Like most children born in the few years before WWII, Hilda Forrester’s schooling and home life were subject to upheaval, finds Michael Holland…
Hilda was born in St Olave’s Hospital to a father who worked in Lipton’s jam factory in Rouel Road and a mother who, like many women of that era, kept house and brought up the children while earning a bit of extra money on the side with a cleaning job at The Admiral Hawke pub off Jamaica Road.
Her early years were spent living in Swan Lane Buildings before the family were bombed out of their next home, the middle floor of a house in Rotherhithe. For the remainder of the war years, they lived with Hilda’s grandmother in Wilson Grove.
“I used to sometimes have to sleep in the air raid shelter,” recalls Hilda. Like many other children, Hilda and her older brother Barry were evacuated to escape Hitler’s bombs.
“We were first sent to a children’s home in Guildford, but then stayed in a nearby village called Shalford where mum was able to stay.
“The toilet was a hole at the end of the garden and my mother fell in it!
“She had to wash out her Lisle stockings as they were so hard to get in those days.”
Another flat was found for the family “over the bagwash shop near The Greg” until 1951, when they moved into the new Neckinger Estate.
Hilda’s first school was Farncombe Street where she enjoyed English and History: “We had a really strict headmistress, Miss Webb, but she was lovely,” she says.
From there they moved to Keetons Road School before Hilda went to Monnow Road, an all-girls secondary school.
Playing out with friends meant “skipping and alley gobs and things like that, and looking after my little brother in St James’s Park, where we loved going on the old slide there; Tommy Steele and his brother used to come and play – I went to his 14th birthday party in Frean Street,” she adds with a twinkle in her eye.
In her mid-teens, Hilda frequented the Bermondsey Settlement youth club and the legendary Clubland in Walworth – “because they had a good dance there on Saturday nights”.
After leaving education, Hilda went to evening classes to learn typing and began a life of working in offices, including WHSmith, Bennie Lifts, and office jobs in Smithfield meat market and Hatton Garden.
“At a chartered accountants, I had to put eight pieces of paper with eight pieces of carbon paper to make eight copies of the profit and loss balance sheets, and it was very hard to keep them all straight in the typewriter!”
Now, with a bit of money in her purse, Hilda would go to The Lilliput and the Thomas A’Becket, where someone would always get up and give a song, and also go dancing to live music around the bandstand in Southwark Park. The Savoy Club in Catford was also a favourite.
Hilda met her docker husband Ron Perry at The George in Camilla Road. “We got married in St Anne’s Church,” she says smiling at the memory.
The newlyweds first lived in “the upstairs of a gentleman’s house” in Ablett Street but, when the house was sold, the new owner put the rent up and different people moved in.
“The state they left the toilet we all shared in the backyard was too much for us so we went back to live with my mother for a year until the council found flats for all married couples living with a parent. We got one on the Bethel Estate.”
The Perry’s next move – now with a young family – was to the Arnold Estate where “we had two lovely bedrooms”.
Finally, on 10th June 1975, the family moved on to her forever homeon the Rouel Road Estate.
After Hilda had her children, Clare and David, she began working part-time in Southwark libraries as an assistant with the role of reading to children from local schools.
“Southwark Park School, St James, Galleywall… It was lovely; when reading to young children you realise just how much they absorb. I felt very, very lucky to come into contact with so many young children,” she says.
Hilda laughs as she tells of the regular women visitors to the Blue Anchor Library who came “every Thursday for their Mills & Boons”.
Enjoying working with children so much, Hilda started up a girls’ club in the hall on her estate for five to fifteen year-olds, which she ran for about eight years. “I still get stopped in the street by some of those girls who recognise me,” she says.
Eventually, Hilda’s love of dancing got more serious.
“My husband Ron started learning sequence dancing when he was 70,” begins Hilda, “and he became very good.
“There were lots of local places to dance: the Assembly Hall, Beormund Community Centre, Wade Hall…
“The women who went on their own loved Ron because he would always have a dance with them and give them a kiss on the cheek – and one said, ‘he always smelled nice’.
“He really was a lovely man… When he died I got a hundred condolence cards and 64 wreaths.”
She says the highlight of her 86 years was meeting Ron.
“I’ve had a wonderful life; lovely parents and friends and, despite the war, I remember enjoying my childhood, but, above all, I was proud of having met my husband and having such a wonderful, wonderful life with him.
“I feel very privileged.”
http://southwarknews.co.uk/news/culture/the-tale-of-tommy-and-sebastian/