Grey Jumper'd Childhood

Another Heathrow view

2012-01-14T14:38:00.003+01:00

I came across this photo by chance - a one-off among my father's black and white negatives. It's my brother's birthday today, and I was looking for some early photos to send him, when I found this - of interest to aviation historians - a pair of BEA Trident jet airliners at Heathrow. Photographed from Queen's Building, dated June 1965, we see Trident 1 G-ARPC and behind it stands G-ARPJ.

Note the multitude of ground equipment, including a Commer baggage carrier that looks like it's been converted from a fire engine, and a number of Bedford Dormobile conversions. Click on photo to enlarge and you'll see a TWA Boeing 707 landing, and in the distance an Airspeed Ambassador with its distinctive triple-finned tail.

Ever the reader

2011-09-19T07:05:00.006+02:00

I mentioned my childhood love of libraries. From before I could even read, the visit of the mobile library (in Malpas in South Wales - where we briefly lived while my father worked on the construction of the Llanwern steelworks) was the highlight of my week as a three year-old.

As well as loving good stories, from an early age I had an interest in aircraft (especially military ones), vehicles, history and wars. Although the cars and planes might have suggested a mind keen on engineering, it was more to do with the aesthetics; colour plates of camouflaged aircraft appealed particularly.

My father was good at selecting story books that I would enjoy; they would typically include aircraft - one series I remember well were adventures about some Norwegian fighter pilots in the early '50s, flying F-84 Thunderjets... a bit of online research and I've found it - Blue Two Bale Out! it was called, by Lief Hamre... "Otter Three Two Calling"; the descriptions of Arctic flying were most resonant with me.

Regular visits to the library with my father (who took the photo above) were an important part of my childhood; they helped get me into the reading habit.

Warrior soul

2011-09-14T20:18:00.005+02:00

Hanwell Carnival, Elthorne Park, June 1964, and here I am (below) getting an early taste of the military. Two thoughts crossed my mind as the paratrooper lowered the helmet on my head; firstly, how familiar it felt. Secondly, how unfamiliarly heavy it felt. Somehow, since early childhood I have felt an affinity with all things to do with the armed forces; as a child I read books about war and battles, aircraft, tanks and guns.

I wrote about this on my main blog (read post here). Was it just to do with growing up in the shadow of war?

Ite, Missa Est

2011-08-15T11:06:00.007+02:00

On this blog, in which posts are mostly triggered by distant memories of childhood, I've not written in any meaningful way about the role of religion in my upbringing. For a Pole, religion by default means Roman Catholicism, wherever he may be brought up in exile. Though theologians dare not call it so, Polish Catholicism is a very specific sub-set of the Church of Rome, with its Black Madonnas (Mario Królowo korony polskiej, módl się za nami) and national martyrology ("Boże, coś Polskę...").

My own childhood, however, was tinged with Catholicism but not the mainstream Polish sort. By virtue of the fact that we lived much closer to the (Irish) Catholic parish of St. Joseph the Worker than to the Polish church (Św. Andrzeja Boboli in Hammersmith), my family would alternate between the two, so my childhood view of Catholicism diverges from the usual Polish UK emigre experience. My First Holy Communion was at St Joseph's, the catechism book I learnt my prayers from was in English (well do I remember the colour illustrations of biblical stories); I was instructed by English-speaking (Irish) nuns. Yet my brother was christened at Andrzeja Boboli. I shall no doubt past again about the specifics of the Polish parish.

Above: I'm getting a signed reproduction of Leonardo's Last Supper as a souvenir of my First Holy Communion. Hanwell, spring, 1965.

The old St. Joseph's church reeked of incense. It was dark; its nooks and crannies filled with statues of saints, and of Jesus baring his exposed heart to one and all, or nailed, bleeding, to a cross - quite scary for a small child. Outside of Mass, the church resonated with silence; one's footsteps echoed around it. Votive candles burned on black cast-iron framed holders that could accommodate 30 or so candles ('small candles 3d, large candles 6d'); when all were ablaze, they gave off much heat and light (pleasant on winter afternoons).

Above: not County Limerick, nor a suburb of Dublin - this is Hanwell, 1965. Note the hats, the clothes, the advert for Sunblest Bread, a branch of Halford Ltd, the sunshine. That's me in the foreground (face turned away from camera).

It was demolished and replaced by a new modern-style building in 1967. I remember when it was a building site, grey concrete pillars and scaffolding; I remember the first Masses in the new church.

In my childhood, Mass was said in Latin in both churches, which made me feel that the Catholic Church was one great, universal religion, and not splintered by nationalist divisions. "Dominus vobiscum" the priests, Irish or Polish, would intone. "Et cum spirito tuo", the faithful would respond. I still recall much of the Latin mass, and in a way am sorry that it has gone, a layer of mysticism and magic stripped away in a global trend of dumbing down.

By 1969, when I started at Gunnersbury Roman Catholic Grammar School for Boys, Mass was said in the vernacular. Father Gilligan and Father Doyle would celebrate Mass and Benediction in English. Months later, we moved to West Ealing, to worship at the Polish Catholic Centre (POK) on Courtfield Gardens. And here, Mass would be said in Polish.

The Continental Travels of EKX 604 B

2011-06-12T22:45:00.000+02:00

I have mentioned before (on my other blog here) our family visits to Cold War Poland in the 1960s; there were two trips - one in 1961, when I was but three, and one in 1966 when I was eight and my brother three. This post is in praise of our family car that in July and August 1966 transported us to Poland and back. Below: That's me touching the roof rack, my brother crouching and my cousin Hania to the left. Somewhere near Bystrzyca Kłodzka, south-west Poland (close to the Czechoslovak border).

My father's car, a dove-grey Morris 1100, EKX 604 B, performed admirably, getting us there and back safely (despite lack of head restraints, airbags, crumple-zones, rear seatbelts, anti-lock breaks etc). I recall one hairy moment - after a night in West German hotel, my father set off the next morning onto an entirely empty road - on the wrong side! An oncoming car promptly had us swerving off back into the right-hand lane! Our journey to and from Poland took us from Ostende, through Belgium, West Germany and Czechoslovakia. My father had an AA Continental Route Planner, which set out the entire route with great precision - down to the last roundabout and roadsign.

Left: West Germany's autobahn network allowed us to cover the stretch between the Czechoslovak border and the Rhine rapidly. There were parking areas where we could eat food that had been prepared for us by our family in Bystrzyca. I recall in one such area, we found a tin but no tin-opener; my mother suggested I go up to a truckful of American GIs. They were amazed to hear English spoken to them by a boy with a British accent; the truck was huge, the men were huge - tall, fierce-looking, with large hands; several were black. The tin was returned to me opened.

Above: overlooking the Rhine. I have very pleasant memories of this part of the journey - both going out and coming back - West Germany in the middle of its wirtschaftswunder, prosperous, clean - and not a visible trace of its Nazi past. We passed through Mainz, Cologne and Bonn.

Right: waiting for the ferry to Dover at Ostend. Most of the cars in the queue are British - Austins predominating - and a Bedford Dormobile at the back there, the '60s equivalent of a people carrier. There were fewer continentals keen on visiting England than Brits keen of visiting the continent!

Air display, late summer, 1966

2011-06-11T18:35:00.000+02:00

I was scanning my father's b&w negatives of our family trip to Poland in July/August 1966, when, at the end of the final roll of film, I came across some photos taken at an air display. I'm not sure whether this is Farnborough (1966 was a Farnborough year) or whether it was the Battle of Britain Day at RAF Benson. I suspect the latter, as the aircraft in the pictures were not listed as taking part at Farnborough that year. Anyone have any more info?

Above: I'm standing on the wind of a Beagle Bassett (in front of the tail fin of the USAF C-130 Hercules), more interested in the Bassett's cockpit than the in Avro Vulcan bomber (bomb bay doors open) that's just flown over at low altitude.

Above: Four US Navy McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms.

Four USAFE North American F-100 Super Sabres

Above: An English Electric Canberra T4, WE195. This aircraft later went on to serve in the Indian Air Force. All photos by Bohdan Dembinski, taken with a Praktica camera (50mm f2.8 Tessar lens).

Swings, roundabouts and witch's hats

2011-02-17T23:16:00.007+01:00

All the fun of going to the park was about The Swings. The rest of the park was boring. Nothing beat the thrill of swinging high; swooping to an apex, leaving your stomach behind as you started to faaaaall backward until you reached the second apex behind you - and then accelerating forward again, like the pilot of a fighter aircraft zooming in to strafe ground targets.

Any self-respecting park in 1960s England was equipped with the following: Two sets of swings - baby ones (with gates to stop the infant falling out), and the grown-up ones (like the one pictured left with me sitting on it); a slide, a roundabout (to the left of the pic), a witch's hat (a conical frame rotating wildly around a central pole) and a rocking horse (for six children).

Today, children's playgrounds in parks are vetted by Heath and Safety. There's a foot-deep carpet of soft rubber in case a 'kid' should fall off any of the apparatus, all of which are sanitised versions of the wild rides my generation used to enjoy.

Look at the chains on the swing. Imagine poking a finger into one of the larger links. Or for those who remember the witch's hat - a little hand being stuck into the space between the rotating cone and the pole holding it up. Yet I cannot remember any cases of death or hospitalisation among my fellow playmates. I did once do myself a nasty bruise running down a slide, though.

The rocking horse could be thrilling if six children - all together - really put all their effort into seeing whether they could violently rock the horse off its moorings and set it into orbit.

For me there were three parks. Elthorne Park, Hanwell (in the photo - taken by my father, Bohdan Dembinski, in 1960), and Dean's Gardens, West Ealing - both within walking distance of our house - and for a special treat - Gunnersbury Park which had a climbing frame shaped like a fire engine.

Elthorne Park disappeared into the distance, the valley of the River Brent and the Grand Union Canal. As a child I was cross-eyed and could not judge distance very well. As a result, I thought the park was infinite in size, its western borders shrouded in mystery. It was only after a successful eye operation at the age of eight did I realise that Elthorne Park was actually quite small.

Looking at the photo above gave me a deja vu; for two nights ago, I dreamed of Moni's son, some time in the future; he looked like a smiling version of the little chap seated on the swing.

Childhood illnesses

2011-01-30T21:44:00.000+01:00

A post inspired by a mercifully short viral illness which confined me to the house yesterday and today; shivers - chills and fever and aching muscles. I slept it off (in bed from yesterday afternoon to midday today) and right now, I'm back on form, thanks.

While lying in bed, I remembered what it was like being ill as a child. I thank the Good Lord for a strong constitution and good health (at times like this I ask the question - am I healthy because I'm happy, or am I happy because I'm healthy?). Anyway, my childhood was infrequently punctuated by those illnesses that all children get - mumps, measles and chicken-pox, of which I remember only the latter (pink lotions and itching scabs). And more usually, flu, which would lay me out for several days.

When confined to bed due to a dose of influenza, my mother would look after me by bringing up regular food and drink to my bedroom on a wooden tray. Toast with Marmite, tea with honey and lemon (a taste to this day I associate strongly with illness), chicken broth with pearl barley or krupnik, boiled chicken leg with mashed potatoes or rice.

Wanting to keep me warm, my mother would bundle me up in bed with extra blankets and the nocny sweterek I mentioned in my last post. All this plus fever would mean I'd be sweating like a runner in a sauna, turning over in my sleep, churning those multiple layers of bedding... In those days, there would be a bed sheet over the mattress, a second one separating the sleeper from the roughness of the woollen blankets of which there would be two, then a small eiderdown, finally a candlewick bedcover. Today's duvet is just so much more comfortable, cosy and convenient.

My temperature would be read using a mercury thermometer; it would take as long as a modern digital one for the right reading to appear (about 90 seconds held under the tongue), but reading it would be more difficult as you'd need to account for the parallax effect and the meniscus lens running the length of the thermometer.

In bed I would read; war stories, mostly. WWII was only two decades in the past; lying in bed I would thrill to the daring exploits of the RAF's bombing raids on German warships in Norwegian fiords or follow British commandos into the Burmese jungle to attack Japanese outposts. And when I'd be well enough to get out of bed wearing a dressing gown, these scenes would be re-enacted on my bedroom floor with little Airfix soldiers and Lego aeroplanes.

Later, when my brother started school, my mother returned to work and I'd be left home on my own when ill, my father would bring up the radio to my bedroom, so I could listen to pop on BBC Radio 1. This has proved a very useful memory aid; for example, I recall listening to The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde, by Georgie Fame, which reached No.1 in the UK pop charts in January 1968. And, at the same time, Don't stop the Carnival by the Alan Price Set, which (see how powerful memory is!) this line, which I thought at the time to be so apt...

But this is England on a winter's afternoon
There is no sun, there's just a pale and tardy moon
And chivering sparrows on the smoking chimney tops
And all the children suffer from cold and flu...

Miserable old time of the year wherever - whenever - you are!

Whatever happened to Jack Frost?

2011-01-10T05:45:00.002+01:00

In my West London childhood, winters were mild and frost was rare. But temperatures did occasionally fall below zero, and in houses that were neither centrally heated, nor properly insulated, nor double-glazed, when it did become frosty outside, you'd feel it inside.

I wrote about how houses (and our house in particular) were heated in the 1960s, but I'd like to make mention of Jack Frost. At Oaklands Road Primary School (infants department) we'd have a nature table on which all aspects of the current season would be on display, under a wall chart prepared specially for schools by Shell Petroleum. [This, incidentally, shows that the influence of commerce on education is not a new phenomenon.] While the autumn nature table was full of russet leaves and chestnuts, what I remember from the winter poster was ponies on Dartmoor and hares that had turned white to merge in with the snowy landscape.

In our class, we'd hear about Jack Frost, who'd come in the night painting patterns on our window panes, and nipping at our fingers, toes, noses and ears. Jack Frost, a folk personification of the phenomena associated with sub-zero temperatures, would be a thin white man, dressed in white, with a pointed white beard and sharp fingers.

Not having double glazing, condensation inside the house would form on the inside of windows and would freeze in interesting patterns, which today's youngsters living in much warmer houses are unlikely to ever witness. Below: this is the sort of thing I mean.

Photo by Mary Peterson, click here to see the original.

In the days before duvets, beds in our household made up for winter would be covered with many blankets, warmed with a hot water bottle, and we'd wear woollen night jumpers (nocny sweterek) over our pyjama tops. Wrapped up snugly in bed, only my head would be exposed to the cold of the room at night; I'd wake up with a cold nose.

While central heating and duvets have become universal in the UK, double glazing is not; sash windows such as the one in the photo above are still prevalent in Victorian and Edwardian houses. But the warm air inside ensures that condensation no longer freezes; Jack Frost's handiwork is a very rare sight in Britain today.

London to Brighton, 45 years ago

2010-11-07T00:27:00.001+01:00

November 1965. My father takes me to watch the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, which is the world's longest running motoring event. (This year's event takes place today, Sunday 7 November 2010, for the 78th time). For some reason I'm wearing school uniform - blazer, cap, woollen scarf and shorts. SHORTS! In this weather? (I can precisely recall the texture of that scarf - especially damp.)

I remember the day as being foggy and damp as we set off from Hanwell for Redhill, where, on the A23 London to Brighton road we watched the veteran cars - all of them at least 60 years old - on their way to the coast.

Above: the front seat passenger of this Leon Bollee (A302) looks less than delighted at the prospect of another two hours in the damp and cold, without seatbelts or airbags! Fortunately, these old machines are barely capable of more than 20mph/30kmh. Below: chaps on bicycles follow the cars much as they did in 1896 when the first run was staged, to commemorate the repeal of the Red Flag Act.

It is interesting to note that the distance in time between 1965 and 1905 (the cut-off date for veteran cars) is the same as the between the earliest Morris Minors and the present day (my father's one was a later version with one-piece windscreen).

Above: 1958 Morris Minor. In front of it my paternal grandmother, Babcia Stefa, over from Warsaw; me, and my mother. In the background, the River Thames.

All photos by my father, Bohdan Dembinski.

Tanners, or the confectionery pleasures of childhood

2010-11-02T05:59:00.001+01:00

A powerful flashback brought on by walking into the newsagents on ul. Rozbrat. As in this case, the phenomenon works in the following way. I'm going about my routine business when suddenly a very specific concoction of molecules hits my olfactory senses and brings on a sudden rush of memory, so strong, so profound, that I could have been there right then.

What's puzzling is that this particular newsagents is on my regular beat; I often pop in to buy a paper before eating at the Vietnamese lunch bar round the corner. Yet I've never had that same intense reaction before, nor since (this happened two weeks ago).

All of a sudden, the exact combination of the smell of newsprint and confectionery (it had to have been the precise balance of chemicals) reminded me of Tanners, the newsagents and confectioners on Oaklands Road, round the corner from our house 45 years ago... A small boy would pop in, with thruppence or indeed even a tanner* pressed into his hand, to buy some sweets on his way home from school.

There's that characteristic smell of confectionery mingled with the smell of newsprint from copies of the Daily Herald, Daily Sketch and London Evening News (the latter delivered by Bedford vans, side doors slid open, delivery boys dashing out with bundles to drop off at the newsagents).

Large glass jars of sweets ('candies' to my transatlantic readers) stood alluringly colourful on shelves behind the counter, right up to the ceiling. Sold in quarter pound measures (4 ounces = 113 grammes) these sweets played havoc with young teeth. The boiled sweets ('hard candies') in particular; acid drops, pear drops, winter mixture, bulls' eyes, aniseed twists - these were manufactured using sugar and various chemicals - absolutely awful when I think about their dentine-destroying potential! (see previous post)

Along with the sweets in jars were those on display - brands still with us (Cadbury's Dairy Milk, Mars Bars, KitKats, Bounty, Smarties, Fry's Turkish Delight) and others long taken off the market (Spangles, Rowntree's Butterscotch Gums). Liquorice. Bootlaces, Blackjacks, All-Sorts, Pomfret cakes (I once ate an entire quarter pound bag and came out in a skin rash all over my body).

In summer it would be ice lollies - Zoom was my favourite (red, yellow and green in colour, with collectable cards of spacecraft or jet aeroplanes inside the wrapper).

Chewing gum and bubble gum also had collectable cards. Many of these were from the USA, Bazooka Joe, for instance. More interestingly for me were the historical ones, with facsimile pages from American newspapers in WWII, b&w photos (here's one I clearly recall). There was another series from the American Civil War, which included facsimile Union and Confederate banknotes; however I found this less compelling.

My favourite reading material (mid-'60s) was TV Century 21 comic, full of the illustrated adventures of my favourite children's TV puppet shows, Fireball XL5, Stingray and Thunderbirds. (A selection of front covers here.)

As well as selling sweets and papers, Tanners also sold cheap toys, the best being Matchbox cars, which at the time cost a shilling (see post here about pre-decimal money in the UK).

* 'Tanner' - as well as the shopkeeper was coincidentally also the slang for a sixpenny bit (six old pence - two and half pence in decimal currency). Much then could be bought for that tanner pressed tightly in a little boy's hand.

Our Polish doctor, our Polish dentist

2010-10-20T07:55:00.004+02:00

Watching the Coen Brother's inestimably brilliant movie A Serious Man sparked off so many reflections; one of relevance to this blog relates to the characters of Dr Shapiro and Dr Lee Sussman, doctor and dentist respectively. Just as Minnesota's Jewish community would see Jewish healthcare specialists, so we Poles of West London had our own doctors and dentists.

Our doctor was Dr Bernaciński, who had his surgery in a flat in South Kensington. Very posh place, plush carpets in the hall and spiral staircase leading up to his apartments. Through the door into the waiting room; usually a handful of people sitting there, leafing through magazines. Our turn to see Dr B. First impression - cigarette smoke. The man smoked prodigiously (indeed, so does Dr Shapiro in A Serious Man). The place reeked of tobacco smoke, both stale and fresh. Right into early adulthood, I would always be reminded of Dr Bernaciński's surgery when entering a smoky room. Bald on top with brown hair, beaked nose, slim build, wore glasses and tweed suits. His large, leather-topped desk was always clear, except for a stethoscope, a blood pressure monitor in a steel case, a diary and presciption pads.

With our prescriptions written out, my father and I would step out into the night air of South Ken to a nearby pharmacy. Bright lights, big city, an exciting departure from the grey suburbs of Hanwell W7. A trip to the doctor's, invariably at night in winter, into town along the Great West Road, past the old West London Air Terminal on Cromwell Road, was a rare treat. So if my brother was ill and a prescription was needed, I would beg my father to allow me to go with him on the eight mile (13km) drive to the doctor's. Why so far? Dr Bernaciński was my mother's doctor from before she married and moved to Hanwell from Kensington. My father's doctor was also Polish, if I remember correctly - Dr Kimmerling.

If my memories of visits to Dr Bernaciński are pleasant, the same cannot be said for my memories of our dentist, Dr Kucharski. I would dread visits to his surgery on King's Avenue in Ealing. Having an appointment for the dentist looming before me would be like facing a dreadful wall of fear that was moving ever closer, unavoidable, physically terrifying. In the 1960s, dental equipment was not as sophisticated or patient-friendly as it is today. The drilling machine, upright ivory-coloured pillar with stainless steel arms and little wheels and wires and that drill bit at the end which went into your mouth - it was the devil's own instrument for torturing for small boys. That moment when the drill hit the nerve. Those cotton-wool tubes inserted between gum and cheek made me retch. Pain-killing injections, delivered in huge shiny syringes, were worse than the pain they were meant to relieve.

Dr Kucharski was a big man, silver-haired with hairy arms in a white coat. Every procedure would be followed with a rinse of pink mouthwash and the instruction wypluj ('spit it out') in a sing-song voice. His tall, thin wife, working as his assistant, also in white coat, would laugh at me for crying.

My diet today is almost totally free of confectionary, and oral hygiene is an important matter. I have also lost all fear of dentists. In the past 30 years, I've had just two fillings, compared to the two a year I used to have in my childhood. Did Dr Kucharski over-treat my young mouth, egged on by generous NHS payments? Or was this the price I was paying for a sugar-rich diet?

Before moving to Poland, I would long continue using the services of other Polish doctors and dentists. Today, I have little choice in the matter!

My Welsh childhood

2010-08-22T16:10:00.010+02:00

Well, several months of it anyway. Early months - I would have been three at the time, and here were formed some of my earliest lucid memories.

In 1960, the firm for whom my father worked, West's Piling, won the contract to design and build the foundations for the steelworks in Llanwern. So soon after we moved from Hanwell, London W7, to live in a village called Malpas, outside Newport, Gwent (Monmouthshire at the time).

We rented a house from a Mrs Hopkins. My father would drive to work on the site in a Series II Land Rover (short wheelbase with canvas roof). It was a blue with a khaki roof; inside it had colourful knobs on the gear levers (one for high- and low-range four wheel drive). There were three seats in the front, none in the back, no seatbelts (or indeed children's safety seats) in those days.

Above: It would have been a soft-top like the one left, but it was exactly the blue colour like the one on the right. So much more impressive than our Morris Minor (where I'd always sit in the back). Later on in life I'd buy a soft-top short wheelbase blue Land Rover of my own (albeit a Series I).

Above: photo taken by my father, back end of the Land Rover in shot. It's wonderful to have found this neg, as it seems to be the only photographic evidence that we indeed did have a Land Rover back then. In the distance - Malpas? Below: The Usk Valley?

I remember a couple of things about the house in Malpas. In the garden was a fallen tree trunk, which to me was a horse, a train, a lorry. The garden looked down over a Welsh valley along which a real steam railway ran. That's me, left, trying to explore further afield. Every Tuesday (?) the mobile library would visit. I would run up to the bay windows at the front of the house shouting "Biblioteka! Biblioteka!" and with my mother we'd go out to chose me a book. The library was a large van, entered up wooden stairs, books on shelves on either side of a central passage, all illuminated by a translucent skylight. The books I remember seeking out would be ones containing pictures of aircraft. This was when I was three and half.

I also remember Newport. Three memories - the first being the city's iconic transporter bridge. The second being the 25-pounder field gun, all polished and shiny, standing outside the artillery barracks. The third being a clothes shop in which the basement had been opened up and made accessible via an open staircase - very modern and impressive. These things somehow clicked with me in an atavistic way, immediately reminiscent.

Another memory while I'm here - my father's friend Pan Albert who had at the time a convertible Austin A40. And this construction toy, consisting of coloured polyethelene rods, with four rows of holes on opposites side and one at the end, and four matching spiggots on the other two sides and one at the other end. You could join them together to make thing. Aeroplanes in my case.

I also remember a children's comic with the characters Snip and Snap - an anthropomorphic pair of scissors(?). Sitting in the car on a summer's day outside a village shop somewhere in South Wales. *PAFF!* It could have been ten seconds ago - it's just that vivid.

From Malpas we'd go on weekend excursions; one I recall was Caerleon, the Roman fort. Weston-super-Mare, across the Bristol Channel beckoned; in Bristol - Bristol Zoo. The journey across the Bristol Channel was by paddle steamer. In the depths of the paddle steamer, we saw the boiler; a man was standing on the other side of the flames shovelling coal in. From where we were observing this scene, it looked like the poor chap was actually engulfed in flame.

By the end of the summer of 1961 I was back in London, ready to start nursery school on The Avenue, West Ealing.

As for Llanwern, the plant opened in 1962, and closed in 2001.

La mer, an escape from greyness

2010-07-02T23:40:00.012+02:00

In 1967 and 1969, we travelled to northern France for our family vacation. The place - Stella-Plage. As with most things in my childhood, there was a Polish angle. Stella-Plage was a town where many Polish coal miners and industrial workers from Lens, Lille and Roubaix, the economic migrants of the 1920s and 30s, and their children and grandchildren would spend their holidays. The Franco-Poles spoke very little Polish and were culturally, historically and politically more distant from Poland than we, the children of WWII political refugees.

There was a thriving Polish club and church (Stella-Maris), and there was the place we stayed, Maison Maternelle (on Avenue des Plages, between the top end of Boulevard Edmond Labrasse and Avenue Francois Godin), a former maternity hospital, which from the early 1950s on belonged to Polish girl guides (harcerki) - Hufiec Bałtyk.

Maison Maternelle is where we stayed. There were hotel-style rooms and barracks for the scouts, guides and cubs - (zuchy - as I was in 1969). The cuisine was Franco-Polish - garlicky salads and boiled potatoes sprinkled with dill, pureed beetroot, chicken. Milk soup and chicory coffee served in large bowls.

Stella-Plage itself was (and still is - looking at photos on Google Maps Street View) a beautiful small resort on beautiful sandy beaches that stretch on to Le Touquet to the north and Berck-Plage to the south.

My main impression of Stella-Plage (and by inference, France) was la difference. You drove on the wrong side of the road in completely different cars. Citroens (DSs and IDs - low and sleek, 2CVs - flying dustbins, the odd Traction Avant); Peugeots (203s, 204s, 403s and 404s); Renaults (4CVs, Dauphines, R4s, 16s); Simcas (1000s, Arondes, Vedettes). Ah - and the odd Panhard (PL17, 24). All of these cars were then very rare sights on British roads. The UK was not a member of the European Economic Community as the EU was known at the time. Commercial vehicles were different too. Corrugated steel-sided Citroen vans, Renaults, Saviems, and Berliets. So - what was on the road was exotic - as were the roadsigns (quite different to the British ones at the time, before they standardised on the 'continental' ones we now all have).

But it was not just the roads. Everything was different. For a start, France smelt different. Arriving by sea at Boulogne-sur-Mer, the smell of rotting fish at the harbour was overpowering. And lack of proper drains gave the countryside between Boulogne and Stella-Plage a familiar odour that I notice when our septic tank is being emptied. But not just unpleasant smells (though the association with pleasure removed any sense of disgust). Sand after a rainfall. Pine trees in the heat (there's a splendid forest behind Maison Maternelle stretching right the way to the sea). And of course the food and drink. Proper coffee (not the powdered muck the British drank). Fresh baguettes, red wine, overpoweringly ripe Camemberts, vanilla-flavoured icing sugar and liquorice sweets - and Pernod, and creme de menthe. As you walked past the holidaymakers' rooms in Maison Maternelle, you could pick up the smell of Piz Buin and various exotic eaux de parfum.

And shops were different. Peaches, apricots, yoghurts (in dozens of flavours!) and saussicons secs. Hypermarkets in rural Pas-de-Calais when London was only beginning to get supermarkets. Different typefaces, crazy, imaginative typefaces, on the boulangerie, the quinquaillerie, the brasserie, the boucherie - and the cafe tabac, the smell of the newsprint (La Voix du Nord, L'Equipe and those bandes desines for children of all ages) mingling with the distinctive tobacco smoke of Galoises, Gitanes and strong black coffee. All of this as far away from dull old West Ealing as could be imagined by a small boy. And here I could buy les miniatures de Norev. Tiny French cars in 1/87th scale (or 1/43rd with opening doors). Plastic rather than the metal Corgis and Dinkys I played with at home, but exotic and collectable. Most of those cars listed above I had in 1/87th scale as little models in little plastic boxes.

And visual difference. Just 22 miles across the English Channel, 20 miles south of Boulogne, the climate was so different to that Miserable Grey Little Island across the water. The sky was dazzlingly blue. Children would get nosebleeds from the heat. And the architecture. Not England's oppressive Victoriana with its fusty gas-lit strictures, but airy moderne houses built so that their owners can enjoy the sensation of sun and sea on their skin.

My childhood seaside experiences had been limited to places like Eastbourne, Bognor Regis or the Isle of Wight. Pebbly beaches, close, wracked, pooled; Stella-Plage's beach was endless clean white sands dotted with sand yachts and WWII German bunkers. For 10 year old boys, this was heaven. And the pommes-frites stand by the beach.

Above: Polish cub scouts, or Zuchy, in Stella Plage, 1969. So many familiar faces! There's my brother in there; and there's blog commentator AdtheLad, plus ace photo artist Rysiek Szydło - and do I see the managing partner of PwC's Warsaw audit practice here as well? And my parents' dentist, ah - and there's Stan!

The hinterland behind Stella-Plage, Cucq, Trepied, Rang-du-Fliers, I'd later explore on future trips as a teenager and young adult. I've not been back here for 30 years, and would love to return.

Above: Petrol station, between Stella-Plage and Merlimont Plage. Today, a private house (below) photo courtesy of Google Maps Street View.

Childhood summer holidays would be over all too soon, and we'd return by British Rail Ferries to Dover; as the ferry berthed in the dock, I'd see a red phone box and a helmeted (and unarmed) British bobby and feel a mix of reassurance at returning to the certainties of British Democracy but a twinge of regret of leaving somewhere so exotic and exciting as France was then.

Today, signage right across Europe is one variant of Helvetica or another; cars are all the same everywhere, the same shops (pretty much) appear in the same malls. One homogenous sameness - the price one pays for economic progress. You can drive from northern France, through Belgium and Holland into Germany and not see a tad's difference. What a shame.

And yet... and yet. Having writing this post on a hot July night, it all comes back to me with a freshness, a lingering ambience, spirit of place. By way of afterword, the morning after writing, I step out onto our sunny balcony overlooking Jeziorki and am still there in my mind enjoying summer in the Pas-de-Calais.

Maybe it was watching the sun set over the English Channel as a nine year old boy that the conscious search for the Sublime Aesthetic began...

Washday

2010-05-18T21:04:00.002+02:00

Monday was washing day. My mother would wash (by hand) at least 15 shirts, 15 pairs of socks and underpants, plus her clothes plus vests in winter, plus whatever everyone wore at the weekend - in other words - vast amounts of laundry. All would be washed in Omo or Daz, collars and cuffs scrubbed and starched, then spin-dried (we had a Creda Debonair spin dryer*) hung out to dry on an 60-foot clothes line that stretched all the way from the veranda to the summerhouse, utilising hundreds of wooden clothes pegs (which could give you a nasty nip if you weren't careful!).

The clothes line itself was kept aloft by a long, square-sectioned pole made by my father which could be extended as required. If I remember correctly, we'd also use this pole to knock down apples from our two apple trees (the one on the left grew Bramleys, the one on the right Coxes).

On Monday afternoons, the back gardens of our street would be full of flapping laundry, drying in the breeze. On those regularly grey, overcast days, a watchful eye would be kept on the weather; should raindrops begin to fall, mothers would dash out with their washing baskets and begin to rapidly unpeg the laundry and bring it indoors.

Assuming the weather was clement, the drying process would take several hours (during which tea and supper were cooked and served), and then the laundry would be gathered in for ironing. This took several more hours. On Tuesday mornings, our wardrobes would be full of crisp, clean shirts, underwear and socks, and so my father, my brother and I could go about our daily duties without fear of stigma that we were dirty or smelly. Of course, I imagined the entire process to have happened by magic, and to this day I have yet to fully appreciate the physical effort my mother put in each and every Monday to ensure that our clothes were clean.

* They still make them! Ours was white with light blue trim and a grey rubber gasket that stopped the water from getting out.

Cars on the road

2010-04-23T19:44:00.009+02:00

Hillman, Singer, Sunbeam, Humber; Austin, Morris, MG, Wolseley, Riley, Rover, Triumph - the names of British cars that drove around on the streets where I lived. Defunct brands, just memories other than those few still kept going by classic car enthusiasts. Today, the only brands from those years to have survived are Vauxhall and Ford, Jaguar and Land Rover, both owned by an Indian company, Mini, Rolls-Royce and Bentley by the Germans and the only other mass producers of cars in Britain today are Japanese car makers - Toyota, Nissan and Honda.

(Out of interest - only the USA can boast so many defunct car brands as Once Great Britain)

When I was a small boy, the sound of a car driving down Croft Gardens would have me rushing to the front window to see what it was. Parked along Croft Gardens were cars like the Vauxhall Victor estate, the Ford Anglia, Ford Popular, Hillman Minx, Austin Cambridge, and my father's Morris 1100.

Posh cars were rare; old cars (they didn't last as long in those days) were rarer (there was a Lea-Francis parked on Oaklands Road, between Cumberland Road and my school).

Number plates: In 1963, the system was changed giving a letter suffix denoting year of production ('A' for 1963, 'B' for 1964, 'C' for 1965 and so on). Until 1972 ('K' reg) when the reflective plates came out - white at the front, yellow at the back as to this day), number plates were white on black. From 1963: three letters, three numbers, one letter, for year.

My father's first car was a Morris Minor 1000 four-door saloon. In Smoke Grey, with red seats. Registration number: 23 RMU. In 1964, he replaced it with a Morris 1100 four-door saloon, in Dove Grey, with red seats. Registration number: EKX 604B.

Popular small family cars in those days cost around ₤600 - ₤650 (including purchase tax*), which was around one-third of the average annual salary after tax. In today's terms, one-third of an average salary is around ₤8,000. So let's compare what you'd get for four month's work:
* Purchase Tax was what the UK had before joining the European Economic Community (as the EU was known at that time). It was replaced of course by VAT.

Many thanks to my brother Marek for presenting me with two excellent books - British Saloon Cars of the Early Sixties and British Saloon Cars of the Fifties, both by Michael Allen. The books take me right back there!

Gastronomic pleasures of the '60s

2010-04-04T17:14:00.008+02:00

Britain was not a foodie's paradise in the 1960s. Food was essentially dull stodge. School meals were unspeakably awful (gristly meat in gravy, powdered lumpy mashed potatoes, over-boiled greens). Ready meals didn't really exist - only Bird's Eye Chicken Pie springs to mind, bits of chicken and garden peas in that ubiquitous gravy, all in a pastry shell. I liked Bird's Eye Chicken Pie, associating it with those very rare occasions on which my mother was ill and my father would cook.

Supermarkets were still rare. I remember the old Sainsbury's on the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing before it was turned into a supermarket. There would be a grocery counter (queue here for sage and onion stuffing, gravy powder, jam, tinned pilchards and tapioca), a dairy counter (queue here for butter and cheese), a meat counter (queue here for lamb chops, mince and cold cuts). My favourites from Sainsbury's were mature Canadian Cheddar, gum-tinglingly good, with the word 'CANADA' stamped on the rind, and Hungarian salami (10/6d a pound, I recall); the right balance of meatiness, spiciness and under-stated garlic. Self-service came to our Sainsbury's some time in the mid-'60s.

My mother would do most of her shopping (very) locally, buying meat at Mr Laurence's, which typically she'd mince, add an egg and bread, and shape meatballs (kotlety mielone) for the frying pan. Fruit and veg at the greengrocer's further along the parade on Oaklands Road. Bread would come from Parker's on the Uxbridge Road (mostly ghastly white sliced); groceries (as in items in tins, packets, jars) from Sainsbury's. Ah, and fish - from MacFisheries on the Uxbridge Road.

Milk came delivered daily to our doorstep courtesy of Express Dairy's electric milk float. I remember yoghurt appearing in the late '60s; we'd first sampled this dairy delight on holiday in France; soon after our milkman began selling it. I also recall my brother (aged five) running down the middle of the Croft Gardens chasing the milk float and shouting at the milkman to stop as he wanted a yoghurt.

Tea was an essential requisite in every English household, and ours, despite its exotic provenance, was no exception. This was an age before the teabag. Tea was bought loose (we'd favour Brooke Bond) in quarter-pound packets, which often came with collector's cards (Butterflies of the World, for instance). The leaves would go into a glazed ceramic teapot (I recall one with blue-and-white stripes; I guess they'd be broken frequently or have chipped spouts so they'd not pour straight). Boiled water would come from the kettle that was boiled on the gas stove. I can see the kettle now; lime scale in the spout, aluminium, black bakelite (?) handle and lid knob, blackened around the base by the town gas flames. The tea would be served with milk, and for us young ones, with sugar. And Rich Tea biscuits. To my current taste buds - repulsive. At the time, reassuring, calming, nourishing and as English as Queen Victoria*.

Being Polish, the more adventurous food in our house came from Pan Rozwadowski's Polish shop on the corner of Northfields Avenue and Elers Road. Here, my parents would buy powidly (plum jam), smoked meats, krówki (Polish cream fudge) and other foreign-currency earning products denied its subjects by Poland's communist regime

Food in Britain suddenly became exciting in the 1970s with the advent of foreign food. Until then, Britons of almost all classes were condemned to an awful diet.

* Who, as Captain Edmund Blackadder pointed out had 'a German father, was married to a German and was surnamed Saxe-Coburg-Gotha'.

Elocution lessons

2010-01-27T22:05:00.007+01:00

Around the time I was ten or so, Mrs C. at No. 9 mentioned to my parents that my accent was a bit, well, cockney. This led directly to my enrollment in Mrs. Watson's elocution school; lessons were held in the church hall at St James's Church (C of E) on St James's Road, West Ealing.

Some thirty or so children with socially-anxious parents would be taught ever week how to speak the Queen's English, beginning with limbering up and breathing exercises. We would say "In my right eye, I've a tiny fly" and try to lose for ever more our normal propensity to pronounce the rhyme "In mah rah['] aah, aah'v a tahnee flaah" or "In moy royt oy, oy'v a toyny floy" (depending on which side of the Irish Sea your parents hailed from; in other words, whether you went to Oaklands or St. Joseph's primary school).

The church hall itself smelt of the gas [BOOMF! Suddenly I'm totally there]; I can see the stackable tubular metal framed chairs stretched with canvas, the beige exercise books we used with a faux-posh navy-blue crest and clear plastic covers that have tears and scratches on them; in the toilets the was a sign pasted to the tiled walls saying "WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER EVERY BOWEL MOVEMENT". My brother recalls a billiard table in the church hall, which somehow escaped my unprompted memory of the place.

The church is still standing. The cast-iron fencing has been torn down and replaced by more friendly lower wooden slats; the 19th century wooden pews have no doubt replaced by bean-bags; Tallis and Byrd and the Anglican Hymnal at Evensong replaced by happy-clappy "What a friend we have in Jesus". (If I'm wrong, please let me know!)

We would learn poems by Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, A.A. Milne, and prepare for speech competitions in Isleworth (reciting poems in front of children from other elocution schools with similarly socially-anxious parents). Before such recitals, we would go to Mrs Watson's house on Coldershaw Road, which my brother recalls as being Victorian inside, not even Edwardian(and these were the Swinging Sixties) for extra coaching.

Was it worth it? Well yes. What else would have we been doing? Watching telly or playing with Lego (there was no homework set in state primary schools). Something different, not really enjoyable, something you'd be told to do, and would do, not questioning it at the time. And 'limbering up exercises' - rotating one's neck, arms, etc., still helps with suppleness and fluid movement. But did it change my accent? No. I still naturally have a Middlesex accent, full of glottal stops and lazy vowels, instantly betraying me to any keen-eared English person of the higher social orders as being an upper-lower-middle class, state-school educated, grammar school interlecktual.

Such is the nature of British society. In Poland, accent reflects neither geographic nor social origin; a tram driver from Bydgoszcz will speak with the same accent as a professor from Warsaw or a factory worker from Rzeszów (naturally, vocabulary will differ). Whether England or Poland is the poorer for it, well, that's another long, long discourse.

Christmas; another time, another place

2009-12-28T20:49:00.005+01:00

This is me, aged five, in December 1962. I've just received my present from Swiety Mikolaj (as opposed to Santa Claus), at the Polish school in Ealing. Inside the box was an plastic toy locomotive, like this one but in orange, without any stickers on it. A few weeks later (for St. Nicholas's Day is celebrated on 6 December), I received for Christmas two tin-plate trucks, rather like this one. And a Lego set, seen on this catalogue (set 212 or 213).

Time to get metaphysical. Something around these presents triggered in me an early 'anomalous familiar memory event'. A pleasant memory, though patently not of this lifetime. When I think back to that Christmas, to those toys, I can still feel that sense of 1950s USA and Scandinavia, the textures, the klimat, the wonder at feeling a different reality, as a small child, that I knew was entirely at odds with what I'd experienced in my short life to that time.

Winters that feel like they do today; snow-covered gardens with small evergreens, outdoor lighting, neat, white, detached, modern houses - not Hanwell London W7.

Saturday evenings, late autumn, early winter

2009-11-28T17:08:00.005+01:00

Dark at tea-time, life at this time of year would be indoors, focused on the black and white 405 line television set. Saturdays afternoons would be dominated by sport, Grandstand on the BBC.

This is how it always started.

I'd always be most interested in motorsport; racing and rallying as well as motorcycle scrambling. The latter would often be shown if scheduled football fixtures were cancelled due to winter weather. Then we'd rejoice in the sight of works BSAs, CZs, Husqarnas, Greaves and Matchlesses. Stuff like this.

School assembly, Oaklands

2009-11-15T10:38:00.006+01:00

Each school day would start with Assembly. In the Juniors, this would take place in the ground floor hall. The eight classes of the Juniors (years one through four, two classes in each year) would gather to hear a piece of classical music played over the Tannoy loudspeaker system. Some Italian arias, I recall (Caro mio Ben). Also, Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. After a few words from the headmaster, Mr Beckford, we would sing a hymn.

Ones that spring to mind: For Those In Peril On The Sea; as Welsh as you can get in West London Bread of Heaven; at harvest festival time, We Plough The Fields and Scatter, Come, ye Thankful People, Come; and the perennial O God, Our Help in Ages Past; Praise My Soul the King of Heaven; O Worship the King (Our Shield and Defender/The Ancient of Days/Pavilion'd in splendour/And girded with praise.) To Be A Pilgrim (though I recall the first line as "Who would true valiant be"). And of course Onward Christian Soldiers, and All Things Bright and Beautiful.

One that came back to me months later after compiling the above list from memory was At the Name of Jesus (this version).

During Advent, of course, carols would be sung.

No concessions to multifaith other than a once-weekly assembly for Catholic children held in a classroom by Mr Sayer. Who drove a Sunbeam-Talbot 90 car.

Back then, Primacy of the Established Church (of England) held firm; Queen Elizabeth on the Throne, God in His Heaven, we all knew our place. Yet from today's perspective, over 40 years on, this feudal vision of a deity that is Lord and King, wears a Crown, runs a Kingdom or even an Empire, is out of time and out of place. "Jesus, the President and CEO"? A similarly unlikely conceit. A reason why C of E is losing touch with humans today.

I very much doubt that any of my fellow pupils at Oaklands read this blog, but if you are one of them, and can recall anything else from Assembly, please let me know.

Autumn

2009-10-12T07:09:00.006+02:00

Autumns started earlier in England than they do in Poland; to put it another way, summers would end sooner (and in any case were cooler and wetter). School would start at the beginning of September and all thoughts of summer would soon fade amid the wood-varnish and Magic Marker smells of the new school year.

By the time of my birthday in October, gloom would have descended; wet pavements, darkness just after tea-time and the early evening news in black and white, electric fires and, outside, the all-pervasive dampness.

I remember my tenth birthday; 1967. My present, well-remembered, was a Dinky Toys Rolls-Royce Phantom V. My father bought it at Confiscerie Francaise, the best toyshop in Ealing Broadway (on the Mall). We walked down the Uxbridge Road to Ealing Common, where I took the car out of its box (but not off the stand; as well as all four doors opening, the boot opened as did the bonnet (on two sides). It cost 10/6d. That's 52.5p expressed in today's money, though the equivalent value today would be more like £7.00.

On Ealing Common we collected conkers (horse chestnuts) under the large, wet, reddish-brown leaves until the drizzle became more like rain and we retreated to the car, returning home to Croft Gardens so I could play with my new toy.

Summer

2009-07-05T15:54:00.002+02:00

Childhood summers seemed quite short. I'd usually spend two or three weeks of the six-week school holiday on Polish cub scout camp. This was huge fun, especially when after a few years in old army barracks (Chipping Campden, Gloucs.), the camp moved to Stella Plage in northern France for my last two years as a zuch (Polish cub). By coincidence, we had our family holiday in Stella Plage in 1967, so I holidayed there three years in a row. Stella Plage was my first taste of life outside the grey jumper'dness of West London. France, with its different shops, typefaces, cars and smells, was a departure into the exotic.

But more about Stella Plage anon. Here, I want to write about the few weeks I'd spend in Croft Gardens in between holidays. In the back garden.

There was the fruit. My parents had tended small patches of strawberries, raspberries, loganberries and gooseberries at the far end of the garden. There were two apple trees, bearing Coxes (to the right) and Bramleys - those large, sour cooking apples (to the left). Incidentally, Bramley apples are entirely unknown in Poland. Towards the end of the school summer holidays, the apples were beginning to ripen, but all to often I'd eat them too early, and get a stomach ache for my troubles!

Aside from the apple trees, which I'd climb for the fruit, there was also a lilac tree which was extremely climbable, which formed my sailing ship with its masts and its crow's nest and rigging.

At the far end of the 80 ft garden was the summerhouse, more a storehouse for old rubbish that my parents couldn't bear to part with. The most interesting thing for me was a wind-up 78rpm gramophone player, and two records; Shine on Harvest Moon and Love is a Many Splendored Thing. There were very sharp needles, and with a bit of winding up, I could make the gramophone player work.

Between the garden and the house was the veranda, metal framed and glass roofed and sided. Black-and-white linoleum tiles and garden toys. My father had constructed some cupboard space with sliding panelled doors, this was where the smaller garden tools were kept (the shovels, rakes, brooms etc with their splinter-yielding wooden handles were kept in the summerhouse).

Around the corner from the veranda was a passage to the garage, in this passage was the coal-bunker, which as I mentioned in a previous thread, was not used as such, but as a store for sand. It had asbestos (!!) sheets covering it. To think my brother and I would play hide-and-seek in it!

Toy cars

2009-02-28T00:28:00.005+01:00

Artefacts of childhood, shapes once familiar on the High Streets of Great Britain, delivering the post, carrying the carpenter's tools.

Heating the house

2009-02-07T08:03:00.007+01:00

At this cold time of year, I think back to my childhood years, when houses were not centrally heated. Compared to our present house in Warsaw, constructed of thick airbricks and clad with 15cm of expanded polystyrene (then plastered on the outside), pre-war British housing stock was not built to keep warmth in. Drafty single-pane windows didn't help much. But as London was rarely visited by frost, this did not matter much as it does here.

But when it was cold, you'd feel it in the house. Our house on Croft Gardens was warmed by open electrical fires, three-bar heaters. These would be switched on non-stop during winter evenings, heating the front room (where the TV was). Stepping out into the corridor was cold and unpleasant, as was getting changed into one's pyjamas in a cold bedroom. Worst was washing in a cold bathroom. Here, because of risk of splashing water onto the open heated electrical elements, we'd have an upright paraffin heater (Aladdin brand, made on a factory on the A40 in Greenford). The paraffin heater would use either pink or blue paraffin (boom-boom-boom ESSO BLUE - remember the TV ad?), and a wick would have to be lit by a match or lighted taper. Or a large, cylindrical battery, striped blue and white (EverReady?) with a long chromed metal tube with a sparking device at the end. The Aladdin factory is still there on the A40, a listed building, though many decades have passed since it last made stoves. Latterly, it was a B&Q superstore, before that closed.

The paraffin used to fuel the stove was bought at hardware stores that vaguely smelt of the stuff. Hardware stores, before going the way of haberdashers and fishmongers, were staffed by knowledgeable chaps called Reg or Alf, who wore light-brown warehouse coats, and knew whether you needed a 7/16th" Armstrong-threaded nut or how much creosote you'd need for your garden fence.

I would often accompany my father to the hardware store on the Hanwell-end of the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing, metal cannister in hand, to buy two quarts or so for the bathroom heater.

The burning of anything by smokeless coal in the fireplace had been prohibited by the Clean Air Act of 1956. On every single lamppost there was a note to this effect. The coalmen would call regularly on Croft Gardens (we never burnt fires in the fireplace, considering this old-fashioned, grubby and working-class). The coalmen would arrive in a lorry carrying scores of hundredweight bags of smokeless nutty slack, neatly arranged on the open flatbed. A coalman, as black as a miner, would heave the bag onto his back (he had a special hat with a leather apron protecting his neck and shoulders) and carry it into the back garden. Most houses, including ours, had a coal bunker, used for storing solid fuel. Ours, however, was half-full of sand, and a great place for games of hide-and-seek.

Air crash at Heathrow, 1963

2009-01-10T16:40:00.009+01:00

Before stumbling upon these pictures, which I never knew existed, I did have a memory of a Trans-Canada Airlines crash near Heathrow in 1960s. The plane came down in a cabbage field (so my father christened it kapuśniak, 'the cabbagey one', something I remembered). Researching the previous post, I was looking for information on this incident on Wikipedia's entry about Heathrow Airport. Because there were (miraculously) no fatalities in this crash, it was not listed. Today, while archiving my father's b&w negatives, I came across these photos.

Right: Close-up of the aircraft's nose, with tracked crawlers in place underneath, in preparation for its removal.

The aircraft, a Douglas DC-8-54CF Jet Trader, reg. no. CF-TJM, ship no. 813, crashed after an aborted take off (incident details here).

Overnight, the airline markings were painted over and what was left of the engines removed. The following morning, my father (who worked nearby), managed to get close-up to the plane with his camera.

CF-TJM was removed from the crash site and repaired. Trans-Canada Airlines became Air Canada, the aircraft resumed service. Tragically, it crashed again, this time in Montreal, on a crew training flight. All three crew members died. Below. A policeman watches as the airframe is jacked up.

This from FLIGHT International magazine for 28 November 1963:

TCA DC-8 Salvage

The Royal School of Military Engineering were called in to help move the TCA DC-8 which made a crash landing after taking off from London Heathrow on November 6. The aircraft has been towed back to the airport on caterpillar track bogies over a specially laid metal road, and is now in a hangar for a repair survey.

Heathrow boy

2009-01-05T00:06:00.012+01:00

We lived just over eight miles from Heathrow Airport; my father worked very close to it in the offices of West's Piling on Bath Road. A real treat for me was a visit to the airport. A place of real glamour - international air travel; the Britannic, Europa and Oceanic terminals (to prosaically become Terminals 1, 2 and 3), and the ongoing sense of change (during the 1960s the airport was systematically being extended and developed). To the point that by 1968, Heathrow had more passengers flying through it (14m) than Warsaw's Okęcie did 40 years later (11m in 2008). The best place of all at Heathrow for me was the Queen's Building - below the control tower, on the viewing gallery. Here, the roar of the engines, the smell of kerosene, the romance of flight was at its most tangible. Above: British European Airways' airliners - Vickers Vanguard (centre and left) and a Vickers Viscount (right). Nearest the camera G-APEO. Photo by my father, Bohdan Dembinski, summer, 1962. I'd have been four at the time.

It was at Heathrow one day in 1965 that we came to meet my uncle (mother's sister's husband) who'd come over from Canada. He had worked on the Avro Arrow project and brought me as a gift a large, white, plastic kit of the Arrow supersonic interceptor (1/50th scale?) along with some small white lapel pins of the aircraft. While we were waiting to meet him (Oceanic terminal!) we looked into a toy shop where there was a large, tinplate model of a Vickers Viscount in Lufthansa markings, which had operating features such as passenger stairs and retracting undercarriage. Cost a fortune (five or six quid!), so it was not to become mine.

Right: A period artifact, still in my possession. The New Esso Guide to Heathrow Airport London, 1968 edition (I recall also having the earlier 1965 edition). On one side of this map, photos of every passenger aircraft type flying into Heathrow (b&w), and colour illustrations showing the livery of every airline flying scheduled flights into Heathrow. The other side, there's a map of the airport, a map showing its location, and an article about the tanker trucks that refuel the airliners - Pythons and Super Pythons. More details on request.

Above: That's me at the controls of a Heli-Jet Mk VII at Queen's Building.

Winter in West London, 1963

2009-01-02T17:03:00.010+01:00

January 1963 saw freezing temperatures and heavy snowfalls blanketing the capital. For me, aged five and a quarter, this was an exciting event, made more so by the imminent arrival of my brother (who would be born on 14 January of that year). I clearly recall the atmosphere of those wintery days. The sky was dark grey, England was unprepared (my winter togs were a duffel coat, wellington boots and woollen gloves that quickly got sodden), roads were treacherous. For a child, it was primarily seen in terms of fun, rather than inconvenience. Above: Croft Gardens in the snow (click for full-size image). A snowball fight is underway, while homeowners clear snow from the pavements outside their house. I'm the little boy on the right.

Right: The view from our veranda out onto the garden. At the bottom, you can just make out how high the snow piled up against the door. This pic has strong memory associations for me; I recall how excited I was as I stood waiting to rush into the deep snow. I'd never seen so much. That foreboding dark grey sky, the physical cold - and the desire to run shouting through the powder.

Photos by my father, Bohdan Dembinski

Salvation is at hand

2008-12-20T00:42:00.002+01:00

The Salvation Army still has its hall on Leeland Road, West Ealing. Sometime in the late 1980s, I revisited my childhood haunts, where I chanced upon this sight on Seward Road. A Salvation Army band would often perform in the streets of Hanwell and West Ealing on Sunday mornings, playing hymns. The location here is just across the road from the Grosvenor public house.

Farnborough Air Show, 1964

2008-12-07T01:24:00.006+01:00

What a treat! My father took me to the Farnborough Air Show in 1964. Above: English Electric F1A Lightning XM794 (see colour pic of same aircraft here)

Above: A quartet of Lightning F1As in diamond formation fly past an Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy.

Above: Fairy Delta II WG774, after its rebuild to test the ogilval delta shape wings used on Concorde. This particular aircraft is on display at the Fleet Air Arm museum in Yeovilton.

Above: Two test pilots looking on at a Hawker Hunter (foreground, in export camouflage markings) and a BAC Buccaneer. In the distance, left, is visible a Short Belfast.

And here it is (above) - XR364 Pallas. The Belfast's first flight was in January that year, and it was not to enter RAF squadron service until 1966.

Above: Beagle B.206 G-ASMK at Farnborough. Click here for colour picture of same aircraft; details of pic confirm the date of the air show as September 1964.

All photos by my father, Bohdan Dembinski.

I, too, recall where I was when JFK was shot

2008-11-22T19:30:00.003+01:00

At home watching television with my parents. I was six, the full import of what was happening was of course lost on me. My parents sat in front of the BBC news watching with a sense of gloom. My attempts to cheer them up failed. That evening, the BBC rescheduled its programmes and put on some light entertainment - TV comedian Harry Worth.

In that episode, Harry pulls out of his wicker basket an old teddy bear, which he says he only brings out on special occasions. I joked "...like when a president gets shot", again trying to raise spirits. This time the joke was met with a stern rebuke from my father.

Above: photo taken that evening by my father Bohdan Dembinski of the 405-line b&w TV set as the news was being reported from America.

This article from The Independent published in November 2004 is interesting for those who stayed up watching TV a bit later than my bedtime.

Forty-five years on, my memory of that evening was the Novemberness of it all; the gloom, the three-bar electric heater, flickering black and white 405-line TV set, the sadness in my parents' hearts.

Mushroom picking

2008-10-26T08:53:00.007+01:00

Or, in Polish, grzybobranie. Like all good Polish families, at this time of year we'd head off into the woods just outside London in search of mushrooms. Our favoured spot was Oxshott Common (51°20'29.37"N, 0°22'1.37"W). Mixed coniferous and deciduous forest, with pine and oak predominating. We'd park (usually early on Sunday mornings following a rainy autumn Saturday) on Sandy Lane, and start combing the undergrowth for mushrooms. The forest floor, covered in pine needles, fallen leaves and moss, would have a particular smell that meant mushrooms would be around.

The ones we looked for were prawdziwki - porcini, a mushroom that is readily identifiable, safe (there's a lot of poisonous ones out there!) and tasty - but quite rare. We'd be lucky to return home with more than 20. Our mother would marinade (in jars) or dry them (on a string).

The interesting thing about mushroom picking is that British people don't do it. When combing the forest for them, we'd occasionally come across other people doing the same - they'd invariably be other Poles, or French or Italian restaurateurs, seeking the best wild mushrooms with which to flavour their recipies. For Brits, mushroom = champignon, the white, farmed mushroom, which wild mushrooms beat for taste by a country mile.

Libraries

2008-10-10T21:54:00.011+02:00

I loved libraries. My father would take me regularly, we'd choose books to borrow (once out of earliest childhood years, they'd mostly be about planes, trains, cars, trucks, buses, tanks, wars, etc). Two of the three public libraries that we'd use then are no longer there.

Ealing Central Library was housed in a former stately home, Pitzhanger Manor House. It ceased being a library when the Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre was opened in 1984. But back inthe 1960s it was a grand place to come, and where I acquired my reading habit. My father and I would come here on Saturdays to exchange books. At first, the Children's Section for oversized books about the world, science and technology, nature and history. Once I outgrew these, I loved books about WW2 warplanes, their colour schemes and camouflage.

I also loved the This is... series of cartoon travelogues by Miroslav Sasek (later on in life, I'd buy several of these books over the Internet for my children to enjoy as my brother and I once did).

Right: My brother (then 18 months old) and I, then nearly seven, poring over Sasek's This is Paris.

Closer to home, within walking distance, was the West Ealing Library on Melbourne Avenue, demolished in the 1970s to make way for Sainsbury's and other shops. A real shame, I loved the atmosphere of that Edwardian building, well-lit, with large skylights. Men would come hear to read newspapers in silence. I remember the smell of well-thumbed books and floor varnish, the shelves full of Large Print Books (in the days before cheap reading glasses), and of course the shelves where the aeroplane books were. Indeed I can conjour up the precise atmosphere or klimat just by thinking back to that place; precisely. My mind is there in every detail.

The third library in Hanwell, on Cherington Road, is still there. Next door to the children's clinic it was, to where my mother would push my baby brother in his pram for his check-up and NHS orange juice, cod liver oil and gripe water. The atmosphere at the Hanwell library was essentially similar to the West Ealing Library, with pale blue doors and window frames, skylights and the same layout and smell.

Public libraries, I fear, have dumbed down today.

Trumpers Way

2008-10-09T21:53:00.005+02:00

Across the Boston Road lay exotic territory; Trumpers Way (cul de sac). Now lined with new housing and an industrial estate, in the 1960s it was a rough place unclaimed by development. Scrapyards behind corrugated iron, guarded by noisy alsatians, unkempt back gardens, the fields behind Elthorne Park. By the time I was ten, and in possession of my new bike (a Hercules Jeep).

Then there was the bridge over the Grand Union Canal. It is said that Barry Ricketts climbed on to the parapet and walked across like a tightrope walker, a 30 foot drop to the left of him (no one from my class was there to witness this, but such was the legend). On the canal there stood (and from Google Earth, still stands) a huge warehouse building, towering over the terraced houses of Humes Gardens and Studley Grange Road. The atmosphere was beautifully Edwardian, especially at twilight.

Across the canal, Trumpers Way ran onto the railway line, where the road came to an end. Here was (before Dr Beeching and his cuts) a station on the old Great Western Railway spur from Southall down to Brentford. Long gone as a passenger line, the spur served in the late 1960s as it does today a waste disposal site.

Colour on black and white

2008-09-30T20:54:00.003+02:00

In the 1960s, families would sit around the TV set together after their evening meal. Primary school meant no homework, so from the time I got home until bedtime, most evenings were spent glued to the box, with a brief interlude for supper. Like in every other household. After children's TV - BBC - we were (lower) middle class - it would be the early evening news, followed by Town and Around (replaced in 1969 by Nationwide), the local current affairs programme.

From 1965 onwards, Town and Around was followed on Wednesdays by Tomorrow's World, a popular science programme dedicated to bringing the future of technology to your living room. Presented at the time I watched it most by Raymond Baxter and James Burke, it created the impression (which turned out to be correct) that our lives would indeed be changed by the gadgets being invented by science.

Yet the Wikipedia page about Tomorrow's World indicates that actually precious little by way of life-changing inventions appeared in the 1960s on this programme, other than the breathalyser and the cash machine. More typical fare (apart from all the fascinating space race stuff culminating in the moon landing) was the widely advertised programme about a new technology that allowed you to watch colour TV on a standard black and white set.

This post was prompted by a vivid flashback I had to that very show, discussed avidly in the school playground before and after its broadcast. Looking at the LED screen on the 709 bus home from Wilanowska yesterday, watching the little lights rearrange to form the name of the next stop and the current time, brought back memories of that very programme, some 40 years ago.

Read about it here, and the theory behind it here.

Of bread and cakes

2008-09-23T22:39:00.003+02:00

A flashback the other day, prompted by the cakey smell of icing sugar. On the Uxbridge Road in West Ealing, across the road from Woolworth's, there was a cake shop. In the window were wedding cakes and birthday cakes, demonstrating the shop's artistry. The smell inside was characteristic; sweet, marzipan, icing sugar, shortening. Battenberg cakes, Bakewell tarts, custard pies small and large in tin foil, cakes with hundreds and thousands on top, cakes with little metal ballbearings on top... Very, very rarely, I'd go in with my mother to buy a cake here.

More often, we'd go across the road, past British Home Stores, towards Hanwell, to T. Parker's Bakery. Here the smell was of fresh bread, rolls and buns. My mother would buy both bread that was typically English - white sliced, granary, and continental - croissants with poppy-seed, challa, baguettes. Parker's has closed down on the Uxbridge Road, but the shop on Northfields Avenue is still in business (it opened in 1913).

Wireless memories

2008-09-17T20:34:00.005+02:00

The radio in our house was a Barker, a wooden box with bakelite knobs and valves that glowed. The panel on the right would be gently back-lit, with stations such as Hilversum, Luxembourg, Droitwich, Athlone and many others on short, medium and long waves. After switching on the radio, you'd have to wait several seconds for the valves to warm up.

As I recall, the radio came from Barkers' department store on High Street Kensington. My parents lived in an attic flat on Sinclair Road in West Kensington before buying the house on Croft Gardens. My mother would often use the phrase "kupiliśmy u Barkersa" relating to the provenance of things around our house ("we bought it at Barkers").

Mostly, the radio would be tuned to either the BBC's Light Programme (my mother listening to Housewife's Choice or Music While You Work), the Home Service or the Third Programme (for those occasions when my father spotted some piece of classical music he wanted to hear). Saturday mornings would be Children's Favourites; and on Sundays, the Light Programme would broadcast The Billy Cotton Band Show, followed by The Clitheroe Kid, followed by Family Favourites.

But twiddling with the tuner knob would bring other, more exotic radio stations to life. Moscow's Radio Mayak, or Polish Radio, each with their characteristic station ident tune played on xylophone (Midnight in Moscow; Warszawianka).

Between stations, the tuner would summon forth an unearthly rising and falling tone, accompanied by crackle and distortion, that to me epitomised the romance of the airwaves

My parents' radio went out in a blaze of glory; the picture above is a still from the video for The Bluebell's smash hit Young at Heart, four weeks at No. 1 in the UK singles charts, you'll see the radio itself (and indeed myself for a second or two, then aged 26). By then, the radio was long broken (the tuner knob's fallen off and the tuner indicator's at a funny angle). The old Barker radio fell into disuse at around the same time as the Light Programme gave way to modern and with-it BBC Radios 1 and 2, the Third Programme by Radio 3 and the Home Service by Radio 4, in 1967. The Barker's replacement was a modern hi-fi with separate record player, tuner and amplifier.

Lego boy

2008-09-10T23:24:00.004+02:00

Danish toymaker Lego is celebrating its 50th anniversary. I saw a boxed set of bricks brought out to celebrate the milestone in our local hypermarket. This immediately evoked a rush of nostalgic feeling towards the plastic building blocks that were such an important part of my childhood (and indeed, my children's childhood!)

I vividly recall the colours of the bricks - white, yellow, red and blue, the interlocking studs with the Lego logo on each one, the shapes of the bricks (especially the roof tiles, the rounded pieces, the clear pieces), and special parts such as the Scandinavian flag set (memorably recalled in a flashback while standing outside Warsaw's Radisson SAS hotel on a frosty night), and the small Lego cars and trucks (I had a Bedford furniture truck, with opening door at rear).

I must have been about four when I received my first Lego set, but have perfect recollection of the emotions I felt at the time I opened the box and started putting the pieces together for the first time. Just writing this piece makes me remember the kit, a kiosk with a rounded end, I recall unfolding the instructions.

Follow this link to a German-language page with Lego catalogues from the 1950s and early 1960s. I well recall most of the bricks displayed; it also jogged memories (I had the Lego garage set with up-and-over door).

Holiday on the Isle of Wight.

2008-09-08T22:55:00.010+02:00

Sitting here by the computer, I just had an involuntary, entirely spontaneous flashback, a propos of nothing at all - a childhood holiday on the Isle of Wight. Bembridge. August 1964; my brother would have been one and half, me, I'd have been six and a bit.

I remember the village, its green, our rented holiday house just off the green; Southern Vectis double decker buses, light green in colour. I remember the lead paint scare; toys made in Hong Kong (for that is where cheap toys came from - the euphemism was "Empire Made") that had red paint on them were so full of lead that if you sucked them (so my mother said), your brain would come to a standstill.

The double deckers were an attraction to me. Because we were middle class (just!) and had a car, I very rarely travelled by public transport, and so, a bus journey was an departure into the exotic. During this holiday, I once went by bus with my father, just a few stops, upstairs of course, on the top deck, which was very exciting. I remember the harbour, the smell of the sea; the weather was nice, too.

We drove all over the island - Blackgang Chine, Alum Sands, Ventnor, Ryde... at Cowes, we saw, across the water, the gargantuan bulk of Britain's largest flying boat, the Saunders-Roe Princess, in mothballs, awaiting the scrappers' blowtorch.

Above: What's brown and comes steaming out of Cowes? The Isle of Wight Ferry. Its load here - a new Leyland truck bringing Calor Gas the the island's caravanners. To the left, in the distance, the cocooned Princess.

Above: A more modern way (well, in 1964 at least) of getting to the mainland - a Saunders-Roe SRN2 hovercraft makes it up Ryde beach to unload passengers. That's me covering my ears. As well as being extremely loud, the hovercraft's air cushion would blow sand and grit at high velocity, stinging the skin. Both pictures by my father, Bohdan Dembinski

Playtime at Oaklands

2008-09-03T22:24:00.003+02:00

"All-in-for-US-Cavalry" the boys would chant, as they formed a huge chain around the Junior boys' playground during playtime. More and more would join, and once a critical mass was attained, the chain would split up into cowboys and Indians, and play proper would begin. As well as US Cavalry, obviously inspired by what was going on at ABC Minors at the time, there would be "All-in-for-Zulus-and-Welsh" (the 1964 movie Zulu). Note the Anglo-Saxon imperialists vs. Natives theme in both games. Oftentimes the chain of boys, arms around one another's shoulders, would form under the shelter at the side of the playground opposite the school building. Here was a long wooden bench, the boys would stand on the bench stamping their feet in time in a show of play masculine aggression.

Other games played in the playground; the classic British Bulldog ("British Bulldog One Two Three!"), Chain-he, was a game based on tag, where two boys holding hands chased others running around on their own; when tagged, the boy would join the chain, until the entire playground was one long chain trying to catch the last single boys out there. There were also piggy-back fights, with two teams of horses and riders, trying to pull the others down. A sophisticated variation on this was chariot racing (or fights) in which two boys (the horses) would link arms, between them, bending down, a third boy (the chariot), usually big and strong, and a fourth boy (the charioteer) sitting on the back of the 'chariot' boy, who was supported by the two 'horses'. Two or more ensembles like this would smash into one another, the aim being to physically break up the other team.

While the boys were busy in rough-and-tumble, the Junior girls (who shared a playground with the Infants) would also be parading around arms around each others' shoulders, emulating the Tiller Girls and performing high kicks. "Keep your sunny side UP! UP!" they would sing as they danced around the playground together.

These were the 1960s, but the traditions that we children were drawing on were already decades old; each generation learning from the older children that went before.

My red-and-white bicycle

2008-08-27T22:34:00.007+02:00

I got this bike when I was three. As a reward for no longer being in nappies at night. With 12" balloon tyres, rod-operated brake on the front wheel, finished in red and white, this Silver Knight bicycle lasted me until my tenth birthday, when it was replaced by a Hercules Jeep (24" wheels).

As my principal form of transport for nearly seven years (fitted with stabiliser wheels at first), the Silver Knight was not just a bicycle. It was a racing car, an aircraft, a flying boat, a police motorbike, and express engine. Inspired by endurance - the Le Mans 24 Hours, the Indianapolis 500, the first round-the-world flight - I would do endless laps around the block - Croft Gardens, Oaklands Road, Seward Road and Manton Avenue before returning home for a pit stop or a landing at a remote airfield then carrying on.

Over the years, the Silver Knight lost all unnecessary parts; mudguards (I'd not go cycling in the rain!), rear carrier rack, triangular metal 'fins' on the chainstays; the saddle and handlebars were raised as far as they would go, and an STP sticker applied to the frame.

When I got my new bike (long overdue!) the Silver Knight passed onto my brother.

Above: That's me, aged five, outside our house, going as fast as I could up Croft Gardens. Note total lack of cars parked on the road. The few cars that belonged to residents of Croft Gardens tended to be garaged whenever possible. The fact that my father (who took the picture) was home at around noon suggests the photo was taken on a weekend.

Street Cries of Old Hanwell

2008-08-21T08:44:00.004+02:00

The rag and bone men would come by occasionally. Their horse-drawn, four wheel cart, would be piled high with old bicycle frames, mangles, spin-dryers, mattresses, vacuum cleaners - any old junk beyond repair. As they progressed along Croft Gardens to the clip-clop of hooves on asphalt, they would call out to householders eager to dispose of junk. I could never work out what it was they were shouting. "RI-to" (that's an "i" as in "bit", "o" as in "cot"), it sounded to me. Certainly not "Any old rags and bones you wish to dispose of, missus?"

The institution of the rag-and-bone man (or totter) was an early bottom-up recycling initiative, not dicatated by the council but by the market. I'd guess that most parts of London would have had their 'round' served by rag-and-bone men, who'd have been doing this since Victorian times.

The TV series Steptoe and Son, about two rag-and-bone men and set in Shepherd's Bush (just a few miles up the Uxbridge Road from us), was aired on BBC TV between 1962 and 1965, when I'd have been to young to watch. The second run (1970 to '74), in colour, was already nostalgia, as by then we'd moved to posher Cleveland Road, the rag-and-bone men and their horse-drawn carts had gone.

Airfix boy

2008-08-14T19:56:00.010+02:00

From the day my father bought me my first Airfix kit (Supermarine Spitfire Mk IX, JE*J), sometime in the spring of 1963, I was hooked. Making plastic models of aircraft would be something I'd be up to for the next decade or so. I recall the day. We'd gone to the see the parish priest at Andrzej Bobola Polish church in Hammersmith about my brother's forthcoming christening. Rather than going straight home, we drove to Bushey Park, where, in the car park, my father presented me with the kit. It was in a brown paper bag; inside was in a clear plastic bag with a card stapled the top with an illustration of a Spitfire. The kit itself was of pale blue plastic. Wings, fuselage halves, ailerons, wheels, etc, were attached to sprue, there was a set of transfers with the RAF roundels and a clear plastic hood.

I'd guess my father made the kit, but he showed me how to do it. After a while I was sticking them together with aplomb. At the time there was no mention of solvent abuse, but I'm sure there was something about those fumes from the polystyrene cement (larger kits had little browny-yellow capsules of glue with them). Also, I can't remember whether JE*J (the plane of ace fighter pilot 'Johnnie' Johnson) was ever painted or whether it remained pale blue with transfers applied.

Towards the end of that summer, making plastic kits had become my favourite pastime. Well, that and building things out of Lego. One day, my father took me to Woolworths. I was very keen for him to buy me an Airfix kit of the North American Harvard, like the Spitfire, Series I, costing all of 1s. 11d., and moulded in bright yellow plastic. My father offered to buy me an Avro Lancaster bomber. Series 5 (. Four engines! Moving turrets with elevating machine guns! Functioning ailerons, elevators and rudders! Rotating undercarriage wheels! Which to choose? The Lancaster was a kit bigger and more sophisticated than any I'd helped build before. So I chose the Lanc, though I was a bit sad that the bright yellow Harvard was not to be mine.

Above: That's me proudly displaying the finished Lancaster kit ('G' for George), one fine September day in our back garden in Croft Gardens. My brother is in the pram (the wheels of which would end up as the starring stage prop in Class 3V's production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang five years later). My mother's hand is by the tea things. Behind us is the summerhouse, full of things like a wind-up gramophone, old furniture and other discarded items. The putty on the summerhouse's glazing was forever falling off (or picked away by little fingers). And note the crease in my grey flannel school shorts.

Incidentally, from what my father told me, the previous owner of our house on Croft Gardens, a Mr Appleby or Applegate, was an RAF navigator flying Lancaster bombers. We used to have a large, heavy, grey compass that came from one in our veranda. The insides were painted black and a luminous needle would wobble around inside.

Pounds, shillings and pence

2008-08-13T20:59:00.005+02:00

Talking to my daughter Monika over the holidays about pre-decimal money that we had when I was a child, she expressed her horror at just how complicated things were. Four farthings to a penny, two ha'pennies to a penny; twelve pennies to a shilling, twenty shillings to the pound - twenty one shillings to the guinea... things would cost tuppence (not two pence), thruppence (not three pence) or thruppence ha'penny, we had tanners (sixpence), bob (shillings, never expressed in the plural, so six bob, not six bobs), florins (two shillings) and half-a-crown (two shillings and six pence). No crowns, though, which would have been five bob. A penny was 1d, a shilling 1s. One shilling and six pence ('one and six') would be expressed as 1s 6d.

Decimalisation removed all this wonderful jargon and replaced it with prosaic pence and pounds, one hundred per. Yes, it is now so much simpler. But as a child, I never had any problems with the value of money. Down at Tanner's, the sweetshop, I know what a ha'penny could buy, what thruppence worth of chewy milkbottles or rhubarb-and-custard boiled sweets was like, and that sixpence would purchase a nice bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk ("a full glass-and-half in every bar"). Fry's Turkish Delight would cost 5d.

Now 5d is nominally two pence. That's the rate at which old money was changed into new. A shilling is five pee (as they're referred to now). But it would be wrong to say that a Matchbox toy (a shilling) cost only 'five pee in today's money'), as average earnings in the mid-1960s were some 12-15 times less than they are today.

To compare 1965 prices with today's click here for a useful calculator.

School lunches, or 'dinners' as they were called at Oaklands, cost one shilling and thruppence (1s. 3d.) a week when I started school in September 1962. For that price, a child had five main courses and five desserts. Thruppence a day to feed a child! I remember bringing five thruppenny bits to school on a Monday morning, standing one of the 12-sided coins upright on my desk, then carefully placing a second on on the first, then a third... no one could do all five!

Taste flashback

2008-07-27T14:23:00.002+02:00

The taste of Zott Jogobella pieczone jabłko (baked apple) flavour yogurt is identical in flavour to school apple crumble and custard. One mouthful and the memories of Oaklands' lunchtimes came flooding back! The subject of school dinners will be covered in full, as there's so many memories (pleasant and unpleasant!) associated with this.

On being Polish in West London

2008-07-27T09:53:00.013+02:00

Both my parents are from Poland, they ended up in England after the War, unable to return. They bought the house on Croft Gardens, Hanwell, London W7, in 1955. When I was born, they'd speak Polish to me, and carried on speaking Polish between themselves to this day.

When I started going to nursury school on The Avenue in West Ealing, just ahead of my fourth birthday, I spoke no English at all. My mother tells me that before going there for the first time, she taught me the words "please", "thank you" and "toilet". Because there were several other Polish children in my class, I never had any sense of being unusual.

It was only at Oaklands Primary School, after I'd been there for a few months, that I had the following conversation with my friend Gary Clark. I don't remember the exact words, but the gist was something like this: "Gary - you speak Polish at home to your parents, don't you?" Gary was puzzled - he didn't have a clue what I was on about. I explained. "At school, in shops, on the street, one speaks English. At home, with one's parents, one uses a different language...?" Gary replied "Er... no..."

Only at this precise moment (I must have been five and a bit), did I realise that I was different in this respect to other children. Until this moment, I thought everyone spoke Polish at home, but didn't talk about it in school.

Polishness was for the weekends. Saturday mornings were Polish school, which I attended right up to 'A'-Level. Sunday morning was Polish cub scouts, followed by Polish mass at the Polish church. And so it went throughout my entire childhood and adolescence (scouts on Saturday afternoons).

Unlike many of our Polish friends' houses, my parents' house was not a temple to Polishness, full of folk art, pre-war maps, Black Madonnas, engravings of Lwów or Wilno, cavalry swords, bookcases solid with Polish titles. There were some signs of Polskość around our house, but it was neither deliberately being hidden nor made a show of. Which I think, in retrospect, is the healthiest balance. Not forgetting one's roots, yet not going full-on for assimilation in the host community - and then not cutting one's self off to the ghetto either.

This approach worked well. Throughout my childhood, I never felt picked on, discriminated against or victimised because of my Polish surname. This also says a lot for the basic decency and tolerance of the English host community. Not once, in all those years, can I recall a single snide comment aimed at me on account of my supposed national "otherness".

Playground games at Oaklands Primary (I)

2008-07-26T13:23:00.001+02:00

Unique to Oaklands (I believe), as I never met anyone from any other primary school who’d played this, was a game called Buzzing (or Bunging). The game was played between two teams, one standing on the air-raid shelter side of the Juniors’ playground, the other team standing by the wire fence separating the playground from the Infants. The distance between the two teams was some 90 ft (27m).

A thrower from one team would throw a standard tennis ball from one side of the playground to the other. The other team would attempt to catch the ball. If they did so, they’d get three points (for a two-handed catch) or six points (for a one-handed catch). If they failed to catch the ball, the throwing team would win one point.

A simple game, but it kept us Juniors occupied for many a playtime. It helped hand-eye coordination, teamwork and – numeracy. Adding all those sixes, threes and ones and keeping tabs on the score. Whatever was going on in the rest of the playground, there was usually a steady barrage of tennis balls flying overhead!

There were many other games we played – many common to other schools (British Bulldog, chain-he, piggyback fights). I will describe everyone I remember in future posts.

Ealing Baths

2008-07-25T21:14:00.010+02:00

Back in the days when not every house had its own bath, the local authorities provided public baths. These were in the same building as the swimming pool, which, once in Junior School, I would visit with my class once a week. These were in the Longfield building behind Ealing's rather splendid Victorian Town Hall.

The class would travel by coach (a Bedford Duple, if I recall) down the Uxbridge Road, and we'd troop off to the changing rooms. The swimming pool was to the right of the baths, a row of cubicles, a white enamelled bath in each. It was here that the working classes could sit and soak in warm, soapy water, and get clean for sixpence.

Those were the baths (which, having a bathroom at home, we didn't have to use). Then there was the pool.

Now... was there such as thing as First Class and Second Class pool? I can vaguely remember... or was this at Acton? One with a balcony? No trace on the Net...

The adjacent pool was white tiled, Victorian, smelling strongly of chlorine (if I close my eyes I can imagine the smell), with changing cubicles on either side (male to the left, female to the right). There was a pile of wooden (later expanded polystyrene) floats for learners to grasp as they propelled themselves with their legs, a lifebelt or two, some nets on sticks to remove debris. All was well-run, but showing signs of age. This swimming pool was a far cry from the modern, Olympic-length pools that the council would build in Northolt and Perivale. But at the time, in the early 1960s, pools like this were the norm (I also swam at the Brentford and Acton pools, both of similar vintage and style).

As well as the chlorine smell, the other characteristic of pools of this age were the pool attendants - chaps called Reg or Vic, wearing white slacks, white vests, white plimsolls - trim of physique, in their forties or fifties (probably ex-Army PT instructors). Their chief attribute was their tuneful whistling. They would use the unique acoustic properties of the swimming pool to optimal use whistling popular melodies from the 1930s and '40s.

Apart from school trips to the Ealing Baths, I'd also go from time to time with my father and brother, especially in summer. I'd be dressed in shorts (over my swimming trunks), sandals and t-shirt, so I'd be into the nearest empty cubicle to get undressed, and in the water in seconds.

Note: This was an age of social trust. No one nicked things from cubicles. You'd just find an empty one, leave your clothes (and watch,wallet and keys if you were grown up), go for a swim, and, having remembered your cubicle number, you'd return to find it all there where you left it.

Things obviously got worse by the time Northolt and Perivale swimming pools were opened; these had lockers, with keys, that you safety-pinned to your trunks.

Below: Ealing Town Hall, 1900. The baths were directly behind, entrance from Longfield Avenue, the road to the left of the Town Hall.

West Ealing

2008-07-25T08:29:00.009+02:00

The nearest proper shops to us were on the Uxbridge Road as it ran through West Ealing. Here was a Sainbury's (not yet a supermarket), a Marks & Spencers (where nearly all my clothes came from), a Woolworth's, a British Home Stores, a Dolcis - chain stores that were seen in any other suburb or city. There was a big(ish) department store, F.H. Rowse's, a smaller one, Daniel's, Parkers, a bakery which always had a marvellous smell of fresh bread, Bland's the optician - and the pubs. The Halfway House, towards the Hanwell end of West Ealing, the Green Man (with a pub sign I used to find scary), and between them, the Old Hat.

Toy shops... very important to me. Well, Woolworth's had a reasonable range of Airfix kits, Tanner's on Oaklands Road had Matchbox toys, but for Corgi and Dinkies (larger die-cast toy cars) there was only one shop on a short passage by Deans Gardens. Sadly, this shop either closed or else became a radio and TV shop, but while it was open, it was a great treat to be taken here by my parents to choose a Dinky or Corgi toy. The men serving at the toy shop wore brown warehouse coats, shirts and ties; when ordering a toy, I would look at the catalogue to see which toy car I wanted. The man would look at the catalogue number and would scour the boxes (yellow for Dinky, pale blue and yellow for Corgi) for the right catalogue number. If in stock, he would take out the box from the rack on the wall, open it and show me the car. If it met with my approval, my mother or father would pay, the box would be wrapped up and we'd take it home.

The Uxbridge road was served by red London double decker buses. There was the 207, from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush; this replaced the 607 trolleybus which I can still remember catching with my mother to visit friends who lived in Shepherd's Bush. The trolleybuses were withdrawn from service in November 1960 (I was just three at the time) and replaced by Routemaster buses. Below: A 607 trolleybus on the Uxbridge Road at Ealing Common, on its way to Shepherd's Bush.

Our front garden

2008-07-24T08:15:00.002+02:00

Our house at 15 Croft Gardens had a front and a back garden. (This is a reason why I could never live in a flat - all my life I've lived in a house with two gardens. ) The back garden, where I spent many a happy childhood hour, will be the subject, no doubt, of many separate posts, the front garden was less important from the point of view of playing.

A brick wall, some nine inches thick, separated the front garden from the pavement. A wrought-iron double gate opened up to the short drive up to the garage. The wall had three brick pillars between stretched which two sections of brickwork with a dip in the middle of each.

In my childhood makebelieve, the wall was like a railway train, the gates like a level crossing. I would sit astride the wall and imagine the train was approaching the crossing, which had to be opened, then closed.

The main feature of the front garden was a magnolia bush (today grown very large), which in bloom was quite magnificent.

The advantage of the front garden over the back was the ability to watch the world go by. Milk floats, the rag-and-bone man, cyclists, delivery vans, motorbikes, pedestrians and the occasional car, most of which warranted careful observation.

Oaklands Primary School - infant impressions

2008-07-23T22:58:00.001+02:00

One day in early September 1962, a month before my fifth birthday, my mother took me to school for the first time. I'd gone to nursury school for a year and half before starting at Oaklands, but this was the first day at Proper School.

Oaklands Primary School was divided into two buildings; a single-story Infants school, with its own headmistresses, and six classes with the youngest three years. Across a driveway was the two-storey Junior school, eight classes, with four years.

I remember well the smell of the varnished wooden floors (always the same smell at the beginning of each school year), the solid Edwardian architecture, gloss-painted doors, brass doorknobs, the cloakroom with its coat pegs, the nature table. I also vividly recall the smell of Magic Markers, thick-tipped felt pens used to name everything in neat hand-written letters on large rectangles of coloured card; "Door", "Table", "Window".

Always having had a lactose intolerance, I hated school milk, which was delivered in wire crates full of one-third of a pint bottles (around 200 ml) to each class for drinking during the mid-morning break. Passable in winter when the cold took away the taste, in summer, it made me retch. Still, I had to drink it, no getting away from that. Everyone got a straw, either punctured the silver foil top or removed it (that yellow cream in summer!) and sucked it down with a slurping sound. The taste of the paper straw also comes back to me. Free school milk was withdrawn by the state in the 1970s by then Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher - "Milk Snatcher", but in the '60s, it was a daily ordeal I had to contend with.

The headmistress of the Infants School was Miss Golding; my first teacher was a jolly woman, Mrs Constance, (Class 6) who cycled in on a bicycle with a lady's frame and an enclosed rear wheel to prevent her skirt getting caught in the spokes. She taught me the correct way to walk with scissors (the blades in the palm of the hand).

Oaklands Primary was a state school - no fees. Yet there was a proper school uniform; a green blazer, piped in silver-grey, grey shirt, green and silver striped tie, grey V-necked jumper with green piping, grey flannel shorts for boys, with creases and turn-ups (which I'd wear even in mid-winter! Only in the final year were long trousers allowed), grey socks with green piping, and black shoes. And a green cap with silver piping and crest.

Although the vast majority of children were working class, there was a decency and sense of order. The infants school was run by middle class ladies who I sensed were dedicated to their jobs. Everything seemed in its place.

Oaklands Road

2008-07-22T20:45:00.001+02:00

At the northern end of Croft Gardens is Oaklands Road. In my childhood, this was a serious road, more serious than Croft Gardens, or Manton Avenue, or Seward Road, because it had shops, a pub - and most importantly, my school on it. Plus, more cars drove up and down Oaklands Road.

I will write more about Oaklands Primary School, which I attended for seven years (from the ages of four to 11). But Oaklands Road itself was a rather ordinary road of Victorian two-up, two-down terraced houses; "working class". I can recall seeing children without shoes on it and indeed the same children taking a dump in the gutter, but they came from a problem family - the only one on the street.

Just around the corner from us on Oaklands Road stood a parade of shops (still there), of which the most significant for me was Tanner's. A 'tanner' was sixpence (six old pence - two and half new pee), and in the mid '60s, it could buy a lot. Two small Cadbury's chocolate bars or 24 Blackjack or Fruit Salad chewy sweets (a farthing each). Or an tetrahedron full of frozen orange juice (with tuppence change). Or a Zoom ice lolly. Two tanners would buy you a Matchbox toy. I will write more about toys and play anon. At the near end of the parade was Lawrence's the Butchers, at the far end was The Grosvenor pub, a Courage house (today a listed building). A smell of stale beer and tobacco that pervaded the air around it. My parents rather looked down upon it and upon those who frequented it.

Croft Gardens

2008-07-22T20:18:00.000+02:00

From the time I left Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital in early October 1957 to 1 May 1970, when my family moved to the posher surroundings of Cleveland Park, West Ealing, I lived at 15 Croft Gardens, Hanwell, London W7. Our phone number - HAN 8068. No postcodes then. The 1930s-built house was semi-detached (well, end-terrace really), with a wooden lean-to garage and a drive. A magnolia tree stood in the front garden.

My father had a car - a light grey, four-door Morris Minor, registration number RMU 23. Although this was bought after I was born, I never remember a time when we didn't have a car. I remember the fridge being delivered to the house, but the car was always there. We were one of a handful of families on Croft Gardens to have a car at that time. Once I was tall enough to see out of the front room bay windows, the sound of a car driving down the street would have me running up to see what it was. Cars were still rare.

Apart from Manton Avenue, which joined Croft Gardens at the southern end, all the other streets in our part of Hanwell - bordered by the Uxbridge Road to the north, Northfields Avenue to the east, Boston Road to the west and Elthorne Park Road to the south - were Victorian. Most were terraced, some were larger and harked back to an era of domestic servants. However, my assumption was that our newer, airier houses with their 80ft gardens were posher. We, I assumed from my earliest days of class consciousness, a class above the other streets. In this view I was reinforced by the fact that we had a car, and that my father, a civil engineer, had a better job than the fathers of most the children I would end up going to school with.

My earliest memories are of the house at 15 Croft Gardens, of being in the garden, the veranda, the summerhouse, the coal bunker, the apple trees, the lilac tree... I shall return to our home in future posts.