A West Hill Childhood

When my father died, suddenly, in 1963 we were obliged to swiftly vacate our RAF quarters in Lyneham. My mother, Ruby, wisely drew succour from the childhood friendships she had known in Wantage, Berkshire, some of whom were now bigwigs on the town council. We suddenly found that we had a new family home in West Hill. It was bigger than anything we had known before, and better built. The previous occupants seemed to have confused creosote with paint, but you can’t have everything. The expansive garden contained a Bramley apple tree and if you craned your neck in one of the upstairs rooms, you could just about make out the outline of the Berkshire Downs. So Ruby named our home Bramley Down.

I lived there from when I was 8 until when I was 18; but it seemed like forever. West Hill was a council estate which meant that there was a certain earthiness, and sometimes a pungency, about its residents. But always a sense of community. I learned a lot.

West Hill was a hill. And it pointed straight to the west. The sun set over the top of the road, which was ring-shaped. The houses there surrounded an oval of green with a tree at one end.

“You goin’ up the ring?” was what you had to say to the other kids. One of the older boys who, even then, seemed a bit dangerous to me, told us that he liked to run around the ring so many times that he began coughing up blood. We never saw evidence of this but the story was chilling enough.

The house beyond the top of our garden was occupied by a man with one arm, who always seemed to have a lot of boys around there. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Stephen King comes to mind.

But we had a lot of fun, my mother, two sisters and I.

One of the games which frequently had us in tears with laughter was Blind Man’s Bluff. My grandmother lived with us for the last few years of her life. She was house-bound but had a wheelchair which we could borrow, if we could whip it out of the house without being detected. A child would be placed in the wheelchair with a scarf tied around their eyes. And then they would be wheeled, blindly, by a crowd of children declaring how lovely the walk was, and how safe. Then the wheeling would stop, followed by a period of silence. Finally, a distant voice could be heard shouting, “You can take the blindfold off now!” The child would then unveil their eyes to reveal that they were sitting in a wheelchair at the top of somebody’s garden, or in their vegetable patch, and they would have to quickly push the chair to safety before they were detected.

We lived at the bottom of West Hill, where it joins Ham Road. There was always somebody or other walking along the footpath beyond the wall of the front garden. One day we parked the elder of my sisters, blindfolded, in the wheelchair, on the path outside the front gate. We left her there for maybe ten minutes. Two nuns came walking down the path from the Convent at the end of Ham Road. You often ran into nuns in 1960s Wantage, they seemed plentiful. One of them could be heard saying to the other, “Look at that poor child.” Mind you, they failed to stop to make enquiries or offer help. Maybe they thought they were in Poona or some such place in India where the power of prayer was all that was required.

Actually, while I think of it, many years later I was the editor of the Wantage Churchman, the monthly parish magazine. In the early days I was quite enthusiastic and went to the convent to do some investigative journalism. I wrote a lengthy two-parter on how the nuns live and what they get up to behind those high walls. But when I showed them the piece, they declared that I’d made them sound too pious. Too pious!?! Is the Pope Catholic??? Actually, these nuns were Anglican, so maybe they were right.

The blindfold was integral to a lot of the fun in West Hill. The other game we played was also called Blind Man’s Bluff. But this time the victim was on foot. Yes, I agree, why did we ever allow ourselves to be blindfolded? In this game, the blindfolded player was given very precise verbal instructions on the direction they should walk in, what turns to make, and how to avoid objects in their way. I was the blind man on one occasion and was advised to get on my hands and knees to get under an object. It turned out to be a street sign on two posts. As I was doing this, one of my hands went into something very wet, squishy and smelly. It was a dog poo. And the dog had clearly had a very heavy night involving a dodgy curry!

Our next door neighbours were the Simmonds’s, Tom and Mabel. Very old, but also very friendly. Unless your tennis ball went into their cabbage patch and you had to retrieve it. Since I was constantly throwing a tennis ball against the large chimney stack and catching it on its return, I was on Tom’s cabbage patch a lot. They seemed to spend their entire lives looking out of the window for this very eventuality. Tom used to walk straight past me to report the crime to my mother. He knew this would be more effective than simply beating me up on the lawn.

The Simmonds’s had a grandson, Colin, who used to come to stay for what seemed like weeks at a time during the Summer. I was friendly with Colin. We used to work in Tom’s large shed which contained a proper carpenter’s bench, with a vice and tools of every description. There was a lot of wood in there. So, I had an idea. Why didn’t we make a caravan? It would have a window at the front, a hole for a periscope, and, for some reason, a drawbridge-type door. It was big, but not that big. Only about four children could squeeze themselves in there. It had two sets of roller skates screwed to the bottom.

With no steering, and no brakes, the caravan could be taken to the top of West Hill and then pushed down by a crowd of shouting kids, with four test pilots inside. There wasn’t too much traffic in West Hill thankfully, though the contraption could, in theory, enter uncontrolled into the busy Ham Road at the bottom, if it made it that far.

On one occasion, the caravan finally came to rest against a brick wall. Which meant that the drawbridge door couldn’t be lowered. We were trapped in it for what seemed like hours.

The large family up the road was full of interesting characters. They had various difficulties with linguistics. They thought, for example, that anybody with the same forename is, in fact, your cousin. They struggled with opposites… “He borrowed me a book”. But the youngest boy was the most interesting of all (apart from the murderer). He had once found a tin of Andrews Liver Salts. A spoonful in a glass of water fizzed up like lemonade, so he drank a whole tin’s-worth. The next day was spent on the toilet.

One day, a group of we children offered him a sugar sandwich. Something which would not have looked out of place on his normal menu. “Oh, yes please.” So we made the sandwich but laced the sugar with vanilla essence. You should have seen his face when he bit into it. Actually, there was probably enough vanilla essence to have burnt it off. What a lark!

But not everything in West Hill was sweetness and light if, indeed, that is what I have so far described.

There was a story of a nasty piece of work who pushed a little girl’s face into a bunch of stinging nettles. I didn’t witness this act but the thought still troubles this 71-year-old.

And the boy who liked to cough up blood finally blossomed into a murderer. He had met a girl at a local disco and did her in on the walk home. His distraught mother came to our house to talk with Ruby about it all. She couldn’t understand how this could have happened, etc, etc. But she reached a point where she reasoned that he must have liked the girl because the police had noted there was a semen stain on his trousers. No, wait a minute. Does Andrew know what semen is? I was 14; I expect I did. Well, do you? Do you? All of a sudden I was the focus of attention, the person of interest. It was a good job the police weren’t in there. All I can say is that it wasn’t my semen.

Actually, that wasn’t the only time I was questioned on matters of a sexual nature. Later that year, we went over the road to a neighbour’s New Year’s party. Pretty boring from my point of view, but I was awakened from my slumber when, in the middle of a joke she was telling, our neighbour suddenly said, “Andrew, do you know what a naked woman looks like from behind?” I hadn’t been listening to the joke so, panic-stricken, I thought several things… I’m 15 so I can’t really be expected to know the answer to this. If I say “Yes” then I am almost certain to be caught out in the lie by being asked some subsidiary, unanswerable question. “Well, do you? Do you?” And if I answer “No” then it’s going to sound weak. As weak, in fact, as the punchline turned out to be. “So, that’s where he parked his bike.” I tried to laugh, but I didn’t know what I was laughing about.

Actually, as adolescents, we boys took over my mother’s shed. We used to spend hours in there. We even poked a hole in the roof to put a periscope in so we could watch the previously-mentioned neighbour hanging out her washing. But we never discovered what her joke was about.

And I suppose the funniest thing of a sexual nature was when my mother decided to take all of we children aside to tell us about the birds and the bees. I’ll quote what she said in full.... “You see, when men and women get together, they’re like animals…” She never got any further, we were all so busy falling about laughing.

When I think back to my childhood days, I can see the seeds of interests which have blossomed in later life. My best ever Christmas present was a Phillips Electronic Engineer Kit EE8. A circuit board where a host of transistors, capacitors and resistors could be wired together to make working kits. The only problem was that my mother never got a battery to go with it and, back in the day, the shops were shut for a week over Christmas. But I loved that outfit. The instruction manual alone would have got you a good Physics O-level. Peggy, the tom-boy from the troubled family up the road, was my particular friend – and my assistant in making up these kits. We made a flashing light and placed it on the building site over the road one night. A man walking by seemed particularly puzzled by it, which pleased us no end.

A cousin gave me his home-made photographic enlarger. He was keen to point out how he had hand-folded the leather bellows. Though, as I hadn’t been involved, I failed to be as impressed by this as I would be now. My bedroom was fixed up as a darkroom where in the orange glow of a safelight, my black-and-white prints came to life. When I went to college, my big box of negatives was thrown away – which feels now like a stolen evidence of childhood.

On one of his visits to our house, I showed my grandfather’s brother a tiny, made-in-Japan, transistor radio. He couldn’t believe it, and thought it the great wonder of the age. Whilst, upstairs, I had an old valve radio with the back off – something he would have felt more at home with. I was constantly giving myself mains shocks on that thing. Note to self: even if you turn the radio off, the transformer is still live!

But, by the same token, there are things we did then which I am not interested by now. We smoked the healthy option: mentholated cigarettes, down King Alfred’s Baths – a local wooded glade. We cycled to distant towns; sometimes as far as Witney. I frequently made the journey from Wantage to Abingdon to buy Superman comics. After cycling back I would immediately go to bed, even in the afternoon, as this was the best place to read them. And I brewed the world’s cloudiest lagers in a plastic bag inside a Baby Burco boiler.

Still, it can’t have been all that bad. Can it?