Chapter 14 - ‘Sonya Salutes You’

Summary

In 1947 the Norwoods had moved from Cheshunt to the London suburb of Bexleyheath, following Hilary's appointment as head of science at Erith County Grammar School. Bexleyheath was then the very epitome of post-war smugness in an age of austerity, boasting houses with fake Tudor beams, spacious parks and golf courses. It was middle country, middle class, middle management and middlebrow. Melita was thirty-eight years of age and Hilary was approaching his fortieth birthday. They were a middle-aged professional couple with a fixed mortgage, presumably beyond reproach. Melita would drop off her seven-year-old daughter, Anita, at the local primary school before commuting to London. At weekends they could be seen tending their spacious back garden, 200 feet in length, boasting fruit trees, herb border and kitchen garden. Their front garden was positively resplendent in the summer months, with several varieties of well-tended rose bushes in bloom. Bexleyheath at this time was just beginning to get back to normality after the Second World War. The general election of 1950, greeted across the country as the harbinger of better times to come, caused a great deal of local excitement. The promising young Conservative candidate, Edward Heath, was standing against his long-standing adversary from his student days at Balliol College, Oxford, Ashley Bramall. For Bexleyheath, it was a highly charged, passionate affair. After the votes were counted it was announced that the Conservatives had received 25,854 votes to the Labour Party's 25,721, a majority of only 133. There was uproar among Labour Party supporters in the Town Hall once it became clear that the Communists had polled more than Heath's majority and had gifted Heath the seat. The following year Heath was again elected, and the constituency of Old Bexley and Sidcup became synonymous with the name of Ted Heath.

1949, the year of the Soviet atomic bomb test, had been a critical year for the West. The Soviet test was simultaneous with the revolution in China and the coming to power of the communists under Mao Zhedong. In London a strike by dockworkers – the Canadian seamen's strike – which Attlee was increasingly disposed to explain in terms of ‘malignant orchestration’, led to charges that communists were seeking to take over the London docks and posed a threat to national security.