Travels, Part 1

I was born in the city of Leicester, in the English Midlands, on a street that looked a bit like Coronation Street. My family came from working class or artisan roots; my grandfather on my mother’s side was a skilled mechanic and general fix-it man, and my grandmother worked for one of the local shoe factories. On my father’s side, my grandfather was a watchmaker’s draftsman. He had served as an infantryman in the First World War; he fought in the trenches for two and half years and was then captured and held as a prisoner-of-war until the war ended. He died when I was quite young.

My dad, who was the middle child in a family of five siblings, left school when he was sixteen, did his two years of national service in the Royal Air Force, and then became a commercial artist, painting and drawing in the advertising department of a local sock and stocking company. He met my mum in the youth group at St. Barnabas’ Church in Leicester. In those days church youth groups were mainly social groups; Mum and Dad went to dances there on Saturday nights, and that was how they met. Mum was a few years younger than Dad when they got married; she had been a telephonist, but after I was born she spent her time at home as a full-time, stay-at-home mum. The only time during my early childhood when that changed was when my dad was away at theological college, when she worked at a local toy shop to support us.

We lived on Woodland Road in Leicester, a street of industrial revolution row housing. All the houses were joined together, with little passageways at ground floor level leading to the tiny back yards (or ‘gardens’ as they are called in England). Downstairs was a front room that we never used except after funerals and the odd special occasion, a back room which served as living room and dining room, and a kitchen built onto the back. The ‘bathroom’ (or ‘toilet’ in British English) was joined to the house, but you couldn’t actually access it from the house; you had to go outside. Upstairs were the bedrooms. The house had no central heating; there were coal fires in the rooms.

My mum and dad and my brother Mike and I lived on one side of Woodland Road, and my maternal grandparents, or ‘Nana and Grandpa’ as we called them, lived on the other. Inevitably, we grew up very close to them. Later on, when my dad was off at theological college and my mum was at work, Nana would babysit for my brother and I. They had a TV (the ‘telly’, we called it) long before we did, and it was on their telly that I watched ‘Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men’, ‘Fireball XL5’, ‘Stingray’, and ‘Thunderbirds’. Those were the glory days of Gerry Anderson’s early marionette shows!

My grandfather was short and bald and smoked a pipe, and although he talked tough we all knew he had a soft heart. For some reason when he wanted to communicate endearment he would call us ‘cough drop’; Nana’s equivalent was ‘ducks’ or ‘ducky’ or ‘me duck’ (still a common term of endearment in the English midlands). Grandpa worked for a garage, and toward the end of his time there, one of his jobs was to drive Land Rovers all over the country to be delivered to customers. He could build and fix anything; I particularly remember him building wooden scooters for my brother and me, and later in life he built them for my children too. I also remember a model stream engine that he built for my kids; it was constructed entirely from old pop cans, but it was painted so beautifully that you would never guess what it was made from.

When Mike and I were little my mum’s younger sister, Auntie Carole, was courting Alan Hewitt, and we thought it was a great day when she married him. Alan had a motorbike and looked like James Dean; we thought he was very cool. He worked in his dad’s ladder business, and it was hard work; six and sometimes seven days a week, long hours, making and delivering ladders all over Leicester. Auntie Carole was much younger than my Mum, and she and Alan often babysat for my brother and me. In 1963 she did something very subversive; she introduced us to the music of the Beatles (‘pop’ music was not played in my house, or in Nana and Grandpa’s house either!).

Very few people had cars in those days; most working-class folks got around by bicycle or bus, or took the train. But Grandpa had a car, and in it we made regular visits to Bradgate Park, on the northwest side of Leicester. This old country park had once been the home of Lady Jane Gray’s family, and it was a great place to walk and run. There’s a hill there called ‘Old John’ with a battlemented tower on top of it; we used to love climbing that hill and looking out at the City of Leicester spread below us. I also enjoyed watching the deer that wandered all over the park. Nearby at Swithland Woods, a friend of my grandparents owned a bungalow (what nowadays in Canada would be called a ‘cottage’, I suppose, although this truly was small and rustic). I have vague memories of summer visits out there, and cricket games in the field nearby.

As I said, my paternal grandfather died when I was very young, and I have no memories of him. My paternal grandmother (or ‘Gromma’, as we boys said in our Leicester dialect) lived outside the city at Barrow-on-Soar with my dad’s oldest brother, Uncle John, and his son David. Some Saturdays we rode the train out there to visit them. I remember that the back garden of their house was right up against the railway tracks, and when we went home on the train we would wave to ‘Gromma’, Uncle John, and David as they stood by the brick wall at the back of their property. If I remember correctly, we watched the earliest Doctor Who episodes on their black and white TV.

Today’s children can have little conception of what our life was like back then, growing up in a working-class neighbourhood in the city in the early 1960s. We had no computers, iPads, cell phones, video games, or DVDs. A Saturday outing to ‘the pictures’ (movies) was a luxury; I remember Mike and I getting very excited when Auntie Carole took us to see ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’, and later on we also saw ‘The Sound of Music’ on the big screen. Sweets—as we called candies—were something to be saved and savoured, as we didn’t get them often. We played outside a lot of the time, making our own fun. If we wanted to watch TV we went across the street to Nana and Grandpa’s house.

We must often have been cold, but I suppose we took it for granted, and wore lots of clothes—especially woolen sweaters, which my mother would knit. Dad would get up in the morning, start a fire in the fireplace in the living room, and then as the kindling burned he would gradually load it with coal; by the time the rest of us came down for our breakfast, there would be a cheery fire in the grate. Warmth really did depend on where in the room you sat; close by the fire it was toasty hot, but back in the far corners the rooms got very cold and damp.

One time of year I remember very well was ‘Guy Fawkes’ or ‘Bonfire Night’. On November 5, for some reason, the Brits remember the man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the seventeenth century. When I was a child, that night was celebrated with the building of bonfires, the burning of stuffed effigies of Guy Fawkes, and the letting off of the most wonderful fireworks. I never thought much about the history behind that day; all I knew was that we were going to see rockets and Catherine wheels, hold sparklers in our hands, and weave patterns of light with them until they fizzled out.

Another autumn game was ‘conkers’, or chestnuts. The chestnut trees were full, and we children would collect the ‘conkers,’ as we called them. We would drill a hole through each chestnut, hang it on a string, and then compete with our friends, bashing conkers together until one broke the other. A ‘sixer’ was a conker which had defeated six others; if your ‘two-er’ defeated someone else’s ‘sixer’, yours immediately became an ‘eight-er’! One way of learning basic arithmetic, I suppose!

Once a year my dad would get a short holiday. At that time we had no car, so our holiday trips were taken by train. One destination I remember, because we went back to it more than once, was  Bournemouth on the south coast of England. I remember we stayed at the Saxonhurst Hotel; I have no idea whether it still exists. Bournemouth had high cliffs, and there was a steep zig-zag path down to the beach. You only wanted to walk that path once during the day, so we went down in the morning, carrying everything we would need for the day in bags. If it was windy (as it often was), we would put up canvas windbreaks to provide shelter for our deck chairs. My dad and my brother and I would swim (the Atlantic Ocean was very cold!), jump waves, and spend hours making sandcastles and digging trenches and constructing elaborate fortifications in the sand. Once or twice during the holiday we might go to the pier, a long, high platform protruding out over the sea, with all sorts of arcades, cafés, candy stores and gift shops. When we visited the pier my parents would buy us sticks of ‘rock’: hard, sweet, foot-long candy sticks wrapped in plastic with a photo of the pier on the wrapper. A stick of rock would last you days and days; at least, my parents made sure that it did!

Those days seem far removed from the life children live today. I suppose we were poor, but so was everyone else, and we’d never known anything different. Woodland Road in those days was a real community. Uncle Alan tells me that on warm summer evenings people would bring their chairs out and sit on the sidewalks in front of their houses; someone would take a jug down to the off license on the corner to buy some beer, and neighbours would walk up and down the street all evening, visiting with each other.

That area of Leicester is now mainly inhabited by folk from Asian backgrounds, and they have replaced that old English culture with a wonderfully rich and vibrant way of life of their own. The Woodland Road life that I knew has gone for good, and indeed my memories of it are very vague. But I’m grateful for what I remember, and I’m very glad I grew up when I did, before technology changed the life of children forever. It was a simple life, and no doubt I romanticize it a little, but I think it was a good life, and I’m thankful for my memories of it.