Re: guilford street lozells
Here is a short extract from the book:
A HOUSE OF OUR OWN
The backyards of Birmingham, more accurately Lozells, were the world of our childhood. When I was about three, and my brother a year younger, we had news of a house that our family could call its own. It was a back-to-back house in Clifford Street, just around the corner from Guildford Street where I had been born at number 117. There we had been lodgers in the two front rooms and we owed our good fortune in obtaining this new home to my aunt Annie, mother’s sister, Who lived in the front house of the other pair of back-to-back houses which shared our backyard and facilities. Aunt Annie was a widow and
the lived there with my cousin Joan. They had the tiniest of living- rooms which was divided by a counter from which she ran a shop which sold ladies’ clothes and household linen. The window of the room was converted into a shop window. So it was that when number 2 at the back became empty, my aunt prevailed upon the landlord to let us have It, Access to the two back houses was by means of a covered entry which ran from the street between the two sets of back-to-backs and ended in our backyard. The yard was our castle. It still provides happy memories of hours of child’s play and games. But it reminds me also of the drudgery and the hardships associated with the unemployment and the despairing search for work that was the lot of my parents for much of the time we lived there.
The house had three rooms, one on top of the other, and a cellar below. ‘When we had water installed the sink was fitted into the small space at the top of the cellar steps. This was a red letter day. Soon we had an Ascot heater fitted. The gas stove remained in the small living- room where the cooking was undertaken.
The ‘facilities’ for the four houses were built down the left-hand side of the yard starting some ten feet from our living-room window. First came the ‘brewhouse’ — the wash house — to which each family was allocated a day to do their washing. For this labour there was a sink with a tap from which we also drew our house water until two or three years later when — Oh, happy day — the landlord provided a supply to the house. The sink had an outlet to the ‘suff’ as it was known, the drain to other people. There was also a copper boiler in which the water was boiled. All the water had to be put into it by bucket and ladled out down the ‘suff’ afterwards, a much more difficult task. Underneath the boiler was the fire which we had to get going well before the washing could be attempted. Next to the brewhouse came the two lavatories or the ‘La Pom’ as it was called by the neighbour who shared one with us.
Then came the ‘miskin’ or ‘midden’ which received not only the refuse of the four houses in our yard, but of the six houses in the next yard too. When we moved into this house there were no dustbins. Once a week the dustthen would arrive with their cart and their galvanised tin baths and shovel the ashes -and the refuse into the baths, place them on top of their heads, protected only by an old cloth cap, and carry them across the yard and up the entry, to be deposited in their dustcart. It took many journeys to complete this operation and on a windy day there was almost as much refuse to be cleared up after the dustmen had gone than before they came.