I am attaching a few family pictures taken in and around the house where I was born. At the time it was called ‘The Ark’, and I think that the address might have been 32 Belmont Avenue – on my birth certificate it just says ‘The Ark, Belmont Avenue’. I think my parents lived there from when it was built in 1957 until 1961. Both my brother and I were born there. My mother, Daphne, died in 2018 and my father unfortunately died relatively young in 1989.
My memories of that time are very sparse. I used to play with a little girl about my age called Carol, the daughter of a neighbour. Tragically Carol was killed in a road accident when she was still a child. A terrible thing to happen to a family and if any of them should read this then they should know that I still think of them.
I came across your archive while I was doing some detective work on family history and it was amazing to come across Sue Sage’s post – especially as she mentions my mother by name and her dog as well – actually that dog died before I was born and was replaced with another dachshund named Mandy.
I don’t know if the house is still standing. I did drive down there on a whim some years back but couldn’t locate it so perhaps I have the number wrong. My only real memory of the house is of a plague of caterpillars all over the washing line one year!
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The house looks like the one at the bottom of the second part of Belmont Ave, which is still there, on the left before the corner of 1st part of Belmont. If it is the one I remember, the next door neighbours were the Kirby family, who also suffered a tragedy. Their son, Peter, died after falling from a tree in The Chase, while a group of us children were playing.
I think I recognise the house … maybe closer to 40 Belmont, or it was knocked down when the Tudor Avenue estate was built in the early 1970s.
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