Jill Phillips | Life on Lamlash Street in 1960's Post-War London

Jill Phillips | Life on Lamlash Street in 1960's Post-War London

Heather: Hi, Jill, thanks for joining me today and being willing to share your stories.

Jill: Oh, it's lovely to be here. Heather, thank you for asking

Heather: So you recently wrote a book about your family could you tell us about why you started writing that book?

Jill: Yeah, sure. So the book is called Lamlash Street, Lamlash is L A M L A S H because that's where I lived. and this was back in 1963, it's set in the early 1960s. The reason I wrote it is because as the years go by, I noticed that more and more, my family were basically dying. I know, um, I had 12 aunts and uncles and one by one, they're all disappearing from my life.

Uh, fortunately my mum was the youngest. So in the end it was my mum and her sister, my Aunt Mary, and I was quite close with Aunt Mary's family growing up. So that had meaning for me as well. Then poor Aunt Mary passed on my uncle passed on, who had lived with us back in the sixties.

And so it was just my mom and then my dad started to get Alzheimers. So his memory was go, so all this was happening to me. And, um, so a couple of things went through my mind. Number one, I really wanted to get that those days down on paper, because I don't think, unless we talk about it with the generations to come will understand what sacrifices were made by our families, in my case, back in the 1960s. And the other thing is I thought, well if I don't write it down maybe I won't remember any of this.

Heather: Hmm.

Jill: because my dad having Alzheimers, oh man, I'm going to be next on the list thing sort of thing, you know? So, um, I think it was the need to really have this documented. I didn't really start out saying "I'm going to write a book and I'm going to be an author."

No, nothing like that at all. It was really just to get the information down on the page so that there may be one family member could pick it up in five years, 10 years time say, oh, really? Is that what happened back in the sixties? And that was it really.

Heather: Yeah, I read the first little part of your book. And one of the things I noticed is you're saying that we have this general idea of what the sixties were. And you were saying that might be a generalization, but it wasn't exactly the way it was for your family.

Jill: That's right. The, so there's a sense that the swinging sixties, if anyone still remembers that phrase, with the Beatles and can't be straight. So free love and I think it was fantastic, but the reality was in the early 1960s, most of the country was still sort of digging their way out of the Second World War in a sense because, uh, there was really a lot of shortages of housing.

So there weren't enough houses for people, because during the Second World War, a lot of the houses were bombed in the war. and the housing that was there was really poor. I mean, we lived in a house was over a hundred years. And in my brother's bedroom, I can still remember, there was actually a hole drilled in the ceiling so when it rained the ceiling wouldn't collapse from the weight of the water, it would drip into the bucket, into his room. Plumbing was almost non-existent. Everything was an effort. That the windows rattled, you didn't have to open the windows and get fresh air. There's only like single pane and they rattled and it was, it was awful.

So housing stock was really, really a struggle. And on top of that, it was still very much for women, a difficult time, because back in the 19, early 1960s, women still had to have their husbands sign, any sort of loan agreement. They weren't able to do anything independently by themselves at all. If you were got pregnant and you were bad, you had to be married in those days otherwise nobody spoke to you. Then you had to actually give up work to look after children. So there was no career ladder for women. It was all the men coming back from the war back in the late fifties, had taken over the women's jobs, which the women had done very adequately through the war.

And then by the 1960s, we were homemakers and that was all we were allowed to be. So it was a very different time. And I think that's the other thing, because I mean, I have a daughter and she says, oh, today's terrible, Mum, the things we have to deal with. Yes, up to a point, but you need to get some perspective on that and recognize where we have come from as women and how things have improved for us, despite the new challenges we have. So I wanted that piece of context to come forward as well.

Heather: And I think it's really easy for us to not realize how close the past really is to us because your experiences like your daughter is completely different and yet those experiences have such an effect on the present.

Jill: They do very much so, because we talk about that sometimes. So I, I wanted her to understand where I had come from, but also in terms of family traits, which is, I think one of the greatest influences that take place right now. So for example, my mother was very stubborn and highly organized. I tend to be that way and now Clara is not as organized, but she's very stubborn as well.

So I think it's really important that we link back to the prior generations and understand we don't just start on the day we're born. And, we start from nothing, no. We start from a history, we start from some genetic information that comes through. Also the way I was raised by my mother impacts on the way I'm raising Clare, she's 32 now, so she's grown up. But I think we have to recognize the achievements of our earlier generations, that when I was doing my, I, I had my, my graduate degree. Right. So I was doing a lot of research. And so one of the things they talk about in research is you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

So what that means is that people before you have made their contribution and then you come along, you make your contribution on top. Well, that's how I see families. So my mum had her contribution and that I've added to that. And Clara, hopefully will add to that as well. So we never come with ground zero. We always have a start from our families. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good, but it's still there.

Heather: Can you share an story or an example about how your mother's parents influenced her, which then influenced you?

Jill: Uh, so my mother's parents, they were very, very poor family of 12. They lived in a house. This is all in Southeast London in England. They lived in a house with no plumbing at all apart from on one set of steps up on the left, apparently my cousin told me this, there was a sink in the corner. It's a triangular sink with one cold water tap. That was the plumbing for the whole house. There was nothing else. And there were like 13, 14 people living there. But that was normal for those days. So this is back before the war. So because my mother saw that poverty, when she got married and as she had children, she decided that we were never, ever going to live in those terrible conditions.

I don't know what made her think they were terrible conditions, because compared to today they certainly are, but she swore we would never, ever live like them. So when we came along, my mother valued education because she saw that as a way out of poverty. And she also was very, very single minded. Fortunately she amount of my dad who was a very quiet man.

So, um, she really. Guided us through for want of a better word, to a better life. Whereas like I said, I haven't now I have a graduate degree and she was very proud of that. My brother has been in a professional trade his whole life. We both have our own houses. Our children have their own houses. So where my mother's family came from they didn't have very much, but fortunately it mum knew that she didn't want that. So it was this round about sort of way of, of an influence. But I think her mother was fairly well-educated as well for the day. Her mother was the daughter of a doctor, which was considered very, very upper-class in those days. So I think that influenced her as well.

Heather: You've mentioned, World War II, which obviously had a great impact on your family. Can you share some of the gore family experiences and how the war impacted them.

Jill: Well mum again, mum and my aunts, my aunts. there were two sisters, uh, my aunt lived with us as well at Lamlash Street. It was like a downstairs apartment they lived in. So she was a big influence on my life at that point. During the war, one was 10 and one was 13 and so they were evacuated.

They were taken from London because it was too dangerous for the Blitz and all the children were into the countryside and they were basically put with strangers for two years until the bombing had ceased and they could come back again. The first family that they will put with was in Wales and she said they only really wanted them there because they actually added to their ration.

So they will live on bread and jam for the year that they were with them. And if somebody came round to check, then they would get a really good meal that night, but the rest of the time they were just getting bread and jam. So the family basically took their rations. And mum's only 10. And then the second place they went to was a good bit, about a hundred miles away from there.

She said they were very nice family, looked after them. There, there was no issues that way at all. but one day they were coming home from school and had the school uniforms on and a World War II fighter pilot was, was firing on them on the way home from school. And they had to jump into the, I think she said it was brussel sprouts patch, and she said, and we'd just about managed to do that. They didn't know, we could see the ak, ak, ak, see these bullets hitting in the dirt as they went by. So she went to the people they were staying with and said, well, this has happened and they said, "well, did you get hit?" I said, "no." she said, "well, that's all right and you just going to have your supper." And so they'll just have to go off. And then there's just no escape escaped bed with their lives because they were more worried about the fact that the, the, there was a store in town in the village, and that had been bombed.

They were more worried about the store being bombed than they were about. Well, because that, there was actually real casualties as opposed to my mum and my aunts. And the second time that happened was when they were back in London and they were on the way to school again. And this was in the middle of London, a fighter pilot again, was firing on the ground to hit the civilians.

And I said, so what did you do, mom? She said, well, we had to run into the library. She said, To escape the bullets. It's like, oh, right mom. Okay. Then, um, when I can see why you're a bit of a nervous person after that, but yeah. I mean, it was astounding what they went through, astounding.

Heather: You talk about your uncle in your book. Can you tell us a little bit about him?

Jill: Okay. So, as I said earlier on Uncle was living with us. Uncle was a lovely man, very quiet. And as slightly rosy cheeks, which was from, uh, he was a Stoker in the war, he used to stoke coal into the boilers. And there was blow back from the little explosion which hit his face. And so the engineer saw this is okay, cause he was only seventeen. And he basically had burns on his face, really, is what we would say now. And so, he said, the best thing you can do, my lad, he said, is put engine oil on it. So he put engine oil on Uncle's face and said you sit there for five minutes. And so Uncle sat there for five and he said. Okay. You're fine now, back to shoveling the coal.

Um, so he was in the merchant Navy. and so w one of the things he did was he was on the crossings from England to the US to pick up supplies to resupply England during the war, because they didn't have enough supplies to keep the country, the basics of the country going.

So America was providing supplies for them. He wrote some how I know these stories is he wrote some of them down on a digital sort of jotting note pad thing. And after he passed on, I came across it when we were cleaning through his, his apartment. And so what he said was that they were only 17, they were in New York and I think they went to a cake baking competition and all the lads from this ship were asked to judge these cakes. And they were given a hand knitted, mittens, and hats by the ladies who had knitted them for these brave soldiers and service people in, in UK. But he said on the way back, one of their convoy was hit.

They used to have, it was merchant Navy ships and in between there'd be Royal Navy ships to provide support and protection. So they alternated all these ships and they literally were convoyed right across the Atlantic. Um, but, uh, U-boat, U-boat came along, a submarine, and it fired on Uncle's ship, just missed them, but it hit a ship a little bit further along.

And he said they could hear the screams of the people who were in the water. And he said they weren't allowed to stop because if they stopped they were the next target. So they had to keep going. They wouldn't, were not able to stop to pick up any survivors at all. The most they could do was to throw some nets netting over the side so if one of these poor souls managed to grab onto the netting then they could pull them up, but that was it. So my uncle was only 17 when that happened, but you wouldn't know that. I mean, he was a very nice man, always pleased to see you always interested in what you had to say and do. And he's one of my favorite people.

And really one of the reasons I wrote the book is when, uncle left the apartment part of to myself and to my brother, we sold it and I use some of that money to help me write the book. So that's why the book exists in a sense.

Heather: Oh, well, that's nice. So you center the book in pretty much one year in the sixties. Why did you choose to write it that way?

Jill: I was struggling. What I did to, to begin with. I wrote down as many of the stories that I could remember it, and then I sort of realized they were sort of all around the sixties. And then I thought, well, you know, I, I wanted to get Uncle's stories in there as well, so I did flashbacks as it turned out with Uncle's stories.

And I actually, um, I asked the advice of a book coach because I was struggling. I've never written a book before. I've written the thesis, but that's completely different and I don't think anyone ever bought a copy of my thesis anyway, so that's fine. And again, because I have some finance so I can draw on.

So I got some advice and I was saying, this is what I want to do and this is how I want to do it. And he said, well, have you ever thought of, you know, just keeping it to the one year? I said, well, I absolutely love Christmas. The last chapter in the book I wrote in about, I think it must be two hours.

It was so easy to write. It was a dream. And he said, well, why don't you bookend it with Christmas? So it starts and ends with Christmas cause I absolutely love those big family Christmases from the time, and that was really the structure for the whole book. And then a lot of the other stories are tied in with the times of the year.

You know, like obviously summer holidays in July, August. Daffodils growing around Easter time. So those sorts of things, I could tie into an actual calendar time and that's, that's how I structured the book basically.

Heather: One of the things that I love about family history is that it's general history, but on a very personal level. And that kind of comes across in your subtitle, a portrait of 1960s, post-war London through one family's story. Can you tell me about how you kind of blended together your family's stories with the general history that was going on at the time?

Jill: Well, what I did, I, I wrote down as many of the stories that I could record and I was also talking to mum as well and other family members. So I gathered all the stories together and then what I did was I thought, well, readers of today are going to need some context on this because they always assume many of these things that we have now I've always been here.

 For example, laundry was one of the things that have changed radically. So now we just open the door and pop in a pod and put in the washing and laundry and it's done, you know, basically just press a few buttons and that's it. Well back in the day, laundry was a full day event, always on a Monday because everyone changed their clothes the weekend.

And you had a lot less clothing and you wore your clothing, three or four times, three or four days in a row. I can even remember stories and Mum would say, well, w we didn't do this in our family because we were special, according to Mum. But in other families, um, if they have their underwear, they, she said, well, first day you wear your underwear, the, the regular way around then the second day you turn inside out so it lasts for two days instead of one. Because in those days, a lot of women had to wash everything by hand, like a washing board in the sink and that was the only way they had but we had all the modern cons. We actually had a washing machine.

But even, so we had to drag it out into the middle of the kitchen. You used to have to take buckets and fill the thing up. Then it used to be on for about an hour because it had to come up to boiling temperature. The sheets were literally boiled in this, this thing and agitated. and then you had to, after that. So then we had no dryer, just a mangle. So we used to squeeze all the water out with the mangle, then it had to go up two flights of stairs to be hung up on the washing line.

Then you come back down again. Then you have to empty out all the water from the washing machine. And there was water everywhere on the floor. There was steam everywhere. And then it got pushed back into the corner again, cause it was going to be used for another week. And by the time all this was done, then eventually the sheets were dry and the other things were dry and then they came down and then you started ironing.

So Mum started like eight in the morning. I think it was like nine, 10 o'clock at night before everything was ready to go and on the close horse and hanging up and all this sort of thing. Whereas now it's so completely different. So that's why I thought it was important to provide the context the history and the stories behind what I was talking about because a lot of people wouldn't have a sweet clue what that really meant. So that that's, that's how it came about.

Heather: Yeah. And even something as simple as doing laundry had a huge impact on their lives, a whole day, dedicated to doing laundry. You can kind of see why we live in a different world. Now, when we can just go throw it in and then leave it and come back later and it takes us like 15 minutes of our time instead of a whole day.

Jill: Yes. Exactly. Yeah. And we did, like I said, we didn't have that many clothes and a lot of bedding was never washed. It was just put on the line and brought back in again. Airing, used to air out things.

Heather: One of the things that I read on your website, you said that that time should have been a time of terrible want, but somehow was a time of much richness. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Jill: Yes. That's because I was surrounded by family. There must, must've been 200 family members within like a five mile radius of where I lived. I grew up with tons of cousins and aunts and uncles. There was always one aunt or uncle, usually aunts, dropping round, little bit of gossip, what was going on. And if there was a family wedding, which, you know, they were getting to the age where lots of the cousins were getting married.

So every couple of months, probably every six months, we are a family wedding. And so my life was always full of lots of people I could go to. So say, for example, Mum was in a bit of a state that day over whatever. And she was into nag mode, basically. I would go down to my aunts who live just downstairs and say, "I don't know, what's got into Mum. You know, she, blah, blah, blah." So Aunt would say to me, " don't worry, Jill, you just stay down here, I'll go and I'll speak to your mother and I'll explain to her what's going on." Anyway so that's what I, she would trot upstairs and, and about 20 minutes later, 'cause I'd be down there with Uncle, talking to Uncle. She'd say oh, that's all right now you just go out and play. On your mom's fine. Now don't worry about it. So there was, if your parents were a little bit odd, you always have a lot of other people that you could go to. And if it got really bad, you could always go and to talk to your cousins, "I don't know what these parents are talking about." I, I, so you always had someone else to go to, and I actually loved that.

And also you knew everybody that you knew that were all related. So you go to these huge family weddings and you knew they were all related to one way or the other. You also knew that my mum, my aunts and my other aunt would be sitting there complaining about everybody as well. They'd be sitting in the corner table all smoking, talking, and did you see so-and-so and did you, and did you know about this? So gossip, you know, everywhere, right? So, but it was all about family and that's what the richness was all about. It was, we , . We felt really safe as children because we knew there was a huge number of people there who were sort of looking out for us in their own way.

Heather: You moved to Canada since your youth, so how have those family relations been since that was such a big part of who you were as a child, but now you're on a different continent.

Jill: Okay. Well, technically I'm still back in the UK.

A couple of things. So number one, the family really split up in the sixties when we all moved for better housing, better education for the kids and better job opportunities. So what I had and why that was really special for me back in the sixties is because that was a time where there was tons of family.

And then by the end of the sixties, most people had moved away trying to get better opportunities for their families and remember those days, no internet. Children were not allowed to use telephones. So there's no cell phones. So there was once you moved away, if you're not within walking distance, you have no connection with people. The only way you could connect was by writing letters and really even the kids in those days, didn't like many letters. So that, that was the family had sort of broken up. We saw them a few times, when we moved, but not very often.

And in terms of where I'm living right now, I came over to the UK two years ago for two months. Because mom was getting more and more frail, dad had just passed away. I thought, oh, I'll go over and do my bit and see how mom's doing, help her along, be a bit of a caregiver and so on. So I was here for two months then COVID hit. And so there's Justin Trudeau on say, if you're a Canadian citizen, you have to, do this was on a Sunday, you have to be back by Friday or we're closing the borders. It's like, what is going on? Um, so I spoke to Claire, I said, do you mind? Cause it's only been another couple of months now and um, I just want to help mum through this. And now mom passed away last January, from COVID and we all caught COVID and I'm still here right now, hoping to get back at some point, but I have UK citizenship, so, you know, it's it's it's okay.

Um, and I have reconnected with a lot of family here. So, sitting bull, which is about, it's about an hour's drive from here. I have a cousin there. She has nine grandchildren and so they have lots and lots of family there. Um, my, one of my cousins, I grew up with w I get in touch with him almost daily, so I've got more family now, but different family members. Um, so Yeah, it's been interesting.

Heather: What advice would you give to someone who's been looking into their family history and might want to put it together into a book?

Jill: Okay. Well, number one is don't think of it as a book. Cause the pressure there is, is phenomenal. Don't think of it that way. Only think of it as wanting to write down your family stories. Don't think about plot lines. Don't think about chapters. Don't think about what the book's going to look like. Cause that's just too distracting.

All you do is you go see your various family members that have those stories. And if you have them yourself, write them down, just write them down so their documented. Cause that's sort of what I did. And then I had all these independent different stories and I strung them together eventually into a book, but I did not start out by saying I'm going to be an author.

When my book was actually on Amazon, it's like, oh my goodness, I didn't expect this to happen. So just think of it as writing down your family stories so you can still remember them and family members that come along, the newer ones will be able to look back and just get an understanding of what the life was like then.

Heather: Well, thank you so much for sharing your stories. And I will have links in the show notes for your website and where people can get a copy of your book.

Jill: That's lovely. Thank you very much.