This is Nick Furniss speaking. If you are over eighty years old you will remember little Alfie Furniss who lived in Fairfield Street, first council house on the left when walking from the Blaby Road. We were a biggish family, joining in with local events, attending the Anglican Church and getting into scrapes at school or being praised depending on seniority. It is queer how brains get diluted as time goes by. My four elder sisters were all cleverer than I but my brain still ticks over.

Here are just a few of my memories of Fairfield Street and its vicinity in the 1920's

Apart from the Picture House,showing silent films just round the corner in Blaby Road,there were stage shows at the Clarence Hotel at the bottom of Fairfield Street. Once a year a fair was held in a field which is now the newer end of Marstown Avenue. St. Thomas Church put on several good Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and the Salvation Army trumpeted and thumped frequently in the street. Milkmen whistled the latest tunes from the London and New York shows and one or two people owned wireless sets; the BBC had just started up. A handful more had a mechanical gramophone and a few shellac records. Charlie Moore's Silver Prize band was a great attraction at the annual fete, (usually called The Pageant).
The street itself had no traffic noise apart from the clip-clop of horses hooves so all would have been peacefully quiet but men had not long returned from a very noisy war and knew nothing of quietness. Rag and bone men called out, "Raaagbon" as they passed down the street and would give children a goldfish in a jar as a sort of recycling reward. There were other itinerant salesmen. The coal man shouted "Cooaaal" and a baker shouted, "Muffins" but sold pieklets as well. Every now and then a three man band of discharged, disabled servicemen would come round busking and others would sell boxes of matches, pleading with passers by, hoping to get enough to survive until the next day. The street was swept by a man with a brush and children taking advantage of its cleanliness played marbles, whip and top, cigarette card flip and conkers or chased hoops.

The scourge of chewing gum was not yet in the penny-slot machines but Nestles chocolate bars could be bought from these machines on the railway platforms. Colas and other soft drinks were nowhere to be seen. Nearly all shopping was done at the local shops which generally specialised in, say, greengrocery, drapery or ironmongery. Sometimes free gifts came our way. The most important was deposited by the power units of the trades-men's carts. There was a scramble for buckets and spades when these gifts assailed the nostrils. Rhubarb was a very popular vegetable.
:o*