Transcript Detail
| Transcript Title | Camp, Betty and Daphne (O2003.3) |
| Interviewee | Chris Querry (QR), Betty Camp (BC), Daphne Camp (DC) |
| Interviewer | Jean Riddell (JR) with Eddie Roche (ER) |
| Date | 01/01/2003 |
| Transcriber by |
Transcript
Hertford Oral History Group
Recording no. O 2003.3
Interviewee Chris Quarry (CQ), Betty Camp (BC), Daphne Camp (DC)
Interviewers Jean Riddell (JR) with Eddie Roche (ER)
[discussion] untranscribed matter
DC: The older Mr. Andrews (? RT Andrews, ob. 1926; or HC Andrews?) that owned these places, with the grey beard, he used to walk his estate as he called it and we made hopscotch up the top there, chalk and stuff, and he came round the corner and said "what do you think you children are doing - go on home and get a brush and a bucket and tell your mother I sent you, scrub it all off!" What would the children say today, they would tell you to get lost. We probably made another one after he’d gone.
ER: Was he a good landlord?
DC: He wasn’t too bad really, because I can remember he used to allow a pot of paint and enough paper for one room per year and we used to go up to Castle Street, and we used to get this permit and take it to a shop and get it. There wasn’t a lot else to do, we didn’t have gas or electric, it was oil lamps.
BC: ‘57 and they were putting the bathrooms on over there, that’s where Ken and I were living, and they put electric in and they let mum and dad in the end house.
CQ: They started on us at 39 (sc. Frampton Street) first because our house was an odd one on its own, so to get everything going right, they started on the odd house and they got right up with the bathroom walls and decided they were building too big so they took it all down. So then they decided they were going to move the window where the doors were and the door where the window was, so that’s why the whole back wall had to come down. They got it down and they they decided they were going to start on the pairs. So they started at the top of the street and started to do them and we were three months from the January through without a back wall. And all we had for water was an old cold tap hanging on the wall and the cooker was still in place.
ER: So did you have a bit of tarpaulin hanging there?
CQ: Yes. We had nothing to start with ‘til mother and father kicked up a fuss, they they come and put a piece of tarpaulin up.
DC: Everyone was saying "where’s the plumber got to?" because everyone wanted theirs finished.
CQ: In the end we were the last one - we were the first one to be started and last one to be finished. After three months they then realised all they’d got to do, if they took a door out, they could put the window in there and just brick up and they done it as quick as that in the end. And we still had to pay the full rent and we’d no back wall for three months.
BC: Shortage of bricks in 1957. They were done when the grants came in. There was no way they would have spent money like that.
CQ: Mum’s rent was 2/6d a week and it went up to 11/6d.
ER: That wasn’t a bad rent in these days - I know my mum and dad were paying 15/11d up Sele Road.
CQ: But then nobody wanted to live down here in them days, this was the lowest of the low, if you had to come and live in the Folly. There was no road made up, no paths made up.
ER: The Gaol was the place.
CQ: No, you talk to anybody that remembers the Folly, they all say - I’ve met people and they say "where do you originate from" and I say "The Folly and proud of it, I’m a true Folly Islander" and they say "Phorr, blimey, if you live down there you was the lowest of the low - I said you might think that, but we weren’t because we were all in the same boat.
ER: There used to be a chap who came to our church and he’d walk past our shop and he would never speak to my dad and yet he’d lived in the Folly as a boy opposite my grandad, and I said what’s the matter with him, he said "well he’s a snob now, he doesn’t want to remember that, where he came from".
DC: If you say to someone now you live in the Folly, "oh, wonderful, those lovely little houses!"
CQ: I get ever so annoyed and I really do get real ruffled (!) when anyone says to me the lowest of the low down the Folly as I’m really quite proud to be living down here. It’s been a wonderful place, there was always a mum going up the town but there another said "oh don’t bother to take them, leave them here with me", and they would look after us and we knew we’d be safe. If we wanted a day out we took our sandwiches over on Hartham.
ER: Jumping on a bit, do you remember when the war ended and they had a bonfire in the middle on the crossroads?
CQ: I don’t remember that but every Guy Fawkes night we used to have one at the crossroads on Frampton Street.
ER: I remember my dad saying to us he’d been down to see gran and grandpa and he said they’re having a bonfire down the Folly.
CQ: I was born in ‘42 - I don’t remember anything of the war, I was late ‘42, December.
BC: I do, do you remember the doodle bug dropping, because I’d got a pair of red shoes with one bar - I was very proud of these red shoes. Mum said don’t go up to Millbridge where the bomb had dropped - don’t go. Red rag to a bull. I went up Hartham Lane and onto Millbridge, and I’ve still got a tiny scar there where I cut it on glass and I can remember that as if it were yesterday, that bomb.
DC: Handbags were going down the river from Rushes.
ER: Someone told us ( and him) about Rushes and all the girls on Folly Island on the Monday all went to school or work with a new handbag! Or a briefcase, because they’d all fallen out of the shop into the river and away they went.
CQ: Another thing my mum always used to say was that people used to say "I don’t know how you dare let your girls out near these rivers" and she always used to say "you won’t find a Folly child in these rivers, if anybody falls in it’s an outsider - the Folly lot have been brought up with rivers - they respect them"
ER: Wasn’t there a right of way behind the houses that took you out to the first house on Folly Island?
CQ: Where the old allotments were? Yes, there was. All the houses had a back way. We’ve still got one out here.
ER: I remember my dad saying that Batesy - he used to come up and work for my dad - he’d say Batesy’s in a foul mood - he’s built a truck in the garden, and some old lady came along and said "What you doing Mr.Bates?" and he said "I’m building a truck, a new truck to take the work round. So she said to him "you’ll never get that up the pathway". "How do you know, you nosey old -------". "Because the path’s that big and your truck’s that big". He got it out of the garden and he said to his missus "I’ll have to take the wheels off and bring it through the house."
CQ: As a child you were never allowed to go up any of those backways, you used your own, if we went up anyone else’s someone’d say "Oi, go down your own end, don’t you come up my back way!" There used to be some great big old lime trees out here, limes all grow from the bottom as well, don’t they, and I always suffered from bad ears as a little kid, so my mother used to make me these pixie hats and that was at Eric Game’s house, his dad and I’d gone over there, we’d tied a bit of cotton to his knocker, gone behind this tree and pulled it and bang, it’d gone and I forgot you could see my pixie hat above all this growth, and suddenly I felt myself going up in the air and old Mr.Game’s pulling me up "I’ll get you, young Bradshaw, he said "I’ll tell your father of you". I run like mad, I didn’t go out no more for two or three weeks.
BC: Going back to the war, there used to be, that side, Mrs.Chesher and her husband was the ?ARP man, and when the sirens went mum used to say c’mon and we used to go in Mrs.Jones’s, old Granny Jones’s - Polly - under stairs cupboard. Mrs.J would open the door just a little to see what was going on "shut them doors you’re showing the light" you know - certain things like that I can remember.
ER: So you didn’t have any air-raid shelters of any sort?
DC: Not in our garden, there was one up at ?
CQ: Mum always said she went under the stairs when we had a storm.
DC: Mother used to say we’d hear these planes, "come on Daph, listen up the chimney, is that one of ours or is it one of theirs?
ER: You used to go under the stairs?
CQ: Yes, because a lot of them were like little cellars, little coal holes and you’d got steps in to go down them, they were much deeper and as time went on people filled them in.
ER: I suppose if the house had been hit in any way, you’d have been buried because it was in the centre of the house.
CQ: Don’t know, I wouldn’t like to have taken a chance on it really. My mother had a great big dining room table, she used to say that saved our lives many a time.
ER: My parents got this Morrison shelter and they put it in the small front room at Sele Road, and you always banged your head on it because of its iron girder and mesh things that you let down. You slept on blankets and it wasn’t very high and you’d get up and you’d bang your head on it, but not very many people had them. You could have two levels.
DC: You went and got your gas mask, I used to say c’mon we got to practise this and she said, "I’m not, I’d rather be gassed, I can’t wear that."
ER: They used to come round, didn’t they, and inspect. I used to bolt myself in the toilet, I didn’t like gas masks, I used to stay there ‘til he went.
DC: But all in all it was a nice place to live in. It was always friendly.
ER: I could remember with my grandparents. Old Floss Clark and Floss Watkins used to keep an eye on them, right up until they died, but you don’t get that now, and it was a warmer community down there when you were young.
CQ: But mind you, in them days we were more related. There’d be your parents and the children of other houses as well.
ER: Your family stayed on Folly Island?
BC: My daughter’s actually bought that house, one of my three daughters. And I’ve stayed on.
ER: When you married Ken you came here - to another house, or did you live with
BC: No, we went to Hornsmill. We went and looked at the new houses at Sele Farm, the town houses opposite the community centre. We’d got four children, that’s going to cost us getting them down on the bus, then we exchanged with Saunders who had the Barge.
ER: Was that two beds
BC: That was three. Stayed nearly a year, then my second daughter got a house over there. When she had her children we exchanged back.
DC: When I was young the baker Wren’s used to come with his horse and cart.
ER: Harry - was he the chap who was on the Co-op?
CQ: Yes, lived over the back here. Well, his wife still lives in that house and he’s got a son that was on that row and the other son lives at the very top of this road. The daughter lives over that one as well, so there’s only one son out of three that moved off the island.
ER: It’s an amazing thing.
CQ: I will say that’s one of my biggest fears as I’ve got older that I will suddenly have to leave here.
ER: Now why would you have to leave here?
CQ: I don’t know, but the thought of having to leave here really worries me.
ER: You couldn’t be any nearer to shops, could you?
CQ: The only way I’ll leave here is if they put me in a box and float me down the Lee! I can’t imagine anywhere in Hertford where I’d want to go to live other than here (she later moved to Mitre Court).
DC: Old Mrs.Jones, if she got you, you couldn’t get away and old Bob next door used to have to come down and say Daph! Someone’s knocking at your front door. Oh, I said, thanks, cheerio Jessie and he said, there’s not really but I know you want to get away.
CQ: We’d be at this front here, all us children in the summer holidays, to about nine o’clock at night. All the mums would be out there as well. We used to have two parapets come down from the bridge then and all the mums used to sit on these parapets and all us children were playing quite happily out here. Then they’d fetch us in, get us washed and put us to bed.
DC: But there were hard times too, there wasn’t an awful lot of money, was there?
CQ: I was saying that the other day at the museum, we were talking about washing machines, and I said I can still see my mum and my dad on a Friday night doing our washing the old copper with a fire underneath. Six o’clock in the morning my dad used to light a fire under there. Mum used to do all our washing; she used to do aunt Nan’s and uncle Harold’s, and uncle Will’s and his boys, all those as well. And it all had to be done by hand, then she stood outside and mangled it all, then it was put in the old tin bath with blue bag got out, mangled again, put out on the line and the next day she used to spend ironing it.
DC: You know where the fish shop is, well next to that used to be a Toc H and she came to my mother and said one of your girls is often round the shops, don’t know if she should be - apparently she’d been doing this quite a lot so after they had to take her and give her to one of the teachers.
CQ: Of the roads and puddles, when they froze over they were like a little skating rink and then the council took them over, under the new conservation area, and then everybody wanted to come down here and live; it’s been a wonderful place and it’s been a wonderful place ever since. But it’s only because we have roads and paths - when we didn’t have them they didn’t want to know it.
ER: Did they do the first part of where the Folly was, tarmac’d it?
CQ: Yes, that was always tarmac’d in my days.
ER: And all the island came later
CQ: Yes, then they came with gas pipes and electric cables. They dug the road right out.
ER: So far as services go this is quite a modern estate.
CQ: The services in the houses aren’t but the services from the road to the houses are. You’ve still got old lead pipes there where if you turn one off, the whole road gets turned off, where we on this side, we’ve all got individual ones. We’re posh over this side.
ER: You were saying about having oil and gas coming on in the ‘50’s and electric - I can remember where my gran and grandad lived in the Folly they had gas, because they had a gas cooker, but only downstairs, because they’d send you up the dark stairs and when you’d get upstairs it’d be pitch black and nearly fall down the stairs to get down again.
BC: Those new roads, I don’t quite know when they were done but Chris, he was riding his bike up and down here and to show how deep the potholes were he went into one on his bike and he fell on his face and he was within seconds of drowning. They were huge.
JR: Why did they take those houses down?
CQ: Condemned.
JR: Why were those condemned and not the rest? Had they been neglected?
DC: They kicked up a lot of fuss to try and keep them, Shadbolts, Bentleys, White, Watkins.
ER: Between no.20 and no.22 there used to be an alleyway and you could prop your bike up and go down the alleyway, or you could take your bike up between the houses rather than go all the way round. That was the only place where there was a side alley, because no.20 they were cement rendered and then you had this block of four brick houses. Under that cement facing was ______ brickwork because no.2 The Folly and no.4 the first house that was brick.
CQ: They were the first lot of houses to be built down here, the rendered ones.
ER: The ones opposite, they’re all brick, aren’t they.
CQ: Oh, yes, all the rest of the Folly is brick. I’ve just grown up with them and thought they’re different to ours, not why, or what for.
(Daphne tried to remember someone who lived in the rendered houses.)
BC: Oh yes, a Game, he had a tiny mother didn’t he, always in black.
ER: That would be before the war?
DC: Yes, from about ‘43, I was out the Folly until ‘46. That was the reason my mother moved. She swapped houses with Mrs.Chesher up Campfield Road - she wanted a council house right out of town but she’d just got it in her mind that she’d move out the Folly.
CQ: I very often lay in bed at night-time and I start at 39 and I go all the way up the road and I can remember them all, come along Old Hall Street, come all the way down here, then I go over that side.
ER: So how many families you know have still got a connection here of some sort.
CQ: Wheelers are the most, Molly Monk - she’s got Tracey now across the road. We’re one of the oldest families.
ER: But a lot have been sold off.
CQ: Oh yes, definitely. I think there’s about six left in this road, and I just heard today there’s going to be another one go up for sale, Olive’s not coming back. She’s going to live with them.
ER: Is that a rented house?
CQ: Yes, and she’s what I call an old Folly Islander - I was quite upset when I heard she wasn’t coming back.
ER: So that will go on the market and be sold.
BC: You say old, Chris, but she’s not from an old family.
CQ: Yes, I know, she’s not an old (frog?) but she is to me, she’s an old person, she’s always been here. I know she hasn’t always been here, even as long as what I have, but I’ve only ever known her here.
BC: You remember in the forces, how did we used to clean our shoes?
ER: Spit and polish.
BC: Yes, put them on something warm or a kettle, buff ‘em up. When I came out the forces I still done it, and I remember putting on a tin of shoe polish on the edge of the gas ring and Olive came running over and said Betty’s going to set the house on fire and she came running over and put it out.
CQ: My mother and I, we done an exchange here. We done an exchange with Fords, actually they now live in 39 and I came here when I was 16. We moved over here in ‘61. And she fell down, we’ve got two steep steps down to our kitchen, and we had to run across the road and get Mrs.Jones.
ER: No 28, Osbornes?
CQ: Oh yes, they were a nice family.
NC: The only boy I didn’t like down here was Roy Plumb.
ER: Did they live in the Folly?
BC: He now lives in Canada. I don’t know what it was; and there was another one down Riverside, Taylors - used to call him Spuddy Taylor.
ER: Why was that then Betty?
BC: I don’t know.
DC: Was he any relation to the Taylor that had the fruit and veg on Port Hill?
BC: I don’t know, all I know is he lived down Riverside. Roy Plumb, I don’t know what it was about him, he didn’t frighten me or anything like that, it was just……..
CQ: I never went for any of the boys down there. I mean my husband was local, Villiers Street, but I never went with any of the boys from down here at all.
ER: Probably there weren’t any available at the time.
CQ: Wheelers, all about my age.
ER: Thornton Street.
JR: Was there much river traffic, - barges?
CQ: No, Betty can remember because our dad was a bargee, and he used to work from London right down to Hertford. Sometimes he’d have to stop off at Ware, mainly at Harringtons, but he would come down to Hertford. She used to go on the barges with him. I can remember the barges coming in and emptying their coal up at the wide waters and coming to Jewsons.
DC: And they used to come to Garratts Mill.
BC: Oh yes, he used to have horses on his barge, and had been right up to the docks with coal with the bargees, and he won the Humane Society award for saving a ten year old from drowning.
(Daphne remembered the bargees throwing cherries on the bank for the children)
DC: I worked at Garratts during the war and they were a bit short of staff, so they said come on you girls you go and help empty the barges.
About the other bridge…
ER: It was opened up in the war, wasn’t it, and that (keeping it open) was an argument between Thornton Estates and the Council.
CQ: They can’t find out who actually owns that piece of ground. It’s still going on.
ER: I remember years ago, Councillor Dale, he did say he had a bit of an up and a downer with the Council and he refused point blank to negotiate in a fit of temper. And that could have been settled, because the old war bridge, that rotted in the end.
CQ: All I can remember of that is the old girders that were left, because the times I got a good hiding for walking across the girders instead of going round the footpath! I thought living at no.39 no one could see me, but someone round this side would tell me mum over that side. That’s where I learned to swim over that bit of river out there.
ER: I’ve seen old pictures of men fishing there. Generally taken from that end house garden.
DC: Some of us used to have an old hoop with a line on it, some rock fish or whatever, and the crayfish. They used to bring ‘em in, it was horrible. My brother used to have a pot boiling water and put them in alive. And they used to squeal, but they were lovely to eat.
BC: Were there crayfish in the Barge river?
CQ: Yes, there were quite a lot.
ER: A lot around Hertford, up beyond the Sele Arms.
(Discussion about pink crayfish, which are destroying fish, and were an American import, and the original grey ones.)
ER: They still are quite a delicacy, but these bigger ones are killing off the English species - like grey squirrels killing off red squirrels. (Except it’s a reversal in colour attacks!)
JR: Who’s put these creatures into the river then?
CQ: Nobody seems to know.
BC: I was saying to Lacey Green the other day - fishing you used to get a jam jar and a fishing net.
CQ: My mum was ever so good at catching fish in a jam jar. Never known anybody catch fish like she used to. Used to come here on this bridge, drop her jam jar in and you couldn’t have got another minnow in that jar. And I used to put my jar in there and it’d come up with nothing.
ER: But you’d put a jar in there and it’d always hit a stone. My dad used to send me out to get some minnows so he could go fishing, then Harry Wheeler had a track in the river and my dad’d see Harry Wheeler in the Corporation Yard and he’d say "send the boy down dinner time" and I used to have to take a jar.
CQ: I used to stand in this river as a kid because my dad used to keep pigeons, racing pigeons in the bottom of 39, and he hadn’t the clock, the chap that’d got the clock lived in Hartham Lane. And on Saturday he sends me - right, get in the river- first lot of birds coming home, and he’d shake his corn_____pigeon going in, right come out, get the ring, throw it to me in the river and I used to have to run like mad to get it into the clock to get the fastest time. The hours I’ve spent standing in that river is nobody’s business. But one of the other ones got lost, didn’t it, it went abroad somewhere and it landed on a Polish ship, and he had a letter from the sailor on a cigarette packet telling him that they found his bird but they were taking it home with them, and they’d caged it.
ER: Old man Wren, he used to keep pigeons. People say that those-----
CQ: flying around now are his…
ER: yes, grandchildren.
CQ: He just opened his loft when he left there and just let them go.
DC: They’re no good if they get lost. I had one two or three months ago, landed in my back garden, a lovely pigeon. I saw it’d got a ring on its leg so I fed it. He kept perching on the roof for about a week. I know somebody up Hertingfordbury Road keeps pigeons. I managed to get the number on its ring. Next door, old Kelvin said it’s going to be no good, you might as well give it to me for me ferrets - if you give it back to its owners they’ll only kill it once it’s not gone back.
ER: Yes, loses its direction.
CQ: My dad, he used to have rabbits, chickens - everybody down here had chickens, didn’t they?
DC: The schoolteacher from Chris’s school said to Chris’s dad "would you sell that bird to me, it’s one of my favourites".
CQ: Old Mr.Walters (? Waters) from up Simon Balle school. He came down on the Sunday to buy it, and I come down stairs and went out in the garden, and I nearly died when I see him standing there - what have I done. I ain’t done nothing wrong that I could remember - these two’ll tell you I was a right tomboy, and anyway, he came down to buy this chicken off my dad. I went to school on the Monday, he said, I can tell you about the chicken, if front of all these children, he said it’s perfect and will you thank your father very much for letting me buy it. Father got a cockerel from somewhere about the same time and that hated women. You had to come down this back alley to get to our backway, we had got a little side entrance but it was quicker to come this way and he used to keep down the bottom of the garden and it spotted mum and I coming, and it came up after us with its feathers flapping and its wings going. Mum and I used to run indoors- my mum said to my dad one day, if you don’t get rid of that cockerel, you’re going - one or the other of you. And I’m kicking up a fuss, ‘cos I used to scream every time it came anywhere near me. One Sunday we sat down to dinner and I looked at this chicken come out the oven and I thought, hang on a minute, I ain’t seen Charlie about for the last couple of days, so I said to my dad, it ain’t Charlie is it? He said yes. I said I’m not eating that. He said well you go without then, you kicked up enough fuss until I did kill it. And I wouldn’t have it, I never did sit down and eat that bird. And he was ever so annoyed with me. Really cross with me, he was.
ER: We were like you, it was the war, and everybody had chickens. And then someone’s say "anybody got a broody hen" and they nearly all used to be cockerels and we had this big cockerel that was my younger brother’s pet, but he went in there one day to feed this thing, and it went for him. He came running across the garden all covered in blood and I just went over there and I was in such a temper I wrung its neck and we had it for dinner.
[Talk about a dog who took sausages from a picnic and who let visitors come but tried to stop them leaving by pinning them against the wall.
Childhood memories]