The big thing that we had that nobody else had was a Wendy House in the garden, which my dad made
Anne (left) and sister 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, 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
This memory is part of a longer memory entitled “Forest Hall, Killingworth and West Moor in the 1960s-70s”.