WINDSOR STREET DAYS

Part Six

Chapter One

Taking Up the Pen Again

May 2025

Part I

Regaining perspective on the family story is hesitant. I’m aware that it can only be through my perspective. I’ve written many times that individual memories of an event shared by all, can often be quite divergent. With time no longer on my side, Windsor Street Days must rely upon my perspective.

Where I can draw upon independent perspective, as with our father’s short autobiographical account written for his granddaughters S and C, then I do so Likewise, the large family correspondence that stretches back into the 19th Century.

What I’m doing here is to follow our Dad’s example.

I use the tools available to me to write a small part of our family story, ongoing, of no interest beyond the family. I have no desire to publish. Rather, I own this website that enables me to create a platform for our family to hold on to in the future. That decision is not mine to make.

*

Earlier his year my brother-in-law asked me why I attached so much importance to Windsor Street.

That’s where I started life along with my elder sister. Successive house moves did not break the bond with Windsor Street because, for me, it was safe haven, it was also where I spent much of my time from the age of eight until a month before my thirteenth birthday.

I can recall Grandad bringing me a cup of tea in the mornings. I can recall life vividly with Grandma after Grandad had died unexpectedly in September 1961.

In Liverpool, my passport had expired and I then realised I had only the flimsy piece of paper issued in 1953 confirming my birth ~ a certificate of the registration of birth. It is not, however, a birth certificate. It only gives the briefest detail.

As I used to tactfully explain to clients, yes, that is a certificate confirming that your [relative’s] birth has been entered in the Register of Births. But it does not have any weight with, for example, a life assurance company. If you’re sure you do not have a full birth certifcate, almost identical to your [relative’s] death certificate, then we must apply for this.

Looking at my folder, I giggled.

I think I too must now obtain my full birth certificate! It came within a week. Ah, good! I’m a person. I have an identity.

I then just sat there. Silent. For quite a while.

I could hear the pilot boats going up and down as the large tankers were entering or leaving the Port of Liverpool.

Born in Pittville Circus Road, my first home is 20 Windsor Street. This was akin to the final pin in a complicated mechanism engaging and releasing the door’s lock.

The Webbs occupied 20 Windsor Street and across the road at 25 Windsor Street. Everything began to fall very beautifully into place.

Looking back, I can also see that it was on that morning, at that point, that I realised that I would in time return to my home county ~ Gloucestershire.

Portrait by James 2020

Kenneth Thomas Webb 209246
Leckhampton
Gloucestershire

Portrait by Hicks 1941

Kenneth Ernest Webb 1315766 at RAF Babbacombe just outside Torquay, Devon just prior to embarkation by troop ship to Canada and onward to Alabama, America for pilot training.

I was very aware that my name was somehow linked to the portrait on the wall of my father’s brother painted by Hicks in 1941, and I knew much about all the RAF photographs on the mantel piece in the front room.

If I visited my Grandma and Grandad across town at 36 Elmfield Road, the identical scene played out, with my mother’s brother’s portrait and a similar line of RAF photographs on the mantel piece.

Informal Portrait 1944

Flight Sergeant (temporary) Flight Engineer, Harry Alfred Marshall 1337884, Pathfinder, on leave October 1944 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

*

My life started in Windsor street at Numbers 20 and 25 Windsor Street across the street from each other.

20 Windsor Street was the home of my Aunt and Uncle, Bette and Arthur Webb. Life started up in the top of the house, in the attic.

Even now, I can recall its layout. Thus, it irritates me when people tell me I could not possibly remember anything now that happened before I was aged 3 years.

I beg to differ.

My sisters and I have three different start points.

Carol               1950   36 Elmfield Road, Cheltenham
Kenneth          1953   20 Windsor street, Cheltenham
Vanessa          1957   32 Libertas Road Cheltenham

32 Libertas Road was formerly 8 Orchard Terrace and I always loved, even before, school age, living at Orchard Terrace.

Orchard Terrace sat upon a piece of land along which Libertus Road ran. St Mark’s estate was developed in the late 1930s and then resumed immediately post-war.

8 Orchard Terrace was owned by the Gloucestershire Constabulary and that was our address when Carol and I moved there ~ Mum and Dad’s first of four police houses before they put down the deposit on their home of fifty years on Pittville Mount Park.

To me, being a toddler, Orchard Terrace was grand, huge in comparison to the attic flat when seen through an infant’s eyes, as too was its large back garden with several apple trees.

Four houses, four moves, disrupted schooling.

The move signified that our parents were making steady progress. I've always loved the sound of those five syllables ~ eight orchard terrace. Sixty-five years later a gentle warmth enwraps, standing or sitting within the orchard, newly planted, within the property on the Stow Road in North Gloucestershire, Cotswold.

A silent nod to very happy times ~ Eight Orchard Terrace.

By the time Vanessa arrived on 10 December 1957, the terrace had been incorporated into Libertas Road, now number thirty-two opposite the junction with Devon Avenue. Of course, I’d have been unaware apart from the excitement that we lived in a police house.

Part II

I fast-forward to this present century. I am driving on the motorway, M6 northbound for the city of Liverpool in May 2003 to commence a three-month locum attachment with a firm of solicitors in Southport.

I had been booked into a pleasant hotel near the pier and I had no idea that my whole life was about to change. I remember meeting the senior partner and learning that whilst I would attend the Southport office regularly - it is the firm’s head office - I would actually work 12 miles down the coast road in Waterloo , a large district on the edge of Liverpool and adjoining the upmarket village of Crosby ~ we are not a town Mr Webb ~ and the beautiful Blundellsands.

Three months metamorphosed into fourteen years. Liverpool is part and parcel of me. I am indelibly linked with Liverpool and Merseyside. Liverpool gave me the freedom that I did not have in Cheltenham and Gloucester.

I have, though, very happily returned to my roots for the reason stated. Liverpool is still a central part. I have Liverpool friends. Liverpool gave me the sense of freedom, independence and safety that even today, twenty years on, Gloucestershire simply cannot achieve ~ but I am from the shires.

Liverpool allowed me to live in plain sight with many friends like me.

To my surprise my regular returns to the city witnessed a city’s transition, and the wide open spaces of the Liverpool Waterfront are still pleasant, but a signature for architects in fierce competition with each other. Obviously, this happens in every decade, every century.

The beat of the city is now too fast for me, simply because I am seventy-two, whereas when I arrived at age fifty-two, I still felt as I did a decade and two decades earlier.

Part III

In reviewing Windsor Street Days, I can balance the books. I’m returning our father’s chapters, and adding images and a video. We both have different writing styles. It is not right for me to change that, but I can illustrate them.

We all, in the family, wish to hear the voice of our father and grandfather ~ Desmond Budd Webb. I am not rushing any of this. I go at my pace.