There was an outside loo, there was a coalhole and one has been able to gradually change it. But I remember when I moved in, two of the cottages still had gaslight and they had gaslight until 1972, when natural gas arrived and also, about the second week I’d moved in, I had a knock on the door from a lady who lived further down, and she said,’ can you come and help me, dear?”  Of course I went in to a completely unaltered cottage and I was absolutely shocked at the sort of poverty of it, really, and they were very poor.  It hadn’t really come home to me until that moment, I was one of the first lucky generation to move into the road and be able to start to modernise.

Of course, fifty years later, the cottages are all different, all lovely, and we’ve got younger people and mainly professional people, I was the first professional person in the road, now nearly everybody is professional, because of the pricing structure, I’m not saying it’s a very good thing.  The big change since I moved in that is unusual, is that then it was very much separate units, everybody kept themselves to themselves and now, 51 years later, we are a massive unit within the road; we have a road party every year, often with an excuse, like a royal birth or the Queen being 150, as I’m sure she’s going to be, but we have it anyway! We had one three weeks ago and there’s a huge camaraderie, I think I’ve got the key of every cottage, I know all the cottages, all the people, and that’s unusual for now. You couldn’t drop dead in Evelyn Road and not be found.  A very interesting survey was done of the cottages at the turn of the last century, which found in that, I think, 1911, there were about 90 people living in the road.  Then the following census, about 11 years later, you would find that probably at least three of seven children’s names were no longer there, because they would have died of presumably diphtheria or tuberculosis. I know also in the ’30s, there was a man lived here called Rivety Dick and he was called Rivety Dick because his name was Richard and his job was riveting china! So, Rivety Dick lived here and I know he died in my bedroom…