As a child I was used to open spaces, the vast stretches of Blackheath, Avery hill, a huge area of playing fields and trees where I played cricket with my friends, Alistair Chisholm and Peter Davis until the evening faded and in the dimming light, as we made our way homeward, the bats flickered like shadows and the may bugs ponderously buzzed, random missiles in the hot night air.
The three cornered field at the back of our houses was where we spent most of our time after school and at weekends. Each garden had a gate that led onto it and several people had allottments along the edges but it still left a large area to play in; from each corner a lane ran feeding the backs of some of the houses including ours. A huge oak tree dominated one side of the field, great spreading branches, a remant of the forest that once surrounded Eltham Palace. This tree was our centre; the centre of our universe and from it we set out on our adventures of make believe, medieval battles, King Arthurs knights, cowboys and indians we played the days away in innocence never thinking that they would come to an end and the landscape be vastly changed.
Many of the gardens had apple and pear trees, gooseberry bushes and raspberries. Scrumping seemed perfectly fair to us with the added excitement and fear of being caught. I like to think that we took very little and not very often and did little harm; certainly no-one ever complained. and some people put out windfalls for us presumably to stop us getting the real thing.
Our one enemy was a Mr Streeter, a very aggressive man, who lived quite close to our tree and waged a war on the older boys, who had built camps high in it’s branches. Rory Chisholm, the eldest of the Chisholm boys, in defiance, took a ladder from his garden and hauled it up into the tree; they very nearly came to blows, Rory appealing for someone to hold his glasses, but the moment passed luckily so I am told, for i was safely in bed.
My sister Joan who had been a girl guide, organised bonfires and cooked ‘cheese dreams’, cheese on toast, and made almost un -chewable toffee for us. Much later In the long cold winter of 1947 she made little waterproof gloves to keep our hands warm during the building of snowmen and the serious pursuit of snowballing. She and John Chisholm, a gentle sweet boy, became close friends but he tragically died in an iron lung at the age of seventeen in the polio epidemic of the late 1940s.
By 1945 Alistair’s older brothers had by then gone their various ways, leaving childhood behind and Alistair himself, a little older than I, had almost abandened such childish delights, but there were always newcomers shyly joining in.
It was then that I probably became more aware of Mary, Alistairs sister; previously she had always played with her friends, tea parties and girlish pursuits in the chalet of her friend’s garden; a longing to be with her grew within me daily until I knew with astonishing certainty that I was in love and could hardly sleep at night. I wrote her a letter telling her how much I loved her and hid it in the chalet where they played. I was eleven and she ten. How innocent we were!
Sixty four years later at the age of seventy five, while living on the Isle of Dogs in the East End of London, I cycled back to our field. The chalet had gone and with it my first declaration of love! The oak was still a shattered stump from the V2 rocket that hit us in 1944. The oak sapling that we had planted in its place, was at least thriving.
I never had the courage to climb the oak or the other towering elms that bordered our next door garden but watched Peter and Alistair high up in the branches performing impossible feats glad that I was safely on the ground. Sometimes after the evening dose of ‘Dick Barton Special Agent’ on the radio, my brother and I, would slip out again in the warm evening air.
Two very knowing welsh girls appeared like magic one in our field one evening, screaming with fear as the bats flew low over their heads; teasing and tempting they made in-roads into our innocence leaving us excited and disturbed with something we did not still fully understand. But they were soon gone back to Wales and left us not a great deal wiser. I can still see them standing there teasing us full of mystery and knowledge.
First Love
Should I have climbed
the tree?
Held on to the rope
with rigid hands
bent shaking feet
to the rough bark
and hauled myself aloft
to the leaf green garden.
Made myself
a castle in the sky
a dream of sunshine
and of acorns
in their tiny cups.
Wove branches
into walls
and filled
the day
with laughter?
Would you have stood
looking up
waiting for me?
Or was it better
that I held your hand
felt your cool thigh
next to mine
as the wind whispered
magic in our ears.
Where are you now
my love of ten
fair, fragile
as a summer day?
The oak
became
a shattered stump
war hero
torn and twisted
by a bomb
And you
my first love
my everything love
an old photo
in black and white
your flowery skirt
riding high
in the breeze.
Should I have climbed that tree
for you?
Very moving, for me quite haunting since I passed those early years in almost the same places but shifted a decade in time. Some theoreticians speculate about parallel universes these days, different branes in a multiverse of space-time, I feel as if our early years were spent on different skins of the onion, slipping and sliding, sometimes near sometimes not, the skins never quite tessellating.
ReplyDeleteMy first visits to Avery Hill were with my mother when I was eight or nine I guess, a few years later I would play there in the long summer holidays with my grammar school friend Desmond. I spent a year at school in Eltham too and would often walk home to save the bus fare - down Court Yard, past Eltham Palace and along King John Walk over the hill whose crest gave us a panoramic view of the big city. Down the far slope, take the concrete footbridge over the Dartford Loop Line then across the A20 and the little stream of the Quaggy to home.
Ten years later as I passed by Court Yard in Eltham I noticed a new development of shops with "maisonettes" above, I was a newly married young engineer in my first job and keen to move out of the flat we shared in Gloucester Road with our old college friends, the only problem was the shortage of money. The sign told me that the maisonettes would be for rent so I wrote to the developer hardly expecting a reply, but our luck was in and 14A Grove Market Place became ours for £70 per quarter ( almost a third of my gross salary at the time).
So there we were in our '60s maisonette, living just a couple of stones throw from Edward II's 14th century palace - small world! But that's all another story.
Keep blogging Daisy, I'm enjoying your trip down memory lane!
Nice one Dick. As you know I have crossed the A20 twenty many times in the same place. I played cricket in Eltham about 2008 and afterwards, cycled up the A20 to look at your lane and the bungalow and was horrified to see a new housing estate. The bungalow was still there but I hadn't the heart to go further. Happy days!
ReplyDeleteHello Brian, I'm sure you know that you were in good company as WG Grace played at Eltham and lived for a time at 'Fairmount' in Mottingham Lane!
DeleteHello. Yes, I was back there myself about five years ago. I had some meetings in London with a spare day in the middle so I took a trip out on the DLR to see what was left of the East End. Nothing. Then across on the Woolwich Free Ferry where I was the only foot passenger. All the Woolwich cinemas were Black Evangelical Churches, the market was long gone. By bus through Blackheath to Eltham then I walked over the Hill again. You're right, a housing estate has been built in the allotments. The bungalow was still there, as I stood reminiscing a woman (the widowed owner) came out to ask what I wanted. Nothing really, but when I told her I had grown up there so she let me look around. The house was much improved (thankfully). The shed was gone, the garden, orchard and the wilds of my childhood shrunken. Never go back.
ReplyDeleteNo. Never go back. Although I often do. There is a novel by George Orwell where he returns to a pond that he remembers fishing in as a child and discovers it is filled with rubble! It might be "The Road to Wigan Pier.' There is rarely a place that changes but there must be some. I like your reference to parallel universes. I am writing a novel that involves them. I feel we are in one now actually!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of ponds ... There was a pond in the fields adjacent to Orchard Cottage, hidden in a depression and surrounded by mature chestnut trees, we used to fantasise that it was a WWII bomb crater, though that seems highly unlikely given the surrounding trees, more likely an old clay pit. It was a quiet, hidden place and I must admit there were times when we were there instead of at school, both common and great crested newts lived in the pond so it was a major attraction. One winter I was foolish enough to pull a stick from the ice while standing on the frozen pond. It was a cold wet walk home.
ReplyDelete