Those were the days when there were still two postal deliveries a day; my parents complaining about their reduction from three. Bread was delivered twice daily too, in the baker’s own blue van. Milk came in a horse-drawn cart, which we looked out for in school holidays. Sandra, my dearest and closest friend, adored horses. We were allowed to stroke the patient creature and offer him carrots correctly on an open palm. Just occasionally if no one was around and the milkman was in a particularly good mood he would say, “Come on up, girls!” and we would ride on the shaft of the cart up Stanhope Road, sniffing luxuriously at the horse’s steamy farts.
Our house was, of course, the centre of the world. Stanhope Road was ‘unadopted’, a phrase we did not understand but gathered that this explained why it did not have neat tarmac and stone pavements but was much nicer, covered in yellow-brown gravel with weeds growing at the edges. Three doors down from us the orphan road became even more unadopted and had a bumpy brown surface of mud, packed hard. There was no pavement, but each side trees grew thickly, their roots sticking through the dirt like knees and elbows. We called it ‘Leafy Lane’, but I learned later that to the locals it was ‘Lovers Lane’.
Sandra and Lueen lived in the last house before the lane and came to live there with their grandparents shortly after the end of the war. Sandra and I were the same age and between 7 and 11 years old we were inseparable. Lueen came tagging along, puffing to keep up with her elders, by turns tolerated, excluded or made use of. My brother John was off with his gang of boys most of the time but joined us when he felt like it, particularly for dangerous activities like tree-climbing or running homemade carts down the hill.
Incidentally, when I was a small child I was not really aware of who John was. When, at 3 years, I was evacuated to Pumsaint, as previously described, I apparently referred to him as ‘John Kapp’, as if I sort of knew he had some connection with me, but not what it was and for years afterwards I apparently always referred to him as ‘John Kapp’.
I thought he was wonderfully strong and clever. “I know what ‘tricity is,” I said, “John Kapp told me”. I was also told by our parents that we wore them out with our constant bickering, arguing and one-upmanship. With only 17 months between us, I was determined to catch up and he was determined to keep the lead.