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civilians and 1,136 soldiers who succumbed to cerebrospinal fever, or meningitis, in England and Wales during 1915 alone. There were numerous outbreaks of the disease during the Great War because of the overcrowded conditions experienced by young recruits in army barracks, depots, camps and billets.
    The boys’ father was heartbroken. He soon lost the will to live, dying of exhaustion, melancholia and vascular disease at the age of 68, shortly after the war ended. The war spelled the end of another generation of the Goldsmith family, but it was the dawn of a new era for Kate’s great-grandparents Charlie and Edith and their children.

Chapter 4
The Goldsmiths 1918–53
    It was just before Christmas 1918, six weeks after Armistice Day, and thousands of soldiers were still in France while their leaders wrangled over the terms of the peace. But others, more fortunate, were on their way home. Kate’s great-grandfather Private Charlie Goldsmith arrived back from France shortly after his 32nd birthday. There was great excitement at 57 Clarence Street, Southall. His wife Edith greeted him with their three small children, Charlie, nine, Alice, seven, and Ede, five. But there was also a new addition to the clan, one whom Charlie had yet to meet: six-month-old baby Annie, known as Hetty, who had been conceived when he was on leave.
    After welcoming Charlie home, the young family joined the other local veterans and their children for a Christmas party and then a tea in the white-brick Southall Town Hall. Alice, now 97, still remembers the occasion. She recalls: ‘I was only a little girl but I remember him coming home in his soldier’s clothes. I remember the children’s party and celebrations. It was in a hall at the bottom of the station, which used to be the old billiard hall. We marched from there to the town hall for tea and a present from Father Christmas. I got a skipping rope.’
    The joyous occasion was a welcome break for the family, who found life between the wars a constant struggle. While Southall is now a predominantly Asian area, in those days it was a white working-class suburb, providing labour for the sprawling brick factories, flour mills and chemical plants, the railway depots and engineering works that had sprung up around the Grand Junction Canal (once the main freight route between London and Birmingham), Brunel’s Great Western Railway and the Uxbridge Road. Unfortunately, life did not become much easier for the family when Charlie, who was nicknamed ‘Putty’ by his mates, returned home, as he was suffering from emphysema. He had to abandon his manual work shifting household coal in favour of factory work, landing a job at the Maypole Dairy, owned by a Danish margarine manufacturer. Opened in 1894, it had grown to become one of the largest such plants in the world and was serviced by a specially constructed railway siding and branch of the canal.
    ‘When my dad came home, he wasn’t really well,’ says Alice. ‘I don’t know whether he got emphysema from the trenches or from smoking. He never talked about the war or told us anything about it. But after he came home from France, he would always tell us, “Never volunteer for anything. You never know what you are letting yourself in for.” We were allowed to run free and do as we liked. We weren’t restricted or anything. But I suppose all children were like that then. Everybody was hard up and nobody had anything.’
    Despite their straitened circumstances, Charlie and Edith had two more children, Joyce in 1924 and Kate’s grandfather Ronald on 25 April 1931. Both were born in Clarence Street, which in those days was one of the most impoverished streets in the neighbourhood. It was crammed with large working-class families who earned a living in the nearby factories and gasworks, working all the hours they could. The hardship brought with it a sense of community, with neighbours rallying round to look after the latchkey children, keeping a