Granny's Tales and Treasures
Memories of Reading
Whilst I was at college, I lived out of the centre of Reading. I went in to attend functions at the university and worked in the university bar for a while. I helped to run a club for children with learning difficulties that was located at Brock Barracks, Reading, opposite the Royal Berkshire Hospital. This club functioned in the holidays and I slept on a settee in the premises whilst it was going on, eating from the chip shop on the corner. I’m not a great fan of fish so it was fish cakes and chips every day for a fortnight! I am not sure how sensible it was for a nineteen year old to spend the nights alone in a deserted army barracks but I did. Nearby was Battle School where I did my initial teaching practice.
The main shopping centre was the Butts Centre and I visited some of the pubs; the Three Tuns was a student favourite. I also attended a large non-conformist church a few times; I believe this was the Baptist Church. I remember Forbury Gardens, with its large stone lion. I know that I once walked across a deserted Reading and headed down the London Road at 4.00am, returning from a party. Again, probably not the best of ideas but students are not renowned for their common sense.
Lack of transport made it difficult to get out and about in the area. As students we had access to the swimming pool at the school over the road in Woodley. When it was hot we would walk down to South Lake but most of our social life was college based. I can remember being pulled over by the police a few times for lack of bike lights. We tried to scoot along on one pedal so we weren’t technically ‘riding’. This ruse was not always successful!

Me on a Bike (not mine) at Bulmershe 1974
When I left for college, I shared a room in Woodley, Reading for the first year. Rooms were allocated alphabetically so my room-mate was *. This was my first experience of sharing a room on a regular basis and I was astounded to realise that people went to sleep at night and didn’t wake up until morning. Until then I thought that my sleep pattern of waking up every hour or so was normal. Our twin room was over the garage and while we were there the car was stolen from under us. Although we had been aware of a revving noise in the night, we were unable to help the police. The next year, my single room was in Earley. I can’t visualise this at all. I remember the landlady, Mrs *, a widow with twin teenaged sons. She worked at Aldermaston and always ironed flannels, a procedure that I thought was very odd and unnecessary.
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I then spent two terms ‘in halls’ in room Penn 21 at Bulmershe College, Reading, now part of Reading University. As the number suggests, this was on the second floor. Each floor had a couple of double rooms, which first years shared and a dozen single rooms for third years. You were allocated one clean sheet each week. You were meant to put the top sheet to the bottom and use the clean sheet as the top sheet. There were two shared bathrooms at the end of the corridor. When there was a party, we'd create a rota for bathroom use. There was also a kitchen. You had to be careful not to plug in too many electrical appliances at once in your room, or it tripped the fuse. We weren't supposed to boil kettles in our rooms but we did.
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Homes have always been important to my security and I always took as many of my belongings as possible with me. I hated having my things in two places at once. I can remember trying to get my possessions home from college when I left precipitately. I had far more bags than I could carry so I had to ‘put and take’ - carry some a hundred yards up the road, go back for the rest, carry these a hundred yards past the pile I had already left and so on. When I was at college, we found a source of posters that had photographs and ‘meaningful’ slogans on them. The majority of the ones I chose involved sunsets and sayings relating to silence.

Hostels at Bulmershe