Growing Up In Tottenham

A Memory of Tottenham.

I spent the first eleven years of my life in Tottenham. We lived above the PDSA dispensary in Seven Sisters Road. My father worked for the PDSA as a vet, and I remember very clearly the queues of people waiting to have their pets treated free of charge. My mother used to take my brother, sister and me to Finsbury Park often, and to the Rec. Many photos were taken of us on the Green. My great-grandmother Louisa Upward lived in St Margaret's Road, and we walked to her home to visit and for my mother to listen to her gossip. I was always fascinated when she lit the gas lights and the soft hiss from the gas mantles could be heard. I remember the fog, I was only about five years old when my father took me to school one morning, and left me at the door. He disappeared in a second into the murky pea souper and I felt very alone. I went to The Green School, the head mistress then was Miss Hilditch, who used to terrify me when she shouted, which was often. My first teacher was Miss Parker, a lovely woman who never shouted. She asked me on my first day whether I would like to play with sand or beads. I chose beads. Everybody seemed friendly in those days, but it was just after the war, and there wasn't a lot of money about. We were used to seeing rabbits for sale, and horse meat, and pigeons, all for human consumption. The birds were plucked in the back of the butcher's shop. In those days meaty bones were given away for soup, not sold as they are now. There was also a sweet shop where they made all their own sweets. I can't remember now whether it was in Seven Sisters Road or the High Street but we would stand and watch the heavy loops of sugar being pulled and twisted before being made into various boiled confections. The smell of aniseed and peppermint or whatever flavour being used that day was very strong. Another clear memory is of the huge steam engines puffing their way across the bridge in Seven Sisters Road, not clean and bright, but black and dirty and noisy. When we went to the cinema it was next to the railway and we could hear the trains roaring by as we watched the film. There were still many horse-drawn carts and wagons about, and plenty of stone water troughs on street corners for thirsty animals. The corner shop nearby was a grocers. The smell of the cheese and bacon and coffee was wonderful. Nothing was ready-wrapped then, my mother told the assistant how much she wanted of a particular item, and it was cut up and wrapped in greaseproof paper, if cheese or butter or bacon etc. Everything was loose in large jars or tins and weighed out for you, and placed in a brown paper bag. Biscuits were kept in glass-fronted cube shaped tins lined up against the counter, just where children could see them. Farleys rusks were kept in those too. There wasn't a great variety of baby foods about then, but I was born the year the National Health Service came into being, and had free orange juice and National dried milk along with all the other babies in the land if necessary. If we children were bought sweets a bag would be made first by wrapping a piece of paper round the fingers and twisting at the bottom to fasten it. We could buy very small amounts, and choose one sweet from each jar if we wanted to do so. We only had sweets at the weekends though. Sugar was rationed during the war and it was still on ration for me until 1953. I treasure these memories and many more of early post-war Tottenham. It was like a village then, everybody in our neighbourhood seemed to talk to each other, and Tottenham people were quick-witted and always ready to share a joke. I have never gone back, I think it will be very different now. In my mind's eye it is still foggy, still dirty, and still loved. That will do.