Something along these lines:

The beginning for me was in Canada House, a Royal Navy maternity home in Barnsole Road, Gillingham, Kent, in May 1942. World War II was two and a half years old and still had rather more than another three years to run. My father was serving in the Royal Navy and he and my mother were renting a house in Holmside, Gillingham, next door to my paternal grandparents. 73 Holmside was a three-bedroomed terrace house on two floors, with a large back garden and a reasonable size front garden, and I was to live there for the first fifteen years of my life.

On the ground floor were two reception rooms (known simply enough as the front room and the back room. None of this parlour and dining room nonsense!) and a kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a small, square lobby with the back door and also the toilet leading off. Upstairs, the main bedroom was in the front, with the second and very small third bedrooms at the back. Beside the main bedroom at the front of the house was the bathroom. This contained just a bath with a large water cylinder in which the water for the bath was heated by gas. There might have been a hand basin, but I don't recall one and I rather doubt that there was one as we always washed at the kitchen sink. It was quite a palaver to light the geyser, as the gas boiler was called, to have a bath and we only used it once a week.

The kitchen was quite small and had two doors - one from the hall and the other to the back lobby - but, as well as the sink and draining board, there was a cooker, a fitted dresser, a ‘copper' and a drop-down table which was fitted to one long wall. The copper was a large tub with a wooden lid which would be filled with water for the weekly laundry. The water would be heated by gas burners underneath. While the laundry was immersed in the near-boiling water, it would be stirred around with a stick about a yard long. After the laundry had been washed, it would be put through the mangle before being hung on the line to finish drying. A mangle was a machine with two rollers, one above the other, one of which could be turned by a handle at the side. The laundry would be fed in between the rollers with one hand while the other was turning the handle. As the rollers turned, they squeezed water out of the washing, the water being collected in a bucket for re-use in the copper.

As was the norm for families of our class in the 1940s and ‘50s, the front room was used only for special occasions and the back room was a combined dining and living room. Both these rooms, and indeed the two main bedrooms, were fitted with fireplaces and were heated when necessary by coal fires. It was very rare for a fire to be lit in the bedrooms and I can remember this being done on only one occasion when I was seriously ill.

I was only three years old when the war ended, so I am uncertain whether what I think of as war-time memories are real or imagined. They are few enough, in all conscience. I have vague memories of searchlights crisscrossing the sky as seen from the bedroom window, and large pits dug along the top of the Darland Banks (part of the North Downs) to act as tank traps in the event of a German invasion.

It was in 1947 that Dad came home from the war. I doubt if I recognised him, and my brother Graham certainly did not know him as he had been but a babe in arms when Dad had last seen him some three years before. During the latter stages of the war Dad had been serving on HMS Bonaventure, a depot ship for midget submarines which had been in the Far East and in Australian waters. He arrived in a taxi and had brought with him one of his ratings to help carry indoors a large, wooden chest which was filled with things he had bought while abroad, things which were unobtainable in England. There were toys for Graham and me, and a dinner and tea set, some pieces of which my mother still had when she died nearly sixty years later.