The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 22 ............. leaving Lausanne Road but never quite leaving Peckham

The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

I can’t say I was sad to leave the house in Lausanne Road.

True I was happy enough there but it was a tall rambling old pile or so it seemed to a nine year old especially when your bed room was at the top of the house up three flights of steep stairs.

From up there the noise of the rest of the family did not travel.

But it did have one big asset and that was the train set which Dad had lovingly built over a series of years.

Nor was I alone in dad’s handiwork.  This was the 1950s and while national prosperity was finally delivering to a generation which had grown up with the Depression and a world war Dad still made many of our toys.

I got wooden castles and an annual addition to that train set and my four sisters got a variety of things from a gigantic dolls house to toy cots for their bigger dolls.

Each cot was on rockers and each painted in a bright colour.

I won’t be alone in having such memories but mine remain a cherished part of my childhood.

But we grow up and around the time the train set was gathering dust and  I was looking to more grown up pastimes we moved.

And it was the sort of move that wrenched us completely out of Peckham.

Mum had decided for a whole series of reason that we would up sticks to Eltham, and that we did in the spring of 1964.

Not that this was a clean break, dad still worked for Glentons and was based at the garage off Brabourn Grove and I continued at Samuel Pepys which meant that both of us made that journey back to Peckham every day.

In my case it also meant weekends visited friends wandering the high street and feeling a fish out of water.

It isn’t easy moving somewhere new especially when you still have one foot in both places.

I’d take the train from Well Hall to New Cross slowly making my way up to Queens Road and on to Rye Lane.

And then with O levels taken  in the summer of 1966 it was really time to make that final break.  After discussing it with the teacher’s at Samuel Pepys, mother and I sat on the top park on Telegraph Hill and weighed up the options for the next two years.

Looking out across London and down on to Peckham and all I had known for pretty much 16 years, it was almost on a turn of a sixpence that I decided to leave the school and with that I left Peckham.

I started at Crown Woods in the September, had a ball of a time and left for Manchester in ’69.

And now a full 49 years after that afternoon in the park I am drawn back.

Memories and stories which have lain half forgotten and discarded are once more bubbling to the surface and with them the faces of Wishy Washy who cleaned the coaches at the garage and Dribble whose real name was Paul Driver but who acquired his nickname after falling into the swimming pool fully dressed and of the places I knew.

Pictures Lausanne Road, in the 1950s and 60s from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road