All the time that I spent
productively expanding my mind as described in the previous post, Wendy was
caring wonderfully with the slenderest of resources, for Rebecca and David. We
had to make do with a stipend intended for a single man, and what remained of
my savings from the few years in general practice. We were really, really poor.
Yet it was one of the happiest years of our lives. Our house in Newington Green
was a fascinating old place, over 200 years old, with a new kitchen to replace
the one destroyed by a bomb during the blitz. We had a modern kitchen
with a new “wetback” stove that heated the kitchen, a decent-sized fridge and a
washer and dryer for the laundry. There were parks nearby, Tufnell Park, Clissold Park and
Finsbury Park, and of course the little scrap of grass in Newington Green
itself. Wendy walked to and from the Ridley Road market a mile or so away to
get provisions for us, often bringing back a stroller piled high with spuds,
cauliflower, carrots, mincemeat, etc, and one or both kids perched precariously
on top. We quickly learnt which of the abundant child-friendly entertainments
were available at no or very low cost all over London Town. Feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square cost the bus fare plus tuppence for two little bags of corn, one each for the kids. We were too poor to
take many photographs that year, but the few we have confirm how happy and
carefree we were in that year of financial anxiety. While I worked, Wendy
explored London with Rebecca and David; she has many stories to tell.
I never confided fully in Wendy at
the time, how close we were to total bankruptcy. On a few occasions I had just
enough money to buy that week's food. She knew, of course, that we were very
hard up, and cooperated wonderfully in scrimping and saving to make ends meet.
Looking back from our affluence now, I recall with immense pleasure the
innumerable simple ways we entertained ourselves and the children. We
discovered free museums all over the nearby parts of inner London, and cheap
ways to entertain Rebecca and David. Riding on the top deck of the Number 73
bus from Newington Green to Oxford Circus, or further, along Park Lane to Hyde
Park Corner; visiting the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and
discovering the little bronze fairies, elves, goblins all around its base;
feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square; watching the wizened elderly mariners with
exquisite model ships that sailed the Round Pond; all these and more were some
of our entertainments, and cost no more than the bus fares.
Our social lives were rather circumscribed.
We met my father and his miserable wife Margret - a sour woman who never in all
the years I knew her had a good word to say for anybody. My father was pleased
and interested to meet Wendy, and showed a transient and superficial interest
in our children; but never lifted a finger to help us, showed not the slightest
concern about our welfare. We had far more affectionate concern from strangers
who were our neighbours, the pretty French girl Marie-Christianne and her
South-African Indian friend Ismael Patel - who got her pregnant and married her
while we were there, and brought them to Canada soon afterwards, where they re-entered
our lives years later when we too came to live in Canada. Our other neighbours
included a biochemist friend of our landlord, Arnold Rosen; her name was Dora
and she lived on the top floor of the house, visited from time to time by her
boyfriend. Anne Windsor, a pretty young red-headed school teacher was our other
live-in neighbour, also occupying a bed-sitting room on an upper floor; she was
a built-in baby-sitter, who later had a tragedy in her life when her fiance
drowned while they were holidaying in Spain.
The house at Newington Green had a
large old garden with an overgrown frog pond and two little statues at the
bottom end of it, just below a high wall that separated us from a school
ground. Our children played happily there, and came with us on buses and the
Underground at weekends when we explored the parks, museums and many other
sights and sounds of London. It was wonderfully happy, carefree year, despite
our poverty, or perhaps because of it.
We were too poor to afford a
Christmas Tree, but in our back garden, Wendy found a large branch of a shrub
that had broken off the main trunk. She brought it inside, stuck it in a bucket
of sand, and decorated it with little bells made by pressing aluminium milk
bottle tops on a lemon squeezer. Milk bottle tops were gold if the milk was
very rich and creamy, red if the milk was homogenized, and silver for skim
milk. Our little bells were a mixture of all three. Then a miracle took place:
the bare and leafless branch came to life indoors in the warmth and with its
base in the moist sand, it burst into leaf, so our bare branch turned green
with little leaves sprouting forth all over it. Rebecca and David, and Wendy
and I, were enthralled by this minor miracle. The Wheelers invited us to spend
a few days with them at Christmas; they were tigers for punishment! But Bill
fell ill, so we stayed with them only for a couple of days instead of the week
or so for which they had invited us.
Our “year” in London lasted only about 11 months. Our homeward bound passenger carrying freighter was
ahead of schedule. We had to get ourselves to Rotterdam to embark about 3-4 weeks before the
originally scheduled sailing date. This was a minor disadvantage of choosing to travel on passenger-carrying freighters rather than regularly scheduled passenger ships. Our journey home will be the subject of another post.
Waiting for a Number 73 Bus in Newington Green
Wendy, Rebecca, Dora's boy friend (Eric?) in the garden at 30 Newington Green
No comments:
Post a Comment