Stories
Visiting Grandparents
On some Sundays in the mid nineteen fifties Dad, Mum and I would visit Gran and Granddad Jeffries at 79 Glade Court, Ilford, Essex for tea, a journey which involved four buses and quite a bit of walking in each direction. There wasn't very much time to have tea and a chat before we had to set out home again.
The journey was as follows -
- Walk down Lakedale Road to Plumstead High Street
- Take whichever bus came along to Woolwich
- Walk through the Woolwich Foot Tunnel to North Woolwich
- Take a route 101 to Manor Park
- Take a route 25 to Ilford
- Take a route 123 to the end of Caterham Avenue (Where Auntie Glad and Uncle John lived)
- Walk to Glade Court.
The route 101 used to cross the entrances to the Royal Docks, which in the 1950s were still very busy. Sometimes the bus would be delayed as the road bridge was raised to allow a large ship to pass in or out of the docks. When traffic was held up like this it was known as "Catching a Bridger", and Dad would sometimes say before we left - "I hope we don't get a "Bridger". The term was also used on other London docks.
I think that Glade Court was probably a number of blocks of flats for retired people, and I assume that Gran and Granddad moved there when the house at Redbridge Lane became to big for the two of them. Gran and Grandad lived on the ground floor in number 79. When you entered the block, the inside was bare concrete and rather bleak, and when the outer door closed behind you it did so with a reverberating clang, that I can still hear in my head now.
This photo, taken with Gladys in her garden in Caterham Avenue, gave me quite a thrill when I first saw it a couple of years ago, because this is just how I remember them. Granddad always seemed rather forbidding
On other occasions we would make much the same journey to see Dad's sisters Glad and Margaret. Sometimes we stayed overnight with Glad. On one occasion, cousin Michael warned me not to get out of bed or the crocodiles would get me and I probably beleived him. When I mentioned this to Gill she said that he probably got it from her as she used to tell him all sorts of things.