Part 1 - Wake Green Road

The First Penn’orth.

A large number of people, when starting to write about their childhood, will start with the words:-

“I remember, I remember, the house where I was born.” written in 1827 by Thomas Hood.

I am unable to start this way, as during the Second World War many mothers went into Maternity Homes for safety, away from the City centre to give birth, and I have never returned in person, to seek out that nursing home in Moseley, near Birmingham.

It was called ‘Sorrento’ and was number fifteen in Wake Green Road, a road of large Victorian houses.

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I have tried searching for it using StreetView but the house numbers are not recognisable or not numbered at all, and of course there have been many new developments.

I found a number eighteen (google approximation) looking as I would have imagined it, but as I only spent my first nine days there, to me, it doesn’t really matter that much.

Here’s a likely contender nearby.

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Then just down the road a bit, I found this.

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It was a new block of retirement homes built in 1996 - and the name?

“Sorrento Court”.

So…. it was gone then.

As we are in Wake Green Road, I may deviate slightly and mention two famous writers who, much earlier, lived only a few hundred yards from the original Sorrento Home.

The first was Edith Holden; born just around the corner in Church Road in 1871. She was the author of the “Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady”. Her notes were written in 1906 under the title “Nature Notes” and only published as her ‘Diary’ in 1977.

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Edith Holden

The other, and perhaps more famous, was J.R.R.Tolkien, who in 1896, lived further down at number 264 Wake Green Road with his mother and brother. They lived in a cottage backing onto the meadows running down to Sarehole Mill on the River Cole. It was in this meadow John and his brother went looking for mushrooms and got chased away by the farmer.

They would also visit the mill with its tall smoking chimney; a steam engine now replaced the old Victorian waterwheel for the grinding of bones for use in fertiliser.

Both these early childhood memories were to re-emerge later in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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Sarehole Mill

The two boys of course got to meet local lads and soon picked up on local, Warwickshire expressions; words like ‘pikelet‘ for a crumpet and ‘gamgee‘ meaning cotton-wool.

Of course the word Gamgee is now known worldwide from Tolkien’s character Sam Gamgee. Much more famous than the original Dr J.S. Gamgee who invented the surgical dressing made from cotton-wool, then known as ’Gamgee tissue’.

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