186 Clyde Road, Tottenham
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| Picture taken by Dad's father, Walter Granger. Note the extravagant nets and the bootscraper shared with the Hortons at number 184 |
I lived here for all but a few months (at the beginning and end) of the 1950s. Before that we (Mum & Dad and me) lived upstairs at 73 Chesterfield Gardens, a bow-fronted terrace off Green Lanes, Harringay, in a rented flat.
I’m not sure why we moved: it could not have been for more space, as we moved into Clyde Road with my Mum’s mother, who had rented it since 1939, and Mum’s young brother, Bill (who would marry and move out in 1953), and we didn’t have any more room to ourselves. There were just two small reception rooms, a kitchen with a range, a small scullery with a cold-water sink and an outside toilet downstairs, and two bedrooms and a boxroom (above the kitchen). Bill slept there on a put-you-up settee that had been used by his mum and dad when they brought up 10 kids in a two-up, two-down terrace even smaller than this one. That became my first bedroom after Bill moved out.
After my grandma died in January 1955 (I was alone in the house with her: the TV wasn't working properly and I couldn't get her to pay me any attention, she just sat there with her mouth and eyes wide open, dark and faded photos leering down from the walls), there was just the three of us, and I moved into the second bedroom. At some point dad bought the house for a few hundred quid (from the council I think – memory fails) and he celebrated by taking out the sash windows and putting in those flash casements you see in the picture, which he made himself: they were painted a red gloss verging on crimson.
The address no longer exists. That section of Clyde Road was renamed Elizabeth Place (after what used to be a rather dismal cul-de-sac where I would play football). The new houses were built on what used to be the back gardens of that side of Clyde Road, and their back gardens, ending in a high wall, are where the terrace of houses once stood. The only way I knew the place, last time I went back, about 15 years ago, was by the lamp-post that was built right outside soon after the picture was taken, opposite the junction with Bedford Road.
Update
On 20 January 2015 I did go back and tried to take a picture from the same place. I got the angle right, but was maybe a bit closer - the width of the road has changed, too.
