I was too young to remember them but they were just some of the people who rented rooms in my parent’s house on Lausanne Road.
Now this was the period just after the last world war and housing was still in short supply, and most people lived in rented accommodation. It was the age of the private landlord and “living in rooms” was commonplace. We were I think unique in owning our own house and most of my friends lived in grand old Victorian houses which long ago had been sub divided in to flats. One family lived in the basement of a row of terraced houses near the old fire station, and another in one of those prefabs which had been put up to meet post war housing needs and which over 60 years later are still going strong.
Ours was a tall terraced house built sometime in the last quarter of the 19th century. It had nine rooms spread out over three floors, with cellars and a long garden. The land must have once been an orchard because our garden and the surrounding ones were full of fruit trees. In our case we had collard the corner on pear trees, of which there were at least five, along with a worn out apple tree and a tired vine which clung to the back of the house but to my knowledge never produced any grapes.
I don’t know how many lodgers we had at any one time, but until the arrival of my twin sisters in 1955, there was just mum dad and me. So after accounting for the three downstairs rooms and the bath room, this still left enough for a collection of paying customers.
True to the period each upstairs room had a coin operated gas fire and father had fitted radio outlets around the house. I remember them well. By turning the switch you could tune into the Home Service or the Light Programme. My early years were radio years and listening to the wireless remains one of the joys of my life.
But back dear reader to Millie the Mole and Boy Boy Jones. Now smash and grab raids were at the cutting age of big time crime. The gang would choose a suitable jewellers and using a brick and pick axe handle smash the window, grab the loot and escape in the waiting car. Boy Boy Jones was the driver. A career which came to an abrupt end when he drove off during a raid, leaving the gang to struggle along a crowded Peckham High Street, with assorted diamond rings, a necklace and several watches. Needless to say their progress was somewhat hampered by the loot and the Saturday shoppers and they were caught.
Boy Boy Jones remained free which was not necessarily a good thing for Millie, whose relationship with him was tempestuous at the best of times and led on one occasion to Boy Boy arousing the street as he dangled her out of one of the upstairs windows by her wrists.
Then there was Flo and Les who ran an antique shop which wasn’t making enough so they had to work three days in the timber yards. I say an antique shop but I suspect it was really a second had shop with pretentions. This was Peckham in the early 1950s and however genteel Lausanne Road had once been I don’t recall there being much call for posh stuff when I was growing up.
Many of the houses still had a faded glow about them but six years of war; bombing and neglect had rather taken the shine off the area. A trend best reflected by some of the other lodgers we had staying with us.
In particular I remember a young outgoing chap who worked delivering sweets but turned out to be a bigamist which was still a serious offence if you were caught. This was after all a time when divorce was not an easy thing to do, especially amongst the working class. Nor was just living with someone easily tolerated and so in his case he just moved across London and married again. Mother trusted him enough to allow me to accompany him to the swimming baths and on one occasion to drive us to see my grandparents in Derby.
The last of our lodgers were a couple who met in Lausanne Road. She was single and German and he was Polish. Their romance began with midnight trysts and ended with the two getting married. To me they were something different. Occasionally I would be invited to share a cup of real coffee and some Polish biscuits which arrived from the “homeland”.
Like so many of the stories I have posted their experiences reflect the awful events of the century they lived in. Theirs were “little lives lived out in a big century.” Both had been victims of the displacement of millions of ordinary people who had been in the wrong place when the war broke out and found themselves part of that tide of homeless refugees in 1945.
I don’t know their stories and like many of their generation they didn’t talk about the past. But he was Polish and may have spent time as a Soviet prisoner, which begs the question had he been on the wrong side in the conflict, or just a causality of the Cold War?
Either way there is a lasting testimony to their stay in the house, because the garden shed he built in the late 1950s is still there. I had almost completely forgotten about it. And then on an impulse while on a visit to London for a family wedding we visited the old house.
It is almost 50 years since we left but there is much about the place that I remember. I am grateful to Rachel and David the new owners who did not mind that we had invaded their Sunday and were happy to show us around.
The garden seemed smaller and more alive with plants than I remember it. The trees had gone but the shed remained.
I rather liked the fact that something from all those people who had passed through had survived.
Picture; Lausanne Road today, & the long back garden with the shed, Lausanne Road circa 1957 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
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