There were not very many cars parked and we could play out quite happily in the road
Anne in the garden
My name is Anne Leathem. I was born in Leybourne Avenue, Forest Hall in 1960. It was quite unusual because I was born into a house which my mum’s mum’s father bought when it was built new at the start of the nineteen-hundreds. And when my sister and I were growing up in that house my parents and my mum’s parents and also her mum’s mum all lived in the house together, so there were four generations of us.
The house is at the end of Leybourne Avenue which is in between Great Lime Road and Killingworth village and at the time the house, on two sides, was surrounded by market gardens, which we called Barber’s gardens. I think they were the people that owned them. These gardens grew flowers. I can remember people coming with machinery to turn the ground over and then women coming to pick the flowers as well. The land was divided into beds by wooden fencing. But there was nothing behind my dad’s house on the east side until probably Killingworth Bank.
My great-grandmother had run a shop at number thirty-nine Great Lime Road. She’d retired from running the shop by the time I was born in 1960 and was living in the same house as my parents and my grandparents. My mum’s mum was an invalid. She had severe arthritis and
Anne’s mum at the front gate
had been bed-ridden certainly from the nineteen-thirties. My mum left school at fourteen, which was the youngest age that you could leave school at that point and then took over looking after the house for her father and her grandmother and then subsequently my sister and myself.
We didn’t have a car or anything at that point and Leybourne Avenue was a very quiet road off West Lane. There were not very many cars parked on it and we could play out quite happily in the road, which we did with our friends. I suppose our horizons were quite narrow because we didn’t tend to go into Newcastle or anything, so the limits of my experience really were as far as West Moor to the west, down to Forest Hall to the south, across as far as Killingworth Bank to the east and then up to Killingworth Village with occasional forays a bit further up to the north. But I knew all of the paths and the roads and so on, but not necessarily the names and how to get from one place to another.
I went to school at West Moor primary school which was opposite where Lidl is now on the other side of Great Lime Road. The school burnt down at some point and has been rebuilt on the road up towards the lakes, but when I was young there was no Lidl, there were no lakes. I think there were ponds in those fields and there was no Killingworth New Town or shops or anything up there. To go to school, we always walked. We either walked across the field from where the Percy Hedley School is now on West Lane or along Great Lime Road and going along Great Lime Road we would pass the Co-op, which was one of the main shops in the area at that time. I can remember it having different departments. There was definitely a draper’s department – I think as you went in the door – and there was a butcher’s towards the back and I believe there was an abattoir behind the building and so the meat was freshly produced I suppose.
The other shops in Forest Hall I can remember – there was a small bakery which is still in existence and down the road at the side of that there was a wool shop owned by somebody called Mrs Brown and that had a terrifying gas fire in it. I think some of the interior of the fire had burnt away and flames used to come out. It was quite alarming as a small child; it was kind of on eye-level. The main road in Forest Hall, shops were only on one side of it at that point and there weren’t the Estate Agents and Takeaways that are there now. The first shop was a Cobblers, people had their shoes repaired rather bought new ones. And above the Cobblers was the Dentist which at that point was Pearson’s, it later became Reed’s. And I remember as a small child sitting in the waiting room at the Dentist’s being absolutely terrified, because the noise of the drill from the surgery mixed with the equipment down in the Cobbler’s shop and it was really loud and quite scary. Next door to the Cobbler’s there was Bell’s the Chemist. And then I believe there was a drapery shop called Percival’s, my mum used to go there sometimes. She did a lot of knitting and would buy wool from there or from Mrs Brown’s. All of our school cardigans, all of our clothes were hand made basically, mostly knitted jumpers and things. Even at high school I had hand knitted cardigans, but mum also used to make our skirts and so on. There was a Barclays bank which has just fairly recently closed down and I seem to remember it being in the same location for quite a long time just on one side of the first road that goes down towards the library in Forest Hall. I remember the Post Office being in various locations, that seem to move around quite a bit. There’s been a Boots the Chemist all the time I can remember and there was a Butcher’s shop which isn’t there now. The end shop which is now some sort of a convenience store was a Law’s stores when I remembered going shopping there and that would have been, apart from the Co-op, one of the places that mum would have gone shopping.
Anne (left) and sister in the garden
My mum did all of her shopping on a bicycle. She never learned to drive a car, so the shopping would have been done on a daily basis. I mentioned the library, that was in the same position as it still is in Forest Hall, tucked away behind the shops and I can remember going in there with my mum, she used to read a lot. But going in as a young girl and asking for library tickets for myself so that I could take books out too and I read my way through quite a lot from there. I remember reading the Swallows and Amazons books and Heidi and all sorts of things really. My sister never read very much, I think Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe were about her limit, but I was quite a sickly child and had quite a lot of time off school, so the library and books were very important to me. And I still use the library now.
Later on, in Forest Hall, I can remember shops developing on the other side of the road and there was definitely either a Redifusion or Radio Rentals television shop where you would go in and pay for your rented television because nobody, well nobody that I knew, had a television of their own at that point. They were much too prone to blowing up or stopping working, so you rented them and paid a bit of money every week and if it went wrong somebody came out and fixed it or you got a new one. There was a Bookless’ fruit and veg shop at one point over there and I remember a café called The Coffee Pot, which was probably the first of the Takeaway places in Forest Hall. I don’t remember Greggs being there all the time, but I do remember getting cream cakes, so perhaps it was. Maybe it moved around a bit.
Apart from the static shops there were quite a lot of mobile shops that used to come around. Remembering that a lot of people didn’t have cars, that’s why they existed. There was definitely a Fish Shop van that came to Leybourne Avenue. Coal was delivered and we had a coalhouse at the end of the garden where the coal was delivered into then brought into the house by bucket. At that point we only had coal fires in two rooms downstairs. There was no central heating or anything upstairs. Oil and paraffin was delivered earlier on and there was definitely a fruit and veg horse and cart, that came around probably every week. That was run by somebody called Bobby King, who lived at the top of Killingworth Bank and that was certainly still going round until 1985. I know that because there was a photo taken on the day my sister got married of the horse and cart outside our house. There was also an egg man who came on a Sunday, usually when we were having lunch and he brought eggs in a bucket. Where he came from I have got no idea, very mysterious, but it was quite a useful delivery service. Prudential came around every week or fortnight, I don’t know how often, for life assurance I think. There was a pop man, although we never got fizzy pop, so we didn’t get anything delivered off that, although my grandmother who lived in Shiremoor did. And milk was delivered glass bottles every day by the Co-op and you got tokens from the Co-op to get the milk.
Going back to the Co-op, I picked the bread up on my way home from school and it always used to get home with no crusts because I had eaten them on the way. Willow Dene was the other shop in the area. That was on the same side of Great Lime Road as the Co-op, but in the other direction. It was a fruit and veg shop and they also had some poultry at the end. That was in existence for quite a while, but there are houses there now. It was first of all run by somebody called Garbutt that I remember and then Monaghans took over later on. There was a Jet garage and petrol station at the corner of West Lane and Great Lime Road. That was owned by Coopers and the mechanic at the garage was called Alan Twist. They did servicing and so on as well as providing petrol. There was a tiny shop there as well, so if we did run out of milk we could go there. The Co-op was where Sambuca’s is now, on Great Lime Road and after it ceased trading as a Co-op it became a Job Centre for a while before it took on its new role as a restaurant.
We walked to West Moor School every day. Whatever the weather we did that. We very very rarely got money for a bus and it’s not that far a walk, probably half a mile, three quarters of a mile, but when you’re little it’s quite a long way. My mum used to take us when I was very small. My sister is just 18 months younger than me so she would be in the pram and I would be toddling along. I can remember Mrs Gascoigne being one of the teachers when I was there. She lived in West Moor. She was quite scary actually, not above throwing a piece of chalk or a board rubber at anybody who misbehaved in class. You certainly learned spellings in her class. The blackboards were on wheels, not the whiteboards that they use now. It was a blackboard and it could be rolled around the classroom and it had to be wiped down evert day with the board rubber.
We used to get small bottles of milk at school at break time and Mrs Gascoigne would keep any of those that were left over in her cupboard and they would go through various stages of curdling and so on. I never knew what those were for until my mum said it was because she used them for making scones. It must have been quite disgusting taking the tops off though I would have thought. The school was a very old school. My grandmother would have gone there and certainly her brothers did because their names were on the Honours Board, which was in the hall of the school. One of my mum’s mum’s brothers was killed in the war. He was in the RAF and his plane, which was a bomber I believe, came down over the North Sea. The other brother got a scholarship into the army and died during basic training. I think he had a heart condition that nobody knew about, but their names were on the Honours Board in the school hall. We went to assembly there, we did PE in there and we also had lunch in there, so it was multi-functional. There was some PE apparatus which used to come out for our lessons in there, with ropes and climbing things and a beam. I think it was all very large when you were a small child.
The playground in the school was just concrete, there was no grassed area really at all. We used to walk to a field underneath the railway line for sports day. We used to play skipping and people had two balls which you threw against the wall, two-baller we called it. And then there were various singing games. I can remember “The Farmer Wants a Wife”, “Ring a Rosies”, “Oranges and Lemons”, “The Big Ship Sails Down the Alley Alley O” and “In and Out of the Dusty Bluebells”. We used to play those in the playground and also at birthday parties and things like that when we were very young. We’d play games like that.
There was a coal or a coke heap, I’m not sure which it was. It was around the side of the school the boys tended to play in and that was presumably for the boilers. School lunches I really didn’t like. There was always, more or less, meat involved and I can remember absolutely refusing to eat liver and steak and kidney. I’m a vegetarian now and I am sure those lunches had something to do with it. The puddings were things like sponge puddings with custard and awful tapioca and rice pudding and things like semolina, which I couldn’t eat. So that’s probably why I was eating the bread on the way home from school.
Anne’s Mum and Dad
Locally we had friends who lived in our street much the same age as my sister and myself. We used to roller skate and have bikes and dolls and prams, the usual things. But the big thing that we had that nobody else had was a Wendy House in the garden, which my dad made. He was a joiner by trade and he made a scaled down version of a house in our garden. It had windows made of Perspex, so we weren’t in any danger of breaking glass and there was a chimney pot, which also had a bit of Perspex in the top to let a bit of light in. And there was a bench seat which had a lid that lifted and a cot side that pulled up so it could be a bed, a seat or a box that you could put your sister in and sit on the lid of. I’m afraid I did. We did let her out eventually, it wasn’t one of my finer moments. But that house was a big draw for many and varied games and we were quite sad when it went really. Dad did make us a doll’s house as well.
The other thing that we loved playing with, my sister and I, were paper dolls. There were two comics called the Bunty and the Judy, similar to the things for the boys which were the Dandy and the Beano. But Bunty and Judy had paper dolls on the back that you could cut out and then they had clothes that you could hang on these dolls – a very peculiar pastime, but we loved it, until my dad’s mum came to stay with us at one point and cos we didn’t tidy up properly she threw lots of those on the fire, which we were very upset about.
The inside of our house was odd I suppose. Because it had been built in the early 1900s, the bathroom was downstairs rather than upstairs. So, as you came in the back door there was a small toilet and then a larder which was also used as a cold store. The kitchen itself was very, very small because the end of the kitchen was partitioned off with a wooden partition with a hole in it to let the steam out and the bathroom was in there. Then there was the back living room. There was no fridge, there was only a small cooker. I suppose we had the larder instead and everything was bought fairly fresh and that also would be why the mobile shops came around, to give you access to those things that you wanted. You would know that you would be having fish a certain day of the week, because that’s when the van came. The main living room downstairs which we used was at the back of the house facing East. That had a coal fire and on cold winter mornings I can remember scampering down to get dressed in front of the fire. And also, when we were very small, we had our baths in front of the fire. We had a plastic bath that would come out and my children have been bathed in that as well when they were small. Not in front of a coal fire, but just cos it’s easier than filling up a big bath when you’ve got a little baby.
Anne’s great-grandma with Anne at the back door
There was another room downstairs, the front room. That was my great-grandmother’s room, which she had as a bed-sitting room. I can remember her having some quite heavy old furniture in there. It was either a wardrobe or a chest of drawers, I can’t remember. But in the bottom drawer of that there was a doll all done up in a wedding dress and that had been sent from Australia by one of her daughters. It was one of her granddaughters who had got married over there and her daughter had sent the doll to show what the dress was like. There was a fire in that room as well and I can remember it being quite cosy. I spent quite a lot of time with my great-grandmother as I was growing up because obviously she was always there and she would read me comics and stories and things. She had her own cupboard of provisions in her room and she always seemed to have a piece of quite hard, orange-coloured cheese wrapped up in grease-proof paper. And she had a square chair covered in orange boucle material. The carpet in there is still there now and it was very loud and vibrant. I think it might have been 1970s inspired, quite psychedelic at the time, a lot of oranges and green whirls.
Anne’s grandmother at the gate
Because the rooms in the house were quite high, the sort that have picture rails going round and then an area above that as well, the stairs are very steep and how we never fell down those as children I’ll never know, maybe we did. The front bedroom was first of all my grandparents’ room and when they died and my grandfather moved out, he went to live in Guernsey in the Channel Islands, that became my mum and dad’s room. The two back bedrooms are quite small and first of all my sister and I would have been in together and then we had separate rooms. They had long windows that came down very close to the floor and were the sash windows that you can push up and down and how we never fell out of those is another thing I don’t understand.
It was 1973 that the house was modernised slightly and the bathroom went upstairs. It’s a very large bathroom because the water tank had to go up into it and at that point we got central heating, which was amazing after having lived in a house for the first 12 years of my life that had no heating apart from the fires. It was amazing to have central heating in the bedrooms, it was quite the thing really.
The other thing I remember doing when we were younger, mam always had a dog and we used to walk quite a lot with the dog. So the limits of our explorations were where our little legs could go to really. Walking up from Leybourne Avenue, up West Lane you would come to St John’s Church. The churchyard was very different at that point, there was a wall and all of the graves were lined up and there were paths between them, but it became more and more overgrown as I suppose the people who had relations buried there either moved or died themselves. Eventually, a lot of the graves were taken down and the area was mown and I think that was part of Killingworth Village being in the Britain in Bloom competition. My great-grandfather’s grave is in that churchyard somewhere, but I’ve not been able to find the stone. He died in 1918 in the Spanish Flu epidemic which took place, so my great-grandmother was a widow from 1918 onwards and she didn’t die until the 1960s. That’s quite a long time to be by yourself and as it was, she had 5 children, quite young children, when she was widowed.
Walking up past the church, if you turn to the left and go down the side of the church, the building that used to be the old vicarage is there and then the path comes to a halt at the George Stephenson High School. But that path my mum used to refer to as “The Sedgies” and would talk about walking through there to Dudley and Burradon to visit relations and she used to take myself and my sister in our pram, pushchair or whatever there as well. Carrying on up through Killingworth Village, the village hasn’t changed a huge amount, but when you come to where The Plough is, opposite there, there used to be a farm and we used to go to bonfires there at Guy Fawkes and I can remember getting cinder toffee and baked potatoes. There used to be a path that went from there right up to where the Wagonway is at the top of Killingworth now. It runs between Hillheads egg farm and the road that goes round the village and down towards Backworth. And my mum used to refer to the path that went up there as the Green Lane. There were no houses after Killingworth Village, it was literally just fields and there were horses in some of them. Now obviously, Killingworth New Town is there, though it wasn’t at that point.
If you carry on through Killingworth Village, just after Killingworth Hall, which is on the right-hand side going towards the top house, the pub at the top of the bank, there’s a path that goes down and connects down onto Great Lime Road. And that path we used to call The Croft. It’s just a cinder track and at that time it ran between the playing fields that were St Joseph’s, the catholic school, field that was on West Lane opposite the churchyard. There were market gardens as well in between that and Killingworth Bank going towards the East. The fields are now very overgrown and it’s woodland, but they did used to cultivate some flowers in there and I can remember there being Michaelmas Daisies certainly and occasionally there will be an odd patch of them still through the wooded undergrowth.
There were always horses in the fields that were nearest the top of Killingworth Bank and I guess that one of those horses possibly belonged to Bobby King, the fruit and veg man because he lived up in those houses. The path used to run by the side of where Willow Dene nursery was and as you went over the bridge at the bottom you could see chickens that they had running around there. There were various cuts going down to Forest Hall. One went through Letchwell and there were pigeon lofts on one side and allotments which I think are still there. And there was a school at the bottom of that, which has gone now. St Mary’s catholic school was on the other side of that track. The other entrance to that track is virtually opposite the entrance to Elm Grove and Leybourne Avenue and there’s another branch which goes off towards Glebe Road. We used to cycle a lot so those tracks were very useful short cuts to get to Forest Hall when we were walking or cycling and mum would have used those every day to go and do her shopping to save going round Glebe Road or round Forest Hall Road, Clousden Hill. Obviously there was no traffic down there either.