You wait for ages and two come along together. Two 662 trolleybus bus tales - link…

 

Here is my link to two 662 trolleybus paperbag stories by me. Both are Wembley related and of my time in Wembley:

https://paperbagstories.substack.com/

I hope they bring a smile to your face.

Robert 

Click on the image to enlarge.

Brent Archives quickly amend wrongly captioned Swinderby Road photo

 Brent Archives have updated the caption which accompanies a photograph of my maternal grandfather (who I called 'Pop') at his workbench at the rear of 36 Swinderby Road in Wembley, with me and my mother, Betty, looking on. To the left of my mother, is my Uncle Syd, Pop's brother. Thank you Brent Archives. Here is the updated copy from the Brent Archives' online catalogue:

The photograph, of which I have my own original copy, is one of a number given to Brent Archives twenty years age by my Uncle Frank (Francis Howard), was was Syd's son and my mother's first cousin. They came all be found in the Archives. They are easy to find.

My first memory is of Uncle Syd and, like so many early memories, not a happy one.

Back in 2011, Mike Burnham, who was tutoring a WEA writing class I had joined a few months earlier, asked the class to write about a childhood memory and I wrote this in half-an-hour, then read it to the class. Reading again I feel it captures how I felt as a young boy growing up in Wembley in the late-1940s/early 1950s.

My first memory

My early years are blank,

I only know what I've been told,

Or seen in photographs of me,

Are they clues to who I am?

Perhaps reality lies hidden.

When did I become aware?

Sitting in a pushchair,

Uncle Sid and Pop. A fight,

Men running out,

A woman shouting.

Left in Nanna's care,

I remember little of those childhood years,

Pictures show a happy child,

One, standing on a tank,

And, yes, I see the man in me.

Conjuring memories now is easy,

Just how real are they?

And here they come,

A frenzy in my head,

A maze I scramble through.

Perhaps a play describes them best,

In the theatre of my mind,

Sometimes victim, never hero,

Sometimes audience, never star,

Then passive, watching other lives.

Now I see my life in others,

Childhoods that seem my own,

Still upon a stage,

Love growing up,

A family moving on,

And that first memory?

I was nearly two,

But was 26 before I knew,

It was a family gathering,

Of a kind we all dread.

'Well I never' my Pop said,

'Fancy you remembering that,

Now that Sid is dead',

Then we laughed,

And wondered who'd be next.

Robert Howard

3 April 2011.

What I have are the memories of what Pop told me and my mother later confirmed. Uncle Sid didn't want to go back to Springfield Mental Hospital, near Tooting and 662 and 630 trolleybus ride away, after having the spent week with us on Swinderby Road. Sid staring kicking Pop and they ended up wrestling on the pavement across from the old Wembley Police Station. It was probably my mother's screaming which brought the policemen running out and dragged Uncle Sid off Pop and took him to the police station, Pop and my mother following, me still in my pushchair being lifted up the steps. I remembered all this, op and my mother told me years later, at Uncle Sid's funeral. Pop explained what was what and Uncle Sid calmed down and was told that he could either go back on the bus with Pop or in a police car. Pop always said it was the sight of the uniforms that calmed Sid down and he did what he was told.

The outbursts happened from time to time and I would go with Pop whilst growing up to see Uncle Sid in Springfield every month. By trolley bus of course. Always a great adventure.

The photographs in Brent Archives include a number of Uncle Sid in 'Persia',but I grew up believing he become a POW during WW1 whilst fighting in Mesopotamia.

I still see the scene still in my head much as I captured this memory when prompted to write it down in 2011.