Ann Kyne remembers South Home

I lived, with my mother and younger sister, in an apartment on the first floor of South Home when I was a young child, after the Second World War. I understood that South Home had been converted into apartments after the war, but the house was very much intact. I was told that it had been requisitioned during the war, for use by the army, but have no confirmation of this.

South Home was an imposing house, with an impressive semi-circular drive and a front garden that hid the road from view. If my memory is correct, the house was similar in design and materials to Woodheath, though probably not on quite so grand a scale. I don’t remember it as being in any way mock-Tudor, like Nizels next door. I recall a rather grand staircase, off to the left as one came through the front entrance, which, I believe, had a galleried landing. I remember my sister and I sitting crying on these wide stairs one day when my mother was late home and someone from the ground floor flat coming to comfort us. The many large windows made the apartment very light and I used to sit looking out over the garden.

The rooms were very large. Our bedroom was vast. My mother told me, possibly tongue-in cheek, that it had been the ballroom, and I remember being frightened in the night because of its size. There was a large bathroom on the second floor above the sitting room, with a huge old fashioned geyser at the end of the bath. One day, when workmen were busy in the bathroom, the ceiling collapsed onto the sitting room below just after my sister and I had gone from there into the kitchen.

The garden was very large, with many beautiful trees and shrubs, including a striking bank of rhododendrons down the left-hand side. There was also a stream and woodland at the bottom, which backed onto fields. It was like having one’s own private park. I noticed, when I visited, in about 1995, that the old garden had been divided between South Home, by then rebuilt as an ugly 1960s style block of wardened flats (where my grandmother ended her days), and what had once been the gardener’s house behind (now Wild Wood).

Kemnal Road was very rural in those days, and there were a great number of children who played there and in the large gardens of the nearby houses. I went to Mead Road school, and remember being taken there by a lady called Jean, who had a withered arm and looked after my sister and me whilst my mother was at work. I never knew her surname. I was surprised to see how little changed the school was after so many years, and the same trees, which are an abiding memory, lining the street.

Kemnal Road and Chislehurst were special to me and gave me a sense of place. I love space, tree lined streets and prefer rural to built locations. My memories are of the house and surrounding area being a little bit of heaven for a young girl and her friends, and when my family left, childhood was never the same again.’