Forecasts

Thursday morning’s Weather Advisory! warned of “Rain and winds gusting up to 7 mph” and I wondered when such a forecast became a matter of such concern.

Later, it became “Sleet with wind speed increasing to 13 mph.”

It materialised as drizzle and an eventual thin layer of snow, the air totally still.

.

Wednesday’s predicted gloom turned into another very fine afternoon.

So much for forecasts!

Bit by bit, though, our snowcap is retreating and I may soon find myself attempting to write inspiring words about the properties of mud.

.

Mud is something I was once a great fan of.

Mother did all our laundry by hand but I suspect she didn’t mind me getting dirty as long as it kept me quiet. She was less pleased, I think, when my brother got into the coal hole

Peter and I were regularly admonished to be silent if father was home and the scowls he threw us convinced us to comply. It was no secret he had not wanted children.

Luckily, we lived in a two-level flat that had an empty spare room where we were allowed to play. The floorboards were bare and it was unheated, so it was chilly but I don’t remember being bothered by that. In the depth of winter, I played in the kitchen, which was also where, at lunch time, the radio was tuned for me to Listen with Mother. Later in the day, my brother had Journey into Space.

Peter who was older was often out with his school friends, or boy scouts. Boys in those days spent a great deal of time playing in bomb sites which got my mother quite agitated. I was never tempted to explore those ruins myself, but I was very aware of them. Bits of wallpapering caught my attention and I pictured the people who had chosen it, which made me wonder about the families that had been bombed out.

The war had been over for three years when I was born and no-one spoke much about it except in terms of before or during. My mother still had her old ration books which I was given to play with. When I was a bit older, I learned from my father’s books of Giles war cartoons.

Perhaps that was where I found out that people had sheltered from the bombs in Underground railroad stations. I never went down one without thinking about what that must have been like. Noisy, dirty, cold and smelly.

London was being rebuilt and people were doing their best to forget about the war, but I think years of that sort of devastation take a long time to dissipate. I was spared knowing it, but I feel that I grew up in its echo.

Perhaps I always had too vivid an imagination.

.

The flat we had was just above ground level, with stairs connecting to the basement. When I was a child, coal could be delivered through a chute in the pavement to the hole which we accessed from the basement passageway. As I recall, we only used gas, but there was plenty of coal leftover from earlier times for my brother to get into trouble with.

From modern plans, I see that the coal hole is now a vault.

The basement had an outside door, of course, but I’m not sure how it was that a burglar once broke in. My father had gone to work and my brother was at school, so Mum and I were there alone. We were in the kitchen when we heard a sound at the end of the passage, near the stairs and I believe my mothered called out, thinking my father had returned, but when there was no answer, she didn’t go to check and I sensed she was apprehensive.

Some time after, she went upstairs and discovered some money and a few bits of jewelry had been stolen, but I don’t remember that the police came. It was another of those things I never asked about years later. Perhaps it was what caused me to worry that someone would break in and steal me!

.

The outside of those flats looks exactly as it did all those years ago, but for fun I found a website that shows images of one of the interiors which could scarcely be more different.

The tiny bit of space we had at the back, where I made mud pies, is now a nice little patio with plants growing on trellises.

Sometimes I try to picture all the people who have lived in that flat since we left in 1956.

How many stories could be told?

.