For the first eleven and a bit years of my life I lived in
Grove Road in Hastings. In late 1974 my mother became incredibly restless and
she and my father started looking to move house. I don’t know how many houses
they looked at, but they bought a house quite literally round the corner from
where we were living. I wouldn’t say it was only a stone’s throw away, but you
could hit one house with a stone from the other if you used a catapult.
I can’t remember exactly when we moved in, but I can
remember going to primary school in the morning from Grove Road and coming home
to Winchelsea Road in the afternoon. Because it was primary school and not
secondary it must have been some time in or before July 1975.
At the time I was rather bemused by the move. We’d gone
from a relatively spacious terraced house to a (quite frankly) small and
poky semi-detached house. But my dear old mum was always something of a snob (bless
her); semi-detached was definitely a step up in her mind; even if the new
house was half the size of what we’d moved out of.
I suppose being a smaller house was something of a boon for
my father. Whereas in my world I am constantly walking the dogs, ironing and
fiddling with my pond, my Dad was always decorating. Just like the Forth
Bridge, once he’d finished decorating the house he would start again.
Having moved in to the house in Winchelsea Road, my mother,
brother and I immediately decamped a mile down the road and spent a week living
at my grandmother’s house whilst Dad bashed down internal walls in the new
house. The kitchen was so small you could stand in it and touch all four walls
without moving. Combining it with the back room gave a little more space (but
not much).
Despite being a tiny house (compared to what we had been
used to), about half of the available downstairs floor space was wasted.
The front room was set up as an immaculate shrine into which special visitors
would be welcomed. Sadly no visitor that I can remember was ever deemed
important enough for them to be allowed into the front room though. I only ever
saw that front room being used on a Christmas morning (as it was a special
celebration).
Amazingly despite the room’s never being used, the pristine
furniture was changed for new stuff on a yearly basis.
Why?
Sadly this keeping the front room as a shrine for the
important visitors that never came was maintained right up until my mother had
to have a downstairs bedroom only five short years ago.
Whilst knocking down internal walls, Dad also installed a “back
boiler”; a frankly ridiculous system whereby all the house’s hot water was
heated by a coal fire. Consequently the house was constantly far too hot with a
coal fire roaring at all hours of night and day. In the height of heatwaves a
coal fire would be going non-stop. We had one on the go all through the
legendary summer of 1976.
I moved out in 1983 after we’d been there for eight years.
I’m told that when my brother moved to the other side of Hastings my mother was
keen to move house, but my father wasn’t having any of it. Despite all his
family having moved away, he wanted to stay close to where he’d been brought
up.
After forty-eight years in our family we finally sold that
house today…
Something of an end of an era…
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