Allenton: The changing face of Allenton
 
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Netball was a great passion of mine, which has remained an interest until my retirement. The only trauma I suffered at that school was when Maureen Headworth was given the role of one of the three kings in the nativity play in preference to myself.
During those years, Allenton was a quiet suburb with few cars. The main form of transport was the bicycle. Heaven help anyone who tried to cross Osmaston Road from 12.10pm-12.20pm and again between 1.10pm-1.20pm as thousands of bikes filled the road after leaving Rolls-Royce and the railway, returning an hour later after lunch.
This absence of cars also meant that playing in the streets was a popular pastime. After school, we would play marbles, skipping and fag (cigarette cards). The latter involved standing a line of cards against a wall. Your opponents would flick their cards in an attempt to knock yours down, thereby winning the card if successful. Simple pleasures!
My mum and dad rode bikes to and from work. Dad worked at Frank Porter’s furniture shop on London Road. Every day, I walked to Aucott’s at the Mitre corner, where my dad would lift me onto the crossbar for a very uncomfortable ride home. Talking of Aucott’s – what an Aladdin’s cave. It was a grocers, greengrocers and hardware shop rolled into one.
Mr Aucott was a formidable character, clad in a button-through overall somewhat reminiscent of Arkwright in Open All Hours.
A few doors away stood an amazing sweet shop. After church on a Sunday morning, my friends and I would gaze longingly into the window wishing that post-war pocket money would stretch to the treats within. Window shopping was a popular pastime in the Allenton of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Supreme Fish Shop provided part of my favourite meal of the week, every Friday lunch time – soup and chips. Having negotiated the road full of bikes, I would call on my way home from school for a penn’orth of chips.
My mum had, meanwhile, cycled home from Pear Tree Infant School, where she taught for the whole of her working life, and would be heating a tin of tomato soup. I can still taste those soggy chips soaked with soup. Scrumptious!
The Broadway cinema was an important amenity in Allenton during the pre-television era. My father visited three times a week, every time the films changed. He felt so at home there that he made the journey across the road in his slippers.
The films were all black and white and the more risque ones even had couples kissing! More often than not they would have an X certificate and the posters advertising the films were inside the cinema rather than on the outside wall.
For us children, apart from trying to catch sight of the X-rated pictures when people went in or out, the slope in front of the cinema was great for bike and scooter riding – and sledging in winter. Round the back, the huge iron fire escape was the venue for many games.
I remember Mr Cave, the watch mender. Penny Wilkinson (my best friend at the time) and I used to stand for ages staring in through a small window while he worked. He had a single eyeglass, which always fascinated me.
Sometimes, he became so fed up with this observation that he would bang on his window. However, some 55 years later, I can still remember a poem he taught us though I can only take a guess at the spelling of the words.
“I die, chicka dee, woony poony, pom pom piney, ala bala basta, Chinese tea.”
What was all that about, I wonder? Flint Street Methodist Church (now St Martin’s, I think) was an important part of my life. Three times each Sunday I attended – morning and evening services and afternoon Sunday School.
I remember being cross each week as I had to miss the end of Educating Archie in order to get there on time. The Sunday School anniversaries were memorable, everyone balancing on specially constructed wooden tiers in their best clothes, singing their hearts out.
The annual Sunday School treat was usually at Osmaston, near Ashbourne. Races and a picnic were the favourite activities of those trips. In later years, I became a Sunday School teacher, secretary of the Scripture Union and member of the Church Council there.
Tea at Penny’s house was the highlight of my week. We always had strawberry jam sandwiches, a real treat, which were eaten in the room behind her parents’ draper’s shop. I can’t remember what we had for tea when she came to my house but it was nothing as exciting as red jam.
Another good friend was Ann Matchett. I used to call for her every morning before school. Her mother had a fascinating job, mending net. Even at 8.30am, she would be sitting there with a sack full of yards and yards of white net, mending the holes. What puzzled me was how she found the holes in material that was already full of holes.
Ours was the first house, in the block between Bingham Street and the Supreme Fish Shop, to be converted into a shop. That was when my family moved to Shelton Lock, when I was 13.
Shortly after, a similar fate awaited most of the other houses along that row. Allenton is now a thriving, busy shopping centre, with cars packing pavements and roads.
Gone are the trolleybuses with poles that frequently came off the wires, as we called them. Gone, too, are the smartly uniformed conductors and conductresses with their machines that punched holes in different coloured tickets, according to the destination.
Also gone is the milkman with his measuring jugs. Quarter, half and full pints of milk would be ladled into an earthenware jug and left on the doorstep each morning.
Supermarkets and bread shops have superseded the baker’s van, which called on alternate days. A long pole was used to pull out wooden trays that held row upon row of freshly baked bread. No more do we hear the calls of the rag and bone man with his horse and cart.
I remember the excitement when Borsley’s superstore took shape. After all, no-one had ever seen such a huge shop outside the town centre and it evolved right across the road from my house.
I still pass through Allenton every week. So many memories. So many changes. If Ann Matchett, Jean Ford, April Bailey, Barbara Wain, Christine Pratt, Mick Bailey or any others who remember those times read this, please get in touch with me. Strange to think that my childhood friends have probably also reached retirement age. Maybe we could meet for coffee in one of the Allenton cafes. No such luxuries for the children of the ’40s and ’50s.
This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.
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