My Wembley boundaries when at home

This post has been prompted, in part be a conversation with a friend here in Beeston, Nottingham, where I have lived since the end of 2014. We were having a conversation about 'sense of place' and how important it has been to both of us throughout our lives.

Richard used to live in Lenton and we met through my Lenton based blog, Parkviews. Susan and I bought our Lenton house at 1979, but did not move in until 1980 and stayed there until we left in 2014.

We were active in the community for all those years and when I look  back at the places where I have lived being involved in the community has been a common factor: Wembley until I was 22 and from 15 I was active in Wembley South Young Socialists and the Labour Party; then Harrow 1966–69; Birmingham 1969–78; Mansfield 1976–1979; Lenton, Nottingham 1980–2014 and Beeston, where my involvement began in 2011 when I joined the WEA Beeston Branch writing class.

The common thread has been the Labour Party and local history, the former I trace back to my Uncle Dave and Auntie Nannie, who I used to stay with in Harlow New Town, as it was then, throughout the 1950s. They were Party activists and Uncle Dave was Secretary of then Plumbers' Trade Union Harlow branch, so there was a steady stream of visitors. The latter, local history, came through my grandfather, Ernie Howard, who I called 'Pop'. He had been born above the family shop on Totnes Terrace (part of Wembley High Road between Ealing Road and Wembley Central Station) in 1896 and was living at 36 Swinderby Road in 1976, the year he died in Harlow whilst staying with Uncle dave and Auntie Nannie. He lived on Swinderby Road for fifty-four years. My Nanna, Anne Starr, grew up in Ickleton on the Essex/Cambridgeshire border and they met during the First World War and every day I see and use things which they used every day and I love that sense of continuity.

I can never remember sitting down and listening to Pop talk about his Wembley, it kind of seeped out over the years during chance conversations or when I heard him reminiscing with old Wembley friends, many from his childhood days, perhaps in a shop when buying shoes, groceries, fish or with family. In the 1940s and 1950s Wembley, despite it rapid growth during the inter-war years, especailly the 1930s, still had a solid core of pre-First World War families, of which the Howards were part.

My Wembley was, by today's standards, quite constrained, yet I was happy with it as it was and the legacy of that happiness has been an ability to be happy in all the places I have lived. I could probably create a similar photographic record for Lenton and Beeston (and in a sense I have since 2007, thanks to blogging), but right now I want to share with you My Wembley as captured on a few chance postcards in my possession. At some point I will give them all their own posts as memories are triggered.

Swinderby Road looking north towards Wembley High Road. No.36 is on the right-hand side of the road, with the handcart outside the semis with the angled front bays (the one furthest from the camera). From the open windows, despite, the clouds, it may have been a warm day, although wanting to keep the air inside the house 'clean' was something I grew up with and, with the benefit of hindsight and a better understanding of history, I suspect that my Nanna, born in 1892, was Victorian enough to believe that ill health and stale air went together. Fresh air equated with healthy. 

Ealing Road from Wembley Brook looking north towards Wembley High Road. Uncle Joe's tobacco shop and newsagents is in the parade of shops on the left and from when I was seven until I was eleven he paid me 5/- (25p) to deliver afternoon newspapers every day except Sunday to about seventy houses.

Just out of view on the left-hand side of the road, the first house beside the brook was a dentist, where I used to go until I moved to Harrow. The fact that I still have most of my own teeth and do not need dentures I put down to my dentist. My mother used to tell me that she took me there the day after the National Health Service (NHS) started and that I never needed to see the school dentist.

Further up the road on the left-hand side, nearer the High Road, opposite the Regal Cinema was Cut & Quality (grocers) and DeMarcos ice cream parlour and coffee bar.

On the right-hand side you can just glimpse the entrance to Union Road, where I went to Sunday school at The Church of God in the British Legion Hall (which was on the south-side) every Sunday. I went there from about six until I was eighteen.

On the other side of Union Road the Labour Party built its New Hall in the late-1950s, where we held Young Socialist meetings and where my first wife, Tricia, and I had our wedding reception in 1965.

Just beyond that and before the Regal Cinema was St Andrew's Presbyterian Church where I went to the 1st Wembley Cubs. I didn't join the Scouts because by the time I was eleven I didn't like uniforms or the discipline!

The Regal Cinema came next (bottom left-hand), where I went to the pictures most weeks, including the Saturday Club and was a member of the 'ABC Monitors'. It cost 6d (2½d) to get in.

In the parade of shops facing Ealing Road which were part of the Regal were Radio Rentals, from where we rented our radio for 1/- (5p) a week. We didn't have electricity in our house until 1958, so I had the job of lugging the acid battery to and from the shop on a trolley every few weeks, where I got a replacement.

Close by was the fish & chip shop on Station Grove, at the far end of which was the Toc H hut.  

A view of Wembley High Road looking east from its junction with Ealing Road, about which I could probably write a book. I will return to it in future posts. I went there most days for something. Just beyond the Station Hotel was Sharvil's the fishmongers. Reg Sharvil was one of Pop's closest friends and they played snooker most nights in the Fairview Club. I would go the shop for fish every other day or so it now seems. I grew up on a diet of fish, cheese, beetroot, runner beans  and apples and only cheese has fallen by the wayside in recent years because too much now upsets my bowels!

Barham Park along with One Tree Hill were my childhood playgrounds if you discount Swinderby Road. In the house they did tea and cake in the summer, but it was demolished sometime in the late-1950s if I remember correctly, by which time I was visiting Barham Park Library more often.

An 83 bus across from Alperton Station on its way to Ealing Broadway. For most of the 1950s there was a Sunday extension renumbered 83A to Kew Green (later changed to London Airport). The 83 took me everywhere in my then known world, well not quite, it took me to family in Kingsbury and on days out to Kew, Hampstead Heath and Gunnersbury Park.

The 18 and 79 buses, and the 662 trolleybus also played a big part in extending my childhood boundaries, as did the Piccadilly line (see previous blog). Trips from Wembley Central Station were in the company of family, every couple of months to Broad Street on a Sunday morning to visit the Petticoat Lane market. My love of buses and public transport began in Wembley as a child.

As a child my world was Wembley and the trips I made to Harlow and Grantown-on-Spey, with visits to Glasgow as well, gave me a sense of being part of something beyond Wembley, but it was home and it was where I always returned to. I read Anne of Green Gables when I was about twelve and remember a male teacher reproving me for 'reading a 'girl's book'. It is a book about place and its importance.

Life has taught me that townscapes change over time, as they should, not always for the best, but sometimes, but individuals endure and they are what I want to remember and celebrate. Wembley may be different in many respects, but what I see and hear I still love.

That is the memoir and legacy I want to pass on to my grandchildren and the families I will never know, that we carry the past with us and we decide, as ourselves, what to do with it, no one else.

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.