Heidi's Story
November 1947
Heidi and Karen were met at the station by Alan and his father William Titus. They took a taxi to the family home at 5 Connaught Gardens. Karen's pram and Heidi's case went in the boot. Heidi only had one suitcase, a brown one that may still be in her flat in Westcliff (note on 25 April 2021: we will check when we get back from Portugal). It was the first house, end of terrace, on the left of the street as the car pulled in. Alan's step mother opened the door as they approached, and when she saw Heidi coming up the path she went to her and took the baby, which Heidi let her take and hold as she was the step-grandmother, and held up her other arm in a Nazi salute and said "Heil Hitler". Heidi said as she remembered this on 25th April 2021 "I can't remember her name. I always call her "the witch". I will have to think of it."
Heidi was very tired and could not speak any english and says she probably could only say "hello". They all went in the house, to the back room where there were some sandwiches ready, which they all ate. There were three younger half brothers also there, living in the house. (All of them were named after car manufacturers: Austin, Morris and Dennis). Alan's only sibling, his sister Joyce - who can be seen in the wedding photo - had left home at the age of 14 to live with her uncle and aunt John and Edith, and Alan was the only child in the house from William's first marriage. Alan's mother had died when he was young and is buried in London.
After eating the sandwiches and having a cuppa (Heidi would have had coffee but the others almost certainly would have had tea) William and the step mother showed Heidi around the house and Alan explained in German that they would have the front room. The room had a square bay window to the front garden and street, with a double bed, a table, two armchairs, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. It was evening and they settled in the room and soon went to bed.
Alan took Heidi out for a walk the next day, with Karen in the pram, to show her around the area. For the first days Alan would go to the local Co-op store around the corner to buy their food. But Heidi quickly started doing the shopping herself, learning the words for the items she needed such as milk, bread, potatoes. She would buy three or so things at a time as she learned new words. Heidi would prepare the food with in the backroom and Alan showed her how things work in England, how to use the stove etc.
The first few days were OK but very quickly things changed. When Heidi put things on the stove, to heat the milk for Karen for example, the step mother would take it off. She would regularly hoover the hall and bang the hoover loudly against the front room door repeatedly. If Heidi wanted to fetch water from the kitchen, she would tell Heidi to go upstairs and get it from the bathroom. In the end Alan bought a bucket and fetched water from upstairs every morning before going to work for Heidi to use during the day. (He worked at Cook's Travel Agency in the town centre). Every chance she had the stepmother would tell Heidi to "get back to Germany". If she wanted to use the bathroom she would tell Heidi to go to Germany to use the bathroom. One day there was a very big argument about the stepmother's treatment of Heidi, between Alan and the stepmother, when Alan almost turned the kitchen table over.
William became concerned about the way things were going and after a while William started spending more time with with Heidi and was eating his meals with Heidi in the front room. He even gave Heidi his ration book to get shopping. "It was hell living there actually" Heidi says. The stepmother hated this friendliness between them and the boys took her side and hated Heidi. The half brothers, all teenagers, were also very unfriendly. At one time one of the sons hit Heidi with a poker and her left arm was swollen and painful for some time after. William eventually couldn't stand it anymore and threw his wife and the children out of the house. And from that time, until they moved out to their own place, Heidi lived there happily with Alan, William and Karen. She learned english quickly without any study or books. Although at first she made some mistakes, one she remembers because everyone laughed is: "I can too the light out put" when someone wanted to turn the light off and she said she would do it (using the german word order).
After about one year of this living arrangement one of Alan's aunties died and left him some money. He used this as the deposit on a two bedroomed bungalow in Broomridge Avenue in Newcastle. We think it was number 34. "It had a nice feel about it, a nice small kitchen and nice living room in the back looking out over the back garden. In the front was a front garden with a path to the gate." Joyce, Alan's sister, came to visit them there "and she liked it". Grandad William also came to visit once week or so. His wife and children moved back in with him in the family house after Heidi and Alan moved to the bungalow. As Heidi says: "After I left the old witch came back".
Karen was two when they moved to the bungalow and from the age of three or four she would walk up the road to the corner with Alan in the morning when he went to work, and then run back from the corner to Heidi waiting and watching at the gate. Alan was still working at Cooks in the town centre.
Margaret was born in that bungalow on 8th December 1950. She was born at home in Heidi's bedroom. It was a very long, drawn out and painful birth starting in the morning until she was born at 7 o'clock in the evening. "I was sick like a dog" Heidi says. "I was trying to push and was sick at the same time with a bucket next to the bed". (Although Karen's birth was even worse, Heidi says). The midwife was about to arrange to take Heidi to the hospital, but Margaret was born as the church bells rang at 7pm.
"I had her christened quickly because I had a funny feeling right from the beginning that I might not have her for long". She was christened sometime around 4 to 6 weeks after the birth and the baby photo we have of Margaret was taken on the day of the christening. There are only two photos - the christening photo, and the one of Alan holding Margaret in the back garden of the bungalow.
Margaret was a very quiet, peaceful baby. She rarely cried. "She was like a little angel. She even looked like an angel. She was a very calm and peaceful baby. Too good to be true. I hardly ever heard her cry and she always had a little smile". Heidi says she was very different than Karen at that age. "Karen, good gracious me. She was a little dragon. We had the pram next to our bed and one of us had to keep rocking it at night to get her to sleep. You didn't get a peaceful night with her. But Margaret, you hardly knew she was there". (They had taken Karen to the doctors but the doctors explanation for the crying was "a nervous tummy".)
The bungalow had two bedrooms and Alan wanted separate bedrooms for the children. Heidi was not so keen on moving but she went along with the idea. So a couple of months after Margaret was born they quickly sold the bungalow and moved to a downstairs 3 bedroomed flat Alan had found and bought, two roads along and nearer to the town centre. "It was a big flat, and it was a nice place, but I preferred the bungalow as we were on our own and had front and back gardens and didn't have neighbours above". We have been trying to identify the street and think the flat may have been in Canning Street but we are not sure. There was a school at the end of the road.
When she was almost six months Margaret caught whooping cough and measles from Karen. "Karen had it first and then Margaret got it. That was a rotten time. No sleep at all. I was dead beat". As Karen was getting better, Margaret was getting worse. Margaret was sleeping in the pram in the living room and Heidi or Alan spent alternative nights on a mattress on the living room floor to keep an eye on her. The doctor visited the house every day to see how Margaret was doing. On the seventh day he told Heidi that she was over the worst and she would get better from now on. He told Heidi not worry, to relax and have a good nights sleep now.
That night Margaret died. Alan was sleeping in the living room and Heidi had taken the doctors advice and had slept in the bedroom. "When I woke up in the morning I was frightened to get up. I had a feeling something was not right. I went into the living room, Alan was on the floor fast asleep. I looked into the pram and I saw that she was not moving. I thought she was asleep so I picked her up and then I realised she was dead."
Margaret lay at home in the living room in a small white coffin for three days. Heidi says: "I went into the room every day to look at her. She looked like an angel laying there." The funeral was at the local cemetery. Heidi had told Karen that Margaret had gone to Heaven and when they arrived at the cemetery Karen asked the man who opened the gates "Is this Heaven?" Only Alan, Heidi, Karen and Grandad were present at the funeral. Margaret was buried while they stood at the graveside. Margaret is still there. Heidi said, tearfully, on 10 May 2021 while relating this "I will go there again."
The family doctor recommended that they all move down South as "the air is better there" and it would be better for Karen. "I think he felt guilty because he should have done more for Margaret. He came every day to have a look but he didn't do anything." Alan started looking for work in the South and he managed to arrange a job at Brown's Furniture store in Hamlet Court Road in Westcliff. The manager was Sid Hershfield who became a friend of Alan.
Alan moved down South first and Heidi stayed behind with Karen for a few months. She arranged to sell the house and found a buyer. She travelled all the way down to Westcliff in back of the removal van with the furniture, sitting on a settee with Karen. They all stayed in a flat in one of the roads going down to the seafront by Westcliff station. She can't remember which one exactly, although it was not Seaforth Road. "The people downstairs had a little girl called Ruth, who Karen used to play with". They stayed there for two or three months before buying a house at 17 Osbourne Road, Westcliff.
The house in Osbourne Road was a a typical terraced house of that period with three bedrooms, one bathroom with wc, plus an outside toilet, and it had a nice back garden. On the right of the house was an alley that led to the back gardens. At the end of this alley, at right angles to this one from the street, was a long alley that went along behind all the gardens on the road and this was a favourite play area for all the kids in the road who could see and visit each others back gardens using this connecting alleyway. At the back of this long back alley was the brick wall of the old Westcliff Hospital and Alan junior remembers a loose brick in this wall used for hiding things in.
During their time their Alan senior built a nice garden shed in the back garden with breeze blocks. It looked like a small house with windows and a door and a corrugated roof. Alan junior remembers that he used to enjoy climbing up onto the roof at around the age of seven, and jumping off with an umbrella as a pretend parachute. He also had a large metal/tin bathtub in the garden and he would lay a plank of wood across it to create wings and it would be a pretend airplane.
Heidi says "Everyone in the street knew each other. There were lots of children to play with. All the children were always playing in the streets. I was happy in that street with all the people". Heidi had a German friend, Inga, living in the next street, Windsor Road, with her english husband Bert and two children, Hans and Michael. And they had a mutual friend, another German girl, Elsa, living close by in Beedell Avenue with her english husband and two children.
The neighbours on the left were a Scottish couple Mr and Mrs Bell. They had a long haired cat that always sat outside on the window sill of the front room. On the right were a couple Mr and Mrs Philpot, whose daughter Linda was never allowed to play in the street with the other kids. After that was a couple with a boy known as Big Alan because he was older than Alan jnr (who was known as Little Alan whenever both were mentioned together). Opposite lived the Tongs, an Irish couple, Dottie (Dorothy) Tong and her husband and their many kids. Mr and Mrs Gilchrist and their daughter Sharon lived on that side of the road in the corner house. Around that corner was Karen's friend Hilary Courtney, a jewish girl whose parents owned the off license there. Three or four doors along to the left of the house, after the Bells, were the Collins family with seven kids.
Alan played mainly with Beryl Collins and her younger brother Richard. Karen played mainly with Katherine Collins ("a happy one who was always smiling and laughing" says Heidi) and Margaret Collins. "Mrs Collins and I were sometimes skipping in the street with a long rope, playing with the kids in the middle of the road". Alan would ride around on a little red three wheeler bike with a boot in the back, from which he once proudly produced a big snake he had found, and Heidi called the police to get rid of it. Alan also once, around five or six years of age, rode this bike all the way to Priory park with little Richard Collins in the boot and Alan fell into the pond there and came back home drenched. Mrs Collins and Heidi were very worried and not happy about this. On another occasion when Alan was older, maybe six or seven, he was brought back home by the police who stopped him riding a big two wheeler bike along London Road. Alan John remembers another encounter with the police when he found a car wheel hub on the street and took it to the local police station to hand it in, at around the age of six or seven.
There was a newsagents called Kiggins at the end of Osbourne Road, on Hamlet Court Road, that sold selections of small sweets that the local children loved, and next door on the corner with Albany Road, was Leighs, a small convenience store where Heidi bought milk, bread etc. On the opposite corner of Albany Road was Heidi's hairdressers. The midwife who delivered Alan lived in Albany Road. Hamlet Court primary school, where all the local kids went, was a few doors along from Kiggins on the corner of London Road (it was demolished and is now a large car park).
Ann Mullender, an Austrian friend of Heidi's, lived on the corner of Osbourne and Hamlet Court. She and her husband and daughter Jane moved later to a flat in Valkyrie Road and later to Grays in Essex and Heidi and the kids visited her there over the following years.
There were very few cars at that time. The only one on the street, towards the end of the Hardman's stay there, was owned by Alan senior. He had two, first a small classic XXX registration number RHJ 316 and after that a very smart Cresta which was towed away and repossessed by the hire purchase company.
The road was usually empty and the kids would play on the street itself, rolling marbles on the street, playing ball games, tying skipping ropes onto the trees, using the trees as posts for games of rounders, the girls would make chalk marks on the pavement for their jumping games. When not on the street the kids were in the back alleys playing, visiting each others back gardens, scrumping fruit from overhanging fruit trees. It had a real community feel and life was very different from life today.
Alan George was working in a large furniture store in Hamlet Court Road called Browns Furnishings. He walked home at lunch time to eat at home (neither of the kids stayed for school lunch so everyone was at home at lunchtime). Heidi spent the morning doing housework, shopping and cooking lunch. After Alan John was born, for extra money, Heidi started working as a registered child minder and there was often an extra child or two in the house during the day. The parents would drop them off in the morning and pick them up when they finished work, around 5 or 6 o'clock.
Karen was four when they moved into the house in Westcliff. She started school at Hamlet Court Road Primary and Heidi became friends with some of the neighbours, especially Mrs Collins. Karen made lots of friends in the street and they often came and played in the Hardman's back garden. Heidi would sometimes take the kids, and the neighbours kids, down to the beach in the warmer months.
In the summer of 1953 when Karen was six, and Heidi was around 29, Heidi had a miscarriage and lost a baby boy she was carrying, at four and a half months. "The baby was already kicking. I was standing by the front gate and Karen was playing in the street and I called out to Mrs Collins, who was standing at her gate". Heidi felt pain in her belly. Mrs Collins came over and Heidi started to bleed. Mrs Collins called an ambulance and Heidi was rushed to Rochford Hospital. She lost a lot of blood and needed four pints of blood transfusion. She was in and out of consciousness and remembers hearing beautiful music and someone saying the pulse had stopped. She was very ill and was kept in hospital for over a week. During that week Alan Senior took Karen to school and Mrs Collins picked her up in the afternoon and looked after her until Alan George finished work. A nurse told Heidi when she left hospital that she was "very lucky" to be able to go back home again. (She remembers that she later heard the song Moulin Rouge on the radio and it sounded just like the music she heard when she was unconscious in the hospital).
ADDED ON JULY 23, 2026: Heidi has often mentioned an out of body experience during this episode where she could see her body from above, saw the staff struggling to get a line into one and arm and then moving to the other side of her and to the other arm to try there, and seeing Alan Senior waiting in the corridor outside. She has often said since that time that "I am not this body".
Heidi quickly fell pregnant again, with Alan John. "I never saw my periods coming back. It was a bit too quick!" (she said in June 2021). Alan was born on 26 April 1954, in the front room of their house at 17 Osbourne Road.
While Alan was born Karen stayed at the Collin's house down the road, as Mrs Collins had suggested that Karen stayed in her house when Heidi started labour. Karen came back with Mrs Collins that day shortly after the birth and found out that she had a little brother. Soon after that she asked "When is he going back?". Heidi thinks she didn't want a sibling at all and discovering it was a boy instead of a sister was even worse. "Come to think of it I don't think she was too keen on Margaret either. She always wanted a bottle when Margaret had one, even though she was four, and if she wasn't given one she would just take Margaret's from her".
Alan senior was working at Browns until two or three years after Alan was born. He left there to start his own business and opened a shop in London Road called Bermuda Furnishings in around 1957. It was a furniture shop selling high quality expensive furniture. At that time, pre credit cards and loans, people who could not pay cash would buy expensive items on hire-purchase, which meant they could pay off the item weekly or monthly until it was paid in full. If they defaulted the item would be taken from them. Unfortunately, Alan senior was unable to get a deal with a finance company to provide hire-purchase to customers on the pricey furniture. Because he did not sell enough to cover costs or make a profit he had to close the business and move on. Without a job to go to he started working for a sales company on commission knocking on doors trying to sell encyclopedias - "Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedias - a quality ten volume hard bound set". This also didn't go well and he couldn't sell many and he was getting despondent about this. One day Heidi saw an advert in a furniture shop window on London Road saying Manager Wanted and she persuaded Alan to apply. He got the job. "I sent him into that shop. And Ivy was in there in the office. An office girl. I wish I had never got him that job. Up to that time I was very happy."
Alan Jnr started primary school in Hamlet Court Road at age 5. (Before starting school Heidi and Alan John had an interview with the headmistress and the head told Heidi that Alan was a "clever boy, a scholar" and she was sure he would go far). The school was at the top of Osbourne Road on a big corner plot with London Road, opposite the shop where Alan George worked, and Heidi would pop into the shop every day after dropping Alan John off at school. During these visits she became friendly with the secretary Ivy (surname Oliver), who had a German background, and they got on well. Alan Snr and Heidi would sometimes visit Ivy and her husband, and their daughter Carol, at their bungalow in Eastwood.
In the weeks before Christmas each year, in the evenings, Heidi and Mrs Collins would cycle on their bikes to the Echo television factory near Priory Park where they worked from 6 to 10 pm to make extra money. Alan George always stood at the front gate of 17 Osbourne Road with the kids and waved her off as they cycled down the road. "I was happy in that street until everything went wrong".
Heidi and Karen were met at the station by Alan and his father William Titus. They took a taxi to the family home at 5 Connaught Gardens. Karen's pram and Heidi's case went in the boot. Heidi only had one suitcase, a brown one that may still be in her flat in Westcliff (note on 25 April 2021: we will check when we get back from Portugal). It was the first house, end of terrace, on the left of the street as the car pulled in. Alan's step mother opened the door as they approached, and when she saw Heidi coming up the path she went to her and took the baby, which Heidi let her take and hold as she was the step-grandmother, and held up her other arm in a Nazi salute and said "Heil Hitler". Heidi said as she remembered this on 25th April 2021 "I can't remember her name. I always call her "the witch". I will have to think of it."
Heidi was very tired and could not speak any english and says she probably could only say "hello". They all went in the house, to the back room where there were some sandwiches ready, which they all ate. There were three younger half brothers also there, living in the house. (All of them were named after car manufacturers: Austin, Morris and Dennis). Alan's only sibling, his sister Joyce - who can be seen in the wedding photo - had left home at the age of 14 to live with her uncle and aunt John and Edith, and Alan was the only child in the house from William's first marriage. Alan's mother had died when he was young and is buried in London.
After eating the sandwiches and having a cuppa (Heidi would have had coffee but the others almost certainly would have had tea) William and the step mother showed Heidi around the house and Alan explained in German that they would have the front room. The room had a square bay window to the front garden and street, with a double bed, a table, two armchairs, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. It was evening and they settled in the room and soon went to bed.
Alan took Heidi out for a walk the next day, with Karen in the pram, to show her around the area. For the first days Alan would go to the local Co-op store around the corner to buy their food. But Heidi quickly started doing the shopping herself, learning the words for the items she needed such as milk, bread, potatoes. She would buy three or so things at a time as she learned new words. Heidi would prepare the food with in the backroom and Alan showed her how things work in England, how to use the stove etc.
The first few days were OK but very quickly things changed. When Heidi put things on the stove, to heat the milk for Karen for example, the step mother would take it off. She would regularly hoover the hall and bang the hoover loudly against the front room door repeatedly. If Heidi wanted to fetch water from the kitchen, she would tell Heidi to go upstairs and get it from the bathroom. In the end Alan bought a bucket and fetched water from upstairs every morning before going to work for Heidi to use during the day. (He worked at Cook's Travel Agency in the town centre). Every chance she had the stepmother would tell Heidi to "get back to Germany". If she wanted to use the bathroom she would tell Heidi to go to Germany to use the bathroom. One day there was a very big argument about the stepmother's treatment of Heidi, between Alan and the stepmother, when Alan almost turned the kitchen table over.
William became concerned about the way things were going and after a while William started spending more time with with Heidi and was eating his meals with Heidi in the front room. He even gave Heidi his ration book to get shopping. "It was hell living there actually" Heidi says. The stepmother hated this friendliness between them and the boys took her side and hated Heidi. The half brothers, all teenagers, were also very unfriendly. At one time one of the sons hit Heidi with a poker and her left arm was swollen and painful for some time after. William eventually couldn't stand it anymore and threw his wife and the children out of the house. And from that time, until they moved out to their own place, Heidi lived there happily with Alan, William and Karen. She learned english quickly without any study or books. Although at first she made some mistakes, one she remembers because everyone laughed is: "I can too the light out put" when someone wanted to turn the light off and she said she would do it (using the german word order).
After about one year of this living arrangement one of Alan's aunties died and left him some money. He used this as the deposit on a two bedroomed bungalow in Broomridge Avenue in Newcastle. We think it was number 34. "It had a nice feel about it, a nice small kitchen and nice living room in the back looking out over the back garden. In the front was a front garden with a path to the gate." Joyce, Alan's sister, came to visit them there "and she liked it". Grandad William also came to visit once week or so. His wife and children moved back in with him in the family house after Heidi and Alan moved to the bungalow. As Heidi says: "After I left the old witch came back".
Karen was two when they moved to the bungalow and from the age of three or four she would walk up the road to the corner with Alan in the morning when he went to work, and then run back from the corner to Heidi waiting and watching at the gate. Alan was still working at Cooks in the town centre.
Margaret was born in that bungalow on 8th December 1950. She was born at home in Heidi's bedroom. It was a very long, drawn out and painful birth starting in the morning until she was born at 7 o'clock in the evening. "I was sick like a dog" Heidi says. "I was trying to push and was sick at the same time with a bucket next to the bed". (Although Karen's birth was even worse, Heidi says). The midwife was about to arrange to take Heidi to the hospital, but Margaret was born as the church bells rang at 7pm.
"I had her christened quickly because I had a funny feeling right from the beginning that I might not have her for long". She was christened sometime around 4 to 6 weeks after the birth and the baby photo we have of Margaret was taken on the day of the christening. There are only two photos - the christening photo, and the one of Alan holding Margaret in the back garden of the bungalow.
Margaret was a very quiet, peaceful baby. She rarely cried. "She was like a little angel. She even looked like an angel. She was a very calm and peaceful baby. Too good to be true. I hardly ever heard her cry and she always had a little smile". Heidi says she was very different than Karen at that age. "Karen, good gracious me. She was a little dragon. We had the pram next to our bed and one of us had to keep rocking it at night to get her to sleep. You didn't get a peaceful night with her. But Margaret, you hardly knew she was there". (They had taken Karen to the doctors but the doctors explanation for the crying was "a nervous tummy".)
The bungalow had two bedrooms and Alan wanted separate bedrooms for the children. Heidi was not so keen on moving but she went along with the idea. So a couple of months after Margaret was born they quickly sold the bungalow and moved to a downstairs 3 bedroomed flat Alan had found and bought, two roads along and nearer to the town centre. "It was a big flat, and it was a nice place, but I preferred the bungalow as we were on our own and had front and back gardens and didn't have neighbours above". We have been trying to identify the street and think the flat may have been in Canning Street but we are not sure. There was a school at the end of the road.
When she was almost six months Margaret caught whooping cough and measles from Karen. "Karen had it first and then Margaret got it. That was a rotten time. No sleep at all. I was dead beat". As Karen was getting better, Margaret was getting worse. Margaret was sleeping in the pram in the living room and Heidi or Alan spent alternative nights on a mattress on the living room floor to keep an eye on her. The doctor visited the house every day to see how Margaret was doing. On the seventh day he told Heidi that she was over the worst and she would get better from now on. He told Heidi not worry, to relax and have a good nights sleep now.
That night Margaret died. Alan was sleeping in the living room and Heidi had taken the doctors advice and had slept in the bedroom. "When I woke up in the morning I was frightened to get up. I had a feeling something was not right. I went into the living room, Alan was on the floor fast asleep. I looked into the pram and I saw that she was not moving. I thought she was asleep so I picked her up and then I realised she was dead."
Margaret lay at home in the living room in a small white coffin for three days. Heidi says: "I went into the room every day to look at her. She looked like an angel laying there." The funeral was at the local cemetery. Heidi had told Karen that Margaret had gone to Heaven and when they arrived at the cemetery Karen asked the man who opened the gates "Is this Heaven?" Only Alan, Heidi, Karen and Grandad were present at the funeral. Margaret was buried while they stood at the graveside. Margaret is still there. Heidi said, tearfully, on 10 May 2021 while relating this "I will go there again."
The family doctor recommended that they all move down South as "the air is better there" and it would be better for Karen. "I think he felt guilty because he should have done more for Margaret. He came every day to have a look but he didn't do anything." Alan started looking for work in the South and he managed to arrange a job at Brown's Furniture store in Hamlet Court Road in Westcliff. The manager was Sid Hershfield who became a friend of Alan.
Alan moved down South first and Heidi stayed behind with Karen for a few months. She arranged to sell the house and found a buyer. She travelled all the way down to Westcliff in back of the removal van with the furniture, sitting on a settee with Karen. They all stayed in a flat in one of the roads going down to the seafront by Westcliff station. She can't remember which one exactly, although it was not Seaforth Road. "The people downstairs had a little girl called Ruth, who Karen used to play with". They stayed there for two or three months before buying a house at 17 Osbourne Road, Westcliff.
The house in Osbourne Road was a a typical terraced house of that period with three bedrooms, one bathroom with wc, plus an outside toilet, and it had a nice back garden. On the right of the house was an alley that led to the back gardens. At the end of this alley, at right angles to this one from the street, was a long alley that went along behind all the gardens on the road and this was a favourite play area for all the kids in the road who could see and visit each others back gardens using this connecting alleyway. At the back of this long back alley was the brick wall of the old Westcliff Hospital and Alan junior remembers a loose brick in this wall used for hiding things in.
During their time their Alan senior built a nice garden shed in the back garden with breeze blocks. It looked like a small house with windows and a door and a corrugated roof. Alan junior remembers that he used to enjoy climbing up onto the roof at around the age of seven, and jumping off with an umbrella as a pretend parachute. He also had a large metal/tin bathtub in the garden and he would lay a plank of wood across it to create wings and it would be a pretend airplane.
Heidi says "Everyone in the street knew each other. There were lots of children to play with. All the children were always playing in the streets. I was happy in that street with all the people". Heidi had a German friend, Inga, living in the next street, Windsor Road, with her english husband Bert and two children, Hans and Michael. And they had a mutual friend, another German girl, Elsa, living close by in Beedell Avenue with her english husband and two children.
The neighbours on the left were a Scottish couple Mr and Mrs Bell. They had a long haired cat that always sat outside on the window sill of the front room. On the right were a couple Mr and Mrs Philpot, whose daughter Linda was never allowed to play in the street with the other kids. After that was a couple with a boy known as Big Alan because he was older than Alan jnr (who was known as Little Alan whenever both were mentioned together). Opposite lived the Tongs, an Irish couple, Dottie (Dorothy) Tong and her husband and their many kids. Mr and Mrs Gilchrist and their daughter Sharon lived on that side of the road in the corner house. Around that corner was Karen's friend Hilary Courtney, a jewish girl whose parents owned the off license there. Three or four doors along to the left of the house, after the Bells, were the Collins family with seven kids.
Alan played mainly with Beryl Collins and her younger brother Richard. Karen played mainly with Katherine Collins ("a happy one who was always smiling and laughing" says Heidi) and Margaret Collins. "Mrs Collins and I were sometimes skipping in the street with a long rope, playing with the kids in the middle of the road". Alan would ride around on a little red three wheeler bike with a boot in the back, from which he once proudly produced a big snake he had found, and Heidi called the police to get rid of it. Alan also once, around five or six years of age, rode this bike all the way to Priory park with little Richard Collins in the boot and Alan fell into the pond there and came back home drenched. Mrs Collins and Heidi were very worried and not happy about this. On another occasion when Alan was older, maybe six or seven, he was brought back home by the police who stopped him riding a big two wheeler bike along London Road. Alan John remembers another encounter with the police when he found a car wheel hub on the street and took it to the local police station to hand it in, at around the age of six or seven.
There was a newsagents called Kiggins at the end of Osbourne Road, on Hamlet Court Road, that sold selections of small sweets that the local children loved, and next door on the corner with Albany Road, was Leighs, a small convenience store where Heidi bought milk, bread etc. On the opposite corner of Albany Road was Heidi's hairdressers. The midwife who delivered Alan lived in Albany Road. Hamlet Court primary school, where all the local kids went, was a few doors along from Kiggins on the corner of London Road (it was demolished and is now a large car park).
Ann Mullender, an Austrian friend of Heidi's, lived on the corner of Osbourne and Hamlet Court. She and her husband and daughter Jane moved later to a flat in Valkyrie Road and later to Grays in Essex and Heidi and the kids visited her there over the following years.
There were very few cars at that time. The only one on the street, towards the end of the Hardman's stay there, was owned by Alan senior. He had two, first a small classic XXX registration number RHJ 316 and after that a very smart Cresta which was towed away and repossessed by the hire purchase company.
The road was usually empty and the kids would play on the street itself, rolling marbles on the street, playing ball games, tying skipping ropes onto the trees, using the trees as posts for games of rounders, the girls would make chalk marks on the pavement for their jumping games. When not on the street the kids were in the back alleys playing, visiting each others back gardens, scrumping fruit from overhanging fruit trees. It had a real community feel and life was very different from life today.
Alan George was working in a large furniture store in Hamlet Court Road called Browns Furnishings. He walked home at lunch time to eat at home (neither of the kids stayed for school lunch so everyone was at home at lunchtime). Heidi spent the morning doing housework, shopping and cooking lunch. After Alan John was born, for extra money, Heidi started working as a registered child minder and there was often an extra child or two in the house during the day. The parents would drop them off in the morning and pick them up when they finished work, around 5 or 6 o'clock.
Karen was four when they moved into the house in Westcliff. She started school at Hamlet Court Road Primary and Heidi became friends with some of the neighbours, especially Mrs Collins. Karen made lots of friends in the street and they often came and played in the Hardman's back garden. Heidi would sometimes take the kids, and the neighbours kids, down to the beach in the warmer months.
In the summer of 1953 when Karen was six, and Heidi was around 29, Heidi had a miscarriage and lost a baby boy she was carrying, at four and a half months. "The baby was already kicking. I was standing by the front gate and Karen was playing in the street and I called out to Mrs Collins, who was standing at her gate". Heidi felt pain in her belly. Mrs Collins came over and Heidi started to bleed. Mrs Collins called an ambulance and Heidi was rushed to Rochford Hospital. She lost a lot of blood and needed four pints of blood transfusion. She was in and out of consciousness and remembers hearing beautiful music and someone saying the pulse had stopped. She was very ill and was kept in hospital for over a week. During that week Alan Senior took Karen to school and Mrs Collins picked her up in the afternoon and looked after her until Alan George finished work. A nurse told Heidi when she left hospital that she was "very lucky" to be able to go back home again. (She remembers that she later heard the song Moulin Rouge on the radio and it sounded just like the music she heard when she was unconscious in the hospital).
ADDED ON JULY 23, 2026: Heidi has often mentioned an out of body experience during this episode where she could see her body from above, saw the staff struggling to get a line into one and arm and then moving to the other side of her and to the other arm to try there, and seeing Alan Senior waiting in the corridor outside. She has often said since that time that "I am not this body".
Heidi quickly fell pregnant again, with Alan John. "I never saw my periods coming back. It was a bit too quick!" (she said in June 2021). Alan was born on 26 April 1954, in the front room of their house at 17 Osbourne Road.
While Alan was born Karen stayed at the Collin's house down the road, as Mrs Collins had suggested that Karen stayed in her house when Heidi started labour. Karen came back with Mrs Collins that day shortly after the birth and found out that she had a little brother. Soon after that she asked "When is he going back?". Heidi thinks she didn't want a sibling at all and discovering it was a boy instead of a sister was even worse. "Come to think of it I don't think she was too keen on Margaret either. She always wanted a bottle when Margaret had one, even though she was four, and if she wasn't given one she would just take Margaret's from her".
Alan senior was working at Browns until two or three years after Alan was born. He left there to start his own business and opened a shop in London Road called Bermuda Furnishings in around 1957. It was a furniture shop selling high quality expensive furniture. At that time, pre credit cards and loans, people who could not pay cash would buy expensive items on hire-purchase, which meant they could pay off the item weekly or monthly until it was paid in full. If they defaulted the item would be taken from them. Unfortunately, Alan senior was unable to get a deal with a finance company to provide hire-purchase to customers on the pricey furniture. Because he did not sell enough to cover costs or make a profit he had to close the business and move on. Without a job to go to he started working for a sales company on commission knocking on doors trying to sell encyclopedias - "Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedias - a quality ten volume hard bound set". This also didn't go well and he couldn't sell many and he was getting despondent about this. One day Heidi saw an advert in a furniture shop window on London Road saying Manager Wanted and she persuaded Alan to apply. He got the job. "I sent him into that shop. And Ivy was in there in the office. An office girl. I wish I had never got him that job. Up to that time I was very happy."
Alan Jnr started primary school in Hamlet Court Road at age 5. (Before starting school Heidi and Alan John had an interview with the headmistress and the head told Heidi that Alan was a "clever boy, a scholar" and she was sure he would go far). The school was at the top of Osbourne Road on a big corner plot with London Road, opposite the shop where Alan George worked, and Heidi would pop into the shop every day after dropping Alan John off at school. During these visits she became friendly with the secretary Ivy (surname Oliver), who had a German background, and they got on well. Alan Snr and Heidi would sometimes visit Ivy and her husband, and their daughter Carol, at their bungalow in Eastwood.
In the weeks before Christmas each year, in the evenings, Heidi and Mrs Collins would cycle on their bikes to the Echo television factory near Priory Park where they worked from 6 to 10 pm to make extra money. Alan George always stood at the front gate of 17 Osbourne Road with the kids and waved her off as they cycled down the road. "I was happy in that street until everything went wrong".
Heidi Hardman
18 January 1924 - 25 July 2024
Visit the Hardman Institute for Science and Consciousness Studies - a venture inspired by Heidi's unwavering faith in there being "much more than we know" and launched in her memory.