The fifties - we moved house1

We moved house! 

This was the biggest event in my life so far, bigger than starting school or even being born, because I was acutely aware of it and even had some influence over it, rather than it being done to me.  And it changed my life.

It was announced, probably over Sunday lunch.  We’re all going to live together in a great big new house!  Let’s go out and find it!  That’ll be fun!

Our parents had, I believe, come into some kind of inheritance.  My father had been doing well at work and had a significant promotion. His career had been built on scientific capability, but then, as now, the only way to reward someone was to promote them, and the only way to do that was to convert them from achievers into managers.  I don’t know how good a manager he became, but he was certainly happy to take the money.

 66 Watcombe was owned outright by my grandparents.  And the tenant in the Stamford Road house (which had been their first home that they’d somehow managed to retain and let) had become intolerable and had to be evicted, which meant that could be sold too.  So capital was available.

And there were practical reasons too, of course.  We kids would soon each need our own room. (That didn’t quite work out as planned, but that’s for later.)  Grandpa had had his stroke, whilst doing some decorating – it rendered him nearly blind, which we were told was due to him getting a chip of wood or something in his eye – and Granny wouldn’t be able to look after him on her own.  

The fifties, part 2: the bike,part 2

Customisation rapidly followed, of course.  The chain guard was the first to go.  I can’t remember the other tweaks I snuck in behind my parents’ backs.  I do remember the parentally approved water bottles, and I can still taste an aluminium-tinged warm sip through a paper straw.  We discussed the feasibility of taking a hacksaw to those clunky lugs to make them look like cutaways; even, I think, drawing fantasy designs, but it was never going to be the racing bike I craved.  But I can remember, quite vividly, the short and long expeditions it carried me on.  That was my first taste of real freedom, granted me, intentionally or not, I’ll never know, by my parents. 

I’d made a few friends at school by then, some of whom were also into bikes.  I think my most avid co-biker was called Mike Bone, but I’m sure there were others.  The furthest I can remember riding is Badbury Rings, which is about thirty miles from Southbourne.  We must have ridden along Castle Lane, then up past Wimborne Minster to reach this Iron Age hill fort, wandered around and marvelled at it, then ridden back home.  We also took our bikes across the Sandbanks ferry and hauled ourselves across as far as Kimmeridge and Worth Matravers, noticing the landscape and the coast.  These trips were to be a lasting component of my education.