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…

A voice from the past

I must apologise for not posting more entries to this blog, but not long after I started this blog I had a small stroke and lost the use of my left hand and wrist for a few hours. It was a surreal experience because I felt no pain. I just had a wrist and hand I could do nothing with. Luckily, I am able to write again, but my grip is weaker than it was and I am now on medication, but other things have taken priority and I am only posting this short entry now because my blog was found by another former Swinderby Road resident, the same age as myself, who I remembered, and we have since exchanged a few emails. This alone has made starting the blog worthwhile.

It made me realise that I have only have a few photographs of me with one other child, who lived on Swinderby Road at the same time as me. The photos below show me with Eileen Matthews who lived next door at no.34. She was three weeks younger than me and we were friends until we went to work and our lives went off in different directions. We both went to Barham and Alperton schools.

I cannot remember the name of Eileen's cat. Our cat was called 'Tibby' and was a gentle tom,  although I do remember seeing him battered and scarred after a few cat fights and his diet was scraps. There was no such thing as cat food. That was something I only discovered in the sixties, when my wife and I were given a tortise-shell cat we called 'Tina'.

We're sitting on an old sink and there's another one to the back of us, along with old pipes and galvanised sheeting. The back garden at Swinderby Road was a junk yard and going through some old family photographs, I came across a photograph from the 1920s, also taken in the back garden at 36 Swinderby Road:

It shows, from left to right, my Uncle Smiler; Uncle Frank, an older girl I have no name for; Uncle Dave and my mother, Betty. All those I know are Howards. My Uncle Frank is the only one still alive, so I am sending him a copy in the hope that he can name the 'mystery' girl for me.

The window you can just see on the left edge of the photograph is the outside toilet. Its floor was bricks on earth and lime washed walls and newspaper pieces on hooks. There was an inside toilet too.

My visit to Brent Archives to go through the electoral rolls for Swinderby Road have been on hold, but I'm hoping now to pay them a visit in late-May / early-June.

A childhood memoir

I lived in Swinderby Road, Wembley, from when I was born in 1944 until my first wife and I bought a house in South Harrow in 1966. From 1949 until 1955 I attended Barham Junior School and then moved onto Alperton Secondary Modern School, which I left in 1959 to start my first job. My memories before starting school are vague. There are a few. I have decided the focus of this blog will be my school years. At a later stage I will add the years 1959–1966.

Over the coming months I will post recollections as they come to me and, as I progress, I may go back and change them. As a local historian of sorts since the 1970s I know from the reminiscence work that I have done that the memory can play tricks on us. We telescope events, confuse years, people and places — which is why I am writing a 'memoir'. Over the coming months I intend to visit Brent Archives to look at the Electoral Roll for the period 1945–1966 and to work my way through archived copies of the Wembley News and Wembley Observer for the same period.

So what has prompted this enterprise. I have had in mind since my mother died in 2008. In the year before she divided up what family photographs she had between me and my two half-sisters, Roz and Jo. Then over Christmas 2010, my two grown-up grand-daughters, Laura and Natalie, got me talking about growing up in Wembley and how I met my first wife, Tricia, then my second wife, Susan. As a result I joined a 'creative' writing class in Beeston, close to where I live in Nottingham. I have been a published writer since the 1970s on matters relating to local politics and local history, mainly news and topical articles, and from 1984–2006, I was News Editor for Local History Magazine, a national periodical about local history, so I have fair idea of what I want to achieve with this blog. In a nutshell, I want to entertain and inform and, if I'm lucky, I will provoke some feedback as well.

I was also prompted by finding myself on two family photographs in the London Borough of Brent Archives (click here and scroll through a few pics of Howards in Brent Archives, a good few showing my Uncle Sid during the WWI — type 'Howard' in the search box), which were deposited a few years ago by my Uncle Frank. The two including me are wrongly labelled as to location and year. This is one of the photographs which I have in my personal possession:

I think it is from 1945, when I was aged one. It shows, from left, 'Pop' (my maternal grandfather), me, Betty (my mother) and Uncle Sid (Pop's brother and my Uncle frank's father) and shows the back of 36 Swinderby Road in Wembley. Pop was a self-employed plumber and central heating engineer, who traded as 'E W Howard & Son', having previously traded with his brother Arch, who was based in Pinner, Middlesex, as 'A E Howard & Sons' — the name given to the business by their father (my maternal great grandfather), when the business had a shop on Wembley High Road. It's a long story — the decline and fall of the Howards — which I may get round to telling one day.

The back of the house was still like this when Pop died in 1976. There was a wartime Morrison Shelter in his backroom workshop and the wooden bench in this pic was replaced by another Morrison Shelter not long after this pic was taken. The house was lit by gas downstairs and in a couple of rooms upstairs until 1959, when we finally got  electricity. I used to go to bed with a candle until I bought two stand-up ex-army torches when I was about seven. All these things are stories for another day.

Then I came across, Memories of Wembley: Growing up in the Forties and Fifties by Derek Addison and Tony Rock, published by Anchorprint in 2011. They both went to the same schools as me and Derek also lived on Swinderby Road at one point, but seven years before, and much of what they describe is and was familiar to me. My memoir will be, in many ways, more personal. I was never in 'a gang' and my childhood friendships were scattered because I knew children from Swinderby Road; school; The Church of God and, for a few years, the Cubs. My enduring friendships were developed as a teenager in the Wembley South Young Socialists but, this again, is another story I won't be telling in this blog.

Here I am then about to embark of something I have thought about for a good few years. If you find me and have memories from the same period, please add your own comments and memories.

Robert (Bobby, Bob, 'Dodo', 'Tubby') Howard.