I was born in Balham in 1947. My mother was unmarried and gay.  From 1953 to 1963 she took over a boarding house in Paddington. The book is my illustrated childhood memories of my mother’s boarding house during the 1950s. It was a unique and crazy time with a house full of eccentric tenants.

 

My mother was with the ATS during the Second World War. Women were not called up to the ATS, as it was a voluntary service. The photograph is of my mother when she was in Palestine. She returned to the UK after the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. She wasn’t hurt, but lost friends in the bombing and it affected her deeply. In 1953 she took over the boarding house at 4 Sussex Place.

 

The boarding house consisted of twenty rooms in total, some bedsits and others for bed and breakfast. The bed and breakfast rooms were for travellers, lovers and sex workers. The bedsits were for the long-term tenants and had just enough space for a bed, wardrobe, gas fire, washbasin and gas ring for cooking. The bedsits were like little universes, each one reflecting a tenant’s life and dreams.

 

By 1963 the pressure of running the boarding house was too much and my monther had to go into hospital.  I was taken into care by Westminster City Council. I left school in 1966 and by good luck ended up having a career in publishing. I worked for a number of publishers and also ran my own business training of publishers in the UK, Eastern Europe, and South Africa.

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In 2017 I took up art and did a Foundation course at City Lit.  It was then I started developing the illustrations of my childhood. Those illustrations and stories have become a book. I grew up in the black and white world of post war  London and the smogs and terrible winter of 1963. The book reflects those times.

 

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