Tooting 1948 1971

A Memory of Tooting.

I was born in Balham in 1948 and lived initially in a flat in Trinity Road near the then police station with Mum, Dad and Aunty Edie, and finally in a bay-fronted twenties house on Tooting Bec Road until I left home to go to college.

I suppose my happiest memories are of the early years in Trinity Road attending Holy Trinity Infants school and then Fircroft Juniors. Fircroft was a wonderful place to be if you were interested in music and art. The head teacher was Miss Lewis and she actively encouraged interest in all the arts, especially music. There were teachers who I will remember all my life: Mrs Hughes (who became a family friend), Mr Clayton and Miss Kavey, who were engaged to be married, Miss Lumley who left to go and work on ocean liners and who sent me out to buy cigarettes during class time! My friend was a Cypriot girl, Lefki Georgiades, who came from Cyprus when we were in the second year (age 9). We lost touch when she moved to Wallington and then met briefly again. I wonder what's happened to her now?

I didn't pass the Eleven Plus and so had the choice of going to the brand new Garrett Green or Ensham County Secondary on Franciscan Road. Garrett Green was the popular choice, but some of our parents were worried about a high proportion of girls who had been forced to leave because they were pregnant! In any case there were soon no more places, so Ensham it had to be...
Not a happy time for me, as it was the beginning of the terrible teens and all the problems that go with them. I made a few friends, some that I still have today. But it was a tough school with a lot of girls who couldn't wait to leave and had little time for those of us who wanted to make a good future for ourselves. There were all kinds of teachers - some of them truly inspirational; Miss Thomas, the head of Art taught in a wonderful way, always treating us as mature students and giving us the opportunity to choose what we wanted to do, and also Mrs Salmon, who was an incredibly hardworking Drama teacher.

I remember the Beatles coming to play at Tooting Grenada - I would have loved to go, but knew I wouldn't have been allowed, so didn't ask. But I did go regularly to the Saturday morning session at the Streatham Locarno and spent happy hours dancing to The Contours 'Do you Love Me?' plus the other dance hits of the day.

The big fashion of the early 1960s was to be a Mod, but my boyfriend Mart came from Thornton Heath and was a member of a bikers' gang so I was more interested in the Rockers, the rival faction. We would hang out at places like the Streatham Bowling Alley (which had free entrance), or go to the dance hall over Burton's Tailoring in Streatham High Road, but more often than not we would go and buy a half of beer or shandy in the Manor Arms pub and make it last all night while we sat and talked and huddled together on our favourite bench at the back of the Saloon.

I lived in Tooting with my parents until I was 21, then went up to Birmingham to do a post graduate course, after which I moved away to another part of London to flat-share with a group of people of my own age. My parents and Auntie Edie who had since married, stayed on in Tooting (where they had all been born) until they died. They didn't like the way Tooting had changed and said that it had become scruffy, but the truth of the matter was that I remember Tooting, Balham and many of the other local areas as always being a bit shabby and down at heel - after all they were originally conceived and developed as working class districts when they were tagged on to London.