Your Memories Of Beckenham

YOUR MEMORIES OF BECKENHAM cont...

MEMORIES OF BECKENHAM and THE FLYING BOMB.

By Richard Beckett

I was born in a Nursing home on 25 May 1935 in Beckenham Kent, and my childhood years were spent mostly in a house about a mile from the place where I was born. The house where we lived was in the middle of a terrace of six, and as there was a house on both sides we were partly protected from the cold and weather. At the bottom of the garden a railway line ran along on an embankment which meant that the passengers could look down into the back gardens and houses.

The three ground floor rooms in the houses were known by different names to thosewhich are used these days. The room nearest the front door was called “the Front Room” and contained a Settee and two armchairs together with the piano. Nowadays that room would be called the Lounge. We hardly ever used that room except at Christmas time.

The next room beyond the Front Room was “The Kitchen”. However the name belied its use, for it was the room where we mainly lived and ate and today would probably be called the Living Room. The name kitchen was probably a left-over from the days when the cooking range would have been in that room, although the Range had long since been replaced with an open coal fire.

Beyond what we knew as the Kitchen was the room were situated the Gas Cooker, the large square white china sink & “The Copper” in which the clothes were boiled & washed. This room was known as “The Scullery”. It had a red quarry-tiled floor and it was in this room where all the cooking & washing were done. Also as there was no bathroom it was where we washed and as there was no water heater, all water for washing had to be boiled in a kettle on the gas cooker. The washtub, although called “The Copper” was actually a large cast iron container set over a coal fire in a brickwork surround. Every Monday rain or shine, this washtub was filled with water, a fire lit underneath and when the water was hot, soap flakes would be sprinkled in to dissolve and the clothes were put in to boil and the wooden lid put on to help keep the steam in. Stirred occasionally with the big “Copper Stick” when they looked clean, they would be transferred across the kitchen in a tin bath and rinsed in the sink. It always seemed that the white sheets and pillow cases were washed first and after they had been rinsed in cold clean water, they would be rinsed through in a second lot of cold water in which the “Reckitts Blue” had been swirled about. This was a small muslin bag containing the “Blue Rinse”. Rinsing in this slightly blue water tended to delay the yellowing which occurs as white cotton sheets & pillow cases get older.

My first memory must be very early because I can remember jumping up and down in a cot in my parent's bedroom. My next memory is of the evening that the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill caught alight in 1936 and was burning. I was about eighteen months old and although I do not actually remember seeing the flames I do recall that we were in the room which we knew as the kitchen (nowadays it would be called the dining room). On the table my father was repairing the clock which normally hung on the wall. (In those days we called the room where the cooking and washing was done, the scullery). My father was mending the clock and I was just tall enough to stand up and hold the edge of the table to see what he was doing. I remember from later years that the clock was about eighteen inches tall and had a carved wooden case. Suddenly he went off on his bike when apparently lots of fire engines were going past and he saw the flames where the Crystal Palace was burning and went off to see what was going on. My mother took my sister and I upstairs to the back bedroom where apparently it was possible to see the glow from the flames, but I do not remember any of that.

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