The Move to Leeds 1948
When we moved from Wakefield to Leeds in April 1948, just ten miles separated the two houses but to me it seemed like a move to the other end of the world. In those immediate post-war years, when the new official spin word 'austerity' governed everything we had and did, only 'posh' people had cars. For ordinary folk a day trip to Leeds was a major outing on the bus. A permanent move to Leeds, such as our family was about to make, was an emigration! I was feeling pretty gloomy anyway, quite apart from the weather and the move away from the railway. I really didn't want to move from Wakefield and all my friends, and most particularly I didn't want to leave the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School which I'd waited for so long to join.I already knew that our new home was a terraced house in Gipton Mount, one of about a dozen parallel cul-de-sacs leading off the right hand side of Gathorne Terrace in Harehills. Dad had told me that there were no railways nearer than Leeds city centre but there were plenty of trams running through Harehills. As though that were any sort of compensation!
Dad and sister Kathleen travelled first, by bus and tram, to get the keys from the agent and then open up the house ready for the arrival of the furniture. I travelled from Wakefield in the front of the furniture van with our pet cat Tiddles on my lap. My pocket diary records merely that Mum followed on later after sweeping up in Cotton Street. I remember how my heart sank when I caught my first sight of Gathorne Terrace and I fear my dismay was noticed, and almost certainly shared, by Mum and Dad. Everything about the immediate neighbourhood looked forbidding and dirty – as indeed it was. Our new home, number 8, had cost the princely sum of £750 to buy. It was quite a let down from the smart semi in Wakefield but it was, presumably, all my parents could afford.
My first quick tour of inspection, while the furniture was being unloaded, revealed a miniscule and totally useless front garden, and a small back yard. A high brick wall at the end of the yard had a gate opening onto Back Gipton Mount, a very narrow cobbled cul-de-sac which was too small for vehicles. Our back windows looked onto the back windows of the next street. On the ground floor of our house there were 'the living room' and a small 'front room'. In those days the room designated 'front' was generally kept in a pristine condition ready for visitors but was otherwise never used. The living room was used for everything else including cooking and washing. By the front door step there was a metal grating which turned out to be the cover over the "coal 'oil"- in other words the hole down which the coalman delivered sacks of coal. He didn't drop the sacks down the hole: he emptied the contents down a steep chute which led directly into a cellar beneath, a drop of about twelve feet! Below ground there were actually two small, dark, dank cellars, one of which was where the coal arrived from the chute onto the bare concrete floor. The level of dust and accumulated grime had to be seen to be believed although it appeared that the previous owners had made a half-hearted attempt to white-wash the walls. The coal was carried upstairs from the cellar as required in a scuttle which lived on the living room hearth alongside a matching small shovel, poker, hearth brush, and a pair of tongs, all of which dangled from a matching cast iron stand.
On the first floor there were two bedrooms and the bathroom-cum-toilet. Now that was modern; many similar houses those days had no bathroom and many still had outside privies. It had already been decided, apparently, that the smaller of the bedrooms was for my sister and the other for my parents. I had now reached an age where I could no longer decently share a bedroom with my sister, as I had always had to do for years in the two-bedroomed semi in Wakefield, and I'd earlier been promised that I would have my own bedroom. 'Where do I go?' I remember asking, in no small panic. It transpired that the larger of the two attics was to be my bedroom. Mum and Dad did their best to persuade me that it would be nice for me to have my own private room at the top of the house. I was not convinced: it seemed to me that I would be completely cut off from the rest of the family.
The attics were reached via a steep flight of stairs which had no safety rail. To be honest, it was more like a loft conversion. The floor boards and walls were bare and there was not even a door separating the two so-called bedrooms. There was no provision for any sort of heating and even as I inspected it in the middle of that April day it was cold and felt damp. There was a small un-curtained skylight in the sloping roof and a bare electric light bulb dangling from a ceiling rose. The light was controlled by two switches, one on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, the other at the top but out of my reach when in bed. In the middle of one night, only a day or two after moving in, I awoke after sleepwalking a few steps in total darkness. Some instinct had alerted me to danger and by gingerly inching one foot forward I discovered that I was literally teetering on the edge of the sheer drop to the floor below. Instantly wide awake, I realised where I was. Nothing would have saved me if I'd over-balanced. Carefully, I backed off and climbed back into bed, still in total darkness, where I shivered from the cold and trembled violently from the shock of my narrow escape. I didn't tell my parents what had happened because I knew Mum would have worried herself sick. I never walked in my sleep again from that day to this – as far as I know – and I never told anyone about that incident until now. Some weeks later I acquired a small torch which I kept under my pillow.