I was still living in the Balham flat with Terry out of my life and Adam and Simon, my two little sons, to bring up when I was allocated my first real home: a council house in Basingstoke, Hampshire. Along with my house we enjoyed a new life. The three of us were free from my disparaging husband. I had a three bedroom, centrally heated house and to my delight, at the age of thirty, a bath I could use twice a day if I felt that way inclined. How different to what I had been used to all my life.

We had moved into my grandmother's house in Clarkson Street toward the end of the war in my pre-school years. Homes were in short supply because of the bombing and the old terrace houses had been divided up so that families and friends could share. Mum, my stepfather, younger brothers Paul and David, and I lived in the lower level of Nan's house. Two bedrooms that used to be parlours, led off the left side of the passage that ran from the front door to the small, cosy kitchen in which we lived. Another door off the kitchen led to the scullery. It was like a glass lean-to tacked onto the wall and Mum worked there doing the laundry in a big, old copper, and sometimes preparing food.


There was no running water in the house it had to be fetched in from the washhouse that was never used and smelt of dog (because that was where Nan's Irish Wolfhound slept), damp concrete and plaster. We had to walk down the back yard path to access it. All her life Mum did the laundry on Mondays, but in Bethnal Green it was hard work. The copper was heated and the washing boiled then she still had to scrub the clothes by hand. When it was clean Mum rinsed the washing in bowls of cold water and rung it out through the mangle in the yard.

Mum's fingers would turn bright red hanging out the wash in the winter and the clothes became so frozen that if we stood them on the ground they would stand up like a row of invisible kids. She was washing for six, already, so she couldn't be blamed for not changing our clothes too often, but having the whitest wash in the street was a matter of pride for Cockney housewives. They all used to inspect one another's laundry as it fluttered on the back yard lines.

The lavvy was further round the back of the house, which meant another trip outside and a fast, scary run in the dark. Aunt Lil, Mums oldest sister, once chased me into that WC. Her hugeness was frightening. I can't remember why she was after me, but it was some game that she must have called 'lets scare the living daylights out of Doreen'. I locked myself in the lavvy, sitting on the wooden seat which was like a shelf, thinking I was safe, but Aunt Lil opened the bolt on the door with a magnet and I was caught, but alarmed her instead with my screaming.

Under the stairs half way along the passage, was where Mr. Short, the coalman who lived two doors down from us, would drop his hundredweight bags of coal into the cellar. He'd park his horse and cart outside the house and throw a thick, dirty leather hood over his head and shoulders. Then he'd heave a hundredweight bag of coal onto his back and tip it into the cellar. Back and forth he would tramp until the cellar was full.

"Ay, Dor," Dad would whisper, "keep an eye on 'im and let me know if those bags ain't full. Don't want 'im givin'us short measure - the thievin' sod."

So I kept one eye on Mr. Short and the other on his far more interesting steed outside chomping at the bag of fodder that was hanging round its neck, but I wouldn't have known anyhow if Mr. Short had given us half a bag.

Once someone left the cellar door open and I came feeling my way along the 'nigger- brown' anaglyphta walls in the dark and fell in. I landed upside down on the mountain and I was terrified. It was as dark as Dracula's coffin down there and I was cut and grazed by the coal. No one heard me crying out for help. All I could see high above me was the hole in the wall where I had fallen through and I had to scramble out as best I could, slipping on the loose coal under my feet. I limped into the kitchen blackened, sore and trembling and stood watching the family collapse into humiliating laughter.

Out the back of the scullery, on the whitewashed wall of the house hung two zinc baths, one the size and shape of a wicker washing basket and the other a full-length bath for adults. Every Friday evening the small one was taken down and placed in front of the kitchen fire. It was bath night for us kids.

The water was boiled in the copper then transferred bucket by bucket into the bath and suitably diluted with jugs of cold water from the washhouse. In hindsight, we must have been grubby urchins. Everyday we washed our hands and face and once a week we had a bath. Paul and David used to get 'told off' for not washing their necks and sometimes mum caught me, too. I can still feel the cold flannel scrubbing at my neck and the clamminess of my wet collar against my polished skin as I went to school. I also remember my filthy feet. Having holes in my socks didn't help disguise them, but all the kids were the same in East London.

Upstairs the council had installed a gas cooker on the top landing for Nan. Her washing facility was a Victorian wash basin and pitcher beside her stove, but she used a tall, white enamel jug to carry her water from the yard and up the two flights of stairs to wash her face in the morning. Often I watched her as she splashed her parchment skin with cold water.


"You have nice skin, Nan," my ten-year old self said.
"Just soap and water," she replied and it was, of course. Make-up in her day was for very fast women.

Nan always wore black and her skirts came down to her ankles, which was nan fashion in those days. It seemed that nans wearing colour was disrespectful to the dead or something like that. My Nan was small and frail with silver hair that she combed straight back from her face and fastened into a tiny bun at the base of her neck. I took the time to trim her fingernails and brush her hair and in return she gave me the left over Lyon's Ice Cream that she loved.

But the kitchen was the centre of my world. We ate, played, listened to Dick Barton on the radio, and worked, in that warm kitchen. Set into the wall was a black coal-range that had to be cleaned every week. It shone like jet and was lit every day. Mum could bake cakes with dried egg powder and potato or rabbit pies in that oven and always knew just how much heat she needed to get the right results. There were little plates that stuck out in the front where she used to rest her saucepans while she stirred them, but often there was a warm, cotton filled shoe box containing a yellow chick that was poorly and needed tender care. Dad's contribution to household expenses after turning over his wages was to raise chickens and grow vegetables to supplement the rations.

Mum worked tenaciously when we lived in Bethnal Green. Sometimes she asked me to help black-lead the range, but I wasn't very good at it and didn't like getting black lead on my hands. I preferred to whiten the 'step'. Looking down the road, from one end to the other, every house had a small patch of sparkling white pavement at their front door, which opened directly onto the street. We just soaked the area and rubbed a chalk block over the pavement. When it dried it was sparkling white, but it showed every dirty footprint.

Now Mum decided I was too old to have baths in the kitchen. Every week she wrapped a piece of soap in a towel and sent me to the Roman Road slipper baths with threepence in my hand. The bathrooms were all white tiled with a wide, brass mixer tap over the bath that looked like a giant Swiss cowbell, but the taps were on the outside wall of the room. An attendant in a white coat would fill the bath and then I would lock myself in and soak for as long as I wanted. If the water was getting cold I learned to ring the bell and the attendant would come along to top me up with more hot water. At first I was shy of asking for too much water, but after a couple of visits I wallowed in it.

It was safe in the late forties for kids to play in the street. Traffic mostly kept to the main roads and there was plenty of it, but in our side streets little traffic ventured. There were as many horse and carts to see as there were cars. As well as Mr. Short, the brewery delivered to the pub on the corner by horse and cart: Whitbread shire horses, matched pairs with brass hangings on their bridles. When the shire horses drove off Dad would send me out with a seaside bucket and spade to scoop up the manure. I'd hold the smelly mess at arms length and Dad would be grinning widely his pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth. But our tomato plants were so tall they entwined themselves in next-doors tree.


There was travelling entertainment, too. A carousel, for instance, came down the street in a horse and cart, as did the rag and bone man who was also a form of distraction. We kids would try hard to find something to give him in exchange for a goldfish if we could talk our parents out of wanting a china plate or cup.

So we raked the streets, my brothers, cousins Doris and Dennis, and I, playing with our whips and tops, skipping ropes and balls, or just ran around chasing each other or playing Knock Down Ginger. We'd go to church just for somewhere to go and dip our fingers in the Holy Water anointing ourselves though we were not Catholics.

"You have a black soul," stormed the priest waving the bible in one hand and thumping his chest with the other.

The only sole I knew was on the bottom of my shoes. I was awestruck and for years walked around thinking I had a piece of black leather dangling in my chest cavity that would miraculously turn white if I kept going to church.

Often we would go to the park to play. It was a long walk to Victoria Park and the three of us with our two cousins usually went together with a picnic. The favorite destination in the park was the Lido Swimming Pool. Only one day at the pool sticks in my mind. I was self-conscious in a brown knitted, Jansen swimsuit. The colour and the fact it was knitted was not all that embarrassed me, there was also a tiny moth hole on the hip that was visible because my white skin glowed through it. I couldn't swim and neither could anyone else in our party.

This particular day I had gone down to the deep-end to watch a man who had twin boys of about two years old. He was throwing them into the pool and they were swimming around like little porpoises enjoying every minute. I sat on the edge of the pool grinning at them when I felt a jab in my back and with a little squeal I slid off the side of the pool into the water. I had twisted round facing the side of the pool and I watched the tiles rising. Well, they looked like they were rising because I was sinking.

"I'm going to drown," I thought to myself. "I don't know how to get out."

It seemed to me I was under the water for an awfully long time, but I didn't struggle. I had always thought when a person was under water they would try to breathe but there was none of that. I just gently floated down imagining that my life was at an end. Then I felt some hands underneath me and the tiles began to move in the opposite direction. I bounced out of the water my hair plastered to my face and began to splutter.
"Pull her out then." a man said and some kids grabbed my arms and yanked me from the pool.


"You should learn to swim," said the man going back to his twins.

I picked up my towel draping it round my shoulders and sat on the boards, warm from the sun, and let the water drain off me. A boy a few years older than I came and apologized for shoving me in.

"I thought you could swim or I wouldn't have pushed you."

Then a woman came and asked me if I was all right.

"Yes," I said. "I've got a headache."

"Yes, you would."

I didn't swim again that day. In fact, I didn't swim again period. If ever I was near a pool I was very careful and if I heard anyone say the way to teach someone to swim is to throw him or her in, I kept well away from that person. That experience put me off swimming forever and I can still only swim a few strokes in shallow water.

Then everything changed. When I thought all was well and I was settled in my fabulous grammar school, Mum and Dad decided London was not the place to live anymore. At the age of eleven I was on the move to Essex. One winter day all bundled up with the furniture in the back of the moving van we left Bethnal Green for Harold Hill, a brand new council estate near Romford. We were the first family to move into the street and it still looked like a building site.


Although the roads were finished, the pavements were not paved and the whole area was a sea of heavy clay. On our side of the street was a chain of empty houses, but on the other side men were still working on blocks of flats from one end of the street to the other. There were cement mixers, and bulldozers, great lorries trundling up and down the street filled with mud or hard fill, and everywhere hundreds of builders hammering and drilling and going about their business. But through the flats and across the road on the other side, were fields. It looked like a park to me but without the flowers. Then, better still, at the end of our street was the Green Belt.

"What's the Green Belt, Dad?"

"It means they can't build on it." he said. "This street is as far as they can go, and you will always have those forests and fields to run around in."

And we did. In the next few weeks the houses slowly filled and I made new friends. My brothers and I and the girl next door, Lorraine, were always in the forest climbing trees and swinging across streams on tow ropes tied to tree limbs, or picking bluebells or blackberries.

In the house Mum was in raptures. She had water everywhere. Apart from the stuff that was falling from the sky it ran out of the kitchen tap, hot or cold. Dad bought her a washing machine that lived under the kitchen sink. It was a small, single tub with a wringer on top, which was the best anyone could get. She still had to do many loads to get all our stuff clean, but she did not have to boil the copper and stand in a cold scullery. Still the thing that we liked best was the bathroom. Our own bath - and a toilet that was inside the house as well as one on the back porch right next to the kitchen door. What luxury.

Heating the water was an expensive job and Dad didn't like the electric immersion heater being on continuously. He thought a constant tank of hot water would cost the family a fortune, so he had a geyser installed over the kitchen sink and the hot water tank stayed cold until it was bath night. Yes, we were still only allowed one bath a week and if anyone wanted to wash in hot water in the morning they had to carry it to the bathroom from the geyser in the kitchen.

Harold Hill was the place I did all my growing up. Because I didn't know the schools in the area I couldn't argue about which one I went to and I was sent to the nearest, which was not a grammar school. The boy's school was right next door to ours, but we were never allowed to look at the boys let alone talk to them. I socialised solely with girls for the next five years and the only men in my life were my family: Mum had three more babies, a girl and two boys. I learned how to cook and wash men's shirts, how to starch a tray cloth and sew an apron, but I never learned anything about the facts of life. Yet, I thought I knew it all and longed to leave school and become a woman of the world.

That happened when I was sixteen. I was a tall, long legged girl with hair that nearly reached my waist. My eyes, everyone said, were my finest feature, but I was a girl, shy and as green as the grass on the other side of the road. I was working and earning and I was allowed to pay Dad ten-pence a week to have an extra bath. I could afford to buy my own soap and decided to bathe with Camay which I saw advertised on TV:

"You'll look a little lovelier each day, with fabulous pink Camay."

Mum used to laugh as I swaggered up to the bathroom with my sachet of bubble bath and bar of Camay. I took a magazine, too, and would sit soaking in the bath for which I had paid, for an hour while I read the latest make-up tips.

"What on earth do you do in that bathroom all that time?" Mum would ask while I inspected my face in my dressing table mirror to see if that Camay had made me a little bit lovelier.

About this time I met Irene. At twenty-one, she was four years older than me. I was a tall, leggy brunette while she was blonde, short, and buxom, but we got on well and we never stopped laughing. She taught me all about flirting and how to get noticed. Much of the time we rode our bikes through the Billerickey army barracks waving at the soldiers who could only wave back if no one was looking because they were on duty. But sometimes we caught a bus and went out waggling our behinds and teasing the men, but keeping a fair distance from them.

One day we painted our legs with leg make-up and went to Billerickey Park where we decided to take a canoe out onto the lake. There we sat; two attractive girls in summer dresses with painted legs and our shoes lying in the bottom of the canoe, trying to manoeuvre ourselves round the little island in the middle of the lake. Along came two young men in a rowboat.

"Having trouble?" they asked. "Want some help?"

They leaned over our canoe and one of them pinched the oars and the other our shoes. They took off fast leaving us stranded in the middle of the lake. We tried to hand paddle to get the canoe moving, but we only managed to turn in circles so we sat there until it was time to go in. That was when the attendant realized we were not going anywhere fast and rowed out to tow us back to shore. The boys had disappeared by that time and our shoes had been thrown on the grass. Just as we put them on it began to rain.

"Let's go to the kiosk for a cup of tea and get out of the rain," I said, and so we ran.

But the rain became a torrent and by the time we reached the café we were drenched and our leg make-up was running down our legs in great, streaky rivulets. We sat down hiding our legs under the table and giggling like tipsy teenagers. We never visited Billerickey Park again.

At twenty-one I left the family home. I moved around from one town to another for the next three years living in bed-sits mostly and sharing bathrooms with other tenants. Usually I was allocated a bath night when the bathroom was all mine.


Then even when I married we did not have our own bathroom. Terry and I had two flats during our five-year relationship, one in Ilford and one in Balham and they were still old Victorian buildings devoid of anything but a cold water tap and a gas geyser over the kitchen sink. But I considered myself to be lucky. Rental accommodation was very hard to come by in London.

When my second son, Simon, was born in 1968, to my great relief Terry disappeared from our lives. I didn't try to find him. I didn't want him back. But a couple of years later out of fear he might turn up one day, I decided to move away. I applied for a house out of London and was soon allocated my dream home in Hampshire.

I had friends there and good neighbours and Basingstoke is a beautiful place. The children could play in our garden or on the green outside. We could pick blackberries from the hedgerows across the road, or go for long walks and drink cider in the gardens of the country pubs. The primary school where my boys would go to school and shopswere in walking distance from our home and we were safe.

The cascade that had begun as a trickle was flowing, pouring down on me everything I could wish for in my life. My awful marriage gave me the best things in my life, my sons, but ensured that the rest of my life would thankfully be as a single woman. Along with my new lifestyle, my joys, and my boys, I found my faith and with that, tolerance of humankind. After all that, I had become a strong and independent person.

My past is what I am; my struggles are what made me I soak every night in my bubbles with my Camay substitute by my side and water is never more an issue.

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