Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Pugh, Peter (O2000.16) |
| Interviewee | Peter Pugh (PP) |
| Interviewer | Peter Ruffles (PR) and Trish Goldsmith (TG) |
| Date | 01/08/2000 |
| Transcriber by | Jean Riddell (Purkis) |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no: 02000.16
Interviewee: Peter Pugh (PP)
Date: August 2000
Venue: 101 Lord Street, Hoddesdon
Interviewer: Peter Ruffles (PR) and Trish Goldsmith (TG)
Transcribed by: Jean Riddell (Purkis)
Typed by: Freda Joshua
************** unclear recording
[discussion] untranscribed material
italics editor’s notes
[Victoria Place is immediately next to the St Andrew Street car park entrance, set back and part was probably once a barn]
PR: This is Peter Ruffles and Trish Goldsmith talking from the Pugh family home in Lord Street, no101, Hoddesdon. I remember it from school registers a year or 2 back – how old is Martin now?
PP: 44
PR: Oh dear, one of my pupils and the particular interest is St Andrew Street, Victoria Place but I expect in the time we’ve got this afternoon we’ll talk about other family matters. This is Hertford Museum so we’ve got to route ourselves as closely as possible to Victoria Place. Now, if I swap places with Trish, you’ve got papers, you could do a little bit of who’s who?
TG: Background, right, OK. I don’t know what your name is, so let’s start with that, shall we?
PP: Peter.
TG: Family?
PR: Just said that.
TG: And I’ve got your address and everything. Presumably you were born in Hertford?
PP: Born at the County Hospital.
TG: Right, and you lived in Hertford for how long – most of your life or did you move to Hoddesdon?
PP: We moved to Hoddesdon after we got married. 1956 we came here.
TG: Whereabouts in Hertford did you live?
PP: Most of the time in St Andrew Street, Sele Road for a very short while.
TG: So what can you remember about St Andrew Street. Are you one of those people who has great memories?
PP: No, I’m afraid not. I haven’t got a very good memory. I moved to St Andrew Street in 1941 and that was when my older brother died. My sister and myself moved in to live with Gran, Granny Wright, and me Grandad – we always called him Darby.
TG: Do you know why?
PP: I think it’s because one of the children, we had lots of cousins ‘cos (Grandfather) got called Father by my Gran (one of the cousins) because he couldn’t say Father, he said Darby and it stuck. Everybody knew him as Darby. We lived with her until I was moved to Stanstead Abbotts for a short while, and I moved back again, I had to live with my other grandparents for a while. My mum died when I was very young and me grandmother brought me up really.
TG: Were your parents Hertford people?
PP: Yes. Well, they started in Stanstead Abbotts but they moved to Hertford. As far as I can make out they lived all over the place, in Bengeo, along the Ware Road somewhere.
TG: So Granny Wright was a Hertford person. She’d been there a long time, had she?
PP: Yes. We worked it out by different Army records of me Grandad and he reckons that she moved down that yard in 1907.
TG: For the people who don’t know St Andrew Street can you explain where the yard was.
PP: It’s in St Andrew Street, on the left-hand side as you approach St Andrews Church. There used to be Ferdy’s Cafe and it’s the yard down the side where Ferdy’s Cafe used to be. I don’t know what it is now.
PR; It’s a stove shop. Were they numbered in St Andrew Street numbering in those days?
PP: Yes, when I was there, yes. I always lived at 15B St Andrew Street. When me Gran first moved there she lived in 15A.
PR: The one with the front door.
PP: Looking up the yard. And my sister and my brother were both born there and later on, somebody who was living next door, I don’t remember who, must have moved out, my Grand and Grandad moved into that place and my Mum and Dad moved into there,15A. That was before I was born.
PR: How were the sizes of the 2 properties, was one a lot bigger than the other?
PP: No, they was about the same, actually I think you was better off in15A. You had water inside and you had your own kitchen with a sink. The toilet was outside, up the yard but it did have its own water. Where we lived, in Gran’s place in15B, the water was in the yard and it was shared by the next house down, Mrs Dearman. We shared the same tap in the yard.
PR: There’s a puzzle why your parents didn’t go into 15B.
PP: I don’t know.
PR: Why Granny Wright preferred round the corner or making way for a better home for the family?
PP; For the youngsters, because the water was indoors. Could be. But it wasn’t until we started looking through the old photos and the different records I’ve got of me Grandad in the forces that we realised that they did change addresses. I always thought that they lived at 15B.
TG: Can you remember much about the house inside?
PP: Oh yes. It was only 2 rooms downstairs – 15B - one door into the yard, it was called the front door but it was the only door. We had 2 rooms upstairs and 2 rooms up in the attic. And all the windows faced into the yard, didn’t have any windows at the side or back.
PR: You could see, presumably, St Andrews Church steeple.
PP: And used to be wakened up by the bells in the morning.
PR: And the windows for 15A?
PP: Some faced into the yard and some faced up the yard. The kitchen window faced up the yard and our living room window faced into the yard.
PR: And was it much lighter because of that?
PP: I would think so, yes. That house, 15A and 15B had gas lamps but Mrs Dearman down the yard, she only has oil lamps, she never had gas at all.
PR: I got into a little bit of family trouble over that. I used to go down to see Mrs Dearman with Desmond Chappell and I knew that in our cellar at home were some of our old oil lamps just wrapped up in newspaper but not used. And I remember going home and telling my own grandmother why have we got them, could we give them to Mrs Dearman, and one of them certainly was a really nice, ornate one, and I took them both down to Mrs Dearman and gave them to her. I don’t think they really needed them.
PP: No, she had some really beautiful lamps.
PR: Now, I suppose, we would have like to have had them. So, you had gas in both 15A and 15B. So what happened, family-wise, then? Your mother died when you were -?
PP: When I was 4. Father was in the TA and when the war came he just went into the Army straight away. And so it was left to Gran to bring us up. He did re-marry but it wasn’t very successful and us children weren’t very happy.
TR: How many children were there?
PP: There’d been 4 but the youngest sister died at birth and me Mum died soon afterwards at Hertford County Hospital. I had an older sister and she’s just died a fortnight ago.
PR: What was her name?
PP: Beryl Maynhard. You may know her. Everyone in Hertford knew her. She used to work on Hartham in the hut, where they do all the recreational, the tennis and the bowling and she used to belong to the WI, the Castle Hall on Fridays.
PR: Yes, I think I know her, didn’t know there was any connection with you.
PP: She had 6 children.
PR: And where is she living now, in Hertford?
PP: In Datchworth. She’s moved into a bungalow in Datchworth.
PR: And what age was she?
PP: 71, She had emphysema.
PR: Is she one up from you then?
PP: Yes, she was 5 years older than me. I had a brother in between her and me and he died in 1941. As a result of that, me father was in the Army, we was taken away from the step-mother then and sent back to live with me granddad.
PR: It was a story for lots of families of that time. War-time added a complication. I can remember Mrs Wright, but I can’t remember anybody else being there.
PP: Well, it was open door. Her door was never locked, the kettle was always on the stove and anybody went down there, there was always a cup of tea. Friends went to the shops, they’d get tired, head for Granny Wright’s and have a cup of tea (overtalking and laughter).
TG: So you’d remember quite a bit about war-time in Hertford.
PP: I was there when the doodle-bug dropped on Millbridge. Before that happened we had a very close shave. My Grandad Darby used to work on the railways, he was a guard, Hertford East Station up to Liverpool Street, and some nights he wasn’t there and some nights he was. One night he was there and it was when the doodle-bugs were about and the air raid siren had gone. He used to take his position at the door, looking out. And we used to have to come downstairs and go under the table. Gran used to make a bed up under the table and if we heard the siren that’s where we had to sleep.
And we heard this doodle-bug coming and you don’t really take any notice unless the engine stops. If it just keeps going you’re all right. This engine was still going but all of a sudden there was such a commotion. Darby come in and he threw himself under the little table we had just inside the door, in the scullery bit. Gran came in to where we were and she come and threw herself on top of us kids under the table and we wondered what it was all about because we could still hear the engine going. What happened, he said, when he could explain, he’d seen it come over and was heading, so he thought, for St Andrews Church steeple, but he didn’t wait for it to hit it, he went under the table. Somehow it missed it and kept going and we did later on we hear a bang, but we didn’t know where it had come down.
PR: That was earlier in the war than Millbridge.
[Transcriber’s note: not much earlier – 1st V1 to fall on Britain was 12 June 1944. Millbridge V1 was 2 July 1944]
PP: Oh yes, that was before the one hit Millbridge. We didn’t know anything about that, we was in bed when that happened but it was in the morning. Me Aunt Freda that was living with us, Gran’s daughter, she’d just finished her night shift at Addis’s and she came to bed. At that time there was only 2 of us children. Me sister was out doing a milk round on a bike. She was in Ware. Us 2 boys were in a double bed and Aunt Freda was in a single bed next to the wall beside us. I was woken up by this noise, a loud noise overhead, a doodle-bug noise. You wake up and you listen for it to stop and it did stop and you don’t know what to do and you’re just there. Big explosion, the house shook, it didn’t come down around us (but) there was dust everywhere and you couldn’t see anything.
The next thing I can remember was Gran crawling up the stairs in the dust, I can see her now, in the doorway, calling our names out. And as the dust cleared, we could see what happened and me cousin, Bob, was beside me, sitting bolt upright, but he’d got a picture frame round his head. We could see outside, where Aunt Freda was in bed there, the wall had disappeared and we could see into Mrs Moore’s garden.
PR: Now where the entrance to the car park is.
PP: Yes, where the car park is now, that used to be Mr and Mrs Moore’s garden. They had all rabbit hutches along there, they bred rabbits and we could look on top of the rabbits’ hutches and we could see through into Mrs Dearman’s. It was all lath and plaster ceilings and the walls were all lath and plaster because there was all sort of woodwork, It was only the ground floor that was brick. As kids, we didn’t mind, there was nobody hurt. Soon as we could, we was out, we wanted to see what had happened. We went up the street and we was told that a bomb had dropped on Millbridge. Rushes had a leather shop there, didn’t they. Us boys used to look in the windows, they used to have sheath knives. The first thing we thought was, we can get a sheath knife.
TG: How old were you?
PP: It happened in ’44 and I was born in ’34 so 10.
PR: So can you remember any other pictures, did you see broken stuff in the streets?
PP; Oh yes, in fact we’d only just got to the top of the yard and we weren’t allowed any further. They’d already got the police and the air-raid wardens there.
PR: No deaths but the damage was quite far-flung.
PP: Oh yes. They told me it actually fell in the river itself, which took a lot of the explosion, otherwise it would have been a lot worse, ‘cos Millbridge still stood there, didn’t it.
PR: Yes. Someone said the balustrades had been knocked down.
PP: The actual bridge was still usable. That was the main road through, because all the convoys used to use that road. The army trucks used to come along St Andrew Street and head north that way.
PR: When you told me that story before, was there glass in the [inaudible].
PP: There was so much rubbish about you really didn’t know what was there [overtalking]. As children, we weren’t allowed up there until it was made safe for us.
TG: And how long did that take?
PP; Didn’t take long. Mr Neale who lived in a little bungalow half-way down –
PR: Yes, a big window at the side and nothing on the front.
PP: He was a steeplejack and he was quite used to doing building work and he helped make the houses safe, water tight, done all the emergency repairs, most of them was plaster-board and the house was cleared up. I couldn’t say how long it took, but we didn’t move out, we still lived there.
PR: And by that time, someone else was in 15A.
PP: My Auntie Esther moved in there when my father moved to Stanstead when I was born, and my Aunt Esther and her husband moved in. Her husband died shortly afterwards. She lived there all the time. I can remember her on her own. So there was my Gran and Grandad in 15B and Mr and Mrs Dearman down the bottom, Vic Neale across the way in the bungalow and Mr and Mrs Moore up top (?)
PR: Now on the way down the yard, somewhere between your front door and Neale’s, there was a gravelly yard, then there was a large concrete –
PP: That’s right. I can show you a picture .
PR: Yes, what was that all about?
PP: That was a manhole. If you look now you’ll see it has iron manhole covers.
PR: It looked bigger than that.
PP: It did. I think there’s 2 manhole covers there now. But that used to be a concrete slab, it was actually in 2 halves and there was a little gap in the middle and we used to drop things down into the water. What we used to do when we was children, used to go down the yard, we would turn the tap on and we could put a hand under the tap, squirt the water up the yard and have that slope soaking wet and we used to go round and collect all the snails and we used to have a snail race.
TG: Was there a way through. The car park’s there now and you can get through to the Castle grounds, could you get through that way then?
PP: Yes, go over the wall at the bottom across Mrs Pilcher’s garden, used to have big branches across the little river [St Andrew’s Ditch] and could get into the Castle grounds climbing over the branches.
PR: So Mrs Pilcher’s garden, I think we’d better get the layout. 15A had a garden pointing up towards the street.
PP: As you came down the yard, on the left was a fence which come out level with the houses, that was 15A’s garden and then there was a pear tree in there, a big one, and there was the toilet half way up the garden. Then you had the front of the house and the front door, the door, the kitchen was on the right. Under the kitchen window was a wooden platform which lifted up and led down into a cellar, but that was the only house that had a cellar, we didn’t. I do remember going down there.
PR: Did it go under more than one house?
PP: I can’t remember that.
PR: And then back into the yard proper, your front door, 15B’s front door, and then ahead of you towards the church was your garden.
PP: Yes, across the yard.
PR: And your toilet was - ?
PP: In the wash house, we had a wash house over there, our toilet was in the wash house and Mrs Dearman’s was on the side of our toilet but not in the wash house. The wash house was in our garden, and the door into it. You went into the wash house and to the left was our loo and to the right was the copper and a side piece to do the washing on and Mrs Dearman’s toilet adjoined ours, but that’s all there was in her garden. She had a wash house on the back of her house with a tin roof.
PR: Did she have a garden across with yours, and at the side?
PP: Yes, she had the end part of the yard as garden and across the yard and up to the edge of the wash house. So she had quite a big bit of ground there.
[Transcriber’s note: it seems, from a map of 1897, that 15A & B were once one house with a further smaller one [Mrs Dearman’s] attached. Pictures show, and even today it can be seen that the whole may have once been a large barn perhaps appropriated for conversion in the 1820’s to obtain more votes]
PR: You can see why they’ve lasted well, other yards gradually got pulled down, because they’re sizeable properties with their own gardens that other yards in St Andrew Street wouldn’t have had. Hattams Yard did have gardens opposite the houses and they lasted a long time, but Oakes Buildings, nowhere to grow anything.
PP: No, well we had a chicken run in the garden - during the war you had your own chickens and eggs. Mr Moore had rabbits. We used to keep rabbits but my Gran would never eat her own rabbits. She’d take them up to a butchers shop further up the road, near the fish and chip shop.
PR: Frosts, Scales it was before.
PP: She used to take our rabbits up there and he used to swap for one of his.
PR: Oh! It’s a wonderful place to be living, town centre.
PP: Yes, everybody knew us children, used to go up the yard and although sweets were on rations, we were never short of sweets because the sweet shop would give us sweets and Mrs Glenister would always give us sweets [Note: When PP says ‘up’ the yard he must mean coming out onto St Andrew Street. ‘Down’ must mean going into the yard].
PR: Was Mrs Moore running the sweet shop [discussion as to her name, was it Moore or Miller].
PR: And Mrs Moore, whose front door was in the yard, had 2 sons.
PP: Tony and Richard, yes.
Tape 1 Side B
PR: Let’s stick with the Moores, 2 sons, their house, I think, had been taller but was burned down wasn’t it? Was that before your time?
[Transcriber’s note: this large house was burned down in 1936 – it was an ancient building – the Carde Charity house, also known as the Red House, no13 St Andrew Street].
PP: I’ve got pictures of my brother in the yard with it as a house and I’ve got pictures later on as a bungalow. Somewhere in between there it got burned down, but in 1932 it was a house.
PR: It had a pebble-dash wall and into that pebble-dash lots of sea shells, and I thought I heard that whoever owned it had a place at the seaside and brought the shells back. I don’t know if the Moores owned it.
PP: I don’t know if they owned it or not but they always used to go to Ramsgate for their holidays. Whether they brought the shells back or not, I don’t know, but the Moores lived in a different world to us because they has electric, they had the hot water, all the mod cons, a bath- we didn’t have any of that.
PR: Mrs Moore would like you to think that, particularly.
PP: I won’t say what we called her.
PR: What did she do, just a housewife or did she –
PP: I think she was a nurse, and she used to lay people out when they died. She used to go round and laid them out. And Mr Moore used to make the coffins, they had it worked between them. He worked for the Co-op down Bull Plain, a yard down Bull Plain somewhere.
PR: Probably down the bottom by the clinic.
PP: That area somewhere, there was a yard that belonged to the Co-op. He was a really good carpenter.
PR: And Mrs Neale, Vic’s widow, stayed there until quite modern times really.
PP: Well, when I was a lad Vic was never married. Whether he had a wife and she died, I don’t know. He married quite late in life, just before I joined the army. I don’t know when old Vic died and I don’t know what happened to Mrs Neale after that.
PR: I’ve got a slide I took of her front door and on it is a notice saying ‘Only put mail for Mrs Neale in here’. She was obviously getting 15A, B or C and she didn’t want it.
PP: I remember coming home on leave from the army and walking down the yard and she never really spoke to me at all. I used to be friends with Vic but she never spoke to me at all really. She opened the door as I walked down the yard and she called me in and I’d never been in that place, and she told me that Grandad had died earlier, so she caught me before I got to the house to tell me. But when Vic was there we’d be in the garden with him because in his garden he had a vice, big old metal vice and as kids we used to go over Hartham- there used to be big rubbish tip on Hartham, they was raising the level.
PR: Where was the tip – which bit of Hartham?
PP: As you go down Hartham Lane now, there used to be a little tunnel under the railway.
PR: A cattle-creep.
PP: It was very low and a train used to go across the top. We used to go under there and the tip then was to the left and we used to go down there and get all the bits of bikes and we used to bring all the bits back and old Vic used to help us to make them into bikes. That’s how we got our bikes.
PR: I think Desmond had that, Desmond Chappell, Mrs Dearman’s grandson, he had a bike he called his ABC bike/
PP: That’s it! That’s just what we used to call it.
PR: All Bits Combined!
PP: We was very fortunate in a way because we could change the design of our bikes whenever we liked. We could put upright handlebars on, we could put dropped handlebars on and when we got fed up with one we could just change it to another one. I can remember having a bike which was too big for me so I rode it without a saddle and I used to do a paper round and I could get round quicker on this bike because it had 2 speeds. I done this paper round all round Hertford, Morgans Walk and all that there, and one Christmas this lady come out with this parcel. She said, ‘this is for you, Peter’,’OK thank you very much’. And inside was a saddle for my bike. I couldn’t put it on because I couldn’t reach the pedals if I put it on.
PR: So, let’s just pause in 15B again. Freda Smith as she became was your –
PP: My auntie.
PR: Now, who else of that generation, how many children did Mrs Wright have? She was your grandmother, she had your mother –
PP: She had my Aunt Edie, Aunt Edie had 6 children, then there was my mum, Nellie, and there was 4 of us, then there was Aunt Freda, she had Stella, Uncle Bert, he had 2 children, Eileen and David Wright, then there was a baby, Charlie, but I don’t really know if he was older or younger. Granny always had a picture of him on the wall as a baby, and he died as a baby and that’s all I know.
PR: Was Freda a young one?
PP: She was next to my mum. She used to look after Gran a lot when she was older. When she first married she lived there and then she got a pre-fab up at Hornsmill.
PR: Top of Cecil Road.
PP: And then she moved from there to Sele Farm and stayed the rest of her life there. She was always backwards and forwards from Sele Farm to Gran’s in her later years to help look after Gran. Darby died in ’52 so Gran spent the rest of her time on her own really, in that house after we moved out. Then we moved in, we lived in the front bedroom until we moved into here ’55.
Wife: Martin was born whilst we was living there – he was the last one of our family born there.
PR: Was he born in the house or in hospital?
Wife: In hospital. Aunt Edie was the first one born there.
PP: Aunt Edie, yes, but they was all born in 15A. All Gran’s children were born in 15A. It wasn’t until she’d got all her children that she moved into 15B. My mum and dad moved and had 2 more children there.
Wife: Still had to go across the yard, no water indoors when I had Martin.
PR: You’ve got a story to tell that a lot of people won’t have. Then beyond, I was trying to think when I was coming over, was Mr Dearman called Amos, old biblical name.
PP; As far as I can make out, they used to call him Jack. He must have died when I was quite small.
PR: Well, I can remember him.
PP: Can you? What, Mr Dearman? I can’t remember him. I can remember Mrs Dearman and the 2 girls [overtalking] and they used to have a big old dog, like a sheepdog, but a mongrel.
PR: No. But I do remember him at a fair, I think it must have been a weekday night in Hartham. There weren’t many people about but it was really sodden, wet and he was just walking round, looking, there were hardly any punters, I think he’d just come out for a walk. We’ll have to look up somewhere and find out when he died. The memory does play tricks but I’m pretty sure, and that he had an old biblical name. I’d settled for Amos, now I’m wondering if it was Noah.
PP: Is Desmond still abroad?
PR: Haven’t seen him for a bit. They had 2 daughters, Ethel and Kit. Kit was Mrs Chappell, lived at 1 Davies Street for a bit.
PP: And Mrs Beryl Chappell.
Wife: That was my Uncle Arthur. I didn’t know ‘til I moved in with Gran, I’d got cousins [confused talking].
PR: I remember once going to see him [Arthur?] doing some work in the maltings in West Street. He was a butcher really, wasn’t he?
Wife: I think he was, I know quite a few Chappells working in the maltings and my father did some work in the butchers and then he went on to farming.
PR: Little tiny snippets like you’ve got. I remember standing in St Andrew Street when we were about 7 or 8, Mum was talking to Mrs Chappell and Desmond was bored and tugging at his mother’s sleeves to get something done and he wanted something to eat and I remember her turning round and saying ‘what do you think I am, a travelling buffet’. It was at the end of the Castle Alleys where there used to be a barrier across. I was pulling a face at somebody and one of them said ‘stop doing that because if the wind changes you’ll get stuck’ and then Mrs Chappell said ‘I used to believe that, didn’t you’ to my Mum. And I thought, got you there, it’s not true.
TG: You said when you came back from the army, were you in the army or was it National Service?
PP: I was in the army for 3 years. I signed on for the extra year to get the extra money.
TG: Your father was in the army.
PP: He was in the army for a long, long time. In the 1st World War, and me granddad Darby, he was in the Boer War and I’ve got all his papers, medals.
PR: That’s the memorial you were looking at the other day. Those names on there were people who came back, or - ?
PP: No, that’s all the volunteers. He was in the Volunteer Battalion, the Hertfordshire Volunteer Battalion, which went into the Bedfordshire Regiment.
PR: So some of them would have lost their lives and some would have returned.
PP: Yes, there wasn’t many that died and those that did died from illness rather than being killed.
PR: Does that war memorial separate the ones who returned and the ones who didn’t.
PP: No, but I’ve got Darby’s book, because all the 3 drafts that went out, and it’s got a little bit of history on each one of them, what one of the colonels wrote himself. It’s not one that’s been published, it’s what one of the colonels wrote when he came back from the war and it was written in 1905 so it was about 2 years after the war and he must have sent them out to all the soldiers that served under him. I did show it to one of the people in the museum and they was quite interested in it but I said no, it’s mine.
PR: That’s a valuable personal family record to have.
PP: They only issued them with one medal, the Queen Victoria medal, but then all the little campaigns that they done throughout Africa, they give them bars with all the names of the campaigns on the bars, or clasps, they call them. In the book it’s even got the name of the ship he went out on and the ship he came back on. But, do you know, he never spoke to me about that. When it was my time to go to do me National Service, I volunteered and went in early and I was going to Kimpton Barracks in Bedford, and he was talking to me about the army but he never mentioned that he was there.
It was only later on that I managed to get hold of all his paperwork, that’s where he was, Kimpton Barracks. I’ve got a picture of him in the Barracks Square and that’s the same barracks that I was in [overtalking]. He never spoke about it at all. Aunt Edie give me all the paperwork, she said ‘hang on to this, you’re the one who’s going to keep it’.
TG: My father was the same, didn’t talk about his experiences until the last 10 years. He was at Dunkirk and it was so horrific he wouldn’t talk about it. He sent for his medals when our son was born because he thought he’d like to see them. Nowadays, they’d have counselling for trauma but then they just had to bury it/
PR: But you’d think he might have shared with you when he knew.
PP: I signed on for 3 years and I remember saying to him 3 years is a long time, ‘that will soon go, boy, that will soon go.’
TG: I think there’s a fear that even bringing up 1 or 2 memories will bring the others back as well. You didn’t dare open up, it was like opening up a tin can and you just kept the stopper on anything that was going to make you remember.
PP: I’ve got a picture of him on board ship and I’ve got a picture of myself on board ship, it’s as if it was the same picture, really, he’s dressed up in his Boer War outfit and I was dressed up in them days modern army gear, sitting on the steps as you go down on the deck on the ships. The whole platoon was lined up sat on the steps and the picture taken, and I’ve got one of me sitting on the steps like that and I’ve got one of him sitting all them years before. It’s not until I started doing this family tree business that we started putting them all together.
PR: Was old Flannel Feet around in your time in St Andrew Street? That lady with a -, had a sweet shop. I remember her but I can’t remember her in St Andrew Street really, who ran a shop to the left of the top of the yard.
PP: The only sweet shop I knew was Mrs Glenister.
PR: It wasn’t as far as that. Quite a lot of people, in their tapes, talk about this woman who would have nothing done to animals to make them suffer and so wearing leather.
PP: You’re jogging my memory. I can vaguely remember someone with all those cloths wrapped round her feet. I’ve got a picture of a charabanc outing from the Three Tuns with all the people from St Andrew Street. They all used to gather in the Three Tuns and then go off on outings. You know where the Drill Hall is now, you’ve got a wide piece of kerb, they’re all standing in there waiting for the coach and someone’s taken a picture. And I’ve been trying to get all their names. I’ve got one or two, Grandad’s on there and I knew one or two people myself: Mr and Mrs Mills from Brewhouse Lane, and I knew Albert because I worked down Beane River View in Hertford, and he comes and visits one of his old relatives down there and he’s older than me and I showed him this photograph. I said ‘Albert, I’ve got your mum and dad on here, how many others can you recognise’ and he’s put a few names down for me, but not many. They used to live right down the bottom of Brewhouse Lane. Were you familiar with it before it all changed?
PR: Yes, houses down the left and some facing you.
PP: Well he lived in one of those, I think it was about the second one along.
PR: Like Victoria Place, tall [houses]. I don’t know whether you know but Victoria Place properties that we’ve been talking about were Victorian conversions from a barn. I may be wrong but it’s the kind of thing you pick up. It looks as if that could be the case, it’s a very big barn-shaped building.
PP: The wall that runs at the back of the garden from where our door faces out into the yard, you’ve got the yard, the garden and the wall at the back that separated that from the hostel.
PR: Oh yes, CAWG [Christian Association for Women and Girls].
PP: That’s a huge flint wall that looks like the wall at the Castle. We always thought it was years and years ago, part of the Castle grounds.
PR: The building could have been part of the Castle as a barn. Someone will have to do some research.
TG: The wall is not complete, is it, round there there’s just a bit of it there, so where did it go.
PP: Well, it doesn’t come up to St Andrew Street, It finishes more or less where Vic’s garden
finished and ours joined on,. But it was a very high wall and as children we could never get to the top of it, even if we climbed up onto the wash house roof, we could never get to the top of that wall
TG: Is it stlll there?
PP: Oh yes. Ferdy’s now built a house across the yard, his son lives in there now.
PR: What was that hostel, the CAWG?
PP: I don’t know, but it had that vent thing that went round and round at the top, that used to be a view out of our window, the church steeple and that.
PR: Like a steam engines funnel.
PP: That’s it, and it went round and round and you always knew when the wind was blowing strong because that was whizzing around [inaudible talking].
PR: No other St Andrew Street people that we ought to refer to? You didn’t have any enemies up there, nasty experiences?
PP: No, we used to be friendly with people who lived down Brewhouse Lane, the Brett family, me and Freddy was quite good pals. And John Foster who used to live down near St Andrew Street’s school in a bungalow. Do you know John?
PR: I know the bungalow and there are lots of John Fosters about.
PP: I think he was an only boy.
PR: That must have been quite new-ish, the bungalow, probably about the same age as you, mid thirties?
PP: Could be, yes.
PR: Anything else, Trish, we ought to -?
TG: I can’t think of anything, no.
PR: Jean Riddell will say why didn’t you say so and so, why didn’t you ask about something else, I shall get told off for missing opportunities.
TG: She’s researching all the yards [published in 1997, 3 years previously]
PP: I’ve got a cousin who lives in Oz now who was in the room in 15B during a raid. And I think me and my sister supposed to have been under the table because of all the commotion. My auntie went into labour when she was visiting her mum, and my sister was sent up to Gallows Hill where she lived with a pram to bring back all the bits and pieces for the childbirth. And she gave birth to my cousin during the air raid, and we were supposed to be under the table but we got ourselves sat on the bottom of the garret stairs and we could hear all what was going on in the room and all of a sudden this bomb dropped right close to us and all the dust and debris started falling down around us and when it all went quiet, we could hear the baby crying. So we thought the bomb helped it along!
PR: You don’t know where that one landed?
PP: No, I don’t. I know the date he was born.
PR: When was that?
PP: It was ’44.
PR: Same year as the doodle-bug then (Yes). And which aunt was this?
PP: Auntie Edie from Gallows Hill. Her husband was a County Surveyor for Kent so he was away a lot and she was on her own.
Tape 2 Side A
PP: That was Alan, that was how he came into the world (the baby cousin).
PR: I was just thinking, what a centre of everything she was, your upbringers, and to be there with the other daughter when the baby started to come.
PP: And he was born in the same bed that we used to have. How many people were born and died in that bed, I don’t know.
TG: (inaudible)
PP: The evacuees we had, one was named Fay, one was Rene and a boy named Gerald. I don’t know any more but I know they used to come and visit Gran after we moved away but I lost touch with them.
Wife: I know at least some of them were Jewish as well.
PP: I know Gerald was supposed to be with Aunt Esther but because he was the only child there and there was all us kids next door, he spent more time with us than he did there, so eventually he just moved in with us. We had to have a bath once a week with the water that done the washing.
PR: Soapy enough!
PP: [overtalking] And the youngest went first. We used to have a great big old enamel bath on top of the gas cooker, light all the rings and heat it up, then Gran’d light the oven and open the oven door. And there was a big tin bath, pour the water into that and that’s where you had your bath. Then we had to bale it all out and tip it down the drain outside when everybody had had a bath.
[Slightly confusing – was the enamel bath on the stove full of left-over washing water that was re-heated? And, presumably, another bath was actually used for bathing]
PR: So a shilling in the gas meter.
PP: No, a penny.
Wife: Was it a shilling when we were there with Martin?
[overtalking]
PP: When Ferdy moved into the house [17 St Andrew Street] they opened the door where the meter was – that was just inside on the right in a little cupboard, we found a stack of pennies and he thought we’d try it and he put one in the meter and turned it and the gas lit. It was all them years after, there was still a stack of pennies there.
TG: So, which school did you go to?
PP: I went to St Andrews first and then for some reason, I don’t know why, they moved me to Port Vale. Then I went from Port Vale to Cowper School, then I had to go to Stanstead, I went to Stanstead School. I got fed up with moving schools and when I went back to my Gran’s at Hertford I cycled backwards and forwards to Stanstead School, and I got tired of that because I’d got a paper round in the morning and a grocery round in the evenings and the last term I spent back at Cowper School.
PR: Where was the school in Stanstead.
PP: Stanstead Abbotts, just on the Roydon Road.
PR: St Andrews.
PP: I think it’s St Andrews church there.
PR: And presumably you didn’t remember the name of any Hertford school teachers?
PP: Oh, Mr Green (Len Green), Stalley was headmaster. Mr Green was my teacher. Later he became headmaster, didn’t he.
PR: Well, he was deputy nearly all the time. He took over at intervals and he was deputy up at Simon Balle School. But at Port Vale you would have had Miss Bradbeer, probably.
PP: That rings a bell, and Miss Kiddle, she was a marvellous woman [overtalking]. When we were sent down the air raid shelter (which was) just behind the school, we used to get our books out, hoped the sirens would go and we would miss lessons, because every week we went down the air raid shelter, they used to read to us, stories. So if the sirens went we’d put our books away quick and run down the shelters and have a story.
But she was marvellous. One of us would always want to go to the loo when we was down there and the loo was right across the playground and she would come out there and she’d have a whistle and she’d stand on top of the air raid shelter and we’d have to run across the playground to the loo and she’d stand there and watch us. If she blew the whistle, wherever we were, we had to lay down and she’d stand there until we got back. And years later when I joined the ambulance service, I had to go and do my paramedic training in theatre, looked on the patients’ list that was coming through theatre and there was Miss Kiddle and I said to one of the nurses there, that can’t be Miss Kiddle, the schoolteacher. She said that is her, because if we knew somebody we weren’t supposed to go in the theatre, you had to declare that you knew them. So we was in the anaesthetic room and I said you used to be a schoolteacher, didn’t you, at Port Vale school and she said ‘that’s right’, I said ‘I remember you standing on top of our air raid shelter’ [inaudible] I said ‘I’m not supposed to come in the theatre with you now because I know you, but would you mind?’, ‘of course not’ she said.
PR: What was she having done?
PP: I can’t remember.
PR: She’s not been gone that long really.
PP: No. Of course we were not allowed to follow up patients from the theatre to find out what happened to them afterwards.
PR: If they’re operating there’s usually hope.
PP: Yes, but it was a funny place to meet someone like that.
PR: And St Andrews, were you too young to remember anybody there (Yes). It was probably Miss Turnbull at the very end.
PP: Turnbull rings a bell.
PR: What about Miss Hornby. She was the Infants/reception [overtalking]. I tell you what, we could finish this tape off with my pupil, Martin. Where did he go to school? First of all here at –
Wife: St Pauls.
PR: At first I was thinking of Westfield (no) [the following statements were very unclear] with Miss Garrod, Barbara Garrod.
Wife: I’m trying to think of the teacher’s name.
PR: And then he came to Broxbourne. I remember him very well and he’s 43.
PP: Got 2 boys.
PR: Where’s he living?
PP: Hundred Acre.
[inaudible talking]
PR: Good, thank you very much.
The filling of the bio forms then takes place which is standard, but a list of the work experience that PP had is worth noting here – coach building at Ware, then the garage at then Chaseside Engineering, Austin’s fork lift trucks, Ambulance Service 20 years, now down Beane River View ‘helping the old people out’