Maurice Cleaver: Early years in Balsall Heath

Maurice Cleaver gave an interview recently to Val Hart and Chris Sutton. This is the first part where he talks about growing up between the Wars and the period after the Second World War.

I lived in a number of houses either side of Ladypool Road. My first one was in Chesterton Road. We were the first house in a terrace and we were actually fronting onto the street. One of my first memories was getting out of my cot and getting into bed with my mother. There was a large family called the Coombs next door; I think there were about six children and they had also got a parrot. We shared the lavatory with the Coombses and my father used to get quite annoyed because all the kids were using the toilet in the morning and he couldn’t get to it. He had originally been a tool maker during the First World War but he ended up out of work because so many men came back from the war. Not long the end of the Second World War when there was a gradual return of men. What he did was he became a window cleaner. He did a proper job, he would replace panes of glass and repair sash cards, that sort of thing. He kept his ladders at a shop on the corner of Roshven and Clifton Road along with his hand cart. There was no vans and roof racks, things like that. The back of the barrow had a hook with a bucket hanging on it. He set up on his own, not as part of an existing round. He started the round from scratch. When I was little I would go with him sometimes and he collected the money in the evening. It was mostly domestic residences but he also did the bank on the corner of Belgrave Road so he got quite a long way over from Ladypool Road.

When I was three we moved to a terraced house in Colville Road and we had our own bog there so it was quite a step forward. From there I started school and the local school was called Dennis Road then but it is now called Anderton Park. I was five and normally you went through to fourteen. I was quite surprised on the first morning that we started school because there were quite a number of kiddies in this first class that were in tears, which seemed rather odd I thought. My mother used to take me of course, which meant coming out of Colville Road and walking along Stoney Lane. I think she was called Miss Unitt the first teacher. After a while I moved to another class and I became aware I enjoyed drawing. There are some photographs somewhere of me as a raindrop in a school production. So dad was a window cleaner and I was a raindrop!

There was a curious arrangement with the people next door to us. The lady of the house used to go out boozing with a lodger and the husband was a tiny little guy – very much under her thumb; you can only guess what the situation was. Anyway we had got a little front or back garden, whereas the house in Chesterton Road had only got a yard. When I was about seven we moved to 129 Oldfield Road, I am sure a lot has been swept away now. The house we had there, you stepped out of the front door onto the pavement. We had a fairly large back garden. I continued to go to school which was quite a jaunt from the top of Oldfield Road. You could walk across the park and quite often at lunchtime (we started at 9, worked till 12 and then we had a 2 hour lunch) I went home and got the main meal of the day, father would come home too and we would eat together. My mother wrapped something like a shilling in a piece of paper and sending me to a pork butchers on Ladypool Road and get pork chops, things like that. Mother would do stews, she made faggots…. There was a large greengrocers almost at the bottom of Oldfield Road called Westwoods. They used to have a sign on the corner saying Nuff Sed. They also had another one on the corner of Brunswick Road and Ladypool Road for a time. We enjoyed our food. For tea we would have all sorts of things. I remember sitting in front of the fire with the toasting fork and we would have dripping on toast – delicious.

I used to go on some Sundays to Clifton Road where my grandmother lived in Ash Grove. Her pension was ten shillings a week and she gave you a sixpence quite often - which was quite a part of it. I used to go into the house next door to a Mrs Long (?) and she had got a son who was at the Blue Coat School and she had also got my uncle Jim! He went there for weekends!

Ladypool Road was quite good. They had got a lot of decent shops there. There was a cinema called the Olympia and there was no balcony, just one floor sloping down. That was our local and sometimes we would go and see George Formby films, with my father and my brother. I also used to go on Saturday afternoons and quite often they would have the main feature which wasn’t for children but we went for the serial that was cowboys, things like Buck Jones. It was always on for about ten minutes, something like that, and they cheated so badly. The film ended, one I recall, with Buck Jones walking into this ranch and falling through the floor and he disappeared from sight…and then the following week he was holding onto the sides!

I went to the theatre as well, I always went to the pantomime. There were some quite good theatres, the best I think was the Theatre Royal, which came down I imagine in the fifties (demolished 1957). The Theatre Royal dated back to the 1700s (there were in fact four on the same site). It had got three balconies, a circle, upper circle and stalls and I remember going to see Lawrence of Arabia with my father, a musical. We went in the cheap seats and we climbed all the way to the top and came out through this door and the angle was so steep. You shuffled along and there was only about that much of the seat in front sticking up and then there was your seat. My father caught his foot awkwardly and he went over onto the row below and for a moment I had this mental picture of…. But he was all right and climbed back up.