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Springfield Road
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Olive moved to Springfield Road in 1941 after a short stay in Boston Manor, West London, where she
found temporary accommodation after a German bomb blew away her home in the West India Dock Road
where she had been living with her mother and brother. At the time Olive was a GPO telephone
operator at Faraday Building in the City of London. Several times she walked through the burning
streets to get to work connecting telephone calls. Sometimes she was unable to get home in the
evening. Unusually for those days the house at Springfield Road had a telephone (on the Grangewood
exchange) and allowing for the move to All Figure Numbers in 1965 and subsequent messing around with
the numbering system by Oftel and its successors, she still has the same telephone number 63 years later.
Over the years
Olive’s back garden has been the setting for many informal snaps. Here some of the older ones are gathered together.
Leslie,
Vera and
Malcolm Knight.
The picture on the left was taken in May 1944 and the adjacent one was presumably taken at the same time. That on the right is more of a mystery. Note the plain curtains at the window and the lack of anti-shatter sticky tape on the upper pane. The summer dress and the likely age of the baby suggests
Rosemary in 1947.
The group photo was most likely to have been taken in 1944 but the one on the left must be
from two or three years earlier if, as appears to be the case, the uniform is not that of an RAF officer.
‘Big’ Olive,
Rosemary,
Gladys and
Malcolm - 1947.
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