Tony Cunnane's Early Years 1935-53

Our semi was different from the other five pairs in Cotton Street because it was set back quite a long way from the street itself, presumably to make best use of the available land. There was a long pathway from the front gate to the front door, and an extensive front garden, much longer but narrower than all the others. The front door opened into a hallway with the staircase on the right leading to the upper floor, the kitchen and bathroom off to the left, and the living room straight ahead. The kitchen window overlooked the front garden but there was a second entrance into the kitchen at the side of the house. In the space underneath the staircase there was a small larder with white-washed plaster walls. Inside the larder was a small wooden free-standing ‘meat safe’ with a wire mesh front and back. The mesh allowed fresh air to circulate within but kept flies and other insects without. In the days before refrigerators most houses had some sort of cool larder for storing perishables.

In what we called the ‘out back’, a rough area that passed for our back garden, stood a large, black, windowless and decrepit wooden shed with a black felt roof. It seemed a really mysterious and forbidding place to me and my sister. This shed was so out of keeping with the rest of the house that I assume it was an old store left behind by the builders. Dad used to keep his gardening tools in it but the rest of the family rarely ventured inside.

At the rear of the semi-detached houses was a wide stretch of waste ground, stretching from the railway embankment all the way to Tew Street; this was known to all the occupants of the street as ‘Our Piece’. This area got extremely muddy in wet weather and for that reason when walking to and from school we usually went the longer way round via the main streets. The image on the right, taekn in 2008, shows 'Our Piece', and the waste ground at the rear of the semis on Cotton Street. Our house is/was beyond the white-fronted garage at the far end on the right - that is roughly where our black, windowless, wooden shed was 'out back'.

On the right are the ends of the long rear gardens of the other Cotton Street semis, while on the left are the rears of Avondale Street. Also just about visible beyond a vast expanse of undergrowth that is definitely post-1940s, is the former LMS railway embankment, still operational for Northern Rail local trains and, from May 2010, for Grand Central trains to London Kings Cross via Pontefract. On the skyline, part of the 99 Arches viaduct of the East Coast Main Line can be seen through the trees.

The bottom image shows the 0742 Grand Central train for London Kings Cross arriving at Wakefield Kirkgate's platform 3 on 25 May 2010 (click on the image to pop up a larger version).

Our ‘out back’ was quite small because our house was set back, but all the other semis had long back gardens. One or two were already cultivated as vegetable plots in 1939 when we moved in, but the rest became more and more overgrown with weeds as time passed. The cultivated ones were where the man of the house was still in residence, while the uncultivated ones were where the husband was away at the war. One of Dad’s first jobs was to plant our front garden with lots of vegetable plants – I remember especially carrots, cabbage, potatoes, peas and runner beans. This was known by the Government of the day as “Digging for Victory”, a campaign that had started in the autumn of 1939. For all our time in the house, however, the rear garden in the 'outback' remained uncultivated because it was, as Dad always put it, “too difficult to work” and all our vegetables and flowers were in the long front garden.

A large communal brick air raid shelter was built in 1940 on Our Piece, more or less in the foreground of my 2008 image (top), but it was never used as an air raid shelter. From about 1943 it became a play area but shortly after the end of the war it was completely demolished because the interior had become disgusting.

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