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Ron Levett, born in Alfriston, East Sussex, enlisted in 1943 and joined the Royal Armoured Corps. He joined the British Liberation Army and took part in the liberation of Germany. He met and married his German wife, Ruth, while stationed in Münster then returned to England to be demobbed.
During the summer, while Ruth's pregnancy was proceeding apace, my mother had become ill. This gradually became worse and at the end of the summer, her sister Florrie came down from London, saw her condition and carried her off to London.
Our doctor, Dr. Troup was furious, I have since found out. Mother went from hospital to hospital in the London area but late in the summer she died. A post-mortem found she had cancer of the thyroid gland. Nowadays she would have been diagnosed and probable cured.
The week after she died, my daughter Angela was born, so we had a time of great sorrow mixed with joy.
My father decided to sell the house, even though there were a lot of people living there. There were Ted Aucock and his wife in one upstairs room with a small child, Mrs 'Dickie' Leese and her daughter Susan in another, my Grandfather and Grandmother in a third and my family in the downstairs rooms.
I don't think he could have done it nowadays, with so many sitting tenants.
The move on my father's part meant that I had to find somewhere else to live. I went to see my great-uncle Jesse who lived in 'Southdown' at the other end of the village of Alfriston. He and his wife, Aunt Jinnie only used the downstairs rooms and my uncle said that I could have part of the house.
He arranged for Wilson's, the local builders, to convert one of the bedrooms to a bathroom. This entailed quite a lot of work because it required a cold-water tank installing in the roof space and a UDB (Under the Draining Board) water heater in the kitchen, together with the bath and washbasin in the bathroom.
Some electrical work was also needed because only the downstairs rooms had previously been wired. When I went upstairs for the first time I went into the small back bedroom to be met by a festoon of cobwebs, which reached almost to the floor.
The whole house needed decorating, paintwork to be cleaned down and two coats of paint applied. The original ceilings and some of the dividing walls were made of lathe and plaster, which turned out later, on closer inspection, to be riddled with woodworm.
I arranged with Uncle Jesse that Gran and Granddad, who were also homeless because of my father selling the house, should share the house with us and they should have the small back room. Granddad helped with some of the work of preparing the house for occupation and just before the winter set in, we all moved in.
Before the weather became too cold, my Grandfather and I thought that we should try out the fires, since it must have been many years since they were last used. We tried the living room first but after a few minutes, smoke started coming down the attic stairs.
When I went up into the attic to investigate, I found that the smoke was coming out of the cracks in the chimney where the mortar had fallen out. I quickly made up a bucket of mortar with sand and cement, went up into the roof and pointed up the chimney until the smoke stopped.
Southdown was equipped with two outside toilets, one for my family's use and the other for Uncle Jesse. Mr. Bristow was still collecting the buckets once a week, but Uncle Jesse told him not to collect his, as he wanted the manure for his garden.
He did grow some magnificent strawberries!
Ron Levett, 2001
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