G R E Y - N O M A D I S T A

She's back

Been bush, gone native, sans de internet, cocooned. Have new screen and ready to go again.

FIRST PART OF GROWING UP IN BARNEHURST KENT

I was born in 1947 at The Russel Stonham Nursing Home Barnehurst with Nurse Latimer on hand. My mum stayed in the hospital for ten days. My brother Dave was only nine months old at that time, so I don’t know who was looking after him. He may have been in the home too, as mum breast fed us both! Every mum breastfed! No questions asked. Barnehurst was post war baby boomer central. Kids were getting podded daily. There was at least fifty kids in our road alone. We lived in a maisonette at 23 Castleton Avenue. It certainly was tiny. Even with child perspective, I remember it as micro. See picture above. We lived in a quarter of it downstairs. My actual earliest memory there, was my brother and I together in our cot and he was rubbing excrement in my hair. Not sure whose excrement but probably mine. There is a bit of kharmic justice about that as my brother is now bald and I have luxuriant head of hair. Hah!

My mental child memory map is dictated largely by front gardens and what was growing there, garden features such as fish ponds or dogs graves, which houses had dogs or chickens in the back, other kids homes, known perves, child-haters, whatever! We used to think a witch lived at the bungalow right at the top on the left of Castleton Ave. You somehow knew by osmosis all the personalities and quirks of every house and family. All life was there in microcosm…. I now realise. Looking at multimaps birds eye view of Barnehurst today, the houses look identical to my memories, but all the luxuriant hedges of my childhood are gone. There were masses of privet hedges, fuchsia hedges; I remember loads of copper beeches , conifers and pampas grass being big favourites too. Some trees are still there just as they were then.

The biggest difference is that the pylon has gone. The pylon was the epicentre of child play in the road for us. Something to run or cycle round. Home-made carts down hill launching point. Meeting place for the kids from the top. Outside our house when it rained the drainage was inadequate in the road, and it made a huge lake to paddle around in. It was completely safe in the road. Fifty or so kids happily played there because only three or four people had cars then. We might have been the first people in Sarf East London to park our car off street in the front garden. My dad got a car with his job, he was a TV salesman in Blackfen. We didn’t have a TV for a long time ourselves though.

The Queens’ Coronation in 1953 when I was five or six was when the big marketing push got under way for them. I remember watching unimpressed but the screen was only about the size of a laptop. We watched with The Family who Lived Above who were called Aunty Mary, Uncle John, Peter Poo and his older brother Antony. Aunty Mary lost a baby in childbirth and I remember taking it hard. My mum explained death to me for the first time and I understood I would never see the new baby. People made all their own clothes and the local knitters and sewers had been mustered to make stuff for the lafayette. There was piles of dead baby clothes all round the room when we watched the Queen. So sad.

The next awesome event I particularly remember was the Total Eclipse of the Sun on 30th June 1954, which was absolutely bloody terrifying. Even though diligent teachers had prepared us, they hadn’t experienced one themselves either. It wasn’t the blueblack of the night but a deep yukky mustard yellow, no birds, real real eerily still and palpably apocalyptic for what seemed a long long time. A hot day turned cold. What a releif when the real world returned…Huzzah! The partial one in the nineties was nothing compared to the big one. It was a hot summer then too…the road tarmac made farty bubbles that burst on our shoes. There were water fountains then, but they have disappeared now. There was one at the Rec and on the triangle at Northumberland Heath and in Martens Grove. You needed them when you were out all day playing and doing adventures.

That local walk-in zone that ran from the top of the road, round the pylon and down both the alleyways was our playground, where adults just happened to have there houses and veg-gardens. But we had an adventure zone that stretched even further. We didn’t have toys in the same way as kids have them now. Although there was a toy shop on Northumberland Heath that sold Dinky Toys and Mr Potato-men. But we somehow got bikes, but they were made bikes from relic shed stuff or the dump. Puncture repairs and brake maintenance were everyday stuff to us eight year olds. We would ride to “The Glory Bumps” on Dartford Heath or down to the Erith Marshes. Any further than that and we would venture onto a trolley bus or the railway.

*** NOSTALGIC JOURNEYS 1: The Woolwich Ferry

THIS IS THE LAST FIREWORK POST FOR A WHILE

I am going to Blackpool in September to see World Championship Finals. Each country is a week apart so I decided to see the Chinese Entry.