I c, my first memory, I remember … coming to, in Gladys Road and we were outside with mum and I’d got erm, I think we’d just come from church or somewhere because I’d got my Sunday best on, my hair in ribbons, and three ladies over the road, I can’t remember their names, but they sort of said, ‘Hello, you look very pretty in your dress. Erm, how old are you?’ And I remember [Chuckling] saying, ‘I’m two-and-a-half.’ So, my earliest memories of being in Gladys Road was being in a, my Sunday best at two-and-a-half.
When we, when we grew up, wer, it, it was [swallow] g, g, loads of children, loads of kids, no cars, so we were able to sort of just play in the street. There were no car, there were no cars in the street, erm … there was just one car at the top of the road, the Pinfields [ph], they’d got one of these erm, I can’t remember but you used to have to wind them up, to undo the bot, wind them up at the front.
Crank them.
Crank, crank them, that’s right [Laughs] to start them. So we used to sort of play football and like the Coventry Road you’d have to erm be careful, you’d sort of play in the middle of the road, because the Coventry Road the ball could sort of go out onto the Coventry Road, but it wasn’t that busy then, so it didn’t matter.
the the road was like completely clear clean, there were always erm … a, again there were always people out … sweeping the steps and, and erm … everybody kept their own front clean and tidy and like it was always sort of flowers and erm, even washing the steps of, like all the, [Chuckles] the women [Laughs], the women would be out scrubbing the steps and, and keeping it really clean and tidy and obviously the milkman would come round, delivering the milk. The pop man would come round with the er, Tizer pop, oh and the [Laughs] the erm, the van, the Davenport, I remember my dad used to erm, what was that advert on the tele? ‘Beer at home means Davenport.’ And he used to have his bottle of stout. Dad used to like er, a bottle of stout and we used to have like … erm fizzy pop, I can’t even remember … can’t remember er the name.
Corona?
Corona! That’s right, yeah. Corona.
One of the things mum sort of said that it’s changed is that … different fam, families used to come in and stay for a, years and years and years. Whereas, there seems to be a big turnover now, erm, families come and er, quite a few of them are rent, are rented and when, I think it was all … erm, owner occupied er, everybody owned their own house when we moved in. But now, I would think … well, I wouldn’t know what percentage but quite a few, quite a number of the erm houses are, rented and we’ve had erm, there’s erm, different nationalities. I mean next-door, erm, there have been Asian families, Pakistan, we’ve had Romanians, erm … I think there’s Polish as well have lived there.
