Your mention of 'Bostock' has opened a lot of memories, but first a bit of history. In1861 my great grandmother Hannah Jane Highfield just 3 yrs old and lived with her mother Mary Ann Highfield at 23 Elder St. By the age of 13, she was working as a servant girl in Streatham, London. She later returned to Brighton and married George Ford from Bishopstone. After several addresses by 1901, they moved to 13 Marshalls Row, where the open market is now. My father Leonard Packham, their grandson, married my mother Doris Ellen Young in 1939 and lived with her mother in 43 Argyle Rd, I was born in 1940. Because of the war, I was 5 before seeing my father for the first time! He was in Malta and Italy, then back to Bostock's, I remember it well. My mother would take me there and two things stick in my memory, the lovely smell and the incredible hight of the counter as I was only small. We would also go to the butchers for our rations and the floor between the door and counter was covered in sawdust and like any small boy could not resist making tramlines everywhere! On the opposite side of the road, between Cambell and Argyle Roads was a row of small shops, I can't remember which one, but we used to take our 'Accumilators' there (lead acid batteries) to be recharged for the wireless! The houses only had gas in those days. One shop there I remember well was the green grocers. Apart from the daily visit for veg we would once or twice a year take a chicken from our back garden to the grocer who would wring its neck for us, mum did not have the heart to do it! I vagely remember my mum holding me up to see the first train going over the viaduct after it had been rebuilt following a bomb hit that brought down one of the piers. I can remember diving into the bomb shelter in the basement front room every time the sirens sounded or a doodle bug flew over, those were the days! In 1950 we moved to Patcham and what luxury, a bathroom and toilet, no more tin baths with the water shared between four of us, no more walking down the garden to the loo but still only one coal fire to heat the house like Argyle Rd. There was one other improvement, the house in Argyle, being three stories high, with large rooms and the coal fire in the basement, the frost in winter was on both sides of the window. In Patcham, a smaller two floor house, the frost stayed on the outside!

My grandmother, Mary Sullivan, lived at No. 8 Elder Street in the 50s. Her married name was Baldwin. My dad, George Sullivan, was her son from her first partner. I remember visiting the house and there being no electricity upstairs, and there was a dark basement where the washing was hung to dry. It was very dark and creepy. Mary and her husband, Leslie, had daughters Maureen, Marie and Eileen and a son Leslie.