9. Moving to Empire Road

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

A WIDOW WOMAN Part 9

One thing that marked the post-war years as being special was the rate at which councils went about creating social housing. Not only the gaps left in streets by enemy bombing but the vast amount of sub-standard housing that was totally unsuitable for the bright new age that dawned somewhere ahead.

There was going to be a proper health service available to all, and proper homes, and hopes and dreams would be fulfilled. A new age had dawned, a better age, but it was a slow dawning and before it came there would be a time of hardship. Rationing would persist for years.

Jane couldn’t wait for changes, though she knew she’d have to, because the old terraced house she’d called home since her marriage to George was totally inadequate. She needed proper bedrooms for two children, to start with: as they grew older they couldn’t continue sharing a single bed in a tiny room, and she couldn’t afford new bunk beds, not straight out without a man’s wage coming in.

It was obvious that things were happening on what had been called the bottoms, a scrawny area of infertile land behind the church.. Roger found it first, he and a couple of friends following lorries and a tractor to what had been a barren land behind the vicar’s church and was now a quagmire. They liked quagmires, and even more they liked watching the men at work as houses were almost thrown up over night, or so it seemed. But there was a sense of urgency about the whole affair, and they hadn’t seen houses like these. Constructed largely of steel and with steel chimneys protruding through steel roofs, these houses had about them a flavour of tomorrow.

Then, in some sort of record time, keys were made available to Jane. Number 9, she was told, of Empire Road.

She went to inspect her new home while the children were at school. She guessed, quite rightly, that the area would still be a building site, and she wasn’t mistaken there. But at least number nine and the houses adjacent to it were finished and looked splendid. Their steel walls and window frames were painted in pastel shades and the whole effect, if you ignored the unmade roads and unfinished pavement, was one of cleanliness and modernity.

“I knew I’d find you here,” came a voice that she recognised. It was the Reverend Jonah Pyke and he had a dribble of brown stuff, possibly gravy, down his black shirt.

“Really, Jonah, you should take more care,” she chided him, and tried to rub the stain off with a handkerchief moistened with spittle, and contrived in making it worse if anything.

“I wanted to catch you, Jane,” he said, “to see what your new home would look like and maybe attract a few recruits for my Sunday services. By good fortune the church is hardly half a mile away!”

She opened the front door with the key she’d collected from the council office, and they both stepped in.

There was a bareness about the place, and a hollow sound that echoed even when they spoke in quiet voices.

“This is nice,” whispered Jonah as they entered what was obviously the living room with its fireplace and spaciousness that compared favourably with the squat house that she was leaving. “You’ll be comfortable in here,” he added, “and your furniture will fit in beautifully.”

“It’ll look tatty compared to nice new walls,” moaned Jane, but she knew that it would have to do.

Upstairs was enough to make her heart sing. There was a bathroom, with a bath fitted, and shiny silver taps, and a sink and toilet. Then there were three bedrooms, one fairly small, little more than a box room but easily big enough for a single bed and some drawers. But the other two were really quite large, particularly what she knew would be the master bedroom, where she would sleep.

“You’ll be really well off in here,” murmured Jonah.

She smiled at him. “I know I will,” she said, “and so will the kids.”

It was only a week before she was able to move in. The council actually helped by providing a lorry to transport her goods, at a modest charge that Jonah insisted in paying, and two burly men helped her move the entirety of her life from a near derelict Victorian terraced house to a modern and shining semi-detached property with front and rear gardens the like of which she might only have dreamed of having before she moved.

Although it was a school day she kept the two children off school, needing to be sure in her mind that they knew exactly where their new home was. She might have explored it, but they hadn’t been with her.

“Where are you going, Roger?” asked Jane as the small boy started to run up and down the almost umade road.

“He’s wet himself,” Betty told her, grinning, “it’s what boys do when they get excited. I’m glad I’m not a boy aren’t you, mum?”

Roger ran up and down the road that needed a top surface before it could be called a proper road. He was clearly trying to break some kind of personal speed limit.

“What s it?” asked Jane when he flew back towards her.

“The wind,” he replied cheekily, “I’m racing against the wind…”

“So you’ve wet your shorts, have you?” asked Jane, seeing the moist patch at the front of his grey shorts.

“I was hoping the wind made by me running would dry them,” he told her, a trifle crestfallen.

“Well it won’t,” she assured him, “you’d have to run as fast as you could for half a day or more before they dried, and then they’d smell of dried wee. Come on, let’s go in and you can take them off. I’ve packed your spare pair and you can put them on.”

Exploring their new home came next, choosing bedrooms being a priority for the two children. Betty, being the older, had first choice and there was, to Jane’s eye, an inevitability about the way Roger was consigned to the smaller box room. But he didn’t seem to mind: it was almost as if the very intimacy of his new space was enough for him. And, of course, he had yet to get an actual bed to fit into it.

“Jonah says he’s got a spare bed in storage, donated by a kindly old lady, free to anyone who needs it,” Jane told him, “and he’s kindly said you can have it. It isn’t new, but it’ll most certainly do until you do get a new one.”

“Do I get a new one too, mum?” asked Betty, whose existing bed was hardly old.

“Maybe in time,” came the reply, “but everything costs money, you know.”

The rest of that day was spent sorting things out and then, as evening drew on, Jane lit a fire in the front room fireplace. It would warm their new home after it had stood empty in all weathers (it being autumn, and a cold one at that), and the open fire had the added bonus of heating water in a back boiler, which filled a large copper tank in the bathroom cupboard, so that they could have hot baths if they needed to.

They did. Moving house can be a dusty affair, especially into a new house when the road outside still needs finishing. But all that would come, to Roger’s excitement, with the arrival of a steam roller the very next day.