PEACEFUL PICCADILLY
There was a deal of publicity surrounding the Guinness fraud trial, which I covered for the BBC, and in amongst it I was described as a 'left wing writer.' A fair assumption, I suppose. I'd worked at the Royal Court Theatre, was known – amongst some journalists at least - to be a friend of the then Labour Leader, though my politics were much more of the Roy Hattersley variety than Neil Kinnock's. Roy, whom I never met – he and Neil were not soul mates – is from Sheffield. 'Hattersley and me built those flats,' his old ally, the M.P., Joe Ashton said to me once, waving towards the great slabs of Park Hill (which have had something of a renaissance these last few years). I'm from Chesterfield, twelve miles to the south of Sheffield, and – proudly – in a different county, but the Derbyshire/Yorkshire border – Nottinghamshire just over to the right – is my neck of the woods. That background and post war upbringing shaped my attitudes – fundamentally.
Apart from three years 'down South' at University I lived and worked for thirty years in that patch of what I used to call the North (less romantically the North Midlands. I'd say Sheffield is where the North starts, but we're North of the Trent - that old dividing line - at least). I went to a Grammar School in my home town of Chesterfield, then taught in comprehensives in the old West Riding, which morphed into the less loved County of South Yorkshire during my time as a teacher. My dad had been a miner, in Nottinghamshire, but when his brother, whom I'm named after, was killed down the pit in 1924, he came out and moved the twenty five miles or so to Chesterfield to become a policeman. He went to war in '42, and didn't come back (apart from at last one leave when he fathered me) till '49, serving with the Allied War Commission. He finished up as a police inspector, responsible for beat duties round the town. I'd love to talk to him about those years in Germany and how he felt about coming back. He'd wanted my mother and me to come over and join him in a little place called Saltau. I remember a photograph of the (very comfortable looking) house that was on offer – requisitioned from some prosperous German, I now realise. There was a servant attached. My mum, a working class woman with a small baby, had her bags all packed and ready to go, but sent a telegram at the last minute: 'Sorry. Can't make it. Elsie.' It was too much for her. She would never leave the street we lived on, Piccadilly Road.
In my dreams I sometimes go back, or occasionally am barred at the end of the road from getting back. It was a long lane on the eastern outskirts of town – there were woods, farms and fields behind us, but to the front of our houses (there were 36, like a little village) was Markham's Engineering works, a vast factory, the length of several cathedrals put end to end, and even more cavernous inside. Most of the men, and some women (cleaners), worked at Markham's. Ours were works' houses. Back in the Thirties it had been thought a good idea to have a policeman living on the street. My dad, newly promoted sergeant, was recently married, and was installed at Number 10 of the 'New Houses'. There were twenty old houses, named (no dressing things up) 'Old Houses', of the terrace variety, lav out in the yard. Our lavatory and bath (though no washbasin) were off the porch by the back door. You washed pots and faces at the kitchen sink. Hot water was supplied to the street by the works. Rents were ludicrously cheap, though my mother complained of having to pay an extra few pence (3d, if memory serves) because we had a bay window. There was a rent man, who came each week. The one and six, whatever it was, was dutifully handed over in the kitchen, and the sum entered in a little blue book. As the only child of a policeman I wanted for nothing, though money was tight: you saved – or waited for a windfall - before buying, say, a washing machine (it was the ponch and a tub till about 1960). When I was living a lot in France, I always enjoyed the sometimes improvised arrangements for washing clothes, and love hanging washing out, in an echo of my mother.
She had worked in a factory – Robinson's – before she got married. They made amongst other surgical items, sanitary towels. In the War Robinson's had converted to manufacturing precision instruments, including time pieces, for the war effort. My mother had gone back to work while dad was away, and incidentally learnt, in noisy factory conditions, how to lip read. It was one of a number of skills she had: she was clever with her hands, knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting. She could also decorate a room. I inherit none of these skills and can barely open a carton. 'You get your brains from your dad,' she said. After the war she had me and didn't go out to work again till dad died. It wasn't 'done' for policemen's wives to work.
And my 'brains' and a strong motivation (where did that come from?) propelled me to Grammar School, in effect, away from the street. It was a kids' paradise. 'Peaceful Piccadilly,' my Auntie Con, who ran a pub in town, called it. As well as woods and fields, there were 'the Tips' a raised undulating hillock of slate – presumably removed when the houses were built – now smooth and compacted, great for bike rides and sledging down. That was at the back. There were also the allotments, extensive and overgrown, abandoned after the War – with the bricked remains of greenhouses, like Roman villas. There were daffodils all over the place in March, followed by lupins, the odd gooseberry bush and strawberry patch. At the top of our back garden was a cherry tree – known as the Cherry Tree, much climbed on, with shiny bark and next to no fruit. To the front of where we lived, over 'the Boards,' was the work's football field, tennis courts, and bowling green. These were verboten, not for kids. What we were much more interested in were the old air aid shelters and 'the Patterns' (large wooden models – or casing? I was never clear - of industrial machinery), some as big as small houses. These littered the area beyond the football field, down by the river. You'd climb through a loose board – the perimeter fence of the works - with a feeling of trespass, keeping an eye out for the 'gaffer' or watchman. But we generally had free rein. In the woods we built dens, and sometimes the older lads would attach a tire to a tree which you'd swing out from, scarily. I was puzzled for years why I was by five or six years younger than the main group of kids I grew up with. I was a 'baby boomer' after all. But one of those lads, in contact again lately via the internet, put me right. Though my dad went off to war most of the men on the street, industrial workers, didn't. When the blackout came in, what else did folk have to do after dark?
There was a single gas lamp down the street at the intersection of the new and old houses. That was the gathering place for games – thrilling games of leek-ie on dark nights – and, by day, whatever was the current craze: pogo sticks, hoopla, roller skates. Girls had skipping ropes, boys favouring a cricket bat and chalked-against-a-wall wickets. Mrs Tattersall, in the end terrace (against which the wicket was chalked), sold pop and sweets, as well as more sustaining stuff if your mam hadn't had time to 'get up town for summat.' We used 'thee' and 'tha' to talk to one another (though not at school). 'Are you going into town?' would translate as 'A 'tha goin up tawn?' The last time I used 'tha,' without thinking about it, was as a teacher. I got genuinely angry with a pupil and it just came out. I was 22.
And yet I wanted to escape the street. I was seldom unhappy, though – as the son of a policeman – sometimes got some stick for being different: a slight cut above? I wasn't mollycoddled – nor an obvious nancy boy – but knew I didn't want to work in a factory. Working days on the street were punctuated by 'the Hummer', the siren that summoned the men to work at 7.25 in the morning, and sounded again at 11.55, 1.25, and 5.25. An army of blue overalls would pour out of the works, returning home along the lane, some hastier than others. They were (mainly) cheerful but I never wanted to join them, just as I never wanted to go in the Forces and was relieved (aged 10) when conscription finished in 1957.
Nor did I want to get polio (we were all injected at that time) or TB. I remember Mrs Higginbottom died down our street of what we called consumption. And a couple of kids – this was by report – had died of (was it?) Scarlet Fever the generation before ours. There was some poverty on the street, kids three in a bed, but they were quietly prosperous years. Factory work provided safe jobs, a steady income. I think only Mr. Smoothey (odd name) at the bottom of the street, where he ran a workshop, had a car. Then Mr. Whysall, two doors from us, in 1955. We got ours, a second hand Morris 8 in ‘57. Dad never used it for work: we went trips into the countryside and to visit relatives on Sunday. And I'm at the 'big' school by then.
There was a fair bit of of sex on the street. We didn't just roller skate or play jacks. It was between the children. You 'did it' with someone – generally, though not always a girl. I wonder how I learnt. Older kids probably. It went way beyond playing at doctors and nurses. I remember being rather avid for it, aged between 7 and 9, when it stopped. Why? We'd been caught by adults a couple of times: there was the fear factor. And I suspect I was on the change. By age 10 I was interested in my own sex. I remember watching 'William Tell' on black and white television, and being interested in the actor, Conrad Phillip's bulge. An all boys' grammar school had other delights than official after school activities. Somewhere half way through my first year, and like most of the rest of the class not yet into puberty, a Sixth Former had remained in the showers as our PE lesson started. I looked at a naked handsome near adult male body for the first time and was never in any doubt from then on. Lindsay Anderson captures a moment like this in his film 'If' where the school 'tart', young and blond, gazes entranced as an athletic senior boy, Richard Warwick, raises himself onto a gym's high bars – he's in leotards. Later there's a shot of the two of them, naked, in bed together. If only...
Homosexual activity began that first year at school. I was 'seduced' very willingly, by an older boy and went on happily from there. My old friend Terry Sanderson, gay campaigner and writer, once told me how, when he was thirteen, a bloke had 'interfered' with him at a matinee performance at the pictures. Terry had gone back the following day to sit in the same seat at the same time. No show from the other guy. It's a tale that encapsulates some of the experience of growing up gay at that time, its secretiveness and occasional thrills. The word 'gay' didn't apply to homosexuals then, or wasn't in common currency. And I remember saying to one lad – also older than me – 'Let's do what homosexuals do.' And he said, 'I think we are.' I'm tempted to say it was suck it and see. I was stumbling my way to a different identity from either of my sexual partners at that time: both ended up married.
I was also growing away from the street. Towards the end of my first year at school – I was 12 – we first years had the day off. This was because the school speech day then took place in a hall that took only so many. Newcomers didn't have prizes, and stayed home. Everybody else down the road was at their respective (secondary modern) schools apart from a younger brother of one of them who'd been ill and whom I never really bothered with otherwise. It was the last time I went out to play. Earlier that year, the January, during snow, I'd gone sledging one night. My best friend was a girl called Rita Clark, who arrived on the Tips later. I knew Rita's mother, Edna, was pregnant and asked Rita how her mother was. 'She's dead,' she said. Edna, who was a very fat woman, had died, along with her baby – a boy – in childbirth that afternoon. I loved Edna, and – the mother of four girls - she had a soft spot for me. I've never forgotten her kindness. The Clarks lived in one of the old houses going down to the river. I found it much more interesting than our more orderly establishment. The chip pan was always on, for a start – a ready supply of chip sandwiches. But the Clarks were also the first possessors of a television. We saw the Coronation there – or rather some of it. Rita and I, bored, aged 6, went off to play in the rain. Edna once said to my mother that she had never been beyond the end of the lane in years. She might have been twenty stone and dressed, in my memory, in black bombazine. Big bum: you could have rested a tea tray on it. But her weight – she had her last child at home – probably killed her, finally. But I remember how she stuck up for me when a woman held me down to let her son, with whom I'd just had a fight, punch me. 'You can't do that,' Edna said, and pulled the woman off. There were always fights. I'd come off best in the one above which was why the mother (not a popular woman on the street: a relative newcomer) had interfered. A year or two later I got badly beaten by another boy, not from the street, and came off much the worse. He landed proper punches – it wasn't the usual scrap. All the fights took place down the street near the old houses and then it was a Mrs Burton from the other end terrace who took me in to wash away the blood from my nose as the other lad scuttled off and my mother was summoned. I can still picture the Burtons' living room. It was Graham, her eldest son, who contacted me some sixty years on. He remembers my policeman dad fondly, and – though a tearaway – admired him. Graham, at 16, had got hold of a motor bike and was riding it unlicensed. My dad took him on one side and said, 'You only ride that bike to the end of the lane, no further.' Ad hoc (as I learnt to say at the Grammar School) and sensible advice - if not straight from the rule book. Occasionally someone would arrive at our house with a problem and I'd be sent out to play while whatever it was was sorted (it was generally what we now call sexual abuse, according to my mother who told me later). A word was said. No 'agencies' involved. One woman locked her children in their bedroom at night while she went out. This wasn't 'on,' was reported and dealt with.
Graham, who had a much tougher life than me, remembers the street as a paradise. We share the same memories of the big November 5th bonfire, on the patch of waste ground now built over with a 'close' of neat little houses. The bonfire needed protecting from rival gangs up the hill - Hady – or at the end of the street – Spital. But Graham, his brothers and pals, were top dogs, and knew it. Mick Madison. John Large. Brian Jennings. I can still name almost everyone on our street, parents and children, from the mid to late Fifties. Graham can do it better than me. I'm a great reader of biographies, though tend to skip the childhood sections. But I've enough (more privileged) comparisons to know I wouldn't swap that pretty secure Piccadilly Road ('Pic' we called it) childhood for another – though Tolstoy roamed pretty free and was a count, which has a certain appeal for the aspirational. Aged 24 I moved away. Aged 27 my mother died and the house was cleared.
I went back the other week. It's much more prosperous, even 'desirable', newer houses than ours, with indoor lavatories and dual fuel contracts, filling every nook and cranny. Scores of cars parked. There's a main road through – the macadam had previously petered out into a rough track we called 'the Irons' and where gypsies used to camp from time to time. You can't get up into the woods the way you used to from the street nor climb straight up onto the tips, now grassed over. I don't regret moving away. But it's paradise lost.
June 2017
There was a deal of publicity surrounding the Guinness fraud trial, which I covered for the BBC, and in amongst it I was described as a 'left wing writer.' A fair assumption, I suppose. I'd worked at the Royal Court Theatre, was known – amongst some journalists at least - to be a friend of the then Labour Leader, though my politics were much more of the Roy Hattersley variety than Neil Kinnock's. Roy, whom I never met – he and Neil were not soul mates – is from Sheffield. 'Hattersley and me built those flats,' his old ally, the M.P., Joe Ashton said to me once, waving towards the great slabs of Park Hill (which have had something of a renaissance these last few years). I'm from Chesterfield, twelve miles to the south of Sheffield, and – proudly – in a different county, but the Derbyshire/Yorkshire border – Nottinghamshire just over to the right – is my neck of the woods. That background and post war upbringing shaped my attitudes – fundamentally.
Apart from three years 'down South' at University I lived and worked for thirty years in that patch of what I used to call the North (less romantically the North Midlands. I'd say Sheffield is where the North starts, but we're North of the Trent - that old dividing line - at least). I went to a Grammar School in my home town of Chesterfield, then taught in comprehensives in the old West Riding, which morphed into the less loved County of South Yorkshire during my time as a teacher. My dad had been a miner, in Nottinghamshire, but when his brother, whom I'm named after, was killed down the pit in 1924, he came out and moved the twenty five miles or so to Chesterfield to become a policeman. He went to war in '42, and didn't come back (apart from at last one leave when he fathered me) till '49, serving with the Allied War Commission. He finished up as a police inspector, responsible for beat duties round the town. I'd love to talk to him about those years in Germany and how he felt about coming back. He'd wanted my mother and me to come over and join him in a little place called Saltau. I remember a photograph of the (very comfortable looking) house that was on offer – requisitioned from some prosperous German, I now realise. There was a servant attached. My mum, a working class woman with a small baby, had her bags all packed and ready to go, but sent a telegram at the last minute: 'Sorry. Can't make it. Elsie.' It was too much for her. She would never leave the street we lived on, Piccadilly Road.
In my dreams I sometimes go back, or occasionally am barred at the end of the road from getting back. It was a long lane on the eastern outskirts of town – there were woods, farms and fields behind us, but to the front of our houses (there were 36, like a little village) was Markham's Engineering works, a vast factory, the length of several cathedrals put end to end, and even more cavernous inside. Most of the men, and some women (cleaners), worked at Markham's. Ours were works' houses. Back in the Thirties it had been thought a good idea to have a policeman living on the street. My dad, newly promoted sergeant, was recently married, and was installed at Number 10 of the 'New Houses'. There were twenty old houses, named (no dressing things up) 'Old Houses', of the terrace variety, lav out in the yard. Our lavatory and bath (though no washbasin) were off the porch by the back door. You washed pots and faces at the kitchen sink. Hot water was supplied to the street by the works. Rents were ludicrously cheap, though my mother complained of having to pay an extra few pence (3d, if memory serves) because we had a bay window. There was a rent man, who came each week. The one and six, whatever it was, was dutifully handed over in the kitchen, and the sum entered in a little blue book. As the only child of a policeman I wanted for nothing, though money was tight: you saved – or waited for a windfall - before buying, say, a washing machine (it was the ponch and a tub till about 1960). When I was living a lot in France, I always enjoyed the sometimes improvised arrangements for washing clothes, and love hanging washing out, in an echo of my mother.
She had worked in a factory – Robinson's – before she got married. They made amongst other surgical items, sanitary towels. In the War Robinson's had converted to manufacturing precision instruments, including time pieces, for the war effort. My mother had gone back to work while dad was away, and incidentally learnt, in noisy factory conditions, how to lip read. It was one of a number of skills she had: she was clever with her hands, knitting, sewing, embroidering, crocheting. She could also decorate a room. I inherit none of these skills and can barely open a carton. 'You get your brains from your dad,' she said. After the war she had me and didn't go out to work again till dad died. It wasn't 'done' for policemen's wives to work.
And my 'brains' and a strong motivation (where did that come from?) propelled me to Grammar School, in effect, away from the street. It was a kids' paradise. 'Peaceful Piccadilly,' my Auntie Con, who ran a pub in town, called it. As well as woods and fields, there were 'the Tips' a raised undulating hillock of slate – presumably removed when the houses were built – now smooth and compacted, great for bike rides and sledging down. That was at the back. There were also the allotments, extensive and overgrown, abandoned after the War – with the bricked remains of greenhouses, like Roman villas. There were daffodils all over the place in March, followed by lupins, the odd gooseberry bush and strawberry patch. At the top of our back garden was a cherry tree – known as the Cherry Tree, much climbed on, with shiny bark and next to no fruit. To the front of where we lived, over 'the Boards,' was the work's football field, tennis courts, and bowling green. These were verboten, not for kids. What we were much more interested in were the old air aid shelters and 'the Patterns' (large wooden models – or casing? I was never clear - of industrial machinery), some as big as small houses. These littered the area beyond the football field, down by the river. You'd climb through a loose board – the perimeter fence of the works - with a feeling of trespass, keeping an eye out for the 'gaffer' or watchman. But we generally had free rein. In the woods we built dens, and sometimes the older lads would attach a tire to a tree which you'd swing out from, scarily. I was puzzled for years why I was by five or six years younger than the main group of kids I grew up with. I was a 'baby boomer' after all. But one of those lads, in contact again lately via the internet, put me right. Though my dad went off to war most of the men on the street, industrial workers, didn't. When the blackout came in, what else did folk have to do after dark?
There was a single gas lamp down the street at the intersection of the new and old houses. That was the gathering place for games – thrilling games of leek-ie on dark nights – and, by day, whatever was the current craze: pogo sticks, hoopla, roller skates. Girls had skipping ropes, boys favouring a cricket bat and chalked-against-a-wall wickets. Mrs Tattersall, in the end terrace (against which the wicket was chalked), sold pop and sweets, as well as more sustaining stuff if your mam hadn't had time to 'get up town for summat.' We used 'thee' and 'tha' to talk to one another (though not at school). 'Are you going into town?' would translate as 'A 'tha goin up tawn?' The last time I used 'tha,' without thinking about it, was as a teacher. I got genuinely angry with a pupil and it just came out. I was 22.
And yet I wanted to escape the street. I was seldom unhappy, though – as the son of a policeman – sometimes got some stick for being different: a slight cut above? I wasn't mollycoddled – nor an obvious nancy boy – but knew I didn't want to work in a factory. Working days on the street were punctuated by 'the Hummer', the siren that summoned the men to work at 7.25 in the morning, and sounded again at 11.55, 1.25, and 5.25. An army of blue overalls would pour out of the works, returning home along the lane, some hastier than others. They were (mainly) cheerful but I never wanted to join them, just as I never wanted to go in the Forces and was relieved (aged 10) when conscription finished in 1957.
Nor did I want to get polio (we were all injected at that time) or TB. I remember Mrs Higginbottom died down our street of what we called consumption. And a couple of kids – this was by report – had died of (was it?) Scarlet Fever the generation before ours. There was some poverty on the street, kids three in a bed, but they were quietly prosperous years. Factory work provided safe jobs, a steady income. I think only Mr. Smoothey (odd name) at the bottom of the street, where he ran a workshop, had a car. Then Mr. Whysall, two doors from us, in 1955. We got ours, a second hand Morris 8 in ‘57. Dad never used it for work: we went trips into the countryside and to visit relatives on Sunday. And I'm at the 'big' school by then.
There was a fair bit of of sex on the street. We didn't just roller skate or play jacks. It was between the children. You 'did it' with someone – generally, though not always a girl. I wonder how I learnt. Older kids probably. It went way beyond playing at doctors and nurses. I remember being rather avid for it, aged between 7 and 9, when it stopped. Why? We'd been caught by adults a couple of times: there was the fear factor. And I suspect I was on the change. By age 10 I was interested in my own sex. I remember watching 'William Tell' on black and white television, and being interested in the actor, Conrad Phillip's bulge. An all boys' grammar school had other delights than official after school activities. Somewhere half way through my first year, and like most of the rest of the class not yet into puberty, a Sixth Former had remained in the showers as our PE lesson started. I looked at a naked handsome near adult male body for the first time and was never in any doubt from then on. Lindsay Anderson captures a moment like this in his film 'If' where the school 'tart', young and blond, gazes entranced as an athletic senior boy, Richard Warwick, raises himself onto a gym's high bars – he's in leotards. Later there's a shot of the two of them, naked, in bed together. If only...
Homosexual activity began that first year at school. I was 'seduced' very willingly, by an older boy and went on happily from there. My old friend Terry Sanderson, gay campaigner and writer, once told me how, when he was thirteen, a bloke had 'interfered' with him at a matinee performance at the pictures. Terry had gone back the following day to sit in the same seat at the same time. No show from the other guy. It's a tale that encapsulates some of the experience of growing up gay at that time, its secretiveness and occasional thrills. The word 'gay' didn't apply to homosexuals then, or wasn't in common currency. And I remember saying to one lad – also older than me – 'Let's do what homosexuals do.' And he said, 'I think we are.' I'm tempted to say it was suck it and see. I was stumbling my way to a different identity from either of my sexual partners at that time: both ended up married.
I was also growing away from the street. Towards the end of my first year at school – I was 12 – we first years had the day off. This was because the school speech day then took place in a hall that took only so many. Newcomers didn't have prizes, and stayed home. Everybody else down the road was at their respective (secondary modern) schools apart from a younger brother of one of them who'd been ill and whom I never really bothered with otherwise. It was the last time I went out to play. Earlier that year, the January, during snow, I'd gone sledging one night. My best friend was a girl called Rita Clark, who arrived on the Tips later. I knew Rita's mother, Edna, was pregnant and asked Rita how her mother was. 'She's dead,' she said. Edna, who was a very fat woman, had died, along with her baby – a boy – in childbirth that afternoon. I loved Edna, and – the mother of four girls - she had a soft spot for me. I've never forgotten her kindness. The Clarks lived in one of the old houses going down to the river. I found it much more interesting than our more orderly establishment. The chip pan was always on, for a start – a ready supply of chip sandwiches. But the Clarks were also the first possessors of a television. We saw the Coronation there – or rather some of it. Rita and I, bored, aged 6, went off to play in the rain. Edna once said to my mother that she had never been beyond the end of the lane in years. She might have been twenty stone and dressed, in my memory, in black bombazine. Big bum: you could have rested a tea tray on it. But her weight – she had her last child at home – probably killed her, finally. But I remember how she stuck up for me when a woman held me down to let her son, with whom I'd just had a fight, punch me. 'You can't do that,' Edna said, and pulled the woman off. There were always fights. I'd come off best in the one above which was why the mother (not a popular woman on the street: a relative newcomer) had interfered. A year or two later I got badly beaten by another boy, not from the street, and came off much the worse. He landed proper punches – it wasn't the usual scrap. All the fights took place down the street near the old houses and then it was a Mrs Burton from the other end terrace who took me in to wash away the blood from my nose as the other lad scuttled off and my mother was summoned. I can still picture the Burtons' living room. It was Graham, her eldest son, who contacted me some sixty years on. He remembers my policeman dad fondly, and – though a tearaway – admired him. Graham, at 16, had got hold of a motor bike and was riding it unlicensed. My dad took him on one side and said, 'You only ride that bike to the end of the lane, no further.' Ad hoc (as I learnt to say at the Grammar School) and sensible advice - if not straight from the rule book. Occasionally someone would arrive at our house with a problem and I'd be sent out to play while whatever it was was sorted (it was generally what we now call sexual abuse, according to my mother who told me later). A word was said. No 'agencies' involved. One woman locked her children in their bedroom at night while she went out. This wasn't 'on,' was reported and dealt with.
Graham, who had a much tougher life than me, remembers the street as a paradise. We share the same memories of the big November 5th bonfire, on the patch of waste ground now built over with a 'close' of neat little houses. The bonfire needed protecting from rival gangs up the hill - Hady – or at the end of the street – Spital. But Graham, his brothers and pals, were top dogs, and knew it. Mick Madison. John Large. Brian Jennings. I can still name almost everyone on our street, parents and children, from the mid to late Fifties. Graham can do it better than me. I'm a great reader of biographies, though tend to skip the childhood sections. But I've enough (more privileged) comparisons to know I wouldn't swap that pretty secure Piccadilly Road ('Pic' we called it) childhood for another – though Tolstoy roamed pretty free and was a count, which has a certain appeal for the aspirational. Aged 24 I moved away. Aged 27 my mother died and the house was cleared.
I went back the other week. It's much more prosperous, even 'desirable', newer houses than ours, with indoor lavatories and dual fuel contracts, filling every nook and cranny. Scores of cars parked. There's a main road through – the macadam had previously petered out into a rough track we called 'the Irons' and where gypsies used to camp from time to time. You can't get up into the woods the way you used to from the street nor climb straight up onto the tips, now grassed over. I don't regret moving away. But it's paradise lost.
June 2017