The memory in words........
WINTER 1947
Here are I and a couple of friends on the Chester Road in Streetly, on the hill leading up from the Parson & Clerk towards the Manor Road crossroads. (I'm on the right, in BVGS black-and-white scarf and short trousers). Great fun and an improvement over the normal venue which was Manor Road. Only interrupted by the occasional vehicle for which we of course had to keep a look out and give way to. Very little, though.
I knew the family in the house in the background, the father a survivor of Dunkirk; they had moved in during the previous year after he was demobbed and now, like everyone in that row of houses which included my own, they were no doubt desperately trying to keep the chill out of their homes, struggling with condensation on their single-glazed windows, at best just streaming down the glass every morning or, more probably wholly iced up. Virtually no loft insulation, no snugly fitting, double-glazed windows, certainly no cavity wall foam, no central heating, just open fires or paraffin stoves or electric fires - if you could afford to keep them running. What an ordeal it must have been for the grown-ups, especially the old or the poorly or the hard-up. Not for us kids, though. Or at least, not today. Clear sky, sun and sheet ice everywhere.
At one stage, up from the Parson & Clerk, came roaring an open military jeep, the driver huddled in gaberdine, muffler and large gauntlets. An angry man with a swarthy complexion and a strange accent – he didn't look British at all and may have been, possibly, American or European. He harangued us for several minutes in no uncertain terms, pointing out the dangers and so on. We absorbed his message, looked suitably remorseful, watched him finally roar off on his journey northwards and then of course returned to our fun.
Over the following days and weeks snow and ice remained everywhere but the traffic on the Chester Road slowly returned and the wonderful white, compacted surface grew harder and grittier and blacker. Finally it was 2 or 3 inches thick, like a layer of sooty, impenetrable concrete. And of course wholly useless for toboganning.
Eventually a team of POWs appeared and inched their way up from the Birmingham direction, wielding pickaxe and shovel, prizing slabs of this horrible material off the road surface and loading them on to a lorry. Day after day, a couple of hundred yards at a time. These men, in their drab winter clothing with POW stencilled on the back and their strange headgear - Afrika Corps, perhaps, or later - were viewed by us with vague curiosity but no particular affection or sympathy and certainly little apprehension. They were just a carryover of that strange wartime world we had all grown up in, for almost as long as we could remember, and which was normal to us. Some may well have been in England for years already, with families scattered in a ruined country. I have often wondered since what they were feeling, far from home and those they held dear, as young children like us walked by and idly glanced at them before entering our (reasonably) warm, comfortable, welcoming family homes and then forgetting all about them.
Chris