Schooldays

I was born on April 8^th 1934. at 21, Brookfield Avenue Carshalton. I am the 4^th son, after Colin Basil and Brian, to be born to my parents Reginald F. J. and Alice V. Walden. There was an elder daughter Doreen who died when only eight days old.

                Brookfield Avenue was on a new housing estate in outer London built just prior to and in anticipation of the electrification of the Southern Railway. It was and still is a modest three bedroom semi-detached house opposite a large recreation ground (The Rec). I remember very little about the house as we moved from it when I was around four years old. I do, however remember that it was not a well-built house, my one clear memory being talking to my brother Brian through a large crack in the outside wall of the front room.

                We moved to a much better house at 40, Mead Crescent. It was only four or five hundred yards away but it was on a different estate, still with only three bedrooms but was detached, had a larger garden and was much better built. The house was a corner house and the side of the garden was fronting onto Brookfield Avenue. A major consequence of this was that as we were now on the other side of Brookfield, I could now get into the Reck without crossing any roads and was allowed to go there on my own from a very early age. I spent very many happy hours there talking to the park keeper “Taffy Lucas” and following him round on his various duties, I must have driven him mad. We felt had definitely moved up in the world, now living on the favoured Westmead estate, albeit only just.

                I went to school at Camden Road School and walked to and from school, a little under a mile away, unescorted after a very short period of being escorted by my mother. The school was a newly rebuilt school and it was not finished when I started. My brother Brian, two years older than me, started at the old building but I do not remember it. For a time we had classes in various pupils houses, odd half days for a small group of children living near the selected house with the teacher travelling to the different venues. I don’t think it lasted long before we were taught two local halls until the school was finished (St Andrews Church Hall and an adjacent social club, both still existing 60 years later). Then we moved into the infants class where sixty of us were under the charge of Miss Etherton. We learned to write on sand trays, a small black tray with a little dry sand in it which we shook gently to get an even cover of sand and on chalk boards. In those early days we were issued with a hot “Cow & Gate” milk drink for a while. It was, however, replaced by one third pint bottles of cold milk, drunk through a real straw. This must have been in 1946 at the time of the School Milk Act when I was twelve. I was some sort of monitor and with a number of other pupils made up crates with the right number of bottles and carried them round to the appropriate class rooms.

                I was also a headmaster (Mr. Chapman)‘s monitor when I was in my final year at Camden Road and very inappropriately spent one day a week in the medical room next to the headmasters study to be at his beck and call to run errands and take messages for him. Being probably his favourite I was also on call when in the classroom, via a special bell outside the room in cases when he did not think the day’s monitor was up to the forthcoming job. Mr Chapmen knew my father through their mutual support for the local football team, Carshalton Athletic “The A’s or Robins” who they both watched each week.

                During my last years at the school the Blitz on London was in full swing with many daylight air raids entailing long periods confined to the brick built school shelters. We were not allowed out of the shelters to go home at the end of the day until the all clear had sounded, unless we were collected by an adult. I was fortunate in that my friend, Gerald Gunn’s father worked at the Royal Mint, he worked very strange hours and was very frequently on hand to collect Gerald Gunn, John Giles and Michael Walden from the shelters and escort us home while playing various guessing games as to which hand various small sweets were in.

            WE walked through the recreation ground on our way to school and a large section of it was one day cordoned off to be used for allotments in the new “Dig for Victory” campaign. Another part was requisitioned to build an Air Raid Shelter, which I watched with great interest. It was an enormous construction being constructed of reinforced concrete in trenches in the ground and covered over with the excavated soil. This shelter was unlike the other shelters with which we had become familiar, the large brick built ones at school for day use and the overnight ones in peoples gardens, brick built or the corrugated iron Anderson Shelters which by that time had become quite common. This new shelter was designed for multi occupational use overnight for the people who did not have shelters of their own. Alongside it was an emergency water tank was built; it was like an outsize version of the circular out of ground swimming pools now becoming popular. We spent one night in the shelter we had watched being built, but it was a very unpleasant experience and my father decided it was a better option to take our chance at home with Brian and I sleeping in the cupboard under the stairs, having been told it was the safest place in the house and my parents upstairs in their bedroom. We also tried another safety ploy by sharing a spacious local school shelter together with another family. It was better than the public shelter but we did not stick it for long. Probably in 1942 we took delivery of two Morrison Shelters. These were used indoors and were made of steel with mesh sides, we slept in them for quite a long time and felt safe in them. A small bomb hit a pair of houses on the opposite corner of the cross roads to our house. I can’t remember exactly what instant damage was caused but they still looked like houses. They were, however, condemned and I took great interest in watching them being pulled down by a team if men armed with no more than ropes picks and shovels. By great good fortune the damage to our house was limited to a small piece of gutter being broken.

            At this time the blitz on London became very severe and the air raid warnings were a nightly occurrence. My two eldest brothers, Colin and Basil had by this time been evacuated with their school, Mitcham County which was inside the London County Council area, to Weston-Super-Mare. I am not clear about the dates but eventually Weston suffered an air raid and Colin and Basil returned to Carshalton.

            A scarier period of air raids developed with the Flying bombs or “Dodlebugs” These unmanned aircraft with an unmistakeable drone were a big fright in 1944. Their engines cut out shortly before the crashed and those 15 seconds or so of silence were a terrifying guessing game of just how close they were going to explode. The nearest one to us weas about ¼ mile away, we were in our Morrison shelter and it was a very big and scary bang but as soon as we could we were off on our bikes to see the damage.