The Bungalow by Ken Worpole

The Bungalow: Magical Thinking in Everyday Life

The New Ages

A new age does not begin all of a sudden.
My grandfather was already living in the new age
My grandson will probably still be living in the old one.

The new meat is eaten with the old forks…

Bertolt Brecht (1943)

‘Oh dear,’ my grandmother, Jane Elvin, used to say at least once a day, giving a theatrical shudder, ‘someone’s just walked over my grave.’ That would have been me, remembering her again. I recently came across an old Ordnance Survey map showing the bungalow where she lived – long since demolished – set in a large commercial orchard in Chelmsford, to which she and my grandfather George were evacuated during ‘the last war.’  He worked for the Taylor Walker brewery, then based in Stepney, but the company moved its operations to Chelmsford after its London buildings were reduced to rubble in a bombing raid in March 1941.

For both of them it was an extraordinary disruption, physically and psychologically. They went from 17 Bloomfield Road, Bow, a two-up, two-down terraced house in the over-crowded streets of Mile End – later to be bomb-flattened like the brewery – to The Bungalow, Arbour Lane, Chelmsford, a clapboard colonial structure fronted by a wide verandah, surrounded by a vast orchard of apple and plum trees. The looping, tree-shadowed River Chelmer marked the farm’s southern extremity, and a steep smoke-blackened cutting serving the Great Eastern Railway formed the eastern edge, before it disappeared into a tunnel under Arbour Lane, less than a hundred yards from the bungalow itself.

This idyllic Chekhovian setting had been the home of one of Essex’s most prestigious fruit-growers, William Seabrook; in the 1891 census The Bungalow is shown as being inhabited by Mrs & Mrs Seabrook and their seven children and two servants. By the time my grandparents arrived it had been divided into two self-contained living quarters. They occupied the back half, from which a small vegetable garden dropped steeply towards the river. The western perimeter of the great orchard was composed of a series of abandoned chicken sheds.

The Bungalow was my first home. Falling pregnant in 1943 my mother was registered with the Salvation Army Maternity Hospital in Hackney, close to where my parents lived, though my father was in the RAF at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys repairing wirelesses.  As a result of the war the Maternity Hospital had been evacuated to Willersley Castle in Derbyshire. Near-to-term mothers were taken weekly by motor-coach from Hackney to the 18^th century castle built for the industrialist Sir William Arkwright, where, according to my mother, they were confined until a week after the birth, spending their time chain-smoking and stamping their feet to keep the rats away in the cold, damp dormitory rooms. This is where I was born in June 1944, as was my cousin Lesley a year earlier in April 1943.

From that gloomy castle my mother took me directly to Chelmsford, to join her parents, her sister and her sister’s young daughter at The Bungalow for the rest of the war, at the end of which my mother and her sister returned to London and their husbands. As we grew older my cousin and I were often sent to stay with our grandparents at The Bungalow during the Easter and summer school holidays. It seemed a magical place, as in an Edwardian children’s book: steam trains, orchards, candle-lit bedrooms, chamber pots, no parental supervision, and new children to play with. In the front half of the bungalow lived a family with two young boys, much the same age as I was then, and these became friends.

I can still picture their mother clearly, but not the husband nor the boys (one of whom had Down’s Syndrome). She had a strong rural Essex accent, and seemed very kindly. If it rained the boys and I took shelter on their verandah, to read comics or to gossip. Their half of the divided bungalow enjoyed the luxury of an indoor WC, whereas we used a small brick outhouse, the toilet paper consisting of torn up squares of The Racing Post strung on a nail. Their family also enjoyed a reduction in the rent by selling ‘windfalls’ from the large barns adjacent to the bungalow to passers-by. The dark, tiered barn interiors were suffused with the sweet scent of ripe apples and plums, overpoweringly so.

*

Grandfather Elvin was born in 1886, left school at 14 and took a book-keeping course at The People’s Palace, the large charitable foundation set up to educate and improve the lives of East Enders, later absorbed into Queen Mary College, today part of the University of London.  George’s parents had lived in a small street in Stepney, just off Commercial Road, where they ran a ‘smoke-hole’ in the back yard for smoking kippers. Grandad’s death certificate recorded his occupation as a ‘brewer’s clerk’, and he worked in this position for Taylor Walker most of his life. Even so, he moonlighted to increase the family’s income, combining the clerking job with working out of hours and at weekends as a street book-maker, his interest in gambling constituting his other lifelong vocation. According to my mother, from time to time the police would turn up at the door to arrest him for ‘running a book’, with the words, ‘Hello George, we’re afraid it’s your turn today.’

It wasn’t just the difference between daily life in the crowded streets and tenements of Mile End and life in the orchard groves of Arbour Lane that must have been hard for Jane and George to adapt to – there were other contrasts too. I knew my grandmother’s story because fifty years ago, in May 1974, I tape-recorded an interview with her about her experience of growing up in Mile End, until she got married in 1911 at the age of twenty-two, a year before my mother was born. I still have the cassette tape, one of many, an old technology that still brings my grandparents and other family members to life again, their voices as real to me as if we are still there in the tiny front room in a Chelmsford terraced back-street where they were recorded. As Brecht’s poem suggests, we are always living in different periods simultaneously; time is malleable within our inner selves. To be wholly modern would be to have no inner life at all.

Her father had been a music-hall artist, Arthur James, whose main act was skate-dancing on a slate plinth or pedestal, dressed as a Russian Cossack.  He was good enough to appear at Collins Music Hall in Islington, the Holborn Empire and other halls on the London circuit. Jane had left school at 14 and before marrying George had worked in a shirt factory in Bow. For or a while she told me she had also worked as an errand-girl for a dress-maker, on several occasions delivering new costumes to Marie Lloyd.

She had another string to her bow.  Completely self-taught, my grandmother became an accomplished and versatile pianist despite never learning to read music. ‘I started picking out a tune with one finger, and then began to vamp along with my left hand,’ she told me. Even before leaving school, she would take time off earning money by accompanying on the piano a ‘Professor Smith’, who toured the homes of middle-class parents with his self-made marionette theatre, playing at children’s parties. Their clients included ‘titled people’ in her words, in whose Park Lane houses she felt ‘more afraid of the butler than of the people who owned the house.’ In reality my grandmother was, according my mother, ‘fearless’.

In Bloomfield Road and its surrounding streets her clientele lived at the other end of the social scale. She was not only a popular pub pianist but much in demand for weddings and anniversary parties, usually held in people’s own homes, for those who could not afford to hire rooms elsewhere. In such cases it was common for the downstairs furniture to be carried out into the street or taken into the back yard, creating room for all the singing and dancing, which sometimes lasted all night and well into the following morning, before the last stragglers made their way home. ‘We used to dance all the roses off the linoleum,’ she laughed, before recalling a rival woman pianist who sometimes played at the same parties, a large woman who ‘instead of pulling her chair up to the piano, sat down and pulled the piano to her.’

George and Jane were very sociable. My mother told me that her father went out most evenings at pub opening time to collect bets and distribute winnings, with Jane joining him later, both staying until last orders.  They loved playing billiards  and went to parties every weekend, Jane invariably playing the piano. Every Tuesday evening George took all the family, Jane, and the three children, Doris (my mother), Jimmy and Marie, to the first house at the Stratford Empire music hall, followed by pie and mash (with eels for the adults) close by.  They were, my mother recalled many years later, amongst the happiest evenings of her life. There should have been four children, but Jane’s second child, George, died of meningitis at the age of two: ‘a lovely little boy, and so clever.’

*

Nanny Elvin would have been in her sixties when my cousin and I used to stay with her, and, as young children do, I observed her and George closely, fascinated by what I regarded as their ‘old-fashioned’ way of life.  Everything happened in the large kitchen, entered directly from the back door, first having negotiated a thick velvet curtain. A coal fire burned throughout the year, a kettle steaming on a trivet next to the fire-grate. Tea-time usually involved making toast – by holding slices of bread on a copper fork as close to the glowing embers as one could bear. The room smelt of coal smoke, steam, grandad’s cigarette smoke, cat food (mostly left-over rabbit), and flowers from the garden, along with the scent of ripe apples and soft plums.

Directly facing you on entering, and standing against the rear kitchen wall was a large Welsh Dresser, displaying a willow pattern dining set, never used, so of course it was from my grandmother I learned the sad story of the doomed lovers illustrated on the blue and white plates: the trees, the arched bridge, the fleeing lovers, the angry father and the two doves. The small room I slept in, at the end of a short, dark corridor, was lined with tongue and groove timber, darkened by age, which gave off the scent of cedar-wood, especially when you dug your fingernail into it. There was no lighting in this room other than by candle.

Our half of the bungalow consisted of my grandparents’ bedroom (with a double bed so high one had to struggle to climb up on to it; it had been raised to locate a Morrison bomb shelter beneath it), the main front room, the small bedroom at the end of the corridor, and another small room that housed a wind-up gramophone with a small selection of shellac records including The Laughing Policeman. This was where my cousin remembers grandad sitting to smoke and read the newspaper away from Jane cooking and washing up in the kitchen, long, fragile extensions of ash drooping from the cigarette permanently lodged in his mouth.

A step-down scullery adjoined the kitchen. In this cold, damp distempered out-house there were usually at least two skinned rabbits hanging from the ceiling over the rarely-used bathtub, waiting to be jointed and cooked (and whose scraps would later feed the white cat, Snowy). Rabbit stew was a common meal, and I liked it, along with bubble and squeak for breakfast. The water in which any greens were cooked was decanted into a jug, and was regarded as a great health tonic to be drunk later, which I was required to do most mornings under my grandmother’s watchful eye.

At least once during each stay it would be time for ‘a proper wash-down’.  I would be stood naked in the Butler sink next to the kitchen window, and scrubbed from head to toe with a soaped flannel.  It was embarrassing enough for a young boy – perhaps eight or nine or even older – to be washed all over by someone not his mother or father, but on at least one occasion there was a knock at the door and several of Nan’s women friends would crowd in, arriving for tea, and I was stood there entirely undressed, a cause of some polite amusement.

*

Grandma Elvin was always in demand as a fortune-teller, as well as being accomplished in other psychic gifts, to the extent that some women were slightly in awe of her, if not afraid.  She earned pin-money by card-reading, palm-reading and interpreting the tea leaves at the bottom of the cup when concluding afternoon soirees with women friends in their front rooms, to which I was often invited. It was probably because of this that I became gripped by Keith Thomas’s magisterial work of post-Reformation English history, Religion and the Decline of Magic, published in 1971. I hadn’t read Thomas’s book until after I interviewed my grandmother, but when I did, I was struck by the realization that she also, like many of Thomas’s subjects, still inhabited a world in which religion, superstition and magical thinking were interwoven, still actively governing her life and consciousness.  The continuity of superstition was the principal argument of Thomas’s book, concluding that, ‘The role of magic in modern society may be more extensive than we appreciate.’

I witnessed the power of such beliefs when staying at The Bungalow, and when accompanying my grandmother on those afternoon visits to her friends. These outings meant a lot of preparation on her part.  Always adorned in a flowery pinafore when at home, she nevertheless dressed well and always put on her best rings when going out. The rings I later learned from my mother were worth serious money; this was how people from her background kept their savings – as jewellery – not in banks or under the mattress. She often wore a fox stole, which both fascinated and disturbed me.  The fox was a complete pelt, with four legs (plus claws) intact, its grinning head lolling down her front, its eyes substituted by glass facsimiles, its tail docked.  It was pinned around her shoulders like a daemon in a Philip Pullman novel. She always wore a lucky rabbit’s foot brooch, and would not go out without it.

Thus armed against misfortune we would close the door behind us and set off – her to gossip and read palms and tea-leaves in someone’s neatly polished front room, me to sit with a box of crayons and a colouring book in the corner and be fed biscuits and orange squash.  She always wore a hat and on special occasions even added a gauze veil. When towards the end of my time at grammar school we were given Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel of provincial life, Cranford, as a set text, I already felt at home. Many of the scenes in Gaskell’s novel involve a small group of women meeting and gossiping over cards and sewing. Gaskell had Cranford, I had Chelmsford.

Her conversation was peppered with small entreaties or imprecations.  Every announcement of what was to happen later in the day or at some point in the near future was punctuated by the phrases, God Willing or Please God, if I’m spared, much as a devout Muslim will say Inshallah.  This was sometimes abbreviated to DV (short, I later learned, for the Latin Deo Volente, also meaning God Willing). ‘We’ll go and see Uncle Jimmy tomorrow, DV, as Wednesday’s his day off.’ Of one of her other grandchildren who had a reputation for getting into scrapes she would say mischievously, ‘Mark my words, that one will finish at the end of a rope.’

Romany women or women from nearby traveller encampments would sometimes knock on the door – as they did much more frequently in those days, in what was still a residual rural enclave in a small country town – offering to tell Nan her fortune or ‘give’ her a lucky charm in exchange for a small piece of silver.  I have said that my grandmother was fearless, other than in one regard, and that was she feared the Romany women, and the curses they might cast upon her if in some way she caused offence. As a result, she always gave them money, in return for which she usually received a few sprigs of heather wrapped in the second-hand silver foil taken from a cigarette packet. That was carefully put away until its magic powers were felt to be fully depleted.

On the occasion her women friends came to The Bungalow, once again I sat in the corner crayoning or reading, while the cards were dealt.  I am sure I remember – but I may have made this up – that she once told me that she always took the Ace of Spades out of the pack in advance, as this forewarned of a death to come, not something she would wish on anybody. Eventually after the cards and the reading of palms, tea was made, biscuits served, and the afternoon ended with the tea leaves being read and divined for events likely to be forthcoming in her friends and neighbours’ lives in the future. My cousin remembers the ritual associated with the reading of the tea leaves especially.  Everybody had to leave a small amount of tea in the cup, and that would then be swilled round and tipped into the sink with a flourish. Thus, the tea leaves would cover the sides as well as the cup bottom. Sometimes Jane claimed to discern particular initials in the pattern of tea leaves which were those of someone the cup-holder was either going to meet – or lose.

My grandmother read the newspaper horoscope every day: hers, George’s, and those of her three children, even when they were long grown up and living far away.  Although my mother and her sister Marie shared the same star sign – Scorpio – she was in no way perturbed by the fact that their very different personalities and trials of life were both divined correctly by the same identical astrological prediction given each day.

*

Sadly this account cannot include the sound of my grandmother’s self-mocking, humorous voice that comes across on tape, often laughing as much as she was sighing over lost times.  It was seeing the ground plan of The Bungalow and then searching out the cassette tape – recorded fifty years ago this year – that made me want to write something about my own memories of childhood, something I’ve usually resisted.  But the story of The Bungalow has been a constant presence in my imaginative life, brighter and more fully-textured than nearly all other memories of places and times recalled.

At several points in the tape recording, when recollecting her party pieces, Jane Elvin breaks into song.  All the long-distant sentiments and emotions of the music hall and the pub sing-song suddenly break through, captured by the titles of the sentimental songs that were her forte: ‘One word, Mother’, ‘Silver threads among the gold’, ‘She was happy till she met you’, ‘If I could only make you care.’  Hardly able to stop herself laughing she sang two verses of ‘One word, Mother (to me there is no other/ The first word of the infant and the last word of the brave…)’ before saying that usually by the time she got to the end of the second verse everybody in the room was crying.  ‘Stop it Jane, please no more, it’s just too much.’ Their eyes were like ’water-carts’ she said, stifling another fit of laughter, recalling those parties from another time and place, stories which have become an integral part of my own life and to which I am still emotionally, and profoundly, connected.

***

With thanks to Lesley Showell and Ian Worpole for their recollections

Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian, and the author of many books on architecture, aesthetics, landscape and public policy. A founder member of the think-tanks Demos and openDemocracy, in recent years he has focused on post-industrial landscapes, settlements and communities, together with questions of ‘Englishness’ and regional identity. He is the author of No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen, and the forthcoming book of essays Brightening from the East.