Part Three
We are standing with our back to the houses that back ontoGeach Street. Palings on the left and just above them in the far lefthandcorner you can see the other end of the row of lavs.
See the door halfway up and on the left of the lamppost;that is where the bloke in his early twenties and lived with his mother, gothis windup gramophone out once a year in the summer and played Hallelujah I’m aBum all day long. Perhaps it was his birthday.
In the middle of the yard there used to be a concrete blockwhich was the communal bomb shelter. After the war this was well used by RoyRogers and his gang. When it was gone we kids played all of those games, longforgotten, whose names I have lost too; statues and the like.
In the houses at the back, in the right far corner, livedthe Evans family. Mr and Mrs Evans kept the whole of Guildford Street awake Fridaynights as they murdered each other on the way home from the Guildford Arms. Theirson Bogey lived with them. His sister went off to London as a ‘night worker’ itwas thought. She came back with a man after a few years and squatted in anempty house in the barracks.
Just on the right with a small front garden their lived a Sikh.A friendly bloke who sold brushes door to door from his suitcase.
A puzzling thing in this photo is that there are dustbins infront of the houses. They all used to be kept in the corner under an overhangnext to the row of lavs. In post #8, the third picture along, you can see adust cart with a bin man with is tin over his shoulder. He will be emptying therubbish from the bins into his tin which he then will carry to empty into hiscart.
Back to the photo – if we were able, we could walk past theSikh’s house, then the house next door, turn left around the corner, past thebrewhouses on the left, then the Trotter’s house. Past our back gate, up theentry and out into Guildford Street.
