Where that grotty caravan is, in the picture, used to be the end of the row of terraced houses. The long cement-fronted bit, with the door in it, was a big double-doored opening on to a huge room where all the laundry parcels went. Further up the road was another similar room where they had all the clean laundry parcels. Somewhere in the building, I'm not sure where as I never saw it, was a big furnace which heated water in a huge boiler.
They had a horse-drawn van for delivering the parcels, in the 40s, and the driver, who knew my family well, was called Alf. If he saw me waiting at the bus stop at Church Commercial, on the way home from school, he would stop and give me a lift in the van with all the brown paper parcels of laundry. I always felt very proud and very honoured when he dropped me off at my front door.
