Swinderby Road my home port

As children we all want to explore and mark territory if we have the chance. Some less fortunate never leave home unless part of a convoy. They are anchored to their home and garden. Someone from my Swinderby Road childhood, who I am getting to know again and met last week for the first time in fifty-four years was one of the latter. Our conversations were at her front gate and I have this memory of her behind her front gate whilst other children, like myself, clustered round.

I know this memory of her is 'reliable' because I told her of where we used to stand and talk before she said as much herself. I thought her very grown-up and whilst she claims she was shy, it isn't how I remember her. She was much more outgoing than the more free roaming Swinderby kids like myself and her memories are beginning to confirm my view.

She moved on, school wise, before the likes of me, going off to Ealing Art School at thirteen after two years at Alperton and what all too few conversations we had afterwards were all at either her front gate or at her aunt's house a few doors down.

We were in the same years at Barham and Alperton, but I cannot remember being in the same class. I was a slow learner back then and didn't really like the constraints school placed on me. I always had things to do away from school and people to see, papers to deliver, bottles to collect and errands to run.

My friend was bright and on the few occasions I thought of Swinderby Road and Wembley as a grown-up in faraway Birmingham and Nottingham, and reminisced with family, or my two teenage friends from my days as a Wembley South Young Socialist, she was always there.

My friend did have 'voyages' away from Swinderby; going to Barham and Alperton schools and Sunday school (which I think she did). I must ask if she went to Barham School on her own, or whether her mother took her and collected her?

I, on the other hand, was taken to Barham School for the first time one morning in 1949. I then made my way home in the afternoon as part of a huge wave of children which rolled down Danethorpe Road every afternoon. Now it may have been the case that a neighbour had me in her sights, perhaps Mrs Matthews, who lived next door. Her daughter Eileen was a few weeks younger than me and we played together a lot in those days.

I suspect I  was the only child at Barham School aged five who already travelled on buses alone, albeit seen onto an 83 outside DeMarco's on Ealing Road, opposite the Regal Cinema, into the care of the conductor, then met at the top of Townsend Lane in Kingsbury by my Auntie Wi'en. In the evening, the process would be reversed. In between time, I enjoyed the company of cousins Fiona and Derek, whose prefab home backed onto open fields leading down to The Welsh Harp.

A blessed 83, Ealing bound, outside Alperton Station in 1952.

By coincidence (yet another one), the 83 was to play an important part in the life of my Swinderby Road friend. Like me, she likes buses. As children they liberated us. Before this blog is done with, there will be fair bit about Wembley buses and where they took us. Image from London Transport Buses and Coaches 1952 by John A S Hambley (1993), which can still be bought on the Amazon website. This is a great series of 'year' books, which capture on page after page how the world looked at the time — with a bus or two in every pic!

On days when I stayed at home, some of us Swinderby kids would wander off to One Tree Hill, a nearby open space, on our own and play, often on the swings and slide by the Piccadilly Line. Most of time we did this without asking or telling and, usually, our absence from Swinderby went unnoticed. If it was, someone would come and find us and sternly tell us not to do it again. We did of course.

At first that was as far as we went. To the top of Swinderby, right along Eagle Road until it met Norton Road, and across to the left was the open entrance to One Tree Hill. There were no fences then and very few cars, if any.

Another day we might go and play beside 'The Brook', which ran between the lower part of Swinderby Road and the length of Ranlagh Road on the west side, which was bordered by back gardens. On the east side all you saw was the bacsk of the sshops which fronted onto Ealing Road. In those days it was open and, most of the time, no more than six to eight inches deep, with an open bridge which carried The Brook under Chaplin Road.

This was where we would lay low on summer evenings waiting for the DeMarco's ice cream vans to return, then as the driver took in their takings, we would dash across to the open van and scoop out as much ice cream as our hands could carry, before dashing back to hide in the bushes again and consume the ice cream as quickly as we could, covering our hands and faces in melting ice cream before washing our hands and faces in The Brook.

I saw other lads steal boxes of tins and other provisions from unloading lorries on the same unmade road behind the shops, but I was never that brave. What I did was akin to scrumping. What grown-ups like my grandfather ('Pop') would call poaching. There was a line and I didn't cross it.

As we got older, perhaps six or seven, and had a year of Barham School under our belt, we would go further afield, in the footsteps of the adults who took us to Barham Park to play or visit the Library. If grown-ups could do it, so could we, and no group I was with ever got lost, for I had an anchor point, where we could hove to and, if lucky, get a free glass of pop of squash or pop, with a biscuit too.

My port of call was the Fair View Club on the Harrow Road, between Wembley and Sudbury, beside Wembley Fire Station. I could get to 'The Club', as I knew it, from Swinderby Road blind-folded. It was a kind of second home. Parked in the 'ladies' room by my Pop, with its leatherette chairs and sofas, I would consume glasses of lemonade and eat Smith's crisps or large penny Arrowroot biscuits with a lump of cheese. I would watch the men come and go and, if it wasn't busy out the back, I would be let loose on a table in a corner and ball the coloured balls into the pockets or make them bounce off one another in the hope that one would go into a pocket on its own. Sometimes we all got lucky and go no further, some raquets would be found and we would end up playing on the already neglected tennis courts, with glasses of squash or pop and food to keep us going. On my own, I would go there with a barrow and collect grass cuttings for Pop's runner beans, but that's another story for a another day. I wonder what occupies them now?

My route to Barham Park was one which allowed me to show off; down Chaplin, into Dagmar, where the Venture Coaches went from, and round the back towards Wembley Hospital, then off to the right, across the tennis courts, through the hall full of green covered tables and a quick dash through the bar of The Club.

Always someone on a stool propping up the bar and my arrival would be greeted with someone saying 'Where's Ernie?' (my Pop's name) and someone else saying 'Not far behind'. By then we would already be in the hallway on the other side heading for the large front door. On my own,  I would have lingered, sure of a free glass of lemonade and an Arrowroot, always my favourite.

Across the Harrow Road, between the then endless stream of trolleybuses and buses, and a few yards up in the direction of Sudbury was Barham Park, like One Tree Hill, fenceless, only separated from the pavement by a ditch of sorts. Then it was off into the dells and sunken gardens, where we would play and hide and, on occasions, visit the Library as well. At the beginning of the 1950s, the large house at the centre of what had once been a private estate was still standing and I have vague memories of a large ground floor room, with windows which opened onto a terrace, serving tea and cake.

I might not have been good at school, but I was encouraged to borrow books from the Library, which I did most weeks and took out picture books, mainly about history and places, and read about Lord Nelson and North Sea fishermen, or other parts of Britain. These were not things we learnt about at Barham School, but there was a young teacher at Barham, Jean Conrad was her name, who took an interest in me and other children too — like the girl I have met again. Miss Conrad will get her posting.

If there is one thing I do not want to lose from my life, it is amazement. You may call it wonder, but I never cease to be amazed in wonderous ways and meeting another Swinderby child again of my own age is a case in point. After so many years, over fifty, there are still so many shared interests and passions.

We are on a voyage of re-discovery together, this time she is free to sail and we are bringing different qualities to our journey. It's very exciting and we have even picked up another 'Swinderberbian' (if that is what we are), a few years younger, but she knows many the same names and has sent me information as well.

At some point, my writing will have to be given some order. For now, I am letting a long forgotten world come to life again before me, as words come tumbling out and many more go untyped. For now they remain scribblings in notebooks.

How did I get to Swinderby Road?

I was born in a Torquay nursing home in 1944. Until recently, I always thought I was born in Teignmouth. At least the Devon part was right. The most this ever meant to me as a child was that I could not play cricket for Middlesex. In the 1940s and 50s, they were very strict about these things.

My mother was unmarried and my father's name does not appear on my birth certificate. My mother never spoke to me about my father and I never asked. I did wonder from time to time, but I never found the courage to confront her and I'm not sure she would have told me the truth anyway.

I was taken back to 36 Swinderby Road, Wembley, where I lived until 1966, except for six-seven months in the mid-fifties, when I lived in Swindon with my mother and step-father. From my point of view, living in Swindon didn't work, so I took off one day and cycled back to Wembley. My Nanna and Pop let me stay and for the next few years I slept on a folding sofa bed in the ground-floor front room.

I don't know how many of the illegitimate children born during the Second World War were adopted, taken into care, lived with their mothers or some other family member. I must find out. In my case it was the latter. My Nanna and Grandfather, who I called 'Pop', took me in and cared for me.

The family must have been talking about me from the moment they knew my mother was pregnant. What was to be done about this unborn baby. Was my mother to be shown the door and told not to come back? She could have been told to give me away. Somehow, a few weeks old, I ended up living at 36 Swinderby Road.

I don't think it was all amicable and the clue to this 'fact' is in my name. On my birth certificate I am 'Kevin Peter', yet as a child the only name I knew was 'Bobby'. I tell myself and others that Nanna gave me this name as a condition of me being allowed into the house. This is my story — I have no way of knowing for sure. Somewhere along the line Bobby became 'Bob' and 'Robert'.

I do know that within weeks of being born my mother had left me and returned to her job working for a Mrs Cooper, helping her to care for her son, Stanley. My mother stayed in touch with the Coopers until they died, then with Stanley, who was at my mother's funeral in 2006. During any visit to my mother, their names would come up in the conversations, so it came as surprise, when, finally introduced to him, at her funeral, he said 'Who?'.

He knew my step-father and my half-sisters, but in all the meetings they had, any reference to me was assiduously avoided and, as far as Stanley was concerned, his parents never know about me either.

My mother liked to believe that she was a good mother. She tried in her way and I do have affectionate memories of her, but these are laced with less than happy ones. When she died, the family rallied round and I gave the eulogy. She was within days of her eighty-sixth birthday and, in the few years before, she had divided up the family photographs between me and my half-sisters, with the result that I suddenly had a tangible childhood, one I could see and touch.

For the first time, I had a few photographs of me as a child to keep.

Swinderby Road was home. I do not believe my childhood was extraordinary, but it was different and, nearing seventy, I find myself wondering about all those conservations about me I was not party to. Who made the decision about me going to Swinderby Road? Certainly not my mother, was it Nanna and Pop together, or just one of them?.

For them this was the second time they had to confront such a decision. My Uncles Dave and Frank* were abandoned by their mother after their father, my Uncle Sid*, was hospitalised in an asylum after The Great War. It's a complicated story, but here they were, my Nanna and Pop, in 1944, having to make a similar decision again. I like to think that this time they were determined not to make the same mistake.

I think I have my uncles to thank for how I ended up going to Swinderby Road.

*Uncle Sid was Pop's brother and appears in the photograph in my first posting dated 25 January 2013, showing me at the back of Swinderby Road, with Pop and my mother, when I was about eighteen months old. You can find more family photographs online in the London Borough of Brent Archives.

After all these years, I not sure it should matter, but watching 'Call the Midwife' on TV last Christmas I was reduced to tears before the end, prompted by a discussion between a mother and father about the fate of their fifteen year old daughter's baby. The camera pulled back and you were confronted with the image of a crib and standing a few feet back, the girl and behind her, her parents. I turned to my wife, already crying and said 'That could have been me', then I cried for a good few minutes. 

Down the rabbit hole of a Wembley childhood

I am re-visiting old territory with this post. In my first posting, I wrote about why I wanted to write a memoir of my Wembley childhood. I have been thinking about it now since Christmas 2010, after having my vanity appealed to by younger family members.

In truth, I have little yet to share. In January 2011  I found myself sitting in a room with a dozen or so other would-be writers at a Workers' Education Association (WEA) class in Beeston, near to where I live in Nottingham.

On one level, I was already a published, self-taught, writer, dating back to the early-1970s, writing regularly about local government politics and local history — and still do, with a monthly column in the Nottingham Post about public transport.

I realised from the outset that my childhood memoir would be different: it was about me telling a story, becoming creative in previously unimagined ways, and the more I thought about it, I realised by Wembley childhood was like a multi-layered labyrinth, which I could view from as many perspectives as there were days in the story. I felt like Alice going down the rabbit's hole and still do.

Childhood is not a comparative experience at the time you are living it. It was like it was and it was mine.

I was fatherless and motherless most of the time. I lived with my grandparents at 36 Swinderby Road and a string of lodgers, some of whom were kind to me, others ignored me and one sexually abused me and I did things to him. No one seemed to notice at the time. If they did, no one ever spoke to me.

School was a haze. I have a few memories. I had no direction. The eleven-plus passed me by. I cannot remember it at all. It was day-to-day until I left at fifteen.

I looked on as a teenager, as several I knew confronted their illegitimacy. At the time, only I seemed 'normal'.

A press cutting from The Wembley News in 1953 shows the joint Coronation street party for Swinderby and Ranlagh roads and says it was attended by '100 children' — 100! Twenty, maybe, but never one-hundred!

I found myself thinking I was more a loner than I realised. Looking back, I was regularly 'despatched' to relatives for weekends and 'holidays' — I had plenty of them as a child in places like Kingsbury and Harlow, occasionally Grantown-on-Spey, Dunbar or Teignmouth, then there were the summer camps with the Cubs and the Church.

My friends at school were few, some in Swinderby Road, others at the Cubs and The Church of God, which I attended until I was about seventeen. What friendships I made were always being interrupted by me going off somewhere. None survived childhood.

I remember the names of a dozen other children on Swinderby Road at most and if we take 1953 as the year I try to remember, then you might understand why the number '100' frightens me: I lived at no.36, next door lived Eileen Matthews (34). On the other side (38), at about this time, the Rutherford's moved in with their daughter Judith, who went to a Catholic school. I'm sure there were other children as well, but no names or faces come to mind.

Gill and Ralph Maiden lived at no.40 and Johnny Hicks, who drowned on holiday when he was about twelve, lived at no.42 and, next door, at no.48 lived Audrey Watson and her sister. Next to them lived the Allen twins and further up Swinderby, on the same side, lived Peter Scott and his elder brother Ivan. Their father died of a heart attack at Wembley Central Station and Peter was killed in a motor-cycle accident in his late-teens. There was also Bobby Kelner, who has no cause to remember me kindly, if he remembers me at all, as he features in an incident from my Barham School days, which still shames me over sixty years on and I will write about.

At no.26 lived Pamela Mellish and on the other side of the road, just around the bend, opposite the Watsons, lived Bobby Dazely and his brother, who then was described as a 'Mongol' child. Everyone was very protective of him and I never heard him called names. A little up from Bobby was a lad called Neil, who, when I was about fourteen, gave me a cigarette. I took one puff, coughed and gave it back. I had the strength of character to say 'no' and can never remember being bullied by anyone to change my mind.

I had a few playground fights and never joined 'a gang'. I was avoided, not shunned. I had my paper-round and I had my bike, and I had the confidence to take myself off to Barham Park Library, the South Kensington museums, to Gunnersbury Park and to relatives in Kingsbury, as well as my mother, when she was the live-in housekeeper to a Dr Sheldon in Kingsbury proper before she married my step-father, where they then lived together until my first half-sister was born.

Perhaps the most liberating thing in my childhood was the advent of London Transport's 'Red Rover' ticket for 2/6d (12½p), which allowed unlimited travel for a day on all red bus routes. I took myself off and explored London, often alone, and got myself a morning paper-round instead of an afternoon one so that I could do this.

Being able to travel on a red London bus on my own from about four years old (then just to Townsend Lane in Kingsbury, where my aunt and uncle and two cousins my age, lived in a prefab) is what gave me my life-long love of buses. I got to know the types of buses I travelled on and started reading Buses Illustrated when I was about nine and still have copies with 'Gillies' written in the top right-hand corner, as my mother used to buy it for me. I never collected bus numbers, always more interested in bus maps and where I could get to on a bus. I will write about my Red Rover days at some point. I grew up wanting to be a bus driver.

There was a darker side to me I want to acknowledge. My experiences at the hands of a lodger, made me think, in all innocence, it was OK for me to do the same. What cured me was how others reacted. My 'normal' was not their 'normal' and I disgraced myself. No more was ever said and the children involved remained friends until leaving school, when our lives went off in different directions by which time, anyway, there were other 'distractions' and more 'grown-up' experiences had left an altogether different mark on me.

No one reformed me. I did that, unthinkingly, for myself. It made me wise enough not to condemn, to be slow to judge and to understand that the greatest dangers we have to confront are those nearest to us — which is why I made sure my own children never had to share a bedroom and why I believe not providing decent housing for all is our biggest failing as a society.

Swinderby Road was my world and it made me what I am — which is why writing about my childhood is proving so much harder than I imagined after  two-and-a-half years and starting this blog has not been the release trigger I had hoped for.

A trait I readily admit to is a deep dislike of authority. It began at Barham School with a teacher who I remember as 'Miss Macheck'. She tried to make me write with my right-hand when my inclination was to use my left-hand, despite doing most other things with my right-hand. She used to hit my wrist with a ruler until one day she used a big black-board ruler and I left the class crying and ran off to One Tree Hill. In those days schools were not like the prisons they have become today.

There is a story here and, I suspect, what I have said above already contains half-truths. None of us, in my experience, because of the reminiscence and oral history work I have done as a local historian, remember events as well as would like to believe, so I have no way of knowing the truth for sure, other than as I have told it to myself since being asked, as a teenager, why I hold a pen 'funny''?

I also remember being laughed at by a teacher at Alperton Secondary Modern on my first day, when I proudly showed him my new Words dictionary my Nanna had bought for me in Harlesden for 2/6d. It is still a treasured possession and I had the last laugh, because the same dictionary was later bought by the School.

There were teachers who encouraged me, whether they knew what they were doing is another matter. For now, it is enough to acknowledge their contribution to the making of the 'Robert' I am today.

Miss (Jean) Conrad at Barham, who sent me a Christmas Card every year until I was about eighteen  and, much to my shame, I never replied once, despite there being an address in Twickenham or Teddington or somewhere like that. Mr Sladden, who taught geography at Alperton and lived on Scarle Road, and Mr Irvine, the English teacher at Alperton who lodged at the top end of Swinderby Road and had to walk to school in the company of over-talkative kids like myself.

Family wise, my Auntie Nannie and Uncle Dave in Harlow were a towering influence on me and my life-long belief in Socialism comes from them, not by talking, but by example. They both became Labour councillors like myself ( one teenage ambition I did fulfil ).

The Church of God, which met in the British Legion Hall on Union Road, off Ealing Road, played a part too, as did my own insecurities — the need to be 'worthy' came from the Church. Only now, nearly seventy years later, am I unpicking this particular 'shackle'.

Others have paid a price at times for my imperfections and I am deeply sorry for this fact, but will go to my grave thanking them for their understanding and forbearance.

This memoir, when I begin writing it properly, will now end when my first wife, Tricia, and I left Swinderby Road in 1966, when we bought our first house together in South Harrow. The future was bright and the world felt good.

And next week I will meet another child from Swinderby Road, the same age as me, after a gap of more than fifty years. Had I not started this blog we would not be meeting. The rabbit hole awaits and it leads to a labyrinth going I know not where…