The Howdens

Inglefield Street park with the bandstand

The Howdens lived around the corner in Inglefield Street, which used to be known as Smith Street.  In fact, the play park in Inglefield Street was always referred to as Smith Street Park.  The mundane name of Smith to the poetic name of Inglefield was dicided prior to the 1940s.  On the ground in front of the bandstand was a large, tiled chessboard.  Around the chessboard, old men sat and moved enormous pieces around.  John the parky made sure that things were kept in order.  Any sign of trouble had him blowing his whistle at the offenders followed by a thick ear if they didn't obey.

A neighboring family, the Howdens, lived in Inglefield Street.  Parked outside the close-mouth was their Humber Hawk, a large, squat, grey car with a running board, conspicuous in the days when cars and telephones were ubiquitously black. Mr Howden was a gigantic man lying in bed, as I recall him, dying very quietly and surrounded by his family.  His bed was in an alcove in the kitchen and although he was expiring rapidly he was checking his watch and making sure it was exact and to the minute.  He had been a bus driver, long distance, and was still concerned about the right time.  Ironically, his time was quickly running out.

His wife, Mrs Howden, was a tall, lively woman who seemed to have a lot of energy and zest.  She would give me an annual every Christmas.  One I remember vividly was about Billy the Kid.  My parents had bought me a cowboy hat, leggings and holster with a silver gun that shot caps.  In bed at the Howden's one night, I was allowed to wear the whole outfit and I wet the bed.  In the morning I had an orange stripe around my middle where the dye had come off the gun belt.  I declared that the hot water bottle had burst.

Mrs Howden was a source of embarrassment.  One day in the Co-op downstairs she wished me a happy Christmas and kissed me on the mouth before I could avert my face.  I'm sure she was drunk.

Another day, she told my mother an embarrassing story about a matron in the hospital where she worked as a nurse, disregarding the fact that I was there, listening to her story.  Apparently there had been this matron who was an old battle-axe, as many were in those days.  She also had an Alsatian and she seemed very close to it.  “One day,” she related, “I was going upstairs and I looked through a skylight window above her door to the office and there she was on the bed with the dog mounting her from behind.”  After that there was a deathly silence as my Mum and I envisaged the scene.

Her son, Tommy, was five years older than me and he would take me into his living room and show me his latest records, which he played to me on his radiogram.  This is where I first heard Lonnie Donegan’s Rock on Line and Elvis’s Heartbreak Hotel.  There was also another 78 called The Deck of Cards where the narrator told a story with some moral message which I can’t remember except that it had a Christian theme.

Hazel, his younger sister who was a couple of years older than me, disappeared from the scene for a while as she was hospitalised with polio, not uncommon in those days.  Photos of her smiling while lying in an iron lung were passed around.  She could see the world only through a mirror placed above her head as she lay in the machine.  The metal contraption was horrible to look at and seemed to me to be a machine of torture.  A patient was placed in the large metal encasement and they were helped to breathe.  Hazel was always weak after her illness and wore metal callipers on her legs for a while.  Thankfully, children of my age were given sugar lumps at intervals, an antidote to the disease.