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Published: February 9th 2008
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I don’t know where this memory came from. It’s funny how they pop up here and there. When I was 21, a friend and I decided that it was time to travel. We organised ourselves to go to England for a 2-1/2 week holiday. We booked our tickets, got our passports, organised our whole trip, even down to a bus tour through to Scotland and back. Very excited young women we were. Both of us were still living at home and this was to be our big adventure before, as good girls do, we settled down to get married and have children. Remember, I’m talking about 1968.
We arrived in London and I remember the first thing I noticed was the green. Coming from Canada, I was used to green, but England has the most incredible shades of green. The other thing we noticed was how dirty and smelly London was.
We spent a couple of days in London and then began our tour. At the same time, we began to develop some different ideas to a 2-1/2 week holiday. Maybe, just maybe, we could stay for longer. We had both arrived with £100 each in our pockets. A lot of money at the time, but, not enough to live on for very long. During our tour, along with other happenings, we began to plot and plan. When we returned to London, if we could find jobs and a place to stay, we were going to hang around for longer than our 2-1/2 weeks.
What a major decision this was. Only now, writing about it, am I aware of the power of this decision. Neither of us had been away from our parents for more than a couple of weeks holidays. Joan had a job to go back to. I had quit just before I left and was planning on moving in with a friend in Ottawa (I lived in Montreal). We had limited finances and limited experience with the world. This decision to stay in London, was probably the biggest decision I had ever made in my almost 22 years.
We both got jobs. And lo and behold, we found a place to live. There are many memories of that time in London and further afield. I stayed in London for over a year and then spent another year in Heidelberg in Germany. I eventually returned to Montreal late in 1970.
What I want to talk about is: 1 Warrington Gardens, our first home in London. It was one of the terraced houses that are common in London. This particular house had been divided up into rentable accommodation. I discovered the “bedsit” accommodation. This is a one room flat, which has some small cooking facilities, a bed, couple of cupboards and little else. You live in one room.
Joan and I rented what used to be the maids quarters right at the top of the house, underneath the eaves, so at the corners of the rooms, the roof slanted down and until we got used to it, we would constantly bang our heads.
Our electricity and gas were run off meters into which you put shilling coins. If you didn’t have the coins, you didn’t have electricity and gas. No gas, meant no heat. The bathroom was down a level, and was shared by all the tenants.
We were lucky. We had two rooms, a lounge, and a bedroom, as well as an incredibly tiny kitchen underneath the sloping roof. Lucky neither of us was very tall, but the boys who came to visit found it difficult and would tend to stay in the middle of the rooms.
There were 72 stairs to our flat. No lift of course. Why do I remember that there were 72 stairs? I don’t know. I do know that we counted them, sometimes at the end of a long day at work, after an even longer evening out with the boys. I remember someone else who lived in the building using these stairs as an exercise tool. She felt she was getting fat and needed more exercise. So every day, she would run up and down the stairs for exercise.
The phone was a pay phone 2 floors down. We all used it. We became like a little family and I can remember almost all the others who lived in the house while we were there. Greg, who lived downstairs was one of the few guys. He was gorgeous and all the girls had a crush on him. Joan and I went down to his flat one morning, barged in on him, and informed him that we were cooking breakfast for him and his visitor. And then asked him what he had in his fridge for us all to eat.
I remember the guy, not his name, just him, who loved drying women’s hair with a towel. As none of us had hair dryers in those days, he was very useful to us.
I remember my first Christmas away from home. All of us feeling a bit like orphans so we decided that the biggest flat would be our home for the day, and each flat would supply part of the meal. None of us had any money. So the New Zealand girls from across the road came over with their pots and pans. Joan and I did something. The boys did something else. We had a lovely Christmas, our first Christmas ever away from our families.
I met my husband to be there as well. He was a friend of Greg’s. One day, from my flat, I could hear someone come from Greg’s flat to use the telephone. Knowing Greg’s list of girlfriends, I decided I would get him into trouble with which ever girlfriend he was ringing. I ran downstairs, opened the door, and said:” And what do you think you’re doing, using my phone?” in my loudest voice. Then I looked, and it wasn’t Greg. It was a man I’d never seen before in my life. This was how I met the man who was to become the father of my children. And that’s another story.
I remember our “verandah”. We would climb out our window onto the roof and there was London below us. We could see who was at our door before we ran downstairs to let them in, we could see what was happening for miles around. The “verandah” made up for a lot of other shortcomings of our flat.
I remember running down the stairs and grabbing the railing and it gave way on me. The building was a wreck. The ancient carpet which must have been original it was so old and worn.
I remember a party. In London, the tubes finished at about 10 p.m. so when you had a party, it was understood that you were likely to have overnight guests if you wanted a decent party. This night about 12 or 13 had slept in our little flat. The next morning, we all traipsed down the stairs, to be confronted by the janitor who was not really happy with the goings on in his building.
I’ve got many pleasant memories of that time in London. In December 2002 I was again in London and decided to check out the old building. Much to my disappointment, the whole block had been torn down about 7 years earlier and had been replaced by an expensive block of flats with a doorman and the works. Lovely building, but not what I’d been looking for. I guess, the old building couldn’t have survived all those years in the state it was, but I was disappointed. Checking out my old house was one of the things I’d been looking forward to during that trip.
Madeleine
Thursday, 15 December 2005
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Kahless
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Hello
Never been to Maida Vale but I know where it is on the tube map!