When George and Betty Smith gave birth to their second daughter Carole they didn’t know they had produced a whirlwind of chatter and mischief.
George was a lift engineer for over 40 years “so they gave him a watch when he retired,” says his proud daughter. Betty worked the night shift in Peek Frean’s. “She used to come home with broken biscuits. I don’t know if she nicked ‘em or bought ‘em but we always had broken biscuits,” Carole remembers.
To get away from working nights, Betty took a Nursery Assistant job at Snowsfields, the school Carole attended. “I couldn’t get away with anything! She’d always be watching me being naughty!” Carole liked junior school “but for all the wrong reasons! I only really remember reading and mucking about.” She went on to Aylwin where she enjoyed English, History, P.E. and left with O and A Levels.
Out of school, Carole would play runouts and Tin Tan Tommy with friends on the Kipling Estate or be on her roller skates.
“I used to put them on in the morning and not take them off until the night-time.”
She recounted a tale of a roller skate race with a life-long friend that they still argue over.
“She only beat me ‘cause I skidded on some oil,” claims Carole, all these years later. “I was always falling over though; my mum used to call me Cack-Handed Carole!”
“We made a camp up in the water tank. I used to get up there with me skates on but I fell out off there loads o’ times. My legs were permanently bruised.”
I sensed a pattern emerging. “I have an older sister Lynne who rolls her eyes at me a lot… When she got married she said I was the worst bridesmaid ever. I refused to do anything useful and took my mate in a matching outfit and pretended we were both bridesmaids.”
The Red Rover bus ticket was another route to adventure. “We’d get lost all over London and try to find our way home at night-time… Sometimes we’d go fruit-picking in Walthamstow.”
Picking or nicking?
“Well, it’s just there, innit? There ain’t no one guarding it so you just take it! Now they call it foraging.”
Continuing on the countryside theme: “I met a cow once when I was taken camping. It was the first time I’d ever seen one and it was terrifying. They’re massive, ain’t they? I’m still scared of ‘em.”
Carole fondly remembers going with her sister and mum to stand astride the middle of Tower Bridge where the two halves met. “I still love doing it now to look down through the crack to the water and feeling it wobble as the traffic goes over.”
Evenings were spent at Charterhouse youth club. “I tried Brownies once; that didn’t go well… Me mum was told not to bring me again!” Carole explains that “there were too many rules.”
Carole’s work-life began as a cleaner down East Street Market at weekends with office cleaning before and after school, which meant she had money to stay on and get qualifications.
Eventually, school gave way to full-time work, and youth clubs to pubs. “I used to spend all my money on clothes and going out; the Fort, the Apples & Pears, Samsons, the Dun Cow, Gillies… I started going in ‘em when I was about 14,” she reveals, adding that she often got chucked out for being underage.
Her first ‘proper’ job was at Southwark Council on a trainee scheme. “They kept putting me in offices where I had to be quiet so that didn’t work; it was really boring… I would get told off for breaking things, wearing inappropriate clothes, being silly…” A spell in Spa Road Housing Office meant she would sometimes have chairs thrown at her. “Luckily, there was a barrier so nothing really hit me.”
She enjoyed a good relationship with her Training Officer. “He was very patient with me” so asked if he could send her somewhere that she “could talk a lot.”
He placed her in the Meals On Wheels office that she recalls as “brilliant. You could talk all day, chatting to the old ladies and doing visits.”
Carole often visited a day centre and again pestered her Training Officer for a move there.
“He gave in just to shut me up but I loved it. You could chat all day, and knit and play bingo -it wasn’t like work.”
After spells in day centres and residential homes, Carole knew she had found her dream job and never returned to office work. After working with the elderly and those with learning disabilities since she was 18, Carole is now the Learning Disability Service Manager for Bede House Association and loves her work.
“You never have the same day twice so I never get bored… Every day we challenge ourselves, and the people that use the centre, and that makes life more exciting. Even when I’ve been really busy I still go home and know something nice has happened that day.”
Carole Brady is genuinely a happy soul.
She now lives off Southwark Park Road. “I’ve only ever moved two miles my whole life,” she says like a true Bermondsey girl.
She’s pleased to reveal that she has always worked close to home. “I had a job in Lambeth once where I had to get on a bus! I didn’t like that. I walked it one day, and then thought to myself, ‘mad cow, what did you do that for?’”
This article is brought to you by our sister publication The Bermondsey Biscuit and Rotherhithe Docks
Looks like she’s ageing backwards beautiful.