Reflections on my Life With the Queen

From a friend in the UK.

 

About the queen.

Just me and my mam for tea tonight, chatted to her about what I thought I remembered as the truth, that as a young girl she moved from Corbridge St to Shaw Avenue (both pictured) in the week of the Coronation, and watched it on a TV. Misremembered misinformation, it turns out, they moved in the December of 1953 and didn’t have a TV for some years.

 When the Queen was crowned, my mam and auntie still lived in the upstairs of Corbridge St. She speaks of it fondly. There was no kitchen - a coal fire with a cast iron oven at side, and a gas thing that once had sausages cooking on it and Brenda tipped off a chair face down in the pan, still has the scar today.

At the top of the stairs was a sink and some shelves. No kitchen. Outside toilet shared with whoever lived downstairs. I spent half my time in Shaw Avenue, never saw my grandad in the bathroom, he always washed in the kitchen sink.

In Corbridge Street there was Mrs Gills, who my grandma called Lizzie Franks, a money lender. My mam says she had very fat legs and little feet, and my mam wondered if her ankles were tied with string. She’d lean out the window and say, ’Pat, tell your mam I’ve a £4 ticket for £2.’ A clothing coupon for a shop someone had swapped her for cash. My gran would buy it, then worry detectives were following her to the shop where she’d pretend to be the person whose name was on the coupon, and buy clothes. Clearly throwing caution to the wind to get a nice dress is in my genes.

Mrs. Bainbridge ran a bookies from her kitchen, my mam took the scraps of paper with a horse’s name on and a sixpence wrapped inside. Mrs Bainbridge had a nice flat and a Hoover. Nobody had ever seen a Hoover, quite a sight. If the plain clothes police ever asked my mam what she was doing, she couldn’t say about the bets. One day they raided Mrs. Bainbridge, but she was baking bread and put the betting slips in the dough and baked the lot.

While all this and more was going on, the Queen was crowned.

All my life I’ve thought, in the black and white photos of the 50s, my mam looked like the Queen. So elegant, such styled hair, so black and white in the past.

Later that year they did move to the house on the end of this terrace pictured. Everyone had a front lawn then and identical front doors the council painted the same for everyone. So this isn’t how it looks in my memory. I said tonight: well it must have been amazing moving from your 2 room flat to this - must have been like a palace. My mam said: it was nice. I’d seen a bathroom before though, because Auntie Mary lived on Prince Edward Road and she had one, but it was nice to have our own.

So long ago. It matters to me, this past. I will tell my daughter about it. I was happier in Shaw Avenue than any other house I’ve ever spent proper time in; I’ve literally no sad memories or anything in that house. Compare and contrast, I will say to my daughter in, 1953 - a woman was crowned with rubies and sapphires on a gold throne and what was left of an Empire curtsied . Your gran, also so elegant and young, moved into a house with a bath and a toilet. A post war political upheaval meant that council houses were built. A lot has changed since then, things have been gained and things have been lost.

My auntie Mary lived on a road named after a Prince and nobody could believe she had a bathroom. A bathroom! Some people’s families live on roads named after princes, and some people’s families get roads named after them. Some people probably had 30 bathrooms in one palace in 1953, some people couldn’t get used to washing in the one the council gave them.

I will leave it to my daughter what she makes of this.

*edit: there’s 78 bathrooms in Buckingham Palace