It's very much a social history of Britain in the years after the Second World War when the class system was rife. Quite a bit of it illustrates through people's diaries and comments made at the time about how the "classes always kept to themselves".
It covers the springing up of New Towns like Stevenage and Harlow and the ultimate recovery from the bombings of the Second World War.
In most ways it was a different world from that in which we live today but there are similarities. Petty vandalism seemed to be rife and I was particularly interested in the way new housing sprung up with the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordering a massive building programme that saw many people owning or renting their first house after living with parents. Many moved out from London to places like Stevenage and found themselves swapping one bedroom in a relative's house to having their own council house with indoor toilets and bathrooms.
I spent quite a lot of my childhood at my grandmother's in Rupert Street in Norwich. I believe that Rupert Street was badly hit during the war and that's something I need to do some research on. Whether Number 97 was an original or rebuilt house I don't know. I suspect it was original as it had no bathroom.
It technically had three bedrooms but two of them were together and you couldn't enter one without going though the other which seems a strange design fault. It was a mid terrace house with an outside toilet which was next to the coal shed. Today I can't envisage a house without an indoor toilet and with no bathroom of any kind, but in those days we just accepted what there was none and got on with it. If you wanted a pee in the night there was always the chamber pot under the bed.
As a youngster I don't remember ever having the need for a wee in the night. Come to think of it I don't remember ever having a wash when staying there but I must have had one.
On page 84 (Kindle edition) of the book we have an interesting piece with a diarist talking about the new housing.
"Social classes all mixed up, for example: nobody likes that, you know, people like to keep their own class, in practice. Then, there's no privacy - think of it, front gardens in common. And the back gardens divided only by wire, so your neighbour knows all about you. And to think of it on washing day. And there's going to be a community centre. Yes, it's not a joke, there really is. A community centre! Planners are nuts on palliness."
What an illuminating passage this is on the way people lived in the early 1950s. The suggestion that people shared their lives with neighbours seems to be something alien to the writer who obviously wants to keep himself to himself. Obviously the inference is that on washing day your neighbour would look at your bras, pants and smalls on the line and make an immediate assessment about you as a human being.
It also shows that people were regimented after the war. I still remember that washing day was always Monday. The idea being that washing was a start to the week when you cleaned your clothes from the previous week. Now, of course, every day is washing day.
It made me smile to see the reference and obvious horror that planners/builders were looking to build "a community centre" where people (shock horror) would be expected to meet and socialise. Now whenever we have a new development the cry is for a community hall or similar to be included. How things have changed. People are obviously much more gregarious and much less judgemental today than in the 1950s. That fear of others obviously comes from the war, although that conflict also served to bring people together.
Here in Hethersett I am looking forward immensely to the day when a new pavilion is built on our playing field. This idea has been in the planning stage for over a decade. I am proud of the fact that I was one-third of the initial team that obtained planning permission for the new build to replace something that I once got in trouble for describing as a brick s-------e. I described it as a brick s because that's exactly what it was and is. Totally inadequate for the needs of a village our size.
It's taken quite some time to get to where we are today where the build now looks like becoming a reality. We can't wait to get a community facility, unlike those people in the 1950s who were suspicious of somewhere the different classes could mingle.