All in All a Good Life. The Memories of Vera Lewis 1918-2008

All donations to the Douglas Macmillan hospice Barlaston Road, Blurton, Stoke-on-Trent ST3 3NZ, www.dmhospice.org.uk please.

To contact the family, grahamATbredhurstchurch.org.uk. (replace AT by @)

We can supply a professionally printed version of the book for £11 including postage, £10 goes to the Hospice..

Mother’s memoirs are hosted on the site of St Peter’s Church Bredhurst.

Chapters:

1: Beginnings, 2: Doreen, 3: Moving On, 4: War, 5: Peace, 6: A Long Encounter, 7: Family

			Chapter 1: Beginnings I was born on 3rd March 1918 at 32 Wakefield Street, East Ham, London, E6 (now part of Newham). I was the first child of Sidney and Hilda Redward who were married in May 1916. They met shortly before the Great War of 1914-18 against Germany started, whilst walking in the local park one Sunday evening (or maybe a Saturday), listening to the band. Apparently it was a favourite place for young men to find a girl (or vice-versa) – the other place was at church on Sunday! My father was a clerk in a German bank in London (Dresdner Bank) which was an achievement since he had left school at the age of 12. After various jobs he had become a messenger boy at the bank and they had promoted him to clerk. He lived in East Ham with his parents and eight brothers and sisters. His father (Dinneford Septimus Mayell Redward) was a policeman. His mother, Elizabeth Eaton (known as Bessie), had been a maid and his father was in service in the same place in Hampshire as a coachman. When they were married they had to leave and they found employment as caretakers of an office building in London where they had accommodation. My grandfather later joined the police force and eventually came to live in a rented house in East Ham – which still had fields around it!
My mother lived in Ilford in Essex (about 5 miles from East Ham). She had six brothers and sisters and two young half sisters. Her father (Charles Smith) was a clerk in a stockbroker’s office in London. The distance between their homes meant they did not see each other very often as neither could afford the fare, although my father used to walk to Ilford! My mother rarely had any money as she stayed at home helping her stepmother with housework and looking after her small sisters. When the war started in August 1914 the Dresdner Bank was forced to close and so my father lost his job. He volunteered for the army but did not pass his medical because he had some false teeth! However he was later called up and after training in Yarmouth went to France. One day in May 1916 he arrived home unexpectedly to tell my mother he had 48 hours leave and had bought a special licence to get married. This apparently came as rather a shock to her as no mention seemed to have been made of such a plan before. She did not seem to have had much option but to consent since he pointed out that if they did not get married he would be court martialled for getting leave under false pretences! However it seemed her only worry was that she had no special clothes to wear for the great day! A relative who owned a car (a rarity in those days) tied a white ribbon on it and drove them to church. As they were coming out after the ceremony they heard a woman passer-by who had spotted the white ribbon on the car say to her friend, “Shall we stop to see the bride come out?” My poor mother’s feelings about her lack of bridal outfit were confirmed! My father returned to France the next morning. After more than six months in the trenches (he had some harrowing tales to tell about those days) he was fortunate to be still alive and was then offered the opportunity to come home to England to train as an officer at Priory Park in Booth. My mother visited him there and stayed in lodgings in Lansdowne Road, Bath. My father played football for the army team there – he had played for the West Ham boys team and his elder brother, Frederick, had played as a reserve for the professional West Ham United team (for which, my mother told me, the brother was paid considerably more than an ordinary worker, so being well-paid to play football is nothing new). When my father completed his training he was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant and posted to Cairo. He was dismayed by the sight of so many children, apparently without any family, living on the street and sleeping in doorways and begging (much the same as in certain parts of South America today). Also, he was compelled to dine in the officer’s mess a certain number of times which was a great strain on his finances as he only had his army pay, whereas a number of the professional army officers had private incomes. Also of course not being a professional soldier he felt an outsider, so he was relieved when he was posted to a railway depot at Aqaba as Railway Transport Office. He was responsible for seeing that supplies reached the army, and Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab army could raid the train to get the gold to pay the Arab fighters. I suppose this was a ruse so that it was not known that we were paying the Arabs to fight for us; though my father said the Arabs fought for whichever side would pay the most! But he also had to allow civilians to travel which seemed to cause him trouble. He said he was offered bribes for places on the train and could have made a nice sum for himself, but he was always a very honest man – also I expect he was too afraid of the consequences if he were found out! One Armenian merchant invited him to his home one evening and entertained him lavishly and at the end of the evening offered his daughter as a companion. My father said he thanked him but explained that he was a married man.
My mother, meantime, was living with my father’s sister in Wakefield Street, East Ham and that is where I was born. When I was 8 months old I became very ill with congestion of the lungs. The doctor visited on 10th November and told my aunt he did not expect me to survive. The war was over and the armistice declared on November 11th. My mother had been awake most of the night looking after me and had forgotten about the armistice. At 11am maroons sounded to celebrate. My mother, thinking they were sounding for an air raid, was so startled she dropped me and that apparently saved my life as it broke the congestion. So apparently, according to family history, my life was saved by the ending of the Great War! My father was still in Egypt and was offered a permanent commission in the army which, as he had no job to return to, he wanted to take, but when he wrote to ask my mother what she felt she said no, she wanted him home. I have always felt that was a shame as I think he would have enjoyed life in the army. He did not return to England until 1920 by which time I was almost 18 months old. I was so frightened when this strange man picked me up that I wet all down his best dress uniform which was not a very good start! Also I was not yet walking which he thought was terrible, so he went out and bought a little wooden horse for me to push and took me for a walk. However he came home defeated as I refused to have anything to do with this and he had to carry me and the horse! However I was the least of his troubles. Most of the soldiers had returned long before and so jobs were few and far between. He went to all the banks but they already had a full staff. To earn some money whilst looking for work he addressed envelopes for a company (work which his father-in-law found for him). But it was poorly paid and he had to work all evening and into the early hours of the morning because during the day he was looking for work. He was even driven to look for work in the docks but stood no chance as he had to have a union card to be allowed to work there and they seemed impossible to get. In despair he went back to all the banks and said “Please give me work for a month without pay just to show you what I can do.” At last the Midland Bank agreed and at the end of the month took him on to the permanent staff where he remained until he retired at age 60.
Once he was established at work he decided to buy a house and so when I was about two years to three years old we moved into 84 Mortimer Road, East Ham. This was the last house in a long row of terraced houses built, I should think, in the early 1900’s. It had two living rooms and a long narrow kitchen one storey high. Upstairs were two bedrooms. The bath was in the kitchen with a wooden cover. The toilet was outside but was under cover because the back and side of the kitchen was enclosed by a glass conservatory. The only source of hot water was to fill the large brick copper in the kitchen. It was hard work for my father having to light a fire under the copper and then ladle the water into the tin bath, so we only had a bath on Friday nights; and then it was only filled once. I went in first, then my mother and last poor father. There was also a black range for cooking which was never used – we had a gas stove. Lighting was gas, fires were coal.
		In 1924 I started school at Brampton Road elementary school which took children from 5 to 14 years. I did not go to school till I was 6 because my mother would not let me go to the school I was supposed to attend as it involved crossing a main road (her argument when told by officials at the town hall that was there I must go) . She taught me to read – from the newspaper and comics, there being no books in our house! In those days there was very little traffic on the side roads and all the children walked to school by themselves though it was quite a long walk for small children. Parents did not seem to worry then about young children being out alone although we were usually in a group and we used to go to the park to play. Once a week we used to have a halfpenny or a penny to spend at the sweetshop and the shopkeeper used to bring out a tray on which rested sweets costing a ½d or 1p each. We took ages to decide between jelly dummies or liquorice pipes or sweet cigarettes! When one day I said I wished I had more my mother said she only ever had one farthing (1/4d) to spend on sweets. At school we did not have separate desks – they were for two sitting side by side. I had to share with a boy who kept wetting his trousers and smelt horrible. There was also a girl who came from a big poor family and often she had no knickers to wear. The teacher used to appeal to children to ask their mothers if they could spare clothes and shoes for these children; and one of my aunts, who was a teacher, used to take bread and cocoa to school to feed her class before lessons.
I quickly made friends with a girl who lived in the next road to ours and we remained friends, even though she and her husband had emigrated to Australia, until she died a few years ago. They and several of their children and grandchildren visited us although we never got to Australia. In the last year of her life she had to enter a nursing home in Adelaide, Australia, and to her amazement found a fellow resident there who had been a pupil at Brampton Road Infants School, East Ham.
Education was limited to the “3 Rs” – reading, writing and arithmetic, but they were well taught by our single women teachers – male teachers only came on the scene in the elementary (11-14) boys’ school. At 11 years some of us – chosen by our form teacher – took “the scholarship”. Every Sunday we visited my father’s parents, about a mile and a half away. Sometimes if we went to tea there would be some of my father’s brothers and sisters there with their children and after tea there would be singing round the piano and my mother, who had a good voice (not, sadly, inherited by me) would be asked to sing solo. Christmas was the best time, when all the family got together at grandma and grandpa’s. There was always a Christmas tree on which was a present for every grandchild (how my grandmother managed this on the very small pension they had I can’t imagine). There was a new fairy at the top every year because at the end of present giving there would be a draw to win the fairy. I longed to win it but never did. I loved my grandma – she was such fun and I think was quite clever even though she had had very little education. She always seemed to try and run her home and bring up her children to standards that she thought would have been approved of by the family she was maid to. Living not far away was the retired butler from this Hampshire house. She seemed still in awe of this man and used to take me with her to visit him and his wife. I was told I must behave well and we used to be served tea on lovely china with a silver tea set (which grandma said was a retirement present from his employer). He looked just like the butlers shown on films – silver hair and dressed in striped trousers and black coat.

Chapters:

1: Beginnings, 2: Doreen, 3: Moving On, 4: War, 5: Peace, 6: A Long Encounter, 7: Family