Third World Conditions In The English Countryside

A Memory of Claverley.

It is all too easy to look back to the past and remember an idyllic picture of country life and forget how it was in reality, I often think back to when I was growing up in Claverley in the 1950s and 60s.
My parents, younger brother, and I lived in a tied cottage which came with my father's job as a farm worker, this was no picture postcard house by any means, in fact it was a semi-hovel.
It was the middle house of three and consisted of a small room with a door which opened to the outside. There was a lean-to kitchen with barely enough room for a small table, an electric oven and boiler, a tin bath and a sink with a single cold tap, also there was a tiny room off the main living area which was used to store anything and everything including my mother's vacuum cleaner, etc, and there was a cellar which flooded on a regular basis.
Upstairs there was a landing bedroom which was just about big enough to hold a double bed and a small chest of drawers. This room served for my and my brother. our parent's room was big enough for a small wardrobe, a chest, a chair, and their bed; neither the rooms nor the stairs were carpeted.
The only source of heat apart from a two bar electric fire was our fireplace in the main room.
Our toilet was down the garden and was just a large bucket with a seat, the contents of which my father used as fertilizer for the garden, I seemed to remember it was often used in the leek trench.
At night we used a torch to reach the toilet and once there we lit a candle; of course in the early hours if you "needed to go" you had to use a pot, or "goz-under" as my father called it.
When we needed to bathe we took the tin bath down from the wall and water was heated in the electric boiler. My parents used the bath one night and then me and my brother the next.
During our time there we suffered the severe winter of 1962/63 and I well remember ice forming in a tumbler by the side of our bed and face flannels freezing solid by the side of the sink; snow used to blow through a gap under the door and this was blocked by old coats and the like, also we had to fill a kettle each night so we could use boiling water to thaw the water pipe.
My father kept fowl, we never called them chickens then, and leading up to Christmas the kitchen was a hive of activity with my mother plucking and dressing; it was no good being "tickled stomached" with the sights and sounds we encountered.
Although neither myself or my brother did particularly well at school the three sisters next door all passed the eleven-plus and went to the local grammar school; so a background as I have described certainly did not have a negative effect as far as they were concerned.
Most of my friends lived on the village council estate and how I envied their bathrooms and flush toilets in modern homes, however I never felt inferior or demeaned in any way.
We left the village in 1965 and many years later I returned to visit the place of my childhood; the block of three houses in which we lived had been converted into a single luxury home like so many others in what is now a dormitory village for Wolverhampton and the Black Country.
Since my marriage we have lived in three modern homes with central heating and all the modern conveniences we now take for granted but I have never thought my upbringing in what would now be classed as third world conditions has had a negative effect on me, in fact I think it has always made me more content with what I have now.

Philip Westwood.
6, Cinema Court,
Cleobury Mortimer,
Worcestershire,
DY14 8PZ.

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