From The Bakehouse

During the Second World War and for well over a decade after the war was over my Granny & Grandad lived at Wonderholm Parade on the East Howe/Kinson border in Bournemouth. The Parade consisted of a series of flats above a row of five shops located at the staggered junction where Kinson Road, Turbary Park Avenue and Columbia Road meet.

It was where Dad and Auntie Linda lived their childhood and teenage years, until the big move around the corner to 36 Cherford Road in April 1958, when Granny & Grandad were finally able to buy their first house together, having successfully cashed in a savings endowment policy, probably one of the “penny policies” sold door to door. It would be their first and their last family home for the next 43 years.

By this time Granny & Grandad were 46 years old so a long way removed from typical first time buyers in their early twenties or thirties.  It took them this long because money was tight, very tight. Grandad’s salary with Hadens was a relatively modest one and from it they also had to support his widowed mother Edith.

Prior to Wonderholm Parade Granny & Grandad were living at 12a Mortimer Road in Queens Park, the address given on my Dad’s birth certificate when he was born on 21 May 1939, and it was still their address in September 1939.

And before this, as newlyweds, Granny & Grandad lived at 25 Curzon Road, barely half a mile from Dean Court, what is now the Vitality Stadium, the home of AFC Bournemouth. 25 Curzon Road was where Grandad and his widowed mother, Edith Cranidge lived, and after Granny & Grandad were married on 6th June 1936, it was where they all lived together, under the same roof, until the move to Mortimer Road, with Edith staying on at Curzon Road.

When the war broke out Grandad enlisted promptly along with his cousin George and was posted to Burford in Oxfordshire, near Bourton-on-the-Water.

Auntie Linda recalls that for some of that initial posting Granny and the infant Dad lived off-base nearby, but that arrangement had come to an end by May 1940 and so the move to Wonderholm Parade must have taken place earlier in the year.

The landlords of 4 Wonderholm Parade was Mr & Mrs Keeping, who also owned 163 Kingswell Road, where Granny’s mum & dad, Herbert & Polly Johnson, lived.

Certainly Granny & Grandad & Dad were officially registered as living at 4 Wonderholm Parade in May 1943, as per their wartime national registration identity cards, and on 7 November 1943 they were joined by Auntie Linda, born at 10 West Way in Moordown, a private house requisitioned as a temporary maternity home, where Auntie Linda’s future husband Roy was also born.

Their registration cards also show that when the war ended the young family had moved across to the neighbouring three bed flat at 5 Wonderholm Parade, which change of address was duly recorded by the National Registration Office in February 1946.

So it was in those two flats above the shops at Wonderholm Parade where Granny & Grandad Granny embarked on the reality of married life and parenthood in wartime, with Granny effectively a single parent to Dad and Linda for much of it.

It cannot have been an easy time.

Wonderholm Parade was built in the interwar years in the Art Deco style to serve the fast growing residential areas of East Howe & Kinson. Back then there was no Tesco superstore a mile or so away in Kinson so it would have been a true one-stop community and shopping hub on the doorstep: grocer, greengrocer, chemist, general stores, etc.  And that was probably just as well as Granny and Grandad had no car, indeed neither ever learned to drive.

Wonderholm Parade today is a little on the scruffy side but it is still has a pleasing bustle and purpose, with every shop let. Its current establishments are as follows:

#1           Hungry Hounds Pet Shop

#2           Like Mum Makes Cafe

#3           Wonderfry Fish’n’chips

#4           Marmaris Kebab & Pizza Kinson

#5           Premier Convenience Store & Post Office

I can just about recall a greengrocers from the 70s and this would have been Fielders at Number 4 (now Marmaris) but the one shop I really remember well was The Kinson Exchange & Mart at Number 5, for years the shop over which the young Cranidge family had lived. Prior to the Exchange & Mart Auntie Linda recalls first living above a bank and then an opticians.

It was a busy second hand goods emporium from the days when second-hand trading and parts exchanges proliferated.

You bought, you sold and you exchanged and my memory is that household electricals tended to dominate trading. But it really was anything goes, bric-a-brac barely covers it, the shop was a true Tardis-like sprawl of junk with TV and radio sets and gramophones piled up high in every corner, making the shop almost impossible to navigate sensibly.

The Exchange & Mart did sell records too, although it was mainly battered old 45s and 78s together with some old cassettes and 8-track cartridges. I cannot remember ever finding much in the way of contemporary vinyl records to interest me there.

But it was never less than a fascinating browsing experience, not least of which I could never even work out what half the stuff actually was, it could easily have doubled up as “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” given the weird and wonderful array of household oddities and unusual artefacts on display.

And all that bizarre stuff meant the shop smelt just fantastic too, musty and exotic.

I am not sure when The Exchange & Mart closed down and transitioned into the convenience store it is today, but it appears it was still going until the mid to late 80s and possibly even into the early 90s.

Dad liked it in there too, it had powerful memories and he would often recall his childhood years living above the shop. I can remember thinking how unlikely this seemed at the time, as it was all a long way removed from the detached space and splendour of Cherford Road, with its massive 130 foot plus garden, which was all I had ever known as the home of Granny and Grandad, and which I had lazily assumed was where Dad and Linda grew up.

Doing the maths now confirms that Dad was very nearly 19 by the time of the move to Cherford Road, working at the Ordnance Survey and only a year off from embarking on his National Service with the Royal Artillery (Survey Battalion), so his childhood home and Just William style boyhood Bournemouth memories are very much rooted in Wonderholm Parade.

Accordingly it feels only right to give Wonderholm Parade its own place in the sun.