Elocution lessons

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.

Salvation is at hand

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.

Libraries

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.

Of bread and cakes

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).

West Ealing

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 (where we didn't shop), a MacFisheries and a Dolcis – the shoe-shop chain 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. I remember witnessing a fire in an upper-story room of the Old Hat one evening in the early 1960s; a crowd of people watching as firemen hosed water at the blaze through an open window from a Dennis appliance parked in the courtyard.

In the days before double yellow lines, the Uxbridge Road served as an experimental stretch with double red lines - denoting the limits of the pedestrian-controlled crossings; here you pushed a button, rather like today, but instead of an illuminated green man telling you when to cross, there was an animated walking matchstick-figure (cross) or stationary stick-figure (don't cross). I remember these very well (they were in the same places as the crossings are today), but can't find any reference to them online.

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 weron this route 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. I always wanted to go on the upper deck, but my mother explained that 'bad people' (i.e. smokers) were up there.

Below: a lovely little film showing the 607 from Shepherd's Bush and onwards through Acton, via Ealing Common and on to Southall, Hillingdon and Uxbridge.