My Welsh childhood

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 afterwards, in early 1961, 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 polyethylene rods, with four rows of holes on opposites side and one at the end, and four matching spigots 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.

Oaklands Road

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

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.