childhood
"I still have this toy – 'Cuddly Teddy' being the closest it came to having a name. I was given it (by my maternal grandfather, I think I was told) whilst 'still in my pram'. I have a photo of me with it when I was about one or two years old, sitting on a patch of grass, and it also figures in a studio portrait of me taken a year or so later. Always remaining my 'favourite teddy' amongst all the others that collected around me, it now has a partner – Nick's favourite teddy from a similar era. They lie in a box protected from further moth damage. When I draw these toys now, they become like living beings with changing expressions – strong presences emerging with the pencil lines. I'm drawing Pete's toys too – 'Sooty', 'Larry', 'Lucy'. How did they appear to us through our childhood eyes? Did they soothe, comfort, threaten us in dreams? Seeing with the eyes of a child."
"...it was the railways that took us back to Lancashire – to Carnforth this time – sandwiched between two spells living in Wembley, so that for a couple of years, between the ages of five and seven, I became a northern child again.
"My mother’s mother lived with us for much of this period until she died, and my brother was born in the course of it; so that I was suddenly and unaccountably free – to play in the mud of the unmade garden with undesirable boys, to pedal up and down Windermere Road on my red tricycle, to pick bits of pebble-dash off the virgin walls of the council semis, to collect poppies from the long grass by the swing..."
Listen to Kate read 'A Northern Childhood' (following a few minutes' chat!) here:
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Listen to Di read 'From birth' here:
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From birth
Born in the Firs Nursing Home in Harrow-on-the-Hill on March 1st 1945, I spent the first few months of my life in Ferndene, Kingsbury NW9, where my mother stayed with 'Grandma Nodes' (an old friend of my father's family), while he was away during the war. Of course I have no memories of that, but my mother has told me stories of how when the air-raid sirens sounded they would put me under the table in my carry-cot and both of them would crouch over me in some futile gesture of protection. She has also told me of how she would leave me outside in my pram under a tree where I would lie happily awake watching the leaves above me. Maybe that also was here – and maybe that is why I have a great sense of peace if I lie under trees watching the leaves now.
Ferndene was a huge early Victorian house standing in its own grounds and we visited many times during my childhood, Grandma Nodes living on the ground floor while her son 'Gi' (I never knew his full name) and daughter-in-law Joan lived upstairs with their slightly disabled son, Steven. I seem to remember him being about my age – maybe between myself and Pete in years, and we would play for hours, Steven's paralysed arm hanging limply, in the extensive grounds of the house. Running freely between the various lawns, tennis court, along the little paths around the vegetable garden, climbing the trees... There was a 'monkey puzzle tree' that defeated us, standing in the centre of the front lawn spreading its spiky branches to create its wide canopy of half-shade. Grandma Nodes had a small parlour, but spent most of her time tending her beloved garden – there was always dirt in the nails of her crooked fingers, and her back was bent into a permanent hunch from her labours. When she was inside she seemed to be mostly in the kitchen that smelt strongly of dog and fish. It always seemed very dirty with pots and pans and clutter everywhere and I could never quite be sure what the smell was, but it wasn't pleasant and I never wanted to spend much time in there. She was very kind always, but had the appearance of an old story book witch with straggly grey and greasy hair, old clothes and a 'pinny'. I remember how fond my mother was of her, how she would complain that the son and daughter didn't take more care of her. She died in hospital where I remember visiting her once – forlorn and frail and unfamiliar between the white sheets. She would beg my mother to take her out of hospital, and if there had been a way for my mother to do so, I know she would have done. The upstairs of the huge house where the family lived was dark – a lot of dark furniture with the main colour of the decoration and carpets a very dark blue. Gi's study once was Grandpa Nodes' apparently, of whom I have no recollection at all, and was smoke-filled and foreboding. We didn't go upstairs much. When Gran Nodes died, the family sold the house, and although now demolished to make way for a block of flats in the late 1950's, it still bears the name 'Ferndene', and according to an Estate Agent's website, is surrounded by mature trees and seemingly well-kept lawns. I wonder if the monkey-puzzle tree is still there.
Ely then Belsize Park (1945 – 1948)
By the time my father returned from the war, at the end of June, 1945, my mother and I were living with her mother in Ely. We moved to a ground-floor flat in a block called Hillfield Court in Belsize Park. I remember its corner entrance and standing outside with my grandmother posing for a photograph and wearing a new coat and hat. I also remember going up in the lift with my mother to play with the little boy who lived in a flat upstairs.
The sofa - It's my earliest memory – sitting behind it secretly chewing on one of my father's cigarettes that I'd pinched from his cigarette box on the coffee table. The box was leather with two compartments. I remember how horrible the cigarette tasted and getting little loose bits of tobacco stuck in my mouth. I was not more than two.
I also associate the sofa with feathers – my fear of them. I have an image of my mother and father blowing them towards me whilst I was crouched in terror behind the sofa so that they wouldn't touch me.
The fear of feathers stayed with me for many years as other ones developed. I still don't like touching dead flower petals (especially those of the Evening Primrose) or balloons when they are almost deflated. Like blowing the feathers, I think my parents tried to 'cure' me of these phobias – my father would make the grasses 'crawl' up his arm disappearing into the cuff of his shirt. Pete of course teased me with balloons in the childhood years ahead.
We left Belsize Park just before I was three and moved to Harrow Weald in readiness for the birth of my brother.
For no obvious reason I still have the smallest of the bricks in these behind-the-sofa photographs. They were all made of Bakelite in different colours and cup-shaped that either fitted inside each other or could be built into a tower. This one that remains – dark blue, with 'The Chad Valley' impressed on its exterior, now has a paler blue tiddly-wink stuck inside. I can 'see' the colours of the others: a musty orange, wine red, pale blue, dark green, light green, yellow ochre and one very dark purple.
Harrow Weald (1948 - 1950)
Number 25 Whitegate Gardens – my parents' first house and we moved there just before I was three ready for the birth of my brother, Peter, on 25th March. During my mother's confinement, I stayed with my grandparents in Ely. On my return I was taken to my parents' bedroom where my 'new baby brother' was asleep in a carrycot between two single beds. (Funny, I remember my parents having a double bed throughout my childhood, so I can't account for my memory of this moment.) How did I assimilate this new member of the family? I remember sprinkling talcum powder on him after his baths and that's about all. There's a photograph of me peering into his pram, behind which is the little row of steps where I remember being stung on the foot by a sleepy wasp and having my foot covered in a vivid blue substance ('bluebag') – iodine I suppose. My only other memory of here is walking along to the end of our cul-de-sac to meet my father as he returned from work – having to walk on the very edge of the kerb for fear of the wayside grasses like wild barley, that grew between the walls and pavements, touching me. My father's well-meaning demonstration of making it 'go up his sleeve' only made me feel worse. There are more photographs of this time – me with a little make-do dolls pram seemingly constructed from an old wooden milk carton on wheels, and one where I'm standing and staring directly at the camera lens looking very serious and one of Peter in his high chair with me standing on the rung behind with my face touching the top of his head. Maybe my mother was right at first in saying I wasn't jealous – but the well-meaning 'help to look after your baby brother' became in later years 'take care of Peter', and it was only as she eventually lay dying, after all my adult years of responding with 'Peter is really capable of taking care of himself' that I was able to acquiesce and reassure her that I would – apparently also she asked Pete to look after me. The implications of this request, however, influenced negatively, I have come to realize, my growing up with a younger brother and my relationship with him as it developed in the years ahead.
Number 25 Whitegate Gardens – my parents' first house and we moved there just before I was three ready for the birth of my brother, Peter, on 25th March. During my mother's confinement, I stayed with my grandparents in Ely. On my return I was taken to my parents' bedroom where my 'new baby brother' was asleep in a carrycot between two single beds. (Funny, I remember my parents having a double bed throughout my childhood, so I can't account for my memory of this moment.) How did I assimilate this new member of the family? I remember sprinkling talcum powder on him after his baths and that's about all. There's a photograph of me peering into his pram, behind which is the little row of steps where I remember being stung on the foot by a sleepy wasp and having my foot covered in a vivid blue substance ('bluebag') – iodine I suppose. My only other memory of here is walking along to the end of our cul-de-sac to meet my father as he returned from work – having to walk on the very edge of the kerb for fear of the wayside grasses like wild barley, that grew between the walls and pavements, touching me. My father's well-meaning demonstration of making it 'go up his sleeve' only made me feel worse. There are more photographs of this time – me with a little make-do dolls pram seemingly constructed from an old wooden milk carton on wheels, and one where I'm standing and staring directly at the camera lens looking very serious and one of Peter in his high chair with me standing on the rung behind with my face touching the top of his head. Maybe my mother was right at first in saying I wasn't jealous – but the well-meaning 'help to look after your baby brother' became in later years 'take care of Peter', and it was only as she eventually lay dying, after all my adult years of responding with 'Peter is really capable of taking care of himself' that I was able to acquiesce and reassure her that I would – apparently also she asked Pete to look after me. The implications of this request, however, influenced negatively, I have come to realize, my growing up with a younger brother and my relationship with him as it developed in the years ahead.
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North Harrow (1950 – 1957)
Listen to Di read 'North Harrow' here:
When I was almost five and Peter almost two, we moved to North Harrow (65 Kingsfield Avenue) and I started at my kindergarten school run by Mrs Barsby. I was good at arithmetic and reading and writing and all that, but my favourite thing was to use the lovely big shapes they had to play with that I could draw round and colour in – patterns. I fell in love with a boy called Brian and we got into trouble for kissing in class. I taunted a little girl till she cried just so that I could comfort her! I also learnt a little French, my mother made me recite 'Mary had a little lamb' in French at big Christmas family gatherings. These were always at my grandparents' house in Ely – everyone crammed into the front room, my Nanna, Grandad, Uncle Bill and Auntie Lily with Lawrence and William, Auntie Nan and Uncle Russell with Brian and Tony, sometimes even (I think) Auntie Pat and Uncle Freddy with Anne, Martin and Christopher as well (I have 14 cousins in all including those on my father's side, but only two of them are girls). Auntie Dee and Uncle Jock did not have children, but he would dance me round the small space in the middle with my feet balanced on his toes. I've always felt the need to dance in one way or another at Christmases since. Uncle Russell had rigged up a little Father Christmas model that travelled along the picture rail all the way round the room as far as the Christmas tree, at which point all the tree lights came on and the fairy doll perched on the top branch that I always longed to have (and usually did) sparkled with the tinsel. Looking back, this must have been some battery-powered feat considering there was no electricity in the house. Gas lamps glowed at the centre of each of the two small rooms and lit the marvellous Christmas teatime spreads in the dining room – my Grandmother's home baking and trifles etc. Apart from her yummy jam tarts, I didn't really care for any of it – always preferring a stick or two of celery with bread and butter and cheese, while my brother, along with everyone else, tucked into the sweet goodies. I loved to give everyone the presents I had bought for them from Woolworth's with my own pocket money saved throughout the year – the prettiest hanky for Nanna, perhaps, a tiny notebook for Aunty Dee... I could hardly bear the day coming to an end, but comforted myself and Pete as we went to bed – up the dark staircase behind the board and brace latched door, candle light at first until my uncle rigged up another system on some sort of wire that lit the stairs with a tiny bulb, 'There's another day tomorrow!'
Visiting here was almost every other weekend when my father would drive us to see my grandmother during my childhood. My mother never stopped referring to Ely as ‘home’. The little council house is engraved into my memory now. The little narrow path, roses on the fence on the right and grassy patch to the left where washing line hung, and that led to the bottom of the garden wire mesh enclosure that housed the pig and some chickens. My grandfather never spoke much, but he took Pete and I to the pig market with him once. All those grave-looking men and the smell of pigs in this huge dark enclosure. There was something going on that I was not in any way a part of, feeling rather lost and insecure in such an alien environment to the little protected suburban girl that I was. We never really spoke about it afterwards. My favourite thing about our visits here, though, was being able to walk freely down West Fen Road – then just a few houses before coming to the muddy and rutted track, soon a typical bush and tree bordered fenland grove. Pete and I would wander off for hours – sometimes reaching 'Ol' Tom's farm'. He had a couple of children and I remember being able to play on the haystacks with them. It's those haystacks for me in the nursery rhyme 'Little Boy Blue'. The freedom of these fens gave me the love of the countryside that I will never lose – the wide open skies with the grove only disappearing from view as it turned a bend in the distance – 'let's just get to the next bend – and the next...'. 'Yew love them ol' fens, don't yew Doyanne – will yew still visit them ol' fens when I'm gawn?' my grandmother would say. I always told her I would, but I haven't, except recently only to discover that West Fen Road is built up with houses and according to the map, continues on a tarmac road all the way to connect with the A10. I don't know where 'Ol Tom's' has been swallowed up.
Each morning, my mother would see me across the road outside our house, and then I'd make my own way to the kindergarten school. I was always afraid I might see 'the naughty boys' who would call me names and pelt me with dry bread, until, that is, my mother came with me to speak with them one day and scared them into never doing it again. Her dependable protection was something that became over-protection as I grew older – a smothering took over and I wasn't good at fending for myself. She would always believe in me though – that I always told the truth – so later at my next school, when after putting all my school-mates at my main school off their rice pudding because I declared I had found a dead fly in mine, and the school secretary called home to complain to my mother, her response was: 'Well, Miss Croxton, if Dianne says there was a fly in her pudding there must have been a fly in her pudding'. Later I was allowed to take packed lunches.
At home, I played a lot with dolls – can still remember the personalities I gave them. Susan was sweet-natured and gentle, Brenda rather naughty and sometimes unkind, Margaret – a tall standing doll with hair, half my height when I had her (won at a Selfridge's Fair – how long it took to choose her from the array of toys in front of me!), was rather bossy and not as endearing. But then later came Rosie – the perfect baby doll – she could even drink from her bottle and wet her nappy. She had all the pretty white clothes – knitted jumpers and leggings with feet attached for winter – in summer a white satiny dress with puffed sleeves and a sash...! And so, eventually, I suppose, and probably inevitably, I became a mother.
And then there were the games that Pete and I played – leading each other blindfold round our suburban garden. I can still close my eyes and 'see' the disoriented vista that I walked through – straight through the stake and wire fence into what would be our neighbours’ garden – 'seeing' field upon field of red and yellow tulips stretching to the horizon... I have happy memories, unlike you, Kate, of playing in the garden with my brother – round and round the front and back of the house on our tricycles, painting the garden sheds with water – they were already painted green, and I loved to watch the colour darken under the wet brush-strokes and marks and patterns that I made and then having to start again when it dried out. The photographs show Peter joining in with this activity – he looks across at my efforts whilst holding his brush as if he is wondering if he is doing it 'right'. I was, I think, a fairly bossy older sister (are all elder sisters like that?) and I would soon change a game of Cowboys and Indians when playing with brother Peter and 'Big Peter' who was in my class in the kindergarten school and who lived at the top of our road in Pinner View, into a game of 'Mothers and Fathers' – oh the shame of it. We did play 'Cowboys and Indians', though, with the vicar's children – Judy and Richard – who also lived in Pinner View in the vicarage opposite St Georges Anglican Church with a large garden with plenty of trees to climb, places to hide – Judy and I always playing the Indians (of course) with feathers tied to our heads with bits of braid, Peter and Richard had cowboy hats and guns. I do remember that Peter also possessed a full Indian head-dress of feathers, though – so maybe he was Indian chief from time to time. There's a photograph of the four of us sitting on a bench in a park. I don't remember the occasion or location or how we came to play with them at all because I have no recollection of going to Sunday School and my parents certainly never went to church on a regular basis. 'Christian' morals and principles, though, were certainly upheld, and I must somehow have learnt about 'heaven' and 'hell' because one night my mother came into the bedroom whilst I was about to say my prayers and I asked her to listen: 'Dear God, please keep us all safe and kill all the robbers and bad people and … ' My mother stopped me and said something like, no no you shouldn't really say that... and I learnt I suppose that such things were never simple.
I was certainly quite a nervous child – always afraid that 'something bad' was going to happen. I remember one evening when my parents had gone out for the evening, pacing round their bedroom and looking out of each pane of the bay window looking for them. I suppose the family baby-sitter, my father's step mother was downstairs. I was slightly repulsed by her, even – she was large with false teeth that seemed to clack and sometimes drop down when she was eating. But she did have a dress with purple and orange and green floral pattern on it. I loved it, and that combination of colours, bizarrely, has a particular attraction for me – especially if I happen to come across such colours in wayside flowers. She had been my grandfather's housekeeper after my father's mother died long before I was born, and I expect my father always felt this responsibility to her after his father also died. This was Grandpa Tom – a truly terrifying tall, gaunt Scot with glasses with one of the lenses greyed over, but he would always bring Pete and me a box of pink and white marshmallows each, and rather than heed our mother's wishes, told us we could eat them 'before lunch'. Pete ate his in one go. I never ate all my sweets quickly – I would keep wrapped ones on a shelf in my bedroom cupboard, sorted according to the colour of their papers. I put this down to being born before 'the war' ended and so sweets were not easy to come by for a while.
Before my brother was born I had had a pretend friend that came with me everywhere – she never had a name other than 'My Little Pretend Girl'. When taken to the park by my mother I would always insist that she had a turn on the swings after me. My mother told me how later she always felt a bit embarrassed by my standing and pushing an empty swing while other children were waiting. Much later I also had 'friends' who lived in the two toilets. Mrs Smith lived in the upstairs loo with her little girl Susan, and we would talk together whilst I sat on the toilet. I can even remember the pattern on the black and white lino floor in there. Likewise, in the outside lavatory lived Mrs Wittington with her son Dick! I never enjoyed spending time with them as I did with Mrs Smith and Susan.
Close family that we were – almost closed to the outside world – and as safe and secure as I felt in it as long as we were all together, I was still full of anxieties. My mother told me so many 'old wives' tales' based on superstitious sayings – I always threw salt over my left shoulder if I had spilt any, never walked under ladders for fear of bad luck and would religiously hold onto my collar until I saw a white dog if an ambulance passed me. I fervently believed I would have doubly good luck on finding not only four-leafed but five-leafed clover down the Cambridgeshire fens in Ely. I continued to be afraid of feathers, certain wayside grasses, going down balloons and dead flowers – especially 'evening primrose' – with large floppy yellow petals at the top of a tall stem – that was always particularly clingy to my skin if I inadvertently touched it – horrors! I don't remember being unhappy, but the happiest times were the annual family holidays – usually 3 weeks long covering the last week in August and the first two in September during our 8-week long school hols. We never went abroad as many of my school-friends did, but the Southwest was most often favoured by my parents – Devon or Dorset mostly. We went to the east coast too – Norfolk and Suffolk. Devon and East Anglia have remained significant places for me during the rest of my life.
Pete and I often told each other our dreams on waking in the double bed we used to share – my most terrifying one was the 'green man in the sky' – I was in a bus-stop waiting room with my father where there was suddenly much consternation amongst the waiting passengers as a bright green light began to shine outside – when my father went to investigate he seemed filled with fear and as I joined him and I looked up I saw this huge male, but slightly amorphous, form looking down from the sky. This seemed to fill everyone with fear, and filled with terror myself, I woke up. Or another – I dreamt the wardrobe in my bedroom became covered in black spots – round and fairly evenly spaced but over the whole surface of the old light oak. This meant that 'the knights were coming' – and this filled me with such fear that I dreamt that I ran from my room and up and down the landing calling for my parents to warn them – then I woke up. Yet another – I was walking upstairs in the same family house, on the landing at the top the let-down ladder to the attic roof space was down and I could only see my father's legs at the top of the steps, the rest of him disappearing into the dark loft. As I reached the top few stairs, I looked through the bannisters across to my parent's room – the door was open and I could see the back of my mother, seated, and looking into the full-length mirror in front of her. When I looked at the reflected image of her face, I saw that she was a terrifying witch watching me, and of course, I woke up! Another was encountering a lion, dressed in red trousers and a blue jacket at the entrance to the local park ('Harrow Rec') through which I would often walk to school. It wasn't quite terrifying, but I never seemed to get past the lion.
When I was seven I passed the entrance exam to Heathfield School for Girls opposite Harrow-on-the-Hill station where I received an all-girls education until I left half-way through the 6th Form when I was 17. I remember my first day there – being sharply told to curb my excitement when, while I was sitting in the classroom, Vivian, whom I had met and liked at the entrance exam day, walked in to join the class. I remember feelings of being overwhelmed by the large number of pupils. I had always been 'top of the class' at my kindergarten school, and left well-versed in my 'times tables' and Enid Blyton literature, a smattering of French and with a love of drawing and creating coloured patterns and a good deal of self-confidence, the latter gradually eroding when I went to Heathfileld. I was never a 'high-flyer' there – too timid to take stock somehow of what was actually being taught, my reports always carrying the inevitable 'Dianne could do better', 'Dianne should try harder, etc.
1953 was the year of Queen Elizabeth 1st's coronation. I was eight and my father took me to see the procession as it passed along Oxford Street. My mother stayed at home with Peter and watched it on our black and white TV – probably bought especially for the occasion. My father and I had a perfect view because he worked at Selfridges and so we watched from the balcony window. I became quite obsessed with royalty and collected pictures from magazines etc for my scrapbook.
By the time I was eleven Helen, whom I always called Humpy because for some reason her name for me was inappropriately (I was very thin) Dumpy, had become my 'best friend'. She was large and rather Germanic in appearance with long blond plaited hair, later worn in a bun on the top of her head. She was mad about ballet, a passion for which I soon came to share. I remember her impromptu 'high kicks' that she would perform suddenly on our way to the next class or morning assembly. Her build forbade her ever becoming a member of a corps de ballet in any shape or form, but we would regularly go to Covent Garden for Saturday matinées, get our tickets for the upper slips and peer down on the likes of Antoinette Sibley, Merle Park and Beryl Gray and then queue at the stage door afterwards to collect autographs. The sound of the dancers' blocks on the wooden stage took me by surprise the first time we went, and it was here that live orchestral music opened my ears to its wonders. On a much more low-brow note, I loved the music that was played at the Wembley ice rink where we frequently went skating on Saturdays before heading on to Covent Garden in the afternoon. I had my aunt's old beige boots, Helen used to have to hire the brown ones. We both longed for the real thing – white with silver shiny blades as Noel Streatfield wrote about in 'White Boots'. Needless to say we had also read her other book 'Ballet Shoes'. We never listened to music at home, whereas Humpy's parents were music lovers – especially her father who, on my visits to their house, would sit at the table during dinner, 'conducting' to whatever piece of music they happened to be playing. Her parents were eccentrics in many ways, and these stays opened my eyes to other ways of living as a family (after all, wasn't ours the perfect one?)! Playing with Humps in her bedroom – I can only remember her getting on top of me on the bed and half-suffocating me while she pressed her already large breasts into my face – mine being still pretty much non-existent at the time. I was a 'late developer' and longed to wear a bra when so many of my school mates had them, but being told by my mother that I really didn't need one yet. What is 'need'? Anyway, this family had a huge garden with an enormous cherry tree with low hanging branches where we picked the ripe fruit lazing in the grass on midsummer afternoons. Or we climbed over the fence to the fields behind the garden and wandered off across the farmland – not exactly fearlessly as we crossed the corner of the one containing the bull. We got into trouble for going so far for so long, and also copped it for jumping out of the latticed dining room window trying to make it across the flower-bed and onto the path. But we were pretty tame in our antics really – just well brought up middle class public school girls. It wasn't until I reached my 'teens' that a certain dare-devil rebelliousness set in.
A Northern Childhood
Even the words, the names are ugly: pow-fagged, clarty, mills and mines, clogs, Aspull, Billinge, Wallgate...
Always it was the place to escape from, the poor and grey and disadvantaged north, uneducated, unambitious, uninspiring, unloving and unloved...
A land of contrasts: Primitive or Wesleyan, Catholic or Protestant, chapel or pub, Lily or Clarice, fingerpost or canal...
A land of back-to-backs and outside lavatories, chrysanths and ashes, coal fires and sooty earth, flat caps and braces, red flannel and pale blue nylon, syrup of figs and cod liver oil, liberty bodices and knee-high socks, sensible shoes and Sunday hats and gloves, winceyette and grey wool, mangles and boilers and solid fuel stoves, chimneys and blackened red brick, co-op divi and coupons, and railways...
At the age of 14 my dad left school and signed up as an apprentice railway engineer at Horwich Tech/Engine sheds (I should check the details here: easy enough since I have his autobiography, self-published with a print run of ten copies, on a shelf at home, a book I’ve always rather flippantly dismissed as the most boring book in the world…) Was this an obvious choice? I’m imagining the cotton mills were still in operation, and I think my dad’s dad worked in steel; but Wigan does have two railway stations, and perhaps the trains rattled past their house on New Springs bridge. For as long as I can remember our family life revolved around the railways, house moves with variable amounts of damage at the hands of the dreaded Pickfords and each destination more unsatisfactory than the last, judging by my mother’s thin-lipped fury and ready tears. There were calls out in the middle of the night, ‘breakdown’ and ‘derailment’ familiar terms to railway children though ‘mishap’ was the most usual explanation, designed perhaps to shield us from the cruelties of this world; and never of course the romance of a young Jenny Agutter & co. celebrating that longed-for return at the trackside, seen first in the cinema with a boyfriend’s mother when I still believed in happy endings; only Dad shambling in exhausted for a quick breakfast and then back out for more.
On the plus side, I suppose, there was free travel for the family, so I remember Scottish holidays which began with the excitement of the sleeper to Oban or Inverness, clambering up to the top bunk and lying half-asleep in the rattling night, or peeking out at platforms deserted in the dark. My concession, barely used I’m afraid, lasted until I finished university and extended to cross-channel ferries; my mum kept hers always, a lifetime’s ‘pass’ to go with my dad’s pension, keeping her horizontally if not upwardly mobile. It was the railways that took us back to Lancashire – to Carnforth this time – sandwiched between two spells living in Wembley, so that for a couple of years, between the ages of five and seven, I became a northern child again.
My mother’s mother lived with us for much of this period until she died, and my brother was born in the course of it; so that I was suddenly and unaccountably free – to play in the mud of the unmade garden with undesirable boys, to pedal up and down Windermere Road on my red tricycle, to pick bits of pebble-dash off the virgin walls of the council semis, to collect poppies from the long grass by the swing. I can date my ‘badness’ to then: the unwarranted attack on the smaller boy who lived at the top of Windermere Road, ingratiating myself, gaining his confidence and pushing him, hard, into the pit which was to become their front garden, so that he landed face first in the standing water and mud at the bottom. More perplexing is the way I pedalled up the road later that afternoon to apologise. Other crimes: taking our knickers down at the back of Helen of Troy’s house (her full name unrecoverable now) to compare notes, and getting caught; dawdling to school on the tip road and arriving late; and being shamed in front of the whole school in the hall later that day for asking how to spell ‘can’. I was ‘peevish’ or ‘contrary’, adjured always to behave myself, to sit up straight, to smile, to ‘be nice’.
The school hall of North Road Infants was vast and varnish-scented, with beans growing on damp blotting paper and carrot tops on saucers on a table at the back, a stage at the front, and the straggle of young voices chanting ‘I sent a letter to my love’ and ‘Incey Wincey Spider’ and ‘Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier’. I remember Barbara Watson of the bright red hair and her back kitchen, always homelier than mine; hurtling down the road on a borrowed sledge; dressing up in white to be a Rose Queen’s attendant. There was a different hall off Mrs Davies’s classroom, with shoe lockers at one end where I hid the Clarks lace-ups I’d outgrown and which my mother insisted I take to school for the ‘poor children’ she’d spotted wearing gym shoes in the rain. I remember acting out the story of ‘Soldier soldier won’t you marry me?’ as we sang along and pulled dressing-up clothes out of a hamper, and the smell of the sodden hymn books we found over the fence outside the derelict church hall. The exuberant grin of my early years has disappeared along with my rampant curls: photographs from this time show me frowning as I play alone, smiling bravely at birthday teas (remember the embarrassment of the elaborate games my dad laid on for such occasions?) or scowling at the camera. I have a blurred image of my dad and me out for a walk near the white-painted fences by Nether Kellet, those days redolent with the smell of scarlet poppies and pineapple weed. Sundays were chewing dry roast meat into an indigestible ball, with the misery of stewed apples or rice pudding afterwards and, occasionally, the unlikely treat of a lift to Sunday School in Amanay’s side car. Our first car, a black Hillman Minx, LKP 477, dates from around this time, and I do remember drives out to Silverdale or Arnside Knot where my dad would veer close to the drop to frighten us. There are clearer, happier memories of the leathery smell of Uncle Harry’s dark green Austin, and holidays when I (and perhaps my brother too though I don’t remember him being there) escaped the confines of the family and stayed with Uncle Harry and Auntie Nina in Warton and helped their son Colin deliver milk in the still-dark mornings around Milnthorpe and the Yellands while Lassie the whippet ran behind the van. Summers there we helped with hay-making on Auntie Belle’s farm or explored Warton Crag.
I can’t fault my parents on their attitude to child-rearing: I was well-nourished, clean and warmly-clad, nursed when I was ill, given a resilient moral code, protected from harm, introduced to books and music, never abused or beaten or neglected. I suppose, in their way, they loved me. But I have to dig deep to find any sense of fun and what is there seems to have been in spite of my immediate family rather than because of it. The most enduring lesson they taught me is that, no matter how hard I try, I will never be quite good enough.
… & a Southern One
There were two sorts of gardens when I was a child: the ones that belonged to other people, and ours. Ours were miserable suburban affairs of prohibition (don’t pick the flowers, don’t crawl into that dark secret space under the verandah, don’t let your new friend wee in the sandpit) or, when I was a bit older, of duty: help your mother, sweep the path and (worst of all) trim the edges. Other people’s, even in the same street, were a world away, lands of mystery and imagination where loganberries and chives were there for the picking and you could clamber over the fence at the end and up the embankment onto the railway. I read and reread The Secret Garden.
We first moved to Wembley from Wigan, where I was born, when I was a few months old. This should have been a passage to happiness: out of the impoverished north, home to mines and mills and mean streets, to the land of opportunity that was the south, with its gentler weather and wide avenues and its proximity to the capital. For my mother, surely, this was the first stage of the great escape? Look at the photographs: here we are smiling out of the mottled pages in our best coats and sensible shoes, marching gamely towards the future. I have few memories from that time, apart from that wooden verandah at the back of the house, and already they suggest that the optimism was misplaced. Two recall my naughtiness, the first letting the bad girls next door wash my curly hair in a bucket of dirty water, the second joining in the redecoration of the front room by crayoning on the new wallpaper. A third is fragmentary: a thump to the side of the head when I ran in front of a girl on a swing and, I think the same afternoon and perhaps to take away the taste of both injury and punishment (for surely I had courted disaster by running where I’d been told not to), an ice lolly in the shape of a teddy bear. The park, I believe, was Monk’s Park. And yes, on the map there is Tokyngton Avenue running alongside the railway to Monk’s Park recreation ground, now absorbed into the London Borough of Brent.
We moved to Carnforth when I was three or four. Circumstances made this for me a spell of unusual freedom. .By the time we moved back to Wembley, the iron hand of aspirational middle-class Methodism had tightened its grip, its dismal order restored. There was a railway line running past the end of my friend’s garden, high up on an embankment: forbidden territory, of course. The memory of illicit scrambles over the fence and through the brambles onto the track and once, I think, down the other side and into Barham Park, itself beyond the narrow confines of permission, evoke still the terror of discovery and punishment, of a piece with our other crimes. Despite the very unglamorous nature of my railway childhood, the smells of worn upholstery and soot, train travel for me is shot through with a kind of glamour; shaking off the trammels of routine, the thrill of setting out on what might become an extraordinary adventure.
Wembley, though, was for the most part anything but adventurous, the years there a bleak shunt between one railway posting and the next: I remember Marylebone station, visits to the Paddington offices on, I think Westbourne Terrace, tales of Old Oak Common and Neasden depots, the vocabulary of breakdowns and derailments, rolling stock and locos. Already albums of photos – ‘snaps’, then – were giving way to slides, rendering Sunday evenings soporific with the whirr of the projector and my dad’s meticulously detailed narratives. The house (a railway house): more pebble-dash, the front garden gloomy with cotoneaster and the worst kind of hydrangea, the back cracked crazy paving and rows of alternating alyssum and lobelia. Inside, dark rooms and a stairway of ivy wallpaper that reduced my mother to tears the day we arrived. I had bars on my bedroom window. My brother – by this time I had a brother, a pale boy with wispy blond hair who hoped, I imagine, that his brave smiles would take the sting out of his sister’s bullying (they didn’t) – had a wooden box of meccano and wallpaper with railway locomotives. We both had piano lessons, until he was caught riding round on his bike instead. I had no bike and so the drudgery of practice continued, except on Sunday mornings when the neighbours objected to being woken early and I crept around in the bathroom (fish wallpaper here) steaming stamps off envelopes to add to my collection. Later on Sunday mornings we would walk up Wembley High Road to Park Lane Methodist Church, and again in the afternoon I suppose for Sunday School, where my dad was superintendent. Or perhaps we didn’t have to walk twice? By this time the family car may have been routine.
The tedium of Sunday school was shot through with the glamour of adults on my Dad’s team who became the subject of pre-adolescent crushes. Sylvia, sharp and flirtatious in high heels and lipstick – she may even have smoked! – lived in Kenton, I remember, and Heather, rounder, wet-eyed, nursed a slow-burning passion for my dad which I’m sure was reciprocated though no doubt unfulfilled. And, later, both halves of a marriage who bore the brunt of my adoration. Brownies and then Guides took place in the church hall and offered a taste of freedom, whether in the illicit chips we managed to sneak on the way back or, occasionally, the near-stranger who would buy me sweets if I timed it right. There were also opportunities sometimes to prowl the empty curtained stage and pretend I was a famous actress, and a bit of badness that crept in to my guiding: by the time we moved away, I’d become the first ever guide to fail a test and was shaping up for dismissal.
Not much of a childhood, you might think, and I’m shocked by the bitterness that lingers, after all these years. Certainly the curls have been tamed, and the smiles are dutiful or simply missing. I have learnt well the lesson that will stay with me for most of my adult life: that I spoil things; that I must try harder to please. There was school, of course: here was a chance to put things right, though by seven I was already in my third school and odd for my accent as well as my newness. AND I failed to keep hidden the fact that I couldn’t see the blackboard, so had to have glasses. I remember the walk to school, solitary playtimes when I’d brood in the classroom, hanging round after school for the chance to walk the long way home with one of the teachers, and the one glorious morning when three of us managed to take a puff of a cigarette that the gorgeous Miss Griffiths had left burning in an ash tray in her office, without being caught. I wasn’t entirely friendless – I did get invited to the odd party and even made it to Ross Abrahams’ eleventh in my last year of the juniors – but the whole thing was precarious to say the least: what could I do but push my way to the top of the class and stay there?
As for the geography, there were glimmers of a world beyond, even before I moved schools for the fourth time. Just beyond the church, Wembley became Wembley Park, with Wembley Stadium where my dad and I stood to see Wigan beaten by St Helens in the Rugby League Cup Final in 1961. There was also the ice rink, where we saw skated versions of Christmas pantomimes, tawdry even to our impressionable eyes, the stockings of the twirling dancers full of holes. Only yesterday, I found out that the ice rink was a permanent fixture where you could skate on Saturdays – if you had parents who permitted that kind of thing. Another Christmas treat saw me disappointed by the Nutcracker in, I think the Festival Hall and, ashamed of my ingratitude, unable to do anything other than pretend delight. There must have been other Christmases there, too, but none I can recall, only the very real magic of Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market in the early morning in the days before Christmas, taken there with Joan who lived round the corner, she of the loganberry-and-chive-and-railway-embankment garden, by her dad who was a buyer, and Hungarian to boot. Both Joan’s parents were Hungarian, in fact, and she had a Hungarian granny, who supposedly only ate goose fat and who was bullied by everyone. Joan wasn’t always very nice to me, either, but I did learn to swear in Hungarian and to eat paprika. Joan’s bedroom was also where I learnt to play monopoly and was the site of my first tentative sexual explorations. Always there was the faint odour of the other there, like the smell of salt on the air as you approach the sea. Even Joan’s daily life had an exotic flavour: she went to a private school in Harrow, where they had a brown and yellow uniform with a little brown cap with yellow piping, as opposed to our ordinary navy blazers. She went to Spain and Italy on holiday, whilst we were in Torquay or Oban. They invited me to go with them to what was then Yugoslavia for a week when I was ten, but I wasn’t allowed.
There were other things to leave behind as I changed schools: the weekly Saturday morning in Ealing baths, with the harridan Miss Green counting the strokes – one – two – push – hard – fingers – together – good – girl – and poking us with her stick, with the lingering memory afterwards of all that swallowed water; the arrival of our first television, introducing me to Mr Pastry and The Lone Ranger, The Whirlybirds and Crackerjack. There must have been toys, but I can only remember a doll with a spotted frock and blond hair which I ruined by combing.
So, suddenly I was travelling to school on the tube, Sudbury Town to Ealing Common, then the walk to Creffield Road. The first year I was chosen as form captain and befriended one or two oddballs – Linda Mitchellhill, Margaret Adams – as well as some apparently well-adjusted girls – Deirdre Burton, Francoise Clark, Ruth Stalbow. A kaleidoscope of images: break-times wandering the tennis courts and the strips of garden belonging to the gardening club or buying sticky buns from an occasional stall near the gym; a library not much bigger than a cupboard where I chose ‘Four Fifty from Paddington’ as my first book; the trail to the school field where I learnt to wedge the hard ball into the hard cup of the bottom of the lacrosse stick for cradling practice; the horrors of swimming in the freezing outdoor pool with the bullying Miss Parker; a tiny baby trout which I carried round with me as part of a biology experiment and kept alive in a glass dish for a day or two; kneeling in the assembly hall to check that our skirts were the correct length; the annual celebrations for St Katherine’s Day…
Already, though, I was studying rebellion. I recall another Linda and her friend playing me and my ‘sex-starved’ state (this at 12!), and a gradual but determined collection of alternative companions, those who seemed older and bolder and experienced in the ways of the world. Some – Rowena, Gillian, Marilyn – I remember as physically bigger. Deborah – long straight red hair and the first beatnik of my acquaintance – took me to Les Wild’s club where the Mods lined one side of the hall and the Rockers the other (we were on the side of the Rockers, obviously!) and to Osterley Jazz Festival, both of us barefoot, and showed me how to drink beer. We all smoked, I think. By the time my family moved to Derbyshire and I completed the school year (my third in secondary) at Haberdashers, staying with the Robinsons in Acton, I was hanging round the tennis club with Rowena and fixing up my first date with a 28-year-old ex of hers called Pete. I shudder to think what made him interested in an innocent abroad, barely into her teens, but I remember the horrors of his tongue in my mouth on top of a bus bound for Richmond and, incredibly, ending the evening in The Attic where The Yardbirds were playing live. I paid heavily for that evening, getting into trouble when my foolish lie (that I was going to see a film about Winston Churchill with a schoolfriend) was found out – was there even such a film? – by my host family and then relayed to my parents. Still, I had learnt the necessity of lying to make possible the freedoms which I felt were absolutely mine by right: if ‘they’ (parents, teachers, the authorities) had no interest in the ‘real’ me, then I would seek out those who had.
Di and Kate read 'Harrow Weald' and 'A Southern Childhood':
There were two sorts of gardens when I was a child: the ones that belonged to other people, and ours. Ours were miserable suburban affairs of prohibition (don’t pick the flowers, don’t crawl into that dark secret space under the verandah, don’t let your new friend wee in the sandpit) or, when I was a bit older, of duty: help your mother, sweep the path and (worst of all) trim the edges. Other people’s, even in the same street, were a world away, lands of mystery and imagination where loganberries and chives were there for the picking and you could clamber over the fence at the end and up the embankment onto the railway. I read and reread The Secret Garden.
We first moved to Wembley from Wigan, where I was born, when I was a few months old. This should have been a passage to happiness: out of the impoverished north, home to mines and mills and mean streets, to the land of opportunity that was the south, with its gentler weather and wide avenues and its proximity to the capital. For my mother, surely, this was the first stage of the great escape? Look at the photographs: here we are smiling out of the mottled pages in our best coats and sensible shoes, marching gamely towards the future. I have few memories from that time, apart from that wooden verandah at the back of the house, and already they suggest that the optimism was misplaced. Two recall my naughtiness, the first letting the bad girls next door wash my curly hair in a bucket of dirty water, the second joining in the redecoration of the front room by crayoning on the new wallpaper. A third is fragmentary: a thump to the side of the head when I ran in front of a girl on a swing and, I think the same afternoon and perhaps to take away the taste of both injury and punishment (for surely I had courted disaster by running where I’d been told not to), an ice lolly in the shape of a teddy bear. The park, I believe, was Monk’s Park. And yes, on the map there is Tokyngton Avenue running alongside the railway to Monk’s Park recreation ground, now absorbed into the London Borough of Brent.
We moved to Carnforth when I was three or four. Circumstances made this for me a spell of unusual freedom. .By the time we moved back to Wembley, the iron hand of aspirational middle-class Methodism had tightened its grip, its dismal order restored. There was a railway line running past the end of my friend’s garden, high up on an embankment: forbidden territory, of course. The memory of illicit scrambles over the fence and through the brambles onto the track and once, I think, down the other side and into Barham Park, itself beyond the narrow confines of permission, evoke still the terror of discovery and punishment, of a piece with our other crimes. Despite the very unglamorous nature of my railway childhood, the smells of worn upholstery and soot, train travel for me is shot through with a kind of glamour; shaking off the trammels of routine, the thrill of setting out on what might become an extraordinary adventure.
Wembley, though, was for the most part anything but adventurous, the years there a bleak shunt between one railway posting and the next: I remember Marylebone station, visits to the Paddington offices on, I think Westbourne Terrace, tales of Old Oak Common and Neasden depots, the vocabulary of breakdowns and derailments, rolling stock and locos. Already albums of photos – ‘snaps’, then – were giving way to slides, rendering Sunday evenings soporific with the whirr of the projector and my dad’s meticulously detailed narratives. The house (a railway house): more pebble-dash, the front garden gloomy with cotoneaster and the worst kind of hydrangea, the back cracked crazy paving and rows of alternating alyssum and lobelia. Inside, dark rooms and a stairway of ivy wallpaper that reduced my mother to tears the day we arrived. I had bars on my bedroom window. My brother – by this time I had a brother, a pale boy with wispy blond hair who hoped, I imagine, that his brave smiles would take the sting out of his sister’s bullying (they didn’t) – had a wooden box of meccano and wallpaper with railway locomotives. We both had piano lessons, until he was caught riding round on his bike instead. I had no bike and so the drudgery of practice continued, except on Sunday mornings when the neighbours objected to being woken early and I crept around in the bathroom (fish wallpaper here) steaming stamps off envelopes to add to my collection. Later on Sunday mornings we would walk up Wembley High Road to Park Lane Methodist Church, and again in the afternoon I suppose for Sunday School, where my dad was superintendent. Or perhaps we didn’t have to walk twice? By this time the family car may have been routine.
The tedium of Sunday school was shot through with the glamour of adults on my Dad’s team who became the subject of pre-adolescent crushes. Sylvia, sharp and flirtatious in high heels and lipstick – she may even have smoked! – lived in Kenton, I remember, and Heather, rounder, wet-eyed, nursed a slow-burning passion for my dad which I’m sure was reciprocated though no doubt unfulfilled. And, later, both halves of a marriage who bore the brunt of my adoration. Brownies and then Guides took place in the church hall and offered a taste of freedom, whether in the illicit chips we managed to sneak on the way back or, occasionally, the near-stranger who would buy me sweets if I timed it right. There were also opportunities sometimes to prowl the empty curtained stage and pretend I was a famous actress, and a bit of badness that crept in to my guiding: by the time we moved away, I’d become the first ever guide to fail a test and was shaping up for dismissal.
Not much of a childhood, you might think, and I’m shocked by the bitterness that lingers, after all these years. Certainly the curls have been tamed, and the smiles are dutiful or simply missing. I have learnt well the lesson that will stay with me for most of my adult life: that I spoil things; that I must try harder to please. There was school, of course: here was a chance to put things right, though by seven I was already in my third school and odd for my accent as well as my newness. AND I failed to keep hidden the fact that I couldn’t see the blackboard, so had to have glasses. I remember the walk to school, solitary playtimes when I’d brood in the classroom, hanging round after school for the chance to walk the long way home with one of the teachers, and the one glorious morning when three of us managed to take a puff of a cigarette that the gorgeous Miss Griffiths had left burning in an ash tray in her office, without being caught. I wasn’t entirely friendless – I did get invited to the odd party and even made it to Ross Abrahams’ eleventh in my last year of the juniors – but the whole thing was precarious to say the least: what could I do but push my way to the top of the class and stay there?
As for the geography, there were glimmers of a world beyond, even before I moved schools for the fourth time. Just beyond the church, Wembley became Wembley Park, with Wembley Stadium where my dad and I stood to see Wigan beaten by St Helens in the Rugby League Cup Final in 1961. There was also the ice rink, where we saw skated versions of Christmas pantomimes, tawdry even to our impressionable eyes, the stockings of the twirling dancers full of holes. Only yesterday, I found out that the ice rink was a permanent fixture where you could skate on Saturdays – if you had parents who permitted that kind of thing. Another Christmas treat saw me disappointed by the Nutcracker in, I think the Festival Hall and, ashamed of my ingratitude, unable to do anything other than pretend delight. There must have been other Christmases there, too, but none I can recall, only the very real magic of Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market in the early morning in the days before Christmas, taken there with Joan who lived round the corner, she of the loganberry-and-chive-and-railway-embankment garden, by her dad who was a buyer, and Hungarian to boot. Both Joan’s parents were Hungarian, in fact, and she had a Hungarian granny, who supposedly only ate goose fat and who was bullied by everyone. Joan wasn’t always very nice to me, either, but I did learn to swear in Hungarian and to eat paprika. Joan’s bedroom was also where I learnt to play monopoly and was the site of my first tentative sexual explorations. Always there was the faint odour of the other there, like the smell of salt on the air as you approach the sea. Even Joan’s daily life had an exotic flavour: she went to a private school in Harrow, where they had a brown and yellow uniform with a little brown cap with yellow piping, as opposed to our ordinary navy blazers. She went to Spain and Italy on holiday, whilst we were in Torquay or Oban. They invited me to go with them to what was then Yugoslavia for a week when I was ten, but I wasn’t allowed.
There were other things to leave behind as I changed schools: the weekly Saturday morning in Ealing baths, with the harridan Miss Green counting the strokes – one – two – push – hard – fingers – together – good – girl – and poking us with her stick, with the lingering memory afterwards of all that swallowed water; the arrival of our first television, introducing me to Mr Pastry and The Lone Ranger, The Whirlybirds and Crackerjack. There must have been toys, but I can only remember a doll with a spotted frock and blond hair which I ruined by combing.
So, suddenly I was travelling to school on the tube, Sudbury Town to Ealing Common, then the walk to Creffield Road. The first year I was chosen as form captain and befriended one or two oddballs – Linda Mitchellhill, Margaret Adams – as well as some apparently well-adjusted girls – Deirdre Burton, Francoise Clark, Ruth Stalbow. A kaleidoscope of images: break-times wandering the tennis courts and the strips of garden belonging to the gardening club or buying sticky buns from an occasional stall near the gym; a library not much bigger than a cupboard where I chose ‘Four Fifty from Paddington’ as my first book; the trail to the school field where I learnt to wedge the hard ball into the hard cup of the bottom of the lacrosse stick for cradling practice; the horrors of swimming in the freezing outdoor pool with the bullying Miss Parker; a tiny baby trout which I carried round with me as part of a biology experiment and kept alive in a glass dish for a day or two; kneeling in the assembly hall to check that our skirts were the correct length; the annual celebrations for St Katherine’s Day…
Already, though, I was studying rebellion. I recall another Linda and her friend playing me and my ‘sex-starved’ state (this at 12!), and a gradual but determined collection of alternative companions, those who seemed older and bolder and experienced in the ways of the world. Some – Rowena, Gillian, Marilyn – I remember as physically bigger. Deborah – long straight red hair and the first beatnik of my acquaintance – took me to Les Wild’s club where the Mods lined one side of the hall and the Rockers the other (we were on the side of the Rockers, obviously!) and to Osterley Jazz Festival, both of us barefoot, and showed me how to drink beer. We all smoked, I think. By the time my family moved to Derbyshire and I completed the school year (my third in secondary) at Haberdashers, staying with the Robinsons in Acton, I was hanging round the tennis club with Rowena and fixing up my first date with a 28-year-old ex of hers called Pete. I shudder to think what made him interested in an innocent abroad, barely into her teens, but I remember the horrors of his tongue in my mouth on top of a bus bound for Richmond and, incredibly, ending the evening in The Attic where The Yardbirds were playing live. I paid heavily for that evening, getting into trouble when my foolish lie (that I was going to see a film about Winston Churchill with a schoolfriend) was found out – was there even such a film? – by my host family and then relayed to my parents. Still, I had learnt the necessity of lying to make possible the freedoms which I felt were absolutely mine by right: if ‘they’ (parents, teachers, the authorities) had no interest in the ‘real’ me, then I would seek out those who had.
Di and Kate read 'Harrow Weald' and 'A Southern Childhood':
