Tooting, My Tooting

A Memory of Tooting.

I moved to Mitcham Road, Tooting, near Amen Corner and next to St Boniface Church, from Putney at the age of five. The year was 1947. The maisonette we lived in was above a perfume factory, it’s now an Indian restaurant called Rayyans, I believe. I attended Ensham Infants. Later I went to Franciscan Road School where I returned to teach many years later. Although I was christened Keith I was called Kit by many because that was my dad’s nickname, subsequently I changed my name to Kit by deed poll.
My brother Rod and I played out in Bickersteth Road with Kenny Hadnut (sadly passed away when he was only thirty years old) and Dickie LeClerc (emigrated to Australia under the assisted passage scheme when he was seventeen) plus many other boys. As a teenager I knocked around with a gang in Colliers Wood ‘rec’. Happy, happy days!
It was very strange returning to Franciscan Road School to teach in the very classroom where I had spent happy years being taught by Nelson Taylor – he came back from Canada for a visit to the school one day and I met him, Mr Coombes (my old headmaster) and the violin teacher Mr Lewis came too. Mr Mooney (who taught my brother) was still teaching at the school.
‘Nel’ Taylor was instrumental in imparting a life long love of music to me, I learnt to read music, play the recorder and, as a teenager in the Sea Cadets, to play the cornet in the band. I remember playing recorder in a huge concert at The Central Hall. I owe a great deal to him and was saddened to learn that he died of a brain tumour not so long after his visit.
My education continued at Battersea Grammar, I walked the two miles or so there and back to school across Tooting Common in all weathers, usually with my friend John Lamoon. Afterwards, I attended St Martin’s School of Art, worked in London then all over Europe, trained at Furzedown College of Education, taught for a while, then went into television programme making. I am now retired and live in South West France. Curiously an ex-Tooting chap lives in a village near here. He is called Norman Ashbee and he was a butcher for thirty years at the Co-op in Tooting Junction. He plays guitar and sings at our local bistrot from time to time. His ‘Be-bop-a lula’ has got to be seen to be believed!
Kit Wells
kitwells@orange.fr