it to a tramp – what was then known as ‘a gentleman of the road’ – who was on his way to spend the summer in the vicinity of Penzance but had got blown slightly off course. He said it would be invaluable to him for carrying his gear when sleeping rough in the open. At that time the main roads of Britain were full of tramps, many of them ex-soldiers on their way southwards to the sun, or else, in winter, travelling from one workhouse to another. There were even some women tramps, but they were rather more frightening than the men. Our particular tramp was about forty and had been a corporal in a Rifle Regiment. He was smart as tramps go, but when he left us, pushing what was now his mail cart, after having transferred his possessions to it from a sack and after a slice of fruit cake and a nice cup of hot sweet tea, the following day we found some strange, cabbalistic chalk marks on the wall outside the entrance, which I later learned years later was tramps’ language to the effect that the occupants of Number Three were a decent touch; but none ever came to try us out.
Now, down on the ground floor, we pushed open the main door, which had a glittering pair of brass doorknobs on it, polished by Edwards, the Head Porter, an ex-Guardsman. He was the custodian of all the flats which belonged to the London County Freehold and Leasehold Company. He was also in command of a number of lesser staff – some of them ex-soldiers who limped, having been wounded. They performed more menial functions, mostly in connection with dustbins and their contents. Edwards also polished the buttons on his navy blue tailcoat, using a button stick to prevent the polish getting on the material. Fifteen years later, when I joined the Army, in 1939, I also found myself using a button stick.
And now, out in the front garden of The Mansions, where the hedges were too high to see over, we turned left on to Castelnau for the long walk up to Ther Bend. Well, it seemed long when you were only five.
On our right now was Glentham Road, at that time a working-class street which encompassed the only part of Barnes at the Hammersmith Bridge end that boasted a bit of downhill. In it was the Sunlight Laundry, which took in our washing and employed numbers of cheerful, noisy girls from Hammersmith. This was the street, too, in which my parents’ chauffeur, Mr Lewington, lived, and where he kept our car, an open Citroën, in his garage. Beyond it was Fanny Road (now renamed St Hilda’s Road). It was to be years later, long after the war began, and I was abroad, before anyone living in Barnes found anything remotely funny in the name Fanny in association with a road. That was, until the Americans arrived in Britain in 1942/3. They had somewhat different ideas of what a Fanny was and when they saw Fanny inscribed on a street sign, they fell about. Soon, Americans from as far away as Piccadilly Circus began making pilgrimages to Fanny Road, SW13, on the Number 9 bus.
Then we used to go on, my mother and I, past where the shops began; past the butcher’s and Hewett’s Stores, which had dead ducks, and geese and pheasants, partridges and grouse, all hanging outside on hooks, in due season.
And inside, dressed in white, and wearing a straw boater whatever the season, was Mr Hewett who never failed to stop doing whatever he was doing, to doff his boater to my mother, a customer of some importance, as she sailed past with or without me in tow.
And next to Hewett’s there was the chemist’s, which I liked just about as much as Uncle Fitz’s surgery, as it had a wealth of what I called ‘Nasty Things’ on offer. And next to that there was a haberdasher’s full of boxes bursting with mother-of-pearl buttons and knicker elastic – important when large numbers of ladies kept their handkerchiefs somewhere in their knickers; and there were rolls of lace that kept on unrolling.
This very dark, even then very old-fashioned shop, was run by a pair of what at that time were quite young people. They were still operating after the Second World War, by that time incredibly bent and ancient. They hardly ever spoke, except to say how much the bill came to, and transacted their business with all the animation of a slow-motion film of a ritual. I was frightened of them, all dressed in black.
The next roads on our left, opposite Ther Boiler, were Arundel Terrace and Merthyr Terrace, which led away down to more reservoirs and more filter beds – this end of Barnes had more water than land in it. It was also the road that led to the council allotments, one of which Wanda put in for as soon as she came to live in Barnes, the scourge of the pensioners who predicted that everything she planted would come to a sticky end. ‘All that foreign stuff won’t do ’ere,’ they prognosticated when she started planting ‘foreign stuff’ in appreciable quantities – all of which did marvels, much to their disgust.
On the corner of Merthyr Terrace there was a dairy with a plaster of Paris – well, it looked like plaster of Paris – cow in the window, and walls tiled with dairy scenes. Here, on the premises, fresh-faced girls dispensed the beverage and the milkmen delivered it to their customers from churns loaded on to horse-drawn carts.
On the opposite side of the road there was Ther Boiler. Behind it was then, and for years to come, open country. There was a farm – it must have been one of the nearest farms to the centre of London – which employed numbers of women as casual labourers. When lifting potatoes, or whatever, they worked in all weathers short of a downpour, and they wore sacks as aprons and over their shoulders, and men’s caps. They, too, came over the river from Hammersmith, but they were much tougher than the girls at the Sunlight Laundry. And there was the fishmonger’s, and the Post Office and a florist’s and the newsagent.
The last shop on our side of Castelnau was an ironmonger’s, otherwise the Oil Shop. It was painted green and had two massive amphorae over the front of it of the sort that in Mediterranean lands are used to store olive oil, which here were painted a vivid, pillar-box red.
A short distance up towards Ther Bend was the Holy Trinity church, a rather sad, perpendicular construction of 1868, a not altogether auspicious time for building churches.
I never liked it, nor did I like the Church Hall, the scene of an unsuccessful attempt to ‘interfere’ with me by a bun-faced curate when I was a member of the Wolf Cub pack. The interference only amounted to my being bounced up and down on his knee but I didn’t enjoy it, as I felt that I was too old to be bounced up and down on peoples’ knees, and I told my mother and she told my father, and my father told the vicar and the curate was sent away to wherever curates who tried to ‘interfere’ with Wolf Cubs went at that time.
Near the church during the Second World War there had been an air raid shelter which had received a direct hit by a German rocket at a time when it had been filled with local inhabitants.
Here, on the opposite side of Castelnau to the church, were the premises of Boon and Porter, motor-car salesmen. The most memorable feature of Boon and Porter was an enormous advertisement for French Amilcars painted on a brick wall a couple of storeys high. It showed them roaring round a steep bank, driven by what looked like Michelin Men.
As we approached Ther Bend the houses became progressively finer, the best of all beginning at Ther Bend itself. They were semi-detached brick and stucco residences known as Castelnau Villas, built in 1842, the earliest early Victorian, with coach houses to match, and shaded by noble trees. Even to my five-year-old mind the Villas made the Mansions and the Gardens look a bit feeble – the epitome of an elegance that has rarely been repeated.
What my mother and I most enjoyed about going up to Ther Bend was that it was there that two members of the Constabulary operated what were known as ‘Speed Traps’.
These constables were always the same ones. Both had identical bushy moustaches and both were fat and had very red faces. They could have been twins. When they saw with the aid of binoculars a car coming up Castelnau from the direction of Hammersmith Bridge that in their opinion was exceeding the speed limit, which at that time, in the twenties, was only twenty miles an hour, they rushed out of their hiding place behind one of the massive gate posts of Number 122 Castelnau Villas at Ther Bend blowing their whistles and waving a large red flag at the offending motorist. This dramatic
