My Early Childhood in Newton
by Peter Howell
Sometime after Uncle Ern's second marriage on 23rd June 1934, my parents managed to put together £275 to buy a house at 26 Nottage Road, Newton. So, after a period of living in my Uncle’s house at 12, Oakland Road, Mumbles, my father had brought us back to the village and the very same road, in which he had been horn and bred.
Number 26 was one of a row of cement-rendered houses on the shoulder halfway up Nottage Road. It had been built on a shell cut into a bank. It was a standard terraced house of the time. A front room, a middle room and a narrow scullery at the back, all of which formed an L-shaped layout, and three bedrooms above. A passageway led from the front door past the little-used front room into the middle room where we lived, and the scullery beyond. The living room was filled by a dining table and four chairs, a sideboard and an armchair on each side of the fireplace. The latter was framed by a polished wooden mantelpiece, on which stood a clock. It was a gift from my grandmother, who had given a clock to each of her sons on their wedding day. My father, following his mother's practice, always kept it a quarter of an hour fast.
An ill-fitting latched door, which let in cold draughts in winter, led from the scullery into a back yard, about six feet below the surrounding ground. With its whitewashed brick retaining walls and a concreted floor it would have resembled an empty L-shaped swimming pool if it had not been for a brick outside lavatory in one far corner and a corrugated iron coalshed in the other. Wallflowers grew in a raised flower-bed no bigger than a table cloth, which lay up against the outside wall of the lavatory. What ground space remained of the backyard was just big enough for me to ride a tricycle in tight circles.
Nottage and Newton Roads formed the backbone of the village. Nottage Road ran down from St Peter's Church, at one end of the village to the junction with Newton Road, which then ran up to Paraclete Congregational chapel at the other end. Both roads were lined by rows of cement-rendered houses or whitewashed cottages. Some had narrow front flower gardens, enclosed by low limestone walls, while the doorways of others fronted directly onto an uneven pavement.
Between St. Peter's and Paraclete, no more than an easy five minutes' walk apart, there was a primary school, a chemist, two grocery shops, a butcher and a baker. Along the same stretch of road, five-bar gates led straight off to the house, stone barns and manure splattered yards of no less than three farms, and a fourth just around the corner. At the Paraclete end two public houses, the post office and a garage, stood at various points around the junction of Newton Road and New Well Lane, which climbed steeply from Mumbles. One pub was The Rock and Fountain, known as The Rock, and the other The New Inn, which the locals still called The Ship (from its former name The Ship and Castle). This junction was the closest that Newton came to having a village square.
A few little lanes and side roads running off Nottage and Newton Roads, completed the village proper. Its men were mostly manual workers, who went to work in overalls and dungarees, while their wives stayed at home and cared for the house and family, scrubbed their front doorsteps, gossiped and went shopping.
Around the edge of the village just minutes away, was a ring of more modern, semi-detached or freestanding houses. Their bay windows overlooked front lawns surrounded by a low wall or hedge, which were entered by a gate and a driveway leading to a garage. Here, men who went to work in a collar and tie and a neat car lived with their families. Their wives clip-clopped through the village with a decorative wicker shopping basket on their arm on their way to and from the shops. Their children did not mix much with the village children. In their early years they tended to go to private preparatory schools, run by somewhat eccentric older men or spinsters in large old houses on the edge of the village. Beyond this white-collared crescent around the village, and overlooking the sea, were the big houses where my mother had been in service.
My earliest memory of life and the village, is the celebrations for the coronation of King George VI on 12 May 1937, when I was almost three and a half years old. I can clearly remember standing with other children at the kerbside of a grassed bank near the junction of Nottage and Newton Roads, waiting to be given a coronation mug. We were milling around a wicker laundry basket full of the china mugs, each wrapped in newspaper for their protection. Auntie Mona was bent over the basket unwrapping the mugs one by one and handing them out. I still have mine.
I also remember the street party for the village children later that day, all of us sitting at a line of trestle tables, covered in white cloth, which stretched along the level of Southward Lane. Family folklore has it that I was caught licking the cream off a cream bun and then putting it back on the cake stand with the untouched others!
The War and Newton
The Outbreak of War
One morning in September 1939, a few days after coming home from Hill House hospital, where I had been confined with scarlet fever, Ivy Parry, our next door neighbour, came running up our front steps and into the house, calling out ‘Nellie, Germany’s invaded Poland!’
But the beginning of the war had no immediate effect on my life, although gradually the village prepared for war. An air raid siren was set up on a metal framework in the back garden of the village policeman. There were demonstrations so that people could learn to distinguish between the undulating wail of the warning and the single drawn out note of the all clear. Each house was issued with a stirrup pump to fight fires caused by incendiary bombs, blackout devices were fitted around doors and windows and glass was criss-crossed with adhesive tape as a protection against flying slivers from bomb blasts. All this was carried out under the supervision of the Air Raid Precaution wardens, who wore ARP arm bands on their dark navy uniforms, with steel helmets and gas mask containers slung over their shoulders. Their headquarters was in what had been Miss Palliser’s chemist shop.
We were each issued with a gas mask in a cardboard box to be carried with us everywhere. The ARP used to encourage people to practice wearing them. We helped each other to put them on—chin first, then pull and adjust the straps over the back of our heads. We sat in the living room getting used to breathing in the suffocating vulcanised rubber smell while our visors misted over.
My parents cleared out under our stairs to turn it into an air raid shelter and during the air raids, I lay on a makeshift bunk in the confined space, while my parents huddled on low stools alongside me.
Wings for Victory
The community threw itself into various designated war efforts. The ‘Wings for Victory’ campaign saw a fairground set up one Saturday in the road junction between the Rock and the Ship, where we paid tuppence to enter little tents to see the ‘village Museum’ or a hoax freak or have our fortunes told. Money was collected and War savings certificates sold at school, where we were later disappointed to learn that all the money which had been contributed so patriotically by local people would only fund one aerilon on the wing of a Spitfire fighter plane!
Taking in Washing
One evening, as I stood round the camp gates, a black soldier came up and asked me in a deep mellow voice, ‘Say Kid, does your mother take in washing?’
Whether out of surprise or because I felt it would be impolite to refuse, I found myself taking home a bundle of his army shirts and underclothes. My mother laundered them without question and I returned them to him. I cannot remember how many times this was repeated before I happened to mention that my client was a black man. She was taken aback at first but soon regained her generosity of spirit. Some time later, she received a letter, which she noted was ‘in an educated handwriting’ from private (First Class) Williams, thanking her for doing his laundry.
A Caswell Picnic
One evening my father came home from work carrying a hessian sack from which he upended a dozen or more cans of food onto the scullery floor. A food warehouse near his workshop had been gutted by fire during the previous night’s air raid and, somehow, he had come by these cans. Their labels had been burnt off by the fire, but he maintained that they contained tinned fruit, a luxury scarcely available in the shops and something to be kept at the back of the pantry for special occasions.
Shortly afterwards, on a summer Sunday, we went to Caswell for a picnic. My mother packed one of the unlabelled tins of fruit as a special treat. But, much to our disappointment, when she opened the tine, the contents turned out to be stewed steak!
Soldiers
The most exciting event for we children was the arrival of the soldiers in the village. A tented army camp was set up in the parish field alongside St. Peter’s Church using the parish hall as the cookhouse. The first ones were a contingent of the Royal Sussex regiment, speaking in the strange accent of south-east England.
The camp became the centre of attraction for the village boys where we were allowed to raom freely. A sickly smell of straw palliasses came from the wigwam shaped tents.In the field latrines enclosed by corrugated iron sheets, I was taken aback by the lack of privacy of men crouching on pans set alongside one another in a long timber frame.
Some of the regular soldiers’ wives, keen to be with their husbands, were welcomed and billeted by families in the village.
On Sunday mornings we watched them marching to church parade at St. Peter’s swinging along behind a band playing the regimental marching song, for which we soon learnt the chorus.
Sussex, Sussex by the sea,
Good old Sussex by the sea.
And we’ll sing this song
As we march along,
Sussex by the sea.
Peter Howell