"Martin and the Forebears": My Childhood

My Memories to December 1964

Here are a few memories I have from before the age of 7 1/2, when my parents moved from Dartford, Kent, across the capital to Eastcote in north west London.

Family photographs can be a help to stirring old memories, but they do sometimes make it difficult. It is never easy to know whether you remember something from seeing the photograph as an adult, or whether you remember something from childhood. Is it a real memory, or just a memory of hearing older family members talk about it?

I was born at Livingstone Hospital, East Hill, Dartford, on 26^th July, 1957, where 14 years to the day earlier Rolling Stone Mick Jagger had been born. Until December 1964 I lived with my parents (and, from 1960, with my younger brother when he arrived) at 10 Princes Avenue, DA2 6NE, on the Fleet Estate, now just a mile west of the Bluewater Shopping Centre. 300 yards to the west is the A282, "a trunk road link (A282) in the M25 London orbital motorway" (Highways England). I remember hitch-hiking through the newly-opened western bore, with my father, for some odd reason, soon after it opened on 18^th November 1963.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartford_Crossing

The side road, Hesketh Avenue, lead to The Princes Hotel, and the area at the end of this side road was also used as a turning circle for local buses. ‘What Pub’ says about it, February 2020.

“Anonymous purveyor of unadventurous and undemanding food and drink. Anyone who likes a decent pint to accompany their meal will find only heavily processed, gaseous products available. Built on the site of the former Princes Hotel, a sometime Ind Coope house that was acquired by Harvester and demolished for no good reason around 2003. Refurbished and re-branded Miller & Carter in March 2019 and still not offering real ale“.

One day, a bus pulling into the bus waiting area at the side of the house, managed to mount the pavement and go into our garden wall. Do I remember that, or do I remember my parents reminding me about it? The house has subsequently had a single storey extension, and the front garden has been total concreted over to provide parking for several cars. Many local front gardens are now also used as off-street parking

On 6 Sep 2002 the house sold for £192,000 and six years later on 11 Aug 2006 for £241,000. It now has double glazing and central heating! As of February 2020 it has the following features:

THREE/FOUR BEDROOMS

· THREE RECEPTION ROOMS
· THIRD RECEPTION CURRENTLY BEING USED AS FOURTH BEDROOM
· GROUND FLOOR SHOWER-ROOM & UPSTAIRS BATHROOM
· DOUBLE GLAZING & GAS HEATING SYSTEM
· PLAYROOM/STUDY/STORAGE ROOM
· 40' X 30' (APPROX) REAR GARDEN
· GARAGE & OFF STREET PARKING
· PLANNING PERMISSION GRANTED FOR EXTENSION TO FIVE BEDROOMS

I have memories of exploring the Fleet Estate, and also some adjacent waste land, which was not yet built on. This must have been on foot as I clearly remember learning to ride a bicycle, soon after moving to Eastcote.

I attended St. Albans Primary School which still exists as Dartford Primary Academy, (and again, do I remember it or have I looked at a picture too many times?) just over a mile away to the north west. I vaguely recall lines or patterns or grids drawn on the playground, and I also remember that there were several deaf children who carried enormous battery packs in their shirt pockets. Cream-coloured wires connected to the ear piece. I remember little else.

One day, age unspecified but between 5 and 7 I had some sort of an accident at school, hitting my head and getting concussion, and my maternal grandfather, who would have been about 65, carrying me all the way from the centre of town to our home. I know I would have only been small, but he wasn't a very big man. He lived in Hartlepool so he must have been down for a short holiday with our grandmother, staying with us.

I thought I remembered the road from school to home passed up a steep hill looking down on to fields on the left where the fair occasionally took place. I have vague memories of winning a goldfish. Looking on Google StreetView, I think it was Dartford Central Arena, from Princes Road. It doesn’t seem to be on the route from St Alban’s Road, but it is immediately east of where Beadles is now.

At the age of 7 I moved from St. Albans School to the nearby York Road Junior School, now also part of Dartford Primary Academy. Patrick Mackay (born 1952) the serial killer had probably just left. It looks a lot smaller than I remember it. The only thing I can clearly recall now is that in the school assembly hall we sat facing a long side wall, rather than the usual narrow end. The long wall had very large scrolls with the words of hymns, and older boys would pull on cords to find the required words. I struggled to see the words, and, soon after, I started wearing glasses. The uniform was navy blue, with a matching cap. On the cap was a white Maltese cross. Part of the reason I remember this so clearly is that I had to continue wearing my old school uniform at the new school in Eastcote, where everybody else was wearing a maroon blazer. I don't think I ever got over being teased about being the odd new boy, and in addition, at that age I started wearing spectacles, so I was known as either Windmill Head or Four Eyes.

Again they are just vague memories, but I can recall visits to nearby Danson Park, and Bexleyheath. Looking at local maps, there are so many places that I must have been taken to, but they do not remind me of anything. The only other thing that I can remember is playing at the bottom of the garden, where a very solid raised concrete path lead across the grass which was dotted with little blue forget-me-not flowers to an old tumbledown garage made of some sort of asbestos. I can clearly remember my brother and I snapping these sheets of rough quarter-inch thick material and watching little puffs of asbestos dust raise from the material. I dread to think what it was doing to us. The path is still visible on aerial photographs.

On Saturdays I have very clear memories of walking down Princes Avenue, with my father and sometimes my younger brother, although he would have only been 4 years old, on our way down a series of lanes near Watling Street Cemetery to watch Dartford Football Club play. I remember there was a sandpit. Or rather a pile of builders’ sand in one corner, which was usually more entertaining than the on-field activities. At halftime the man who charged a little bit extra for admission to the grandstand used to go home and I can remember climbing a series of steep wooden unpainted stairs right to the top of the grandstand, inevitably half-empty due to the lack of supporters!

The football club is long gone, replaced by houses, now Cugley Road, and The Terraces, presumably named after part of the ground. Google Maps shows the walk from home to the football ground via Salisbury Road as being just over half a mile, taking 11 minutes, but I recall a shorter walking route, via the series of lanes. Crossing busy Princes Road must have been a challenge, even then. At the age of six or seven even the walk to the ground must have seemed like an adventure. I have no idea how many times this Saturday journey took place.

Although I don't remember it myself I was occasionally reminded in later years that my mother had worked as a receptionist at Beadles, a local car showroom.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/kent-business/county-news/a-milestone-in-motoring-39853/

I have a photograph, but it is unclear whether it is of my mother, in a dentist’s chair being jokily ‘attended to’ by two men in white coats. Possibly she worked as a dental receptionist.

Again, the dates are very unclear but my father worked at the London Trustee Savings Bank in Gravesend. Whether he used public transport or went by car, I am not sure, but I do remember that we had a blue Ford Popular car. It was his transfer to the Hatch End branch which was our reason for moving house in December 1964. Whether it was in that car from Dartford or a later car from Eastcote, I remember many 12-hour drives up to Hartlepool to visit my maternal grandparents. I have vague memories of often being car sick, not helped by my father smoking in the car. I also recall the car, and possibly its successors, breaking down frequently, in the UK and during later holidays in Belgium, Holland and Germany. I think I usually sat in the front seat, while my mother held my brother in the back. In the later 60s, I remember my parents always had a car with a full-width ‘bench’ seat, so that there was room for my brother and I to sit alongside our father in the front while our mother was with our young twin sisters in the back. There were no seat belts in those days!

I have a photograph taken outside the Princes Road house, showing my grandmother, (although later research showed that she was actually my father's grandmother and not his mother as we all believed, but more of that elsewhere). Whether she was actually living with us in Dartford at the time I can’t be sure. I can picture her in our living room, but whether it was in Dartford or in Eastcote I am not sure. She would have been about 80, and I just remember her as a little shrivelled old lady in some sort of pale blue shawl. My memories of her suggest that she was suffering from dementia, although I don't think that this was properly understood and I think it often appeared that she was just being difficult.

Several years later, I remember being told by my mother that she had heard that one of the first men to donate a heart for a transplant operation in the UK was the father of one of my Dartford classmates. He had been critically injured on Vauxhall Bridge. I have one photograph taken with several of my classmates, but sadly I am unable to identify any of them.