New House in Wakefield 1939
Late in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war and my 4th birthday, my first Lancashire exile ended when Dad was posted from Strangeways to Wakefield Prison. I’m quite sure my parents were delighted with the news when they got it because it meant that the family had to move, or ‘flit’ as it was known in those days, back to the West Riding. I remember very little of our time in Salford, apart from the nuns incident, the birth of my sister, and my friend Little Tony, but I don’t think it had been particularly happy for my parents. Two days after moving into our new house in Wakefield, we learned that the house we had recently vacated in Salford had been completely demolished by a stray German bomb possibly intended for Manchester docks.
This time, instead of moving into a prison house, we moved into a brand-new
rented house on Cotton Street, a cul-de-sac off Denby Dale Road, the main road
out of Wakefield towards the west. The image on the left shows the street in
2005 but when we moved in, the street and pavements still had very rough earth
surfaces and there were signs aplenty that the building contractors had only
recently moved on, and in some haste.These days local television and newspaper reporters frequently refer to areas such as Cotton Street as ‘close-knit communities’ where everyone allegedly knows everyone else. I do not think the residents of Cotton Street and the adjacent streets in the 1940s could ever have been described as close-knit.
Nevertheless, it was considered important in wartime to be friendly and helpful to neighbours but that did not mean you had to be going in and out of each other’s houses all the time. An important social attribute seems to have been the ability to keep ‘oneself to oneself’ and not appear to be pushy or nosey. Adults never visited neighbours without a specific invitation or reason and always referred to each other as Mr or Mrs as appropriate and never by their first names. On our side of the street my parents were soon on tentative speaking terms with several of our closest neighbours but, with one exception, even we could not have been described as close-knit.
On one side of the street there was a terrace of town houses which had obviously been there for decades and to me they looked dark and forbidding. I think quite a few of them must have been unoccupied because we rarely saw any signs of life. In fact the only person I remember seeing from that side of Cotton Street was an elderly man who lived almost directly opposite us. We learned from one of our neighbours that he was the Head Master of nearby Ings Road Secondary School. I never saw him smile and I rarely heard him speak. Eventually he moved away. He was probably a perfectly nice man. Now all that remains of Ings Road school is a plaque in the middle of a roundabout on one of Wakefield’s inner city dual carriageways.