Old Battersea 1

 


This is where I was born: Kersley Mews, Battersea, London, in the middle of WW2. Our house was the one on the left half-painted white. My Grandma Sanders had the house next door, the one with prolific vines now hanging across it. She lived there until she died in the 1980s, but my parents moved to a bigger house soon after my younger brother was born, just beyond the church in the distance and about a hundred yards up to the right, in Bridge Lane.

In those days, Battersea was a working class area; so was the Mews, though there were up-market flats in Cambridge Road, over the back of the Mews to the right in the photo, built between 1850 and 1860. We think that the garages served them, the flanking park-side flats and the Kersley Street houses (the latter are found over the back of the left-hand Mews cottages) with hackney carriages and horses. My father remembered the time when the horses began to disappear and early cars started to take their place.

We’d visit my Grandma at least three times a week. If you look at the first floor of our house, there’s a door, the window of which is a half door. My Grandma had one, too. We think that, originally, part of the upstairs to the garages below was used for storage of food and tackle for the horses; bales and bundles could be lowered down from here on pulleys, rather than be carried downstairs.

By my Grandma’s time, the women in the Mews had those same pulleys strung with ropes between the houses; they were used for hanging out the weekly laundry. God help you if you visited on Monday morning just after the wash was pulleyed across the street! You were likely to get drenched as all the women did their big wash on the same day. If, as very occasionally happened, we had our mid-day meal there that day it was cold meat, bubble-and-squeak and pickles. I loved it, much to my chef mother’s unspoken disgust.

The garages were let out to small businesses after WW1, mostly car repairs, a small metal and welding operation, a cobbler and a couple of market traders who still kept a horse and cart. There was one horse and cart left when I was a child and my Grandma’s old ginger tabby, Billy, the fiend of the street, used to make it his business to go and sit with the stabled horse for at least a couple of hours daily. Only after that would he turn up for food and sleep.

The area, of course, has now been gentrified and the Mews cottages cost a fortune. Some of them have been gutted beyond belief in a race to have modern architects ‘re-design’ the interiors. I remember them having quite small rooms and my Grandma refused to part with the old Victorian cast-iron cooking range in her kitchen – great for toast on a toasting fork in front of a roasting fire after my mother had taken us for a winter’s walk in nearby Battersea Park; not so good for the daily emptying of ashes, cleaning and black-leading of the grate. Ah, well, other times, other ideas, I suppose!

Seemingly, all this reminiscing has nothing to do with poetry. But it does. The poem below, "Provenance," is partly to do with those days.