Martin, Helen
Madeleine bravely announces she reduces her "buddies" from 115 to 30: "I want the best buddies, not all the buddies that I don't like. I am keeping all the buddies given to me by you and mum."
We have our neighbors, Helen and Martin, to afternoon tea. Helen quite serious - proper- and Martin loquacious. He is filled with stories of the area as he should be having been born in the house he now lives in. Actually born, Sonnet points out. Martin in his 70s, I would guess, and probably 20-years older then Helen - they met via their parents who played tennis together. (side story: Martin's mother, Kitty Godfree, ranked Top Ten in women's tennis from 1921 when rankings began to 1927; she won five Olympic medals at '20 Antwerp and '24 Paris still the most medals ever won by a tennis player; Godfree also won Wimbledon twice. A blue plaque on their house).
Martin an electrical engineer and advises Big Projects on electrical rigging which takes him around the world like Brighton, where he advises on ten miles of undergound traffic tunneling. We talk about the Shard of Glass, soon to be Europe's tallest at 72 floors, rising above London Bridge. Martin tells me he plans electrical platforms every twenty stories for the building phase.He notes "a perfectly nice" 42-story demolished next to Tower Bridge station to make way for .. progress. "A frightful waste of good materials" he adds. "We used to use wonderful materials on our buildings, like local timber and stone, that moved together allowing the properties to age."
I ask Martin about World War II and he recalls being relocated to Devon during the air raids."Only one house on the block had a bomb-shelter" (on our cul de sac). "After the war, it was not very practical for the garden, you see, so he had it removed. He dug it up and drove it away." Sheen was spared most of the Luftwaffe's destruction since we are West London while the planes followed the river in from east, destroying the docklands (now Canary Wharf) and looking for juicy targets in the city's center. A bomb did flatten a part of nearby Palmerstone Road and five new houses recognizable. Martin recalls a bomb falling through the roof of number 53 "but it did not blow. (interned) Polish workers probably did a number on the fuse." By us, pilots dropped their left-over payloads or went after a now defunct electricity plant. Or maybe the Stag brewery to demoralize the public. "The Putney (train) station or Barnes bridge targets- they always want the bridges." How unusual to learn that massive anti-aircraft guns in Richmond Park on top of a hill.
Strange factoid: George Orwell's given name Blair. How 1984.
