Moving up the road ......

Shhhh!  don't tell anyone .............. the rain has stopped!!
I nipped to the Post office to post off some stuff from my stash, thought I may as well get the parcels off before the postage goes up - again!!
DH is collecting frogspawn from next door's pond - isn't there something about little boys never grow up they just get older!!!!!
Somewhere I have a photo of the road we lived in but although I have searched I cannot find it - it will turn up one day and I will republish this post.

memories continued:

Next door to Ronny lived her Dad’s sister and their family, three boys and a girl.  They all went scrambling of a weekend and spent most of the week washing and messing with their bikes.  The Salmons lived next door to them and they only had one son – the war reduced some families if there was a serving parent.  Ray was ok with me and we often spoke although when I went to Grammar – he went to Moseley – he was horrified to see me coming up the road with Villa colours on and use to tease me dreadfully.  The other football team (I don't like swearing but for the sake of history ……… Birmingham City!) was the chosen one and not Aston Villa – I didn't know and didn't really care.  I have married a blues supporter and a Villa supporter so ended up going to both football grounds!!

Next door but one to him lived another family but Derek never came out very much, didn’t seem to be able to mix much but he did give me a white mouse (which had babies!!) and I loved that mouse so much – fact that I had a cat and a dog did not enter into it!!  Down towards

Skelcher Road

lived another family who were great friends of my Mam’s.  They had a boy and it wasn’t till years later I found out an older daughter.  John and I were friends, part of the ‘group’………….. he had a heart attack at 24 and died ………. Just like that ………….

By then we had all gone our own way. 

A few houses along from Thelma lived Patrick, much maligned as his dad was a ‘pigman’ – collected all the waste to feed to the farm animals – often parking his truck outside his house and, even if the truck was empty, it smelt!!!  Next door to them lived Freda who wasn’t allowed to play out very much but I liked her and her family.  They lived with her Nan – her father’s mother - and was the eldest, her father was tall & thin and her mother was very petite and feminine, stunningly pretty – or so I thought – she made me tongue tied, I had never met anyone so pretty and ladylike.  Further up the road lived Jill & Lesley; I only came to meet them when I started at Harrison Barrow Grammar School as they both went there.  My mother thought it fortunate as it meant she didn’t have to buy so much uniform for me, I had their cast offs – especially the summer dresses which were made from a very pretty flowered material and I loved very much.  Unfortunately, this was my downfall as, when I was in the third year and Lesley was in the fifth, she noticed a tear in my skirt and told me she had done that to hers and it all became clear as to where her old uniform went.  She sort of looked ‘down’ on me after that and I was pleased when she left, but my friends knew that I wore her cast-offs and it left a very unpleasant atmosphere for some time – till something new became the gossip.  Jill had the new uniform, it was then passed to Lesley and then passed to me, so you can see where Lesley was coming from.  I think that was about it except for some babies and toddlers further up the road ie numbers 10 -14.