Upmarket ice cream van

One of my bon mots about my 'privileged' childhood was that the ice-cream van that plied our posh upper-lower-middle class streets would chime the waltz from Gounod's Faust. Many's the time I told this anecdote to peals of laughter from my listeners, who thought I'd devised the most capital conceit.

Not so. The ice-cream van doing its rounds on hot summer days in Hanwell, London W7, did indeed play the waltz from Gounod's Faust. Messrs Page and Bryn's excellent 'Google' device enabled me to find this newspaper article from 1954 (in the decade before my earliest memories were shaped).

Grays in Essex lies 30 miles to the east of Hanwell. The article harks back to a happier time when PC Plod had little better to do than to track down and persecute ice cream vendors for their over-enthusiastic musical self-promotion.

For many years, this particular music was lost in the folds of my hippocampus; until that is Classic FM burst onto the airwaves of British radio. Classical music had hitherto been the exclusive, nationalised, domain of BBC Radio 3; a dreadfully elitist station dedicated to playing none but the most abstruse of orchestral pieces by Pierre Boulez, Karl-Heinz Stockhausen ("I once trod in some" – Sir Thomas Beecham), Penderecki and other pots-and-pan merchants. Classic FM, "a ghastly descent into populism" (Peter Maxwell-Davies), would frequently play the waltz from Gounod's Faust, and at last I was able to discover the name of the tune that would herald the approaching ice-cream van. Here it is, below, click to listen.

The smell of creosote

Walking along the abandoned railway track close to my home in Jeziorki, Warsaw, Poland, I could smell creosote, used to preserve the sleepers under the rusting rails. With a whiff of that pungent chemical odour, I suddenly found myself in the back garden of 15 Croft Gardens, Hanwell, London W7, on a sunny summer's day. The wooden fences on both sides of our garden were painted with creosote, and after a fresh application of the tarry fluid.

These days, creosote has been banned from household use by the European Union and the US Environmental Protection Agency, the characteristic smell is now to be sniffed only in industrial situations. So its relative rarity means that when it does drift up my nostrils - the association can only be with my childhood back garden (the front garden fence was brick; the gate painted wood).

My father propped a long wooden ladder on the fence between our garden and our neighbours at number 13, the Jones. This gave a long one-in-three incline between the top of the fence (about four and half feet) running down to the lawn. My brother and I would use our old baby bath as a roller-coaster ride; we'd pull it to the top of the ladder and slide down. Not particularly dangerous (the worst thing that could have happened was a fall of a few feet on soft grass), but fun; it kept us amused for quite some time.

To my imaginative and historical mind, our pink plastic bath was a battleship sliding down it slipway into the sea. The ladder would be propped up against the fence for much of the summer holidays. And falling to my knees and giving the railway sleepers leading to the former aggregate sidings in Jeziorki brought it all back to me.

Washday

Monday was washing day. My mother would wash (by hand) at least 15 shirts, 15 pairs of socks and underpants, plus her clothes plus vests in winter, plus whatever everyone wore at the weekend - in other words - vast amounts of laundry. All would be washed in Omo or Daz, collars and cuffs scrubbed and starched, then spin-dried (we had a Creda Debonair spin dryer*) hung out to dry on an 60-foot clothes line that stretched all the way from the veranda to the summerhouse, utilising hundreds of wooden clothes pegs (which could give you a nasty nip if you weren't careful!).

The clothes line itself was kept aloft by a long, square-sectioned pole made by my father which could be extended as required. If I remember correctly, we'd also use this pole to knock down apples from our two apple trees (the one on the left grew Bramleys, the one on the right Coxes).

On Monday afternoons, the back gardens of our street would be full of flapping laundry, drying in the breeze. On those regularly grey, overcast days, a watchful eye would be kept on the weather; should raindrops begin to fall, mothers would dash out with their washing baskets and begin to rapidly unpeg the laundry and bring it indoors.

Assuming the weather was clement, the drying process would take several hours (during which tea and supper were cooked and served), and then the laundry would be gathered in for ironing. This took several more hours. On Tuesday mornings, our wardrobes would be full of crisp, clean shirts, underwear and socks, and so my father, my brother and I could go about our daily duties without fear of stigma that we were dirty or smelly. Of course, I imagined the entire process to have happened by magic, and to this day I have yet to fully appreciate the physical effort my mother put in each and every Monday to ensure that our clothes were clean.

* They still make them! Ours was white with light blue trim and a grey rubber gasket that stopped the water from getting out.

Cars on the road

Hillman, Singer, Sunbeam, Humber; Austin, Morris, MG, Wolseley, Riley, Rover, Triumph - the names of British cars that drove around on the streets where I lived. Defunct brands, just memories other than those few still kept going by classic car enthusiasts. Today, the only brands from those years to have survived are Vauxhall and Ford, Jaguar and Land Rover, both owned by an Indian company, Mini, Rolls-Royce and Bentley by the Germans and the only other mass producers of cars in Britain today are Japanese car makers - Toyota, Nissan and Honda.

(Out of interest - only the USA can boast so many defunct car brands as Once Great Britain)

When I was a small boy, the sound of a car driving down Croft Gardens would have me rushing to the front window to see what it was. Parked along Croft Gardens were cars like the Vauxhall Victor estate, the Ford Anglia, Ford Popular, Hillman Minx, Austin Cambridge, and my father's Morris 1100.

Posh cars were rare; old cars (they didn't last as long in those days) were rarer (there was a Lea-Francis parked on Oaklands Road, between Cumberland Road and my school).

Number plates: In 1963, the system was changed giving a letter suffix denoting year of production ('A' for 1963, 'B' for 1964, 'C' for 1965 and so on). Until 1972 ('K' reg) when the reflective plates came out - white at the front, yellow at the back as to this day), number plates were white on black. From 1963: three letters, three numbers, one letter, for year.

My father's first car was a Morris Minor 1000 four-door saloon. In Smoke Grey, with red seats. Registration number: 23 RMU. In 1964, he replaced it with a Morris 1100 four-door saloon, in Dove Grey, with red seats. Registration number: EKX 604B.

Popular small family cars in those days cost around ₤600 - ₤650 (including purchase tax*), which was around one-third of the average annual salary after tax. In today's terms, one-third of an average salary is around ₤8,000. So let's compare what you'd get for four month's work:
* Purchase Tax was what the UK had before joining the European Economic Community (as the EU was known at that time). It was replaced of course by VAT.

Many thanks to my brother Marek for presenting me with two excellent books - British Saloon Cars of the Early Sixties and British Saloon Cars of the Fifties, both by Michael Allen. The books take me right back there!

Summer

Childhood summers seemed quite short. I'd usually spend two or three weeks of the six-week school holiday on Polish cub scout camp. This was huge fun, especially when after a few years in old army barracks (Chipping Campden, Gloucs.), the camp moved to Stella Plage in northern France for my last two years as a zuch (Polish cub). By coincidence, we had our family holiday in Stella Plage in 1967, so I holidayed there three years in a row. Stella Plage was my first taste of life outside the grey jumper'dness of West London. France, with its different shops, typefaces, cars and smells, was a departure into the exotic.

But more about Stella Plage anon. Here, I want to write about the few weeks I'd spend in Croft Gardens in between holidays. In the back garden.

There was the fruit. My parents had tended small patches of strawberries, raspberries, loganberries and gooseberries at the far end of the garden. There were two apple trees, bearing Coxes (to the right) and Bramleys - those large, sour cooking apples (to the left). Incidentally, Bramley apples are entirely unknown in Poland. Towards the end of the school summer holidays, the apples were beginning to ripen, but all to often I'd eat them too early, and get a stomach ache for my troubles!

Aside from the apple trees, which I'd climb for the fruit, there was also a lilac tree which was extremely climbable, which formed my sailing ship with its masts and its crow's nest and rigging.

At the far end of the 80 ft garden was the summerhouse, more a storehouse for old rubbish that my parents couldn't bear to part with. The most interesting thing for me was a wind-up 78rpm gramophone player, and two records; Shine on Harvest Moon and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. There were very sharp needles, and with a bit of winding up, I could make the gramophone player work.

Between the garden and the house was the veranda, metal framed and glass roofed and sided. Black-and-white linoleum tiles and garden toys. My father had constructed some cupboard space with sliding panelled doors, this was where the smaller garden tools were kept (the shovels, rakes, brooms etc with their splinter-yielding wooden handles were kept in the summerhouse).

Around the corner from the veranda was a passage to the garage, in this passage was the coal-bunker, which as I mentioned in a previous thread, was not used as such, but as a store for sand. It had asbestos (!!) sheets covering it. To think my brother and I would play hide-and-seek in it!

Heating the house

At this cold time of year, I think back to my childhood years, when houses were not centrally heated. Compared to our present house in Warsaw, constructed of thick airbricks and clad with 15cm of expanded polystyrene (then plastered on the outside), pre-war British housing stock was not built to keep warmth in. Drafty single-pane windows didn't help much. But as London was rarely visited by frost, this did not matter much as it does here.

But when it was cold, you'd feel it in the house. Our house on Croft Gardens was warmed by open electrical fires, three-bar heaters. These would be switched on non-stop during winter evenings, heating the front room (where the TV was). Stepping out into the corridor was cold and unpleasant, as was getting changed into one's pyjamas in a cold bedroom. Worst was washing in a cold bathroom. Here, because of risk of splashing water onto the open heated electrical elements, we'd have an upright paraffin heater (Aladdin brand, made on a factory on the A40 in Greenford). The paraffin heater would use either pink or blue paraffin (boom-boom-boom ESSO BLUE - remember the TV ad?), and a wick would have to be lit by a match or lighted taper. Or a large, cylindrical battery, striped blue and white (EverReady?) with a long chromed metal tube with a sparking device at the end. The Aladdin factory is still there on the A40, a listed building, though many decades have passed since it last made stoves. Latterly, it was a B&Q superstore, before that closed.

The paraffin used to fuel the stove was bought at hardware stores that vaguely smelt of the stuff. Hardware stores, before going the way of haberdashers and fishmongers, were staffed by knowledgeable chaps called Reg or Alf, who wore light-brown warehouse coats, and knew whether you needed a 7/16th" Armstrong-threaded nut or how much creosote you'd need for your garden fence.

I would often accompany my father to the hardware store on the Hanwell-end of the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing, metal cannister in hand, to buy two quarts or so for the bathroom heater.

The burning of anything by smokeless coal in the fireplace had been prohibited by the Clean Air Act of 1956. On every single lamppost there was a note to this effect. The coalmen would call regularly on Croft Gardens (we never burnt fires in the fireplace, considering this old-fashioned, grubby and working-class). The coalmen would arrive in a lorry carrying scores of hundredweight bags of smokeless nutty slack, neatly arranged on the open flatbed. A coalman, as black as a miner, would heave the bag onto his back (he had a special hat with a leather apron protecting his neck and shoulders) and carry it into the back garden. Most houses, including ours, had a coal bunker, used for storing solid fuel. Ours, however, was half-full of sand, and a great place for games of hide-and-seek.

Winter in West London, 1963

January 1963 saw freezing temperatures and heavy snowfalls blanketing the capital. For me, aged five and a quarter, this was an exciting event, made more so by the imminent arrival of my brother (who would be born on 14 January of that year). I clearly recall the atmosphere of those wintery days. The sky was dark grey, England was unprepared (my winter togs were a duffel coat, wellington boots and woollen gloves that quickly got sodden), roads were treacherous. For a child, it was primarily seen in terms of fun, rather than inconvenience. Above: Croft Gardens in the snow (click for full-size image). A snowball fight is underway, while homeowners clear snow from the pavements outside their house. I'm the little boy on the right. Right: The view from our veranda out onto the garden. At the bottom, you can just make out how high the snow piled up against the door. This pic has strong memory associations for me; I recall how excited I was as I stood waiting to rush into the deep snow. I'd never seen so much. That foreboding dark grey sky, the physical cold - and the desire to run shouting through the powder. Photos by my father, Bohdan Dembinski

My red-and-white bicycle

I got this bike when I was three. As a reward for no longer being in nappies at night. With 12" balloon tyres, rod-operated brake on the front wheel, finished in red and white, this Silver Knight bicycle lasted me until my tenth birthday, when it was replaced by a Hercules Jeep (24" wheels). As my principal form of transport for nearly seven years (fitted with stabiliser wheels at first), the Silver Knight was not just a bicycle. It was a racing car, an aircraft, a flying boat, a police motorbike, and express engine. Inspired by endurance - the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Indianapolis 500, the first round-the-world flight - I would do endless laps around the block - Croft Gardens, Oaklands Road, Seward Road and Manton Avenue before returning home for a pit stop or a landing at a remote airfield then carrying on. Over the years, the Silver Knight lost all unnecessary parts; mudguards (I'd not go cycling in the rain!), rear carrier rack, triangular metal 'fins' on the chainstays; the saddle and handlebars were raised as far as they would go, and an STP sticker applied to the frame. When I got my new bike (long overdue!) the Silver Knight passed onto my brother. Above: That's me, aged five, outside our house, going as fast as I could up Croft Gardens. Note total lack of cars parked on the road. The few cars that belonged to residents of Croft Gardens tended to be garaged whenever possible. The fact that my father (who took the picture) was home at the time, and the long shadow from a westering sun, suggests a late spring evening.

Street Cries of Old Hanwell

The rag and bone men would come by occasionally. Their horse-drawn, four wheel cart, would be piled high with old bicycle frames, mangles, spin-dryers, mattresses, vacuum cleaners - any old junk beyond repair. 

As they progressed along Croft Gardens to the clip-clop of hooves on asphalt, they would call out to householders eager to dispose of junk. I could never work out what it was they were shouting. "RI-to" (that's an "i" as in "bit", "o" as in "cot"), it sounded to me. Certainly not "Any old rags and bones you wish to dispose of, missus?" 

The institution of the rag-and-bone man (or totter) was an early bottom-up recycling initiative, not dictated by the council but by the market. I'd guess that most parts of London would have had their 'round' served by rag-and-bone men, who'd have been doing this since Victorian times. 

The TV series Steptoe and Son, about two rag-and-bone men and set in Shepherd's Bush (just a few miles up the Uxbridge Road from us), was aired on BBC TV between 1962 and 1965, when I'd have been too young to watch. The second run (1970 to '74), in colour, was already nostalgia, as by then we'd moved to posher Cleveland Road, the rag-and-bone men and their horse-drawn carts had gone.

Airfix boy

From the day my father bought me my first Airfix kit (Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, JE*J), sometime in the spring of 1963, I was hooked. Making plastic models of aircraft would be something I'd be up to for the next decade or so. I recall the day. We'd gone to the see the parish priest at Andrzej Bobola Polish church in Hammersmith about my brother's forthcoming christening. Rather than going straight home, we drove to Bushey Park, where, in the car park, my father presented me with the kit. It was in a brown paper bag; inside was in a clear plastic bag with a card stapled the top with an illustration of a Spitfire. The kit itself was of pale blue plastic. Wings, fuselage halves, ailerons, wheels, etc, were attached to sprue, there was a set of transfers with the RAF roundels and a clear plastic hood.

I'd guess my father made the kit, but he showed me how to do it. After a while I was sticking them together with aplomb. At the time there was no mention of solvent abuse, but I'm sure there was something about those fumes from the polystyrene cement (larger kits had little browny-yellow capsules of glue with them). Also, I can't remember whether JE*J (the plane of ace fighter pilot 'Johnnie' Johnson) was ever painted or whether it remained pale blue with transfers applied.

Towards the end of that summer, making plastic kits had become my favourite pastime. Well, that and building things out of Lego. One day, my father took me to Woolworths. I was very keen for him to buy me an Airfix kit of the North American Harvard, like the Spitfire, Series I, costing all of 1s. 11d., and moulded in bright yellow plastic. My father offered to buy me an Avro Lancaster bomber. Series 5 (. Four engines! Moving turrets with elevating machine guns! Functioning ailerons, elevators and rudders! Rotating undercarriage wheels! Which to choose? The Lancaster was a kit bigger and more sophisticated than any I'd helped build before. So I chose the Lanc, though I was a bit sad that the bright yellow Harvard was not to be mine.

Above: That's me proudly displaying the finished Lancaster kit ('G' for George), one fine September day in our back garden in Croft Gardens. My brother is in the pram (the wheels of which would end up as the starring stage prop in Class 3V's production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang five years later). My mother's hand is by the tea things. Behind us is the summerhouse, full of things like a wind-up gramophone, old furniture and other discarded items. The putty on the summerhouse's glazing was forever falling off (or picked away by little fingers). And note the crease in my grey flannel school shorts.

Incidentally, from what my father told me, the previous owner of our house on Croft Gardens, a Mr Appleby or Applegate, was an RAF navigator flying Lancaster bombers. We used to have a large, heavy, grey compass that came from one in our veranda. The insides were painted black and a luminous needle would wobble around inside.

On being Polish in West London

Both my parents are from Poland, they ended up in England after the War, unable to return. They bought the house on Croft Gardens, Hanwell, London W7, in 1955. When I was born, two years later, they'd speak Polish to me, and carried on speaking Polish between themselves to this day.

When I started going to nursery school on The Avenue in West Ealing, at the age of three and half, I spoke no English at all. My mother tells me that before going there for the first time, she taught me the words "please", "thank you" and "toilet". Because there were several other Polish children in my class, I never had any sense of being unusual.

It was only at Oaklands Primary School, after I'd been there for a few months, that I had the following conversation with my friend Gary Clark. I don't remember the exact words, but the gist was something like this: "Gary - you speak Polish at home to your parents, don't you?" Gary was puzzled - he didn't have a clue what I was on about. I explained. "At school, in shops, on the street, one speaks English. At home, with one's parents, one uses a different language...?" Gary replied "Er... no..."

Only at this precise moment (I must have been five and a bit), did I realise that I was different in this respect to other children. Until this moment, I thought everyone spoke Polish at home, only for some reason they didn't talk about it in school.

Polishness was for the weekends. Saturday mornings were Polish school, which I attended right up to 'A'-Level. Sunday morning was Polish cub scouts, followed by Polish mass at the Polish church. And so it went throughout my entire childhood and adolescence (scouts on Saturday afternoons).

Unlike many of our Polish friends' houses, my parents' house was not a temple to Polishness, full of folk art, pre-war maps, Black Madonnas, engravings of Lwów or Wilno, cavalry swords, bookcases solid with Polish titles. There were some signs of Polskość around our house, but it was neither deliberately being hidden nor made a show of. Which I think, in retrospect, is the healthiest balance. Not forgetting one's roots, yet not going full-on for assimilation in the host community - and then not cutting oneself off to the ghetto either.

This approach worked well. Throughout my childhood, I never felt picked on, discriminated against or victimised because of my Polish surname. This also says a lot for the basic decency and tolerance of the English host community. Not once, in all those years, can I recall a single snide comment aimed at me on account of my supposed national "otherness".

Our front garden

Our house at 15 Croft Gardens had a front and a back garden. (This is a reason why I could never live in a flat - all my life I've lived in a house with two gardens. ) The back garden, where I spent many a happy childhood hour, will be the subject, no doubt, of many separate posts, the front garden was less important from the point of view of playing.

A brick wall, some nine inches thick, separated the front garden from the pavement. A wrought-iron double gate opened up to the short drive up to the garage. The wall had three brick pillars between stretched which two sections of brickwork with a dip in the middle of each.

In my childhood makebelieve, the wall was like a railway train, the gates like a level crossing. I would sit astride the wall and imagine the train was approaching the crossing, which had to be opened, then closed.

The main feature of the front garden was a magnolia bush (today grown very large), which in bloom was quite magnificent.

The advantage of the front garden over the back was the ability to watch the world go by. Milk floats, the rag-and-bone man, cyclists, delivery vans, motorbikes, pedestrians and the occasional car, most of which warranted careful observation.

Oaklands Road

At the northern end of Croft Gardens is Oaklands Road. In my childhood, this was a serious road, more serious than Croft Gardens, or Manton Avenue, or Seward Road, because it had shops, a pub - and most importantly, my school on it. Plus, more cars drove up and down Oaklands Road.

I will write more about Oaklands Primary School, which I attended for seven years (from the ages of four to 11). But Oaklands Road itself was a rather ordinary road of Victorian two-up, two-down terraced houses; "working class". I can recall seeing children without shoes on it and indeed the same children taking a dump in the gutter, but they came from a problem family - the only one on the street.

Just around the corner from us on Oaklands Road stood a parade of shops (still there), of which the most significant for me was Tanner's. A 'tanner' was sixpence (six old pence - two and half new pee), and in the mid '60s, it could buy a lot. Two small Cadbury's chocolate bars or 24 Blackjack or Fruit Salad chewy sweets (a farthing each). Or an tetrahedron full of frozen orange juice (with tuppence change). Or a Zoom ice lolly. Two tanners would buy you a Matchbox toy. I will write more about toys and play anon. At the near end of the parade was Lawrence's the Butchers, at the far end was The Grosvenor pub, a Courage house (today a listed building). A smell of stale beer and tobacco that pervaded the air around it. My parents rather looked down upon it and upon those who frequented it.

Croft Gardens

From the time I left Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital in early October 1957 to 1 May 1970, when my family moved to the posher surroundings of Cleveland Park, West Ealing, I lived at 15 Croft Gardens, Hanwell, London W7. Our phone number - HAN 8068. No postcodes then. The 1930s-built house was semi-detached (well, end-terrace really), with a wooden lean-to garage and a drive. A magnolia tree stood in the front garden.

My father had a car - a light grey, four-door Morris Minor, registration number RMU 23. Although this was bought after I was born, I never remember a time when we didn't have a car. I remember the fridge being delivered to the house, but the car was always there. We were one of a handful of families on Croft Gardens to have a car at that time. Once I was tall enough to see out of the front room bay windows, the sound of a car driving down the street would have me running up to see what it was. Cars were still rare.

Apart from Manton Avenue, which joined Croft Gardens at the southern end, all the other streets in our part of Hanwell - bordered by the Uxbridge Road to the north, Northfields Avenue to the east, Boston Road to the west and Elthorne Park Road to the south - were Victorian. Most were terraced, some were larger and harked back to an era of domestic servants. However, my assumption was that our newer, airier houses with their 80ft gardens were posher. We, I assumed from my earliest days of class consciousness, a class above the other streets. In this view I was reinforced by the fact that we had a car, and that my father, a civil engineer, had a better job than the fathers of most the children I would end up going to school with.

My earliest memories are of the house at 15 Croft Gardens, of being in the garden, the veranda, the summerhouse, the coal bunker, the apple trees, the lilac tree... I shall return to our home in future posts.