Life in Sunderland: Childhood Memories & Rediscovered Letters

This post is featured on South Coast View’s Substack publication.

You can read Part 1 of this story: From Kensington to JFK at 19 Princes Gate.

The Journey North: Steam, Fatigue, and a Covered Parrot

The move from our home in Mitcham up to Sunderland in the early 1960s began with a long, exhausting journey. After making our way across London to King’s Cross Station, my mother and I boarded a northbound train. In those days, the journey to Sunderland was steam-hauled and typically took between 5 and 5½ hours. For a six-year-old, it felt for ever.

By the time we finally arrived at the Bishop household, having navigated the final leg from Sunderland Railway Station, it was late in the day. Tired and completely overwhelmed by the long trip, I remember us being sat down in their home and fed by Mrs Bishop. Among the hazy memories of that first evening, one detail stands out vividly: a pet parrot sitting in its cage in the corner, covered with a blanket to help it sleep for the night.

More Items Came to Light in my Mother’s Suitcase

After discovering my mother’s letters from post-war Kensington, two more items came to light in her suitcase. They date from the early 1960s, when my mother, Aniela, returned to work as a housekeeper for Mr Harvey C. Bishop ARIBA in Sunderland.

I was around six years old then, and attended infant school in Sunderland during our stay. The newly discovered documents, a typed letter sent to my father in London and a handwritten note from one of Mr Bishop’s teenage daughters, offer a sweet snapshot of a child adapting to a new life in Sunderland.

The Letters: A Six-Year-Old’s View of Life in Sunderland

The first letter (tied with a pink ribbon) was typed on a machine in the Bishop home, dictated by me to Mr Bishop’s daughter, who helped write down my thoughts:

Accompanying it was a note written in green ink on circus-themed stationery sent to my father, reassuring him about how I was settling into school:

Childhood Memories of the North East

Reading these notes brought back vivid, scattered memories of our time living in the Bishop household:

Image: Roker Beach (5) by Mike Quinn, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

• The Pedal Car and the Garden: I distinctly remember the toy car mentioned in the letter, a pedal car I drove around the patio. I also remember standing next to Mr Bishop while he gardened and I sang rather loudly. When he warned me that if I didn’t stop singing he would send me away, I carried right on singing, and he promptly sent me inside!
• Roker Beach: The letter mentions going down to the beach. My memory of Sunderland beach is vivid, along with the large sewage outlets under the embankment that flowed into the sea.
• Infant School in Sunderland: The infant school I attended remains the warmest school memory of my childhood. The teachers and children were exceptionally welcoming to a young boy arriving from London with a southern accent, in stark contrast to my later experience at junior school in Leicester.
• I recall a forbidden tunnel in the Sunderland playground running, I think, beneath a road, and an eagle-eyed teacher gently catching me when I ventured inside. I distinctly remember protesting to the teacher, saying: “I am going to Poland!” Another vivid memory from the school gate at “going home time” still makes me smile: while standing outside waiting to be collected, I struck up a conversation with another boy. We exchanged descriptions of our mothers, and I hit upon what I thought was a stroke of absolute childhood genius: “You look out for my mother, and I’ll look out for yours!” How that tactical arrangement actually played out in practice remains lost to time, but I have no doubt both our mothers successfully retrieved us in the end.

These brief fragments from an old suitcase complete the story of our family’s long connection with the Bishop family. This bond began in Brockley in 1947 and extended to a high garden on a hill in Sunderland fifteen years later.

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1960s Life in Sunderland – Were You Part of This Story?

• Are you F…… (one of the Bishop daughters) who lived in Sunderland in the early 1960s, wrote to my father, and helped a six-year-old dictate letters?
• Are you the boy I waited with outside the school when we hatched our “brilliant” plan to look out for each other’s mothers?
• Do you recognise the Sunderland infant school with the large playground tunnel leading under the road?

If any of this rings a bell, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me a private message via my Contact Page.

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