Snippets from my childhood …

 

Times are quite hard for many, right now, as both inflation and interest rates have risen; prices, too, have shot up. Yet, I often wonder how my own parents managed when they were first married. 

Here they are in the photo above; it’s 1949. I know that they had little money during the early years of married life.

And here, above, is the tiny house in which I was born, a few years later. (I don’t have an old photo and so had to search online …the house hasn’t changed apart from the front door, the satellite dish and the car parked outside !) Apparently, if you had a bathroom then you had your baby at home! This house was a ‘two up, two down’, small, pokey, with no garden but just a back yard, which is where I am in the photo below. We had no carpets, no central heating and little furniture! The house was on a hill and how on earth my mum managed to push me and this heavy pram, home from town, I’ll never know! 

Having no garden, my mum would frequently take me to the local parks and, in fact, Newton Abbot was, and still is, very fortunate to have a number of parks. My first steps were taken in Courtenay Park, when the band was playing in the bandstand!

Here are my mum ( heavily pregnant with my sister) , my dad and myself, in Courtenay Park. And below, here I am preparing for Wimbledon, in our back yard! One can never start too young! Advantage Sal! New balls please! 🎾  🎾 🎾 

When I was three years old, we moved across town to a slightly bigger house. It was a semi in an avenue of ten houses and we were number 10, with fields behind us and fields to the right of our house; it was very pleasant.

Here I am with my little sister; in the same road were two more pairs of sisters…so, I give to you, from left to right, Marina, Christine, Sally, Jenny, Hazel and Teresa. I often wonder what happened to the other sisters!

Not long after we moved, my dad decided to train to be a teacher. This meant that times were really hard. My mum couldn’t go back to work as my sister was still very young, so she used to take in French students during the summer months and she also ran a couple of catalogues during the rest of the year. I remember meals consisting of cheese on toast… or soup…and treats were few and far between, But I guess that we were still better off than many!

Fast forward to when I was almost 8 years old. My dad was now teaching full time, my mum was doing supply teaching and we moved, again, to another part of Newton Abbot. The bungalow was brand new and the best bit was that it backed on to woodland and there was a common at the top of the road. It was delightful. Idyllic! And we spent five years here. I was very much an outdoors child and having the woods and the common so close by, was simply wonderful.

Here’s my mum doing her bit in the front garden with our old, Qualcast lawnmower ! We also had a good sized back garden where my dad grew vegetables.

                      

  I think I’m around 11 years old in the photo above.

With both of my parents now teaching full time, after almost 5 years in our bungalow, we were on the move again. It was 1965. And this is the house that we all loved. It too backed on to woodland, and as well as this it had a huge garden. A far cry from that tiny terraced house where I was born!

I’m 14 or 15 in the above photo. Much has happened since then! I’ve lived in Hertfordshire, Hampshire and Surrey before returning to South Devon. And I now live a stone’s throw from the garden above. It was like coming home when we moved across town, last year, to the area where I lived as a child! And now that I’m here, my mind often travels back to my childhood and I think about how hard my mum and dad worked to make life better for us all.