South Riding 6: Coulsdon

This was the last house my parents owned before retiring to the coast, and probably their most valuable. Coming back to it, I now realise realise that this journey, which I initially thought was about me revisiting my past, is just as much about their life story.

Although there are only a few miles between Colliers Wood, their first home together, and this leafy suburb, they feel like different worlds. Here there is space: the house backs onto open parkland with a short walk to some Downs. It is a perfectly pleasant place to live and one can feel content here. The change represents the career progression of my father and the careful way he used each move as a way of moving gradually up the property ladder.

The older I get the more I respect my parents and the way they managed their lives. My father came back from the war, and the campaigns in North Africa and Italy, switched from the more manual side of being a telephone engineer into an administrative role and then managerial posts. All his working life was spent within the same organisation: British Telecoms (even though when he started it was the telecommunications half of the GPO (General Post Office)). Within the organisation there was an expectation that people would stay for a working life and that there would be opportunities for progression and a chance for different types of jobs. It was its own ecosystem and typical of the time; people worked for ICI, Shell or Unilever with exactly the same attitude and expectations. It was a world built on an assumption of stability, managed career paths and final salary pensions.

The thing is that for 35 years after the War this compact, and its underlying economic and business model, worked. There was a gradual rise in the standard of living for almost everybody and especially for middle-income families, with a gradual decline in the differentials between the wealthy and the rest of the population.

My father’s working life spanned this period. A time when there was an underlying attitude of optimism: that things could be beneficially planned, and new means better. In America they call my parent’s generation, the people who fought the War, ‘The Greatest Generation’ and I can understand why. It is not just the War and all that was endured; it is the way countries were rebuilt afterwards.