If one were to look down from a hot air balloon onto Park Lane East one would see 3 identical “tenfoots” , a narrow pathway down each one with to either side 5 prefabs, each with a front as well as a back garden. Across and opposite at right angles to the 3 “tenfoots” sat a further row of another 6 prefabs. Ours, in the middle tenfoot was 102, Park Lane East, Pickering Road, Hull, East Yorkshire, particularly lovely for me as a child because it gave access, if only my parents would lift me over the wire netting, onto Black Sands! This was, I now believe, a disused sand and gravel pit . its undulations and puddles were a perfect backdrop for playing Cowboys and Indians. Linda’s Mother had a different idea, She told us it was where the Bogey Man lived who would get us if we were naughty!
Having a garden after years of having an inner city yard, delighted my father and he filled it with flowers, , , ,lupins, carnations, sweet peas, roses, montbretia, wallflowers, snapdragons. He told me , and I believed him that ours was the poshest tenfoot of all because we had dignitaries: a Dean, a Lord and a King. We did indeed have those surnames in our midst!
My earliest memories of our prefab are at the Coronation in 1953 when our lovely little home was decorated in red white and blue streamers, I especially recall the little window between the kitchen and living room having streamers stretched and twisted from its corners. The kitchen was painted in salmon pink, ( an Uncle with a paint factory in Hull supplied this wonderful colour. The kitchen like the other rooms was always neat as a pin with cooker, fridge, copper, pantry and storage cupboards built into it. There was a little kitchen table with Ercol chairs. The sitting room had a Utility dining table and chairs, brown linoleum and around the fireplace a boxy leather two seater settee and chair all with brown velvet cushions. A large wooden wireless sat on a table and a standard ;amp with a shade with tassels stood in one corner. There was also under one window the Singer sewing machine on which my Mother made us beautiful dresses, all the curtains and cushion covers and my aunties wedding gown. When she wasn’t sewing she was knitting or mending.We had painted walls, not wallpaper, and the addition of a paper frieze with paint of one colour beneath it and of a different shade above it and continued onto the ceiling. Our sweeties, 3 little 4oz bags each week after the end of rationing, sat in a dish like a glass lettuce leaf on a high shelf in the living room storage cupoard above the also integral drawers. Our green budgie Joey lived in his cage just in the cupboard corner, Our living room could be made warm but not so our bedrooms in winter, when icy fern patterns would cover the windows and I would dress under the layers of covers.My bedroom was furnished with Uncle Albert’s bedroom furniture, when Uncle Albert was no more. and there was just one picture. . . .an illustration from a book of a baby in a cradle. I called it Baby Bunting. it was just u inside the bedroom and I can picture my poor Father standing under it, trying to get to his armchair and saying “Come on, luv!” as I said my prayers. I had discovered that I could delay the light going out by extending my prayers . . .an endless litany of God blesses in which I went through all the family and the neighbours, children at school on and on. . . .
Our two bedrooms had yet more storage, my toys being kept, for no reason I can think of, in my parents’ room. A wonderful thing was when it rained. . . .the drumming on the corrugated roof could be pretty spectacular especially in a storm. Once, in a particularly heavy rain storm there was an enormous clap of thunder. (some said , a thunderbolt landing on Black Sands) and a pan of water, boiling eggs for tea, to my delight, jumped on the stove top, so shaken was our little house!
Our shed was an Anderson shelter and this was where my father’s bike, his tools and the lawn mower were kept together with the supply of coal and a dolly tub amd where my Mother’s screams one day alerted probably the entire neighbourhood to the presence of a weasel Once I got my bike at age 11, it was kept in the hallway, there being no room for a second bike in the shed. Our little house and garden were just so neat and tidy. In memory as well as the rain’s drumming,I hear the “wireless” and Workers Playtime or Henry Hall’s “Friday Night is Music Night” or Billy Cotton’s Band Show and Billy’s cry to us of !Wakey, wakey!”, Thjere was The Archers, Workers Playtime or Children’s Favourites with Uncle Mac and Wilfred Pickles telling his wife Mabel to put (money?) on the table.Because of the layout and building materials of a prefab, music could be heard through every room as indeed conversations could be too. secrets between my parents could be heard if I sneakily opened the airing cupboard doors, giving access to sound via the adjacent fireplace back to the whispered words from chairs by the fire. Prefabs echoed and reverbrated sound. Worst of all was my poor grandmother’s chiming clock, responsible for much sleeplessness when it came with her and it chimed every quarter of an hour during her prolonged stay after dear grandad died, just after being awarded this timepiece at his retirement from the Railway, aged just 65.
My overwhelming memories of prefab life in addition to those of a cosy home and pretty garden, are those of neighbourliness. I was fortunate to grow up amongst quite the loveliest people you could wish to meet and to this day still have fellow prefab friends. We played safely up and down the tenfoot under the benevolent eyes of the grown ups .. . . .woe betide us if we were naughty! One neighbour let us pick her daisies for our chains, another knitted us mittens., yet others gave us twists of paper in which we dipped eager fingers for sugar and cocoa to lick. or twists of paper containg winkles, for which we used a pin! We picked flowers by the opendrain (Hull at that time had many) which we were to beware because of rats! We would beg our mothers for washing line to use in a big skipping game with all the children taking part and chanting the rhymes. , Double balls thudded on the prefab walls, Cricket and games like “What Time is it Mr Wolf, cart wheels and leap frog happened on the green , The Farmer wants a Wife and Poor Mary Sat a Weeping were played with great enthusiasm. We all rode bikes or scooters and raced on roller skates or practised hoola hoops. There was marble season and conker season and the addition to our play of huge concrete tubes, , , immediately commandered as dens but in reality the arrival, I think, of new deep drainage In the school holidays we children spilled into our tenfoots after breakfast to go on the field or into each other’s gardens or beg to be lifted over the netting onto Black Sands, coming back when we were hungry. It was a time of simplicity and innocence and community and a steady stream of visitors: the rent man, the insurance man, the Co-op boy on a bicycle, the Laws Lemonade Man. the man in the plain green van who sold the Dazlo toilet bleach, the Coal man, the fruit and veg man, the strange bicycle of the knife grinder, the rag and bone man and gypsies selling pegs. Not far from us clopped Les’s horse pulling Les’s fruit and veg cart and leaving rich manure for my cousins to scoop up for Uncle Norman’s roses! On Sundays all we playmates went to Sunday School, the biggest girls leading our procession. I remember vividly starting Sunday School withe others. I was now 4 and wore a blue dress and clutched my penny to put in the money bag when we walked round the room in a big circle singing “Pennies dropping, Hear them, one by one!” I thought it grand and came home and celerated my new freedom and 4 year old maturity by grabbing a pencil and some tallies(labels from fish boxes given to me by an uncle to be my drawing paper!)and walked up and down our tenfoot copying house numbers! I felt so grown and writing numbers seemed a necessary thing to do now!
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