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Ron Levett, born in Alfriston, East Sussex, enlisted in 1943, and whilst posted to the British Liberation Army, took part in the liberation of Germany. He then returned to England, setting up his own electronics business and developing an interest in the new entertainment of the time - television.
Our home at Southdown had had as much work done as I could afford and I decided to put it on the market and buy somewhere newer. We found a chalet on an estate that was being built in Polegate.
Buyers for Southdown were slow in appearing, but by the time we came to move we had one lined up. I had taken out a bridging loan to buy the new house, but when my buyer dropped out I thought I had a big problem.
Luckily another estate agent in Polegate found another buyer and the sale went ahead. I got £5,500 for a Georgian house which today is probably worth nearly a quarter of a million, but that shows how prices have escalated in the last thirty-five years.
The house was a chalet bungalow with two double bedrooms and a 'Dressing Room,' connecting the two bedrooms. Since we now needed four bedrooms I decided to convert the Dressing Room into two rooms by installing a dividing wall.
I covered the wall on both sides with plasterboard, fitted skirting boards, and then wallpapered it to match the existing paper. Stephen, my son, helped with this, but I don't think he can remember it.
After the space we had had at Southdown we needed extra room for things such as garden tools, mower etc., so I bought a garden shed, laid some heavy timbers down to form a foundation, then erected it in the garden. Gran was quite an enthusiastic gardener and it soon began to look settled.
At work, I found that if I went down to Berwick Station in the van, parked and waited for a few minutes, someone would come up and ask me to do a job. We started to get quite a lot of TV installations in the village.
Two families were tenants of Frank Sutton, the builder who had built most of Berwick Station, council houses on one side of the road and private ones on the other. Some of the latter were Frank's properties, and were rented out.
They said that we would have to get permission from Frank before erecting aerials on any of his houses. He would have none of this 'because of the damage it could do to the chimney'. We therefore had to erect masts in the garden behind the houses.
We first erected a 21 ft length of Water Barrel, a heavy-duty water pipe made of galvanized steel. We let about 12 inches of this into the ground, then wired three stay wires from the top, down to lengths of angle iron, driven into the ground.
We made up the aerial with its BBC & ITA heads, with all the cables and diplexer unit, on the ground and then with a ladder on either side of the water barrel, we climbed the ladders, one of us on each side, and dropped the mast into the water barrel.
We had strainer wires already on the aerial mast, for connection to the stakes in the ground. This was a very expensive job and took a whole morning.
When Frank's brother-in-law, Bob Carpenter wanted an aerial installed, Frank insisted that we erect a length of Water Barrel up the side of the house, clamped to the side of the chimney, then the aerial fitted to the top. This was another expensive job.
Finally, Frank decided that it was about time that he had a television. He asked our opinion about a new Ferguson TV that he had seen advertised. We had not got a very high opinion of Ferguson, having already repaired quite a lot of them, but he insisted that that was the one he wanted.
However, when he found out the cost of installing an aerial similar to Bob Carpenter's, their houses being identical, he decided that his chimney was a lot stronger than any of the others that he had built, and we should erect the aerial on normal brackets on his chimney!
Ron Levett, 2001
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