L
ladywood
Guest
Ladywood at the end of the war was like most of the inner city suburbs of Birmingham at that time. Streets of decaying red bricked blue slate roofed, back to back tenement housing,
The houses usually had a front door that opened onto the street and had a side entrance up an alley. The alleyways were lined with dilapidated fences or overgrown private hedges. In some streets there were wider openings called yards, in which there where usually four houses. A street usually had a couple of small shops that sold everything from white one penny candles to coffee that was really made from chicory. Sometimes there was a pub on the corner. Here and there the bare ground of a bombed site.
The streets were light with gas lamps. In some of the yards there were large brick air raid shelters with a slab of concrete for a roof that was too difficult to be easily demolished.
The boundaries of my world was brick, slate, fencing, concrete, broken glass and rusting metal. Liberation came by way of Mrs. Lester (my teacher) and Natural History courtesy of the BBC's schools service.
For me Natural History was at that time our cat, sometimes a dead mouse. Sparrows and pigeons, the milkman's horse. Some worms when Mrs. Vale turnedover her small piece of soil and under the lino in the back room, an occasional silverfish.
We had no garden. Opposite us was a large oblong air raid shelter with a broken rusting door. We lived in yard with five other families. The yard was bricked over except for a small square of bare soil.
Number 2 and 3 back of 53 each had a piece of brown vitreous drainage pipe, out of which a couple of stems of Virginia creeper, crept and clung to the brickwork Only the moss on the small square of soil in front of our house seemed fresh and flourishing.
Thursday afternoon changed all that. was, it was the high point of my week. A Natural History program was broadcast at 2:00.
It was called Nature Study.
Mrs. Lester plugged a loudspeaker which was surrounded by a large octagonal plywood frame into the wall (the master radio was in the headmistresses office) and turned the single bakelite knob to adjust the volume.
We would then, by our ears, be catapulted into the English countryside. Crawling along side a hedgehog through hedgerows, sitting next to an owl high on a beam in a barn waiting for a fieldmouse, tunnelling under meadows with a mole in pursuit of a worm, or moving through the reeds of a river as stealthily as a pike., we observed everything.
With Spring came budding Oak, Ash, Horse Chestnut, Dandelion, Coltsfoot, Caddis Flies., Swallows, Cuckoos, Missal Thrushes, Moles, In the Summer there were Pipistrelles Barn Owls Sparrow Hawks, Red Admirals, Cabbage Whites, Dragonflies, Newts, Three and Ten spined Sticklebacks. Blind Worms, Smooth Snakes, Grass Snakhttps://forum.birminghamhistory.co.uk/images/editor/attach.gifes, Adders and Harvest Mice.
In the Autumn term we exchanged one set of finery for another. Red Squirrels, Hedgehogs, Voles, Shrews, Stoats, Rabbits, Hares, Foxes and Badgers. And as Winter closed in Grey Squirrels, Blue Tits, Cold Tits, Robins, and a Dormouse.
At St. Peters School,near the window that overlooked the street and canal we had a small dedicated table which over the weeks displayed in jam jars, clover, plantain, bluebells and gorse, spiders and beetles and I can remember between hard bright sunlight and black April showers in a large bucket, scores of wriggling tadpoles.
The radio made everything possible.
https://forum.birminghamhistory.co.uk/images/attach/jpg.gif
Ladywood
The houses usually had a front door that opened onto the street and had a side entrance up an alley. The alleyways were lined with dilapidated fences or overgrown private hedges. In some streets there were wider openings called yards, in which there where usually four houses. A street usually had a couple of small shops that sold everything from white one penny candles to coffee that was really made from chicory. Sometimes there was a pub on the corner. Here and there the bare ground of a bombed site.
The streets were light with gas lamps. In some of the yards there were large brick air raid shelters with a slab of concrete for a roof that was too difficult to be easily demolished.
The boundaries of my world was brick, slate, fencing, concrete, broken glass and rusting metal. Liberation came by way of Mrs. Lester (my teacher) and Natural History courtesy of the BBC's schools service.
For me Natural History was at that time our cat, sometimes a dead mouse. Sparrows and pigeons, the milkman's horse. Some worms when Mrs. Vale turnedover her small piece of soil and under the lino in the back room, an occasional silverfish.
We had no garden. Opposite us was a large oblong air raid shelter with a broken rusting door. We lived in yard with five other families. The yard was bricked over except for a small square of bare soil.
Number 2 and 3 back of 53 each had a piece of brown vitreous drainage pipe, out of which a couple of stems of Virginia creeper, crept and clung to the brickwork Only the moss on the small square of soil in front of our house seemed fresh and flourishing.
Thursday afternoon changed all that. was, it was the high point of my week. A Natural History program was broadcast at 2:00.
It was called Nature Study.
Mrs. Lester plugged a loudspeaker which was surrounded by a large octagonal plywood frame into the wall (the master radio was in the headmistresses office) and turned the single bakelite knob to adjust the volume.
We would then, by our ears, be catapulted into the English countryside. Crawling along side a hedgehog through hedgerows, sitting next to an owl high on a beam in a barn waiting for a fieldmouse, tunnelling under meadows with a mole in pursuit of a worm, or moving through the reeds of a river as stealthily as a pike., we observed everything.
With Spring came budding Oak, Ash, Horse Chestnut, Dandelion, Coltsfoot, Caddis Flies., Swallows, Cuckoos, Missal Thrushes, Moles, In the Summer there were Pipistrelles Barn Owls Sparrow Hawks, Red Admirals, Cabbage Whites, Dragonflies, Newts, Three and Ten spined Sticklebacks. Blind Worms, Smooth Snakes, Grass Snakhttps://forum.birminghamhistory.co.uk/images/editor/attach.gifes, Adders and Harvest Mice.
In the Autumn term we exchanged one set of finery for another. Red Squirrels, Hedgehogs, Voles, Shrews, Stoats, Rabbits, Hares, Foxes and Badgers. And as Winter closed in Grey Squirrels, Blue Tits, Cold Tits, Robins, and a Dormouse.
At St. Peters School,near the window that overlooked the street and canal we had a small dedicated table which over the weeks displayed in jam jars, clover, plantain, bluebells and gorse, spiders and beetles and I can remember between hard bright sunlight and black April showers in a large bucket, scores of wriggling tadpoles.
The radio made everything possible.
https://forum.birminghamhistory.co.uk/images/attach/jpg.gif
Ladywood
