Toys and games

Today's children have all manner of toys and games to play with, as well as apps for  iPhones and other handheld devices.  But back in the nineteen-fifties and sixties we had plenty of playthings, including things that we had made for ourselves.  And I never remember once saying or feeling that I was bored.

Some types of toys are just the same today as they were then, or modern versions of them perhaps. The first toy that I can remember having was my Teddy bear.  I dragged it about by one of its arms and it went everywhere with me. Andy had a toy monkey - perhaps appropriate for the cheeky naughty boy that he could sometimes be.

Another early toy that I remember was a dog on wheels that you could push around. Now that I think about it, it was probably a way of getting me to move from the toddling to the walking stage.  Later, in what was possibly a quite expensive toy, was a little peddle car that I could drive around the garden in. And then of course my first bike.

On a smaller scale we had various glove puppets, painting and drawing books, board games like snakes and ladders, draughts and jigsaw puzzles. We could amuse ourselves using tracing paper to create our own pictures, or playing hangman or noughts and crosses. We played with marbles a lot too.

Grannie and Auntie Edie used to play cards quite a bit so we got into that too, first with snap and happy families, then onto patience (solitaire) and more gambling type games. When we stayed with my father's sister Bet and her husband Fred in Matlock, Fred had us playing with his Pokerdice kit.

I really loved my dinky toys. I managed to build quite a good collection including buses, lorries, ambulances and police cars, and my favourite - a Rolls Royce. I really wish I had held onto them, but like many of my toys they eventually got passed on to Andy and after that who knows where.  Across the road there was an Italian family called the De Lucas and one of the De Luca boys showed me how to use bicycle oil on the car wheels to make them run smoothly.  At one point I bought a big piece of hardboard and painted roads on it that I could drive the vehicles around on.  Later I  built up a collection of Hornby OO trains with a station, track, level crossing and bridges to run my beautiful Mallard engine on.  Then there was a Scalectrix set with cars that we could race each other with. Like many boys at that time we had a Meccano set that we could use to build things with.  Ron Sharp had a more advanced engineering set up with moveable steam powered parts.

We had outdoor games to play too, of course. Football, cricket and tennis in the garden or at the rec.  We were very lucky to have such a big garden to play in. We used to annoy my father by turning the garden seat on its side to make a small goal. He let us use his old and really heavy cricket bat before we got our own. 

We also built a tree house in a damson tree at the bottom of the garden. We put together a gokart made from bits of wood and various old pram parts that we could get our hands on.  Steering was by a piece of rope with a pull of it to the left or right as required.

Like many children I went through a stamp collecting phase so I got to know about strange countries which helped me with my geography of the world.  I  had a John Bull printing set and imagined myself to be a magazine editor as I created poems and short stories to show my parents.  I had an autograph book into which went autographs and comments from friends, family and some Watford footballers.  Something else I wish I still had!

We played a lot with my parents' record player, an old Bush turntable which I eventually inherited when my parents upgraded.  Even before we bought our own records we would play classical records of my mother's and some old 78s that Auntie Edie gave to us.

We also played games at the Church Youth club and then later in the Sixth Form Common Room at school. It was in these places that I got to play table tennis, billiards and table football.

Looking back I was very lucky in the range of toys and games that I had, not to mention the space and freedom afforded by our large back garden, the recreation ground, the woods and the green. And I haven't even mentioned the books I had at home and via school and the libraries. That, I think, deserves its own separate blog post.

Rickmansworth

If you come out of  number 29 and head southwest down Watford Road (the A412), that is in the opposite direction to Watford, you go down Scott's Hill into Rickmansworth.  In many respects Croxley Green is actually part of Rickmansworth - its council, postal address and telephone numbers all place it there. Rickmansworth School (formerly Rickmansworth Grammar School) is in Croxley,at the top of Scott's Hill opposite All Saints' Church. To Croxley boys growing up in the fifties and sixties though it was definitely a separate place, albeit an interesting place with good memories.

One of my first memories of Rickmansworth was Saturday morning pictures at the Picture Palace cinema just as you go into the town from the Croxley side. Black and white cowboy films and space adventures. The cinema now is long gone but it was great for us in the days when daytime television did not exist. Our parents were probably pleased to have some time without us around too!

Rickmansworth had some reasonable sized shops if you didn't want to go into Watford - W H Smith and Woolworths for example. These days there is a Waitrose and a Marks and Spencer
food shop as well as such delights as Caffe Nero.  In the sixties my mother's favourite shop was the Swiss Delicatessen in Church Street which also had a cafe. We would pretty much always go there if we were in "Ricky". Also in Church Street there was a music shop selling records, sheet music and musical instruments. I purchased my first single there - Apache by the Shadows for six shillings and eight pence. Later I bought my first guitar there, a lovely German instrument called a Hawk - a real bargain. I was a regular in that shop also buying lots of sheet music and song books by Joan Baez and Tom Paxton.

As young boys we would often go down into Rickmansworth via Croxley woods which then also took us by the River Chess, a lovely chalk stream with plenty of fish and other wildlife and watercress beds. I remember fishing there with Ron Sharp and catching a fairly disgusting looking fish that we took home and insisted on having cooked for tea! Another route into Rickmansworth was along the Grand Union canal from Croxley moor near the Dickinson's paper mill. It was fascinating to see the locks in action with barges from London and Birmingham passing by. Another place we would visit was the Aquadrome, a wildlife sanctuary and outdoor leisure venue that had been created from old gravel pits.  I can recall taking a young lady from Croxley there for a walk one summer afternoon and then being told when I  tried to kiss her that she didn't fancy me!

When I was still at Primary School there was a class visit to Mr Findlay's farm just outside Mill End, the other side of Rickmansworth.  I can remember that we drank fresh milk (still warm) that we had seen being extracted from the cows.

If we didn't fancy walking or cycling to Rickmansworth we could always catch the 321 bus.  I  was never a trainspotter but I did go through a phase of collecting bus numbers. In those days most of the green London Transport buses were of the RT class but there were also RTLs,  RFs and single decker GSs on some routes. I think the books we used were published by Ian Allan and I  can see from eBay that they are still valued. 

When I first met Pauline one of her sisters, Mavis, lived in Hazlemere, a suburb of High Wycombe. In the Easter of 1970 Pauline stayed with her sister and got a job doing data entry for the  G D Searle company.  We arranged to meet in Rickmansworth and she travelled over by train.  As she got off the train and I saw her coming towards me I suddenly had the feeling that this was not just the latest of my girlfriends but the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I was right. 

Sadly neither Mavis, nor her husband John are still with us. But in a remarkable set of interconnections dating back to the fifties there are some interesting links.  Like Pauline and Mavis, John was originally from Nottingham. But working for a bank he was based for a while in Rickmansworth.  I remember watching a few football matches involving Rickmansworth Town in the early sixties. From what John told me later it was probably him that I saw playing on the left wing. Mavis and John had two daughters,Heather and Claire. Heather was our bridesmaid and Claire has always been close to us too. When  Claire was  still quite young Mavis broke her hip and Claire came to stay with us for a while.  Much later Claire went to Bristol University where she met Chris Field, a young vetinary student from St Albans. They are now married with two lovely sons, who are being properly brought up as Watford supporters.  One big Hornet family!

Bikes

The first bike I had was really just a baby bike with two extra stabilising wheels at the back that were removed once I got the hang of the thing.  Later I inherited a fairly rusty looking old bike from my father until, in my early teens, I was finally able to save up for a lovely new BSA bike with straight handlebars and three speed gears. It was this bike that I rode out in the country lanes of south-west Hertfordshire and nearby Buckinghamshire.  A lot of the time I was happy enough just to venture out on my own, discovering beautiful villages and views. Sometimes in the summer  I would take a picnic and stay out all day. I don't think I ever quite told my parents how far I had travelled, particularly in the light of the Rover Ticket incident when my parents had been worried sick when my friends and I  had got back so late from our day out with the bus pass.

Later, having the bike enabled me to get over to Oxhey to see Dave and Chris and the Hunton Bridge and Langleybury to visit Harry Barlow. I remember also fitting a speedometer so that I could see how fast I was travelling - up to thirty miles per hour on some downhill sections. Of course there was much less traffic in those days and no suggestion that one should wear a helmet. I didn't even like bicycle clips, preferring to tuck my jeans into my socks.

Sometime before that I also acquired a second-hand bike which I turned into what I called my track bike.  I suppose today it would be called a mountain bike. I removed the mudguards and replaced the tyres with much thicker tougher ones.  This was the bike that I used down in Croxley woods, particularly that section that we called the Dell. The Dell was an old Second World War bomb crater, about twenty yards in diameter around the top of which a few trees had grown.  In effect we had a wall of death ride.  We could race around the top of the crater at high speeds, avoiding the trees - a real adrenalin rush.   Again, if my parents had realised what we were up to they would have had kittens. Fortunately there were no serious accidents.  I do remember taking and passing something called the Cycling Proficiency Test so I  wasn't totally gungho!

I did come off my bike once though and had a nasty scrape on my left elbow as a result.  By then Andy had a bike too and we had returned from a ride out somewhere and just left our bikes on the  drive in front of 29 Watford Road to go inside and get a drink. I remember looking out of the window and seeing a young lad get on to Andy's bike and start to ride it away. I rushed outside and gave chase up Watford Road on my bike.  Turning left onto Dickinson Square I  had almost caught up but, unfortunately for me, the road had recently been re-covered with loose chippings.  As I took the corner a bit too quickly I skidded and slipped off the bike onto the road surface. I must have let out a hideous shriek as this was enough to cause the thief to abandon Andy's bike, making his escape on foot. So although I was injured I did manage to get the bike back. We never left our bikes unattended on the front drive again.

When I started work in Portsmouth in 1972 I initially lived in Portchester, sharing a house with George Bulkley and Tony Flegg. Soon though I moved in with Pauline into a lovely first floor flat on Marine Parade East in Lee-on-the-Solent. While I lived here, and later when we moved to Alverstoke in Gosport I travelled to work on my bike, taking it over Portsmouth Harbour on the Gosport Ferry.  While we were still living in Lee, Pauline arranged to be a leader in a summer work camp in the Netherlands where the students would be clearing the forest floor of unwanted undergrowth. It was only after she had committed herself that she discovered that the itinerary involved travelling to a railway station about twenty kilometres away from the camp where the group would pick up bicycles to enable them to complete their journey and to have their own transport for the rest of their time at the camp. It was only at this point that Pauline confided in me the fact that she had never ever ridden a bike.  Growing up in a house on a hill in inner city Nottingham, the youngest of six children there had never been a strong case for her to have a bike. So out we went onto the back streets of Lee to undertake a crash course in bike riding.  I remember that it did amuse one elderly resident who stood chuckling at his gate as a wobbly rider passed back and forth. Anyway Pauline did it (she does most things that she sets her mind to) although she didn't have to undergo the initial long ride from the station as she went in a taxi with all the luggage.

Before we ever visit Greece we had a holiday in Cyprus. Staying in what was then just the small village of Paphos with only a couple of family hotels we hired bikes to get out and see a bit more of the local area.  The concept of mad dogs and Englishmen looms large in my memory as I  recall us being chased through the streets on our bikes by dogs one lunchtime.

In the nineteen-eighties when we moved to Emsworth I again managed to get out into the country on my bike - this time in East Hamphsire and West Sussex. I would go out through Westbourne to East and West Ashing, to Compton and West Marden. I didn't learn to drive a car until I was thirty-nine so for many years a bike was a key form of transport for me. I'm not sure I would want to be out on the roads of today however, even though bikes are probably now more popular than ever.

Croxley shops

John Pilgrim's book includes a few old adverts for some of the shops in Croxley Green, including Wright's shoe shop in New Road. I well remember being taken there by my mother to be fitted with proper Clark shoes and sandals. The nice lady serving there was from Lancashire (Blackpool perhaps) and it was the first time I had met anyone with that accent.

We used to shop at the Coop in New Road which had a separate butcher's section as I recall. There was always the "divi" number to remember if I had been sent there to pick up some shopping.

Then there was Wade's newspaper and confectioners shop over the road from the Coop. Later when we had moved to 29 Watford Road we would instead get our papers from Luxton's at the top of Scott's Hill (Andy nicknamed the proprietor "Slug"!). And we would get grocery deliveries from Hunts which was a few doors down from Luxtons. The owner's son, Johnny Hunt, was in the choir with me - he now lives in Ireland but I caught up with him a few years ago in Cardiff at the Championship Playoff Final when we beat Leeds.

I used to get my hair cut at Mr.Evans barbers in New Road. My mother always insisted on "short back and sides".  I remember rebelling in my later teenage years and going down to Sadiq's in Rickmansworth for a "Boston"!  But I always took a long time at Mr. Evans so that I could read all the comics. My mother only let us have the Eagle and Look and Learn at home (both estimable publications) but I was able to get my fill of the Beano and the Dandy at the barbers. 

That reminds me too of how I used to like Friday afternoons when we had tea over the road at Doris Hunt's house.  Beans on toast and Yogi Bear on the TV. We only really had the BBC on at home!

More on Croxley

In his book John Pilgrim has a list of famous people with Croxley Green connections. One person missing from the list is John Timpson, a journalist who was a presenter on Radio Four's Today programme.   He lived in Watford Road in a house almost opposite us.  There seemed to be a few other BBC journalists who lived in the area and I remember a charity cricket match played at Baldwin's Lane in the summer of 1970 between a BBC eleven and the England Ladies team led by Rachel Heyhoe-Flint. I helped to prepare the pitch (as part of a summer job with Rickmansworth UDC)  but I can't remember who won!

Pilgrim does mention the actor John Grillo, who was the son of the Ice Cream man.  When Andy and I had both left home my parents sold 29 Watford Road and moved to a smaller house on the corner of Gonville Avenue. The Grillos lived on Watford Road just down from Gonville Avenue.  In my first year at Watford Grammar School I was in the choir as part of the school production of  a play called "Galileo Galilei". Grillo gave a towering performance in the title role.

Another set of memories that I forgot to put in concerns our pub visits in the sixth form and later when we were home from university. Our main local was the Coach and Horses on the Green, but I think we sampled all of the Croxley and Rickmansworth pubs over the years.  Alan Rawlinson had use of a Land Rover for one of his part-time jobs and we travelled in this to get out further afield to ChandlersCross, Sarratt and Chorleywood. I remember we always celebrated New Year's Eve in the Coach and one time the Irish barmaid Mary was so tipsy that she got up on a table and danced!

Thinking of Alan reminds me of an event that occurred when we were about fourteen. Alan, Graham and I made use of the bus Range Rover ticket which allowed you to journey on any of the London Transport buses for a day. Our last journey of the day was to be on the 336 bus out to Chesham and back. Unfortunately the bus broke down and we were stranded for a while, getting home very late (after ten anyway when we should have been back by seven).  When we got back to Alan's we found all our parents there, together with a policeman. Of course mobile phones hadn't even been dreamed of then and we hadn't been able to find a public phone box. We were well in trouble and that was the last Range Rover trip we had.

Growing up in Croxley Green

John Simpson, a friend of mine from Croxley Green and school days at Watford Grammar School in the sixties, recently kindly gave me a copy of "Out & About in Croxley Green" by John Pilgrim (published by Alpine Press in 2007; ISBN 978-0-9528631-8-2).  John Pilgrim is a writer and broadcaster (especially on Three Counties radio) who grew up in Croxley. His book is a wonderful blend of the general history of Croxley Green and his own personal experiences growing up there. Pilgrim is seven years older than me but much of what he has written resonates very strongly with my own upbringing in the village. But it turns out that his days and mine ran on slightly parallel lines. He went to school at Malvern Way and Rickmansworth Grammar - I went to Harvey Road and Watford Grammar.  He went to St Oswald's church - I went to All Saints.  He played at Baldwin's Lane recreation ground - I was at Barton Way. He used to like going down by the river Gade - I gravitated towards the river Chess.  So I thought I would put together a short blog to complement his book with a few of my own stories. Here goes!

I was born in Watford in 1949 and for the first couple of years my parents and I lived in a house called The Bungalow just off Vicarage Road.  My father's family were builders and the Bungalow was attached to the builders' yard which was at the back of the building. Later on I must spend some time researching them but not now as this blog is about Croxley Green.

When I was two my parents moved us to a house in Watford Road, Croxley Green - number 88, a semi-detached house on the corner of Harvey Road. They were able to afford it as my father's mother ("Grannie") also lived with us and she had obviously put some money into it too.

Like most people I have only vague memories of my very early years.  I do remember being taken for walks in a pram on the green (up past the Artichoke and Coach and Horses pubs).  I was told later by my mother that I had startled her friend Doris Hunt who was with us by making an observation one day that the street lights had been changed! Before I started school proper I went a couple of times a week to a nursery school on the Cassiobury Park estate where I can remember playing in a sandpit.

In 1953 I was joined by my little brother Andy. I well remember the day when my father and I went in a taxi to collect my mother and the new baby from the nursing home in North Watford.  Growing up with Andy was great. Although we are different in many ways (he has always been better than me at any sport you care to name!) it was lovely to have someone to play with. Of course we had a few differences from time to time - he was the naughty cheeky boy and I was the more serious "goody-goody" there were never any major problem between us and I think he shares many of the good times that we had together in Croxley.

My first real school was Yorke Road Infants school.  The school is no longer there, although I understand that recently it has been converted tastefully into new housing following protracted arguments about the future of the site.  Unlike John Pilgrim I always enjoyed my time at school. I met new friends, several of whom came with me first to Harvey Road Primary school and then on to Watford Grammar School - Alan Rawlinson and Graham Horwood particularly come to mind.  I have a class photo from Yorke Road - that is me third from the left in the front row with Graham second from the right in the front row. I can't be sure of the teacher's name - it might have been Mrs. Graver. And all those girls. 

Here are a few more pictures from my early years. First, an individual picture of me at Yorke Road, then one of Andy and me on a visit to see Father Christmas, I think in either Clements or Cawdells store in Watford.  Then a picure of me on the beach with a bucket and spade somewhere. We used to go on holiday every year, mainly to Sandbanks in Dorset or Bexhill in Sussex. 

 My parents said they always wanted us to have a holiday but if the truth be told I would rather have stayed in Croxley Green where I could play with my friends at the rec or in the woods or later, get out and about on my bike. This was probably partly because, in the fifties we would always have Grannie with us, and also family friend "Auntie" Edie (she was not related but a family friend from Denmark Street in Watford who came over on the 321 bus to visit us every Thursday). On several holidays we also had family friends the Boundys. Les Boundy was an international rugby referee but I always found him to be a bit of a gruff and intimidating character. His wife Mollie was warmer but their daughter Mary and I were expected to play together, something that neither of us fully appreciated!

Back in Croxley too I was expected to play with Mary Makinson who lived with her parents in the first house in Harvey Road which backed on to ours. I had nothing against girls, indeed when I got to Harvey Road school some of my closest friends were girls. It is just that you want to choose your friends, not have them forced upon you because your parents happen to be friends. Although it can sometimes be fine as you will see later in my story when the Sharps of Yorke Road come into the picture.

So after Yorke Road school I moved to Harvey Road County Primary School, as I believe it was called. Here I made many more new friends including Lee Harvey - and a few girls (Christine Wells, Paula Spring, Shirley Lester and Linda Warwick come to mind). The Head Teacher, Mr. Ford, was a very nice man and set the tone very well for the school. In my final year there he took a few of the boys on a Youth Hostelling trip to the Peak District in Derbyshire. I can still remember us gathering at Croxley met station at the beginning of the railway journey that took us up to Miller's Dale.  It was a steam train of course and it was brilliant as it took us over viaducts with such gorgeous views.  The walks were of course very carefully planned to get us from one Youth Hostel to the next but Mr. Ford also had us apparently spontaneously meeting very nice ladies along the way who would invite us into their gardens for tea and cake.

Harvey Road School was housed in what were supposed to be temporary buildings put up in the war.  I expect they have new buildings there by now but we got on OK with what we had. We had some good teachers. One who particularly inspired me was Mrs. Rosen. She was much less maternalistic than some of the other female teachers and really encouraged us to think for ourselves. I later discovered that she was the mother of Michael Rosen, the children's novelist, poet, and trenchant critic of Mr. Gove and all that he stands for. One of my heroes (Rosen, not Gove!).  I also remember Mr. Tidder who took us for football and his catch phrase "You Can't Kick a Ball Through a Boy!"  

As I have noted in another of my blogs about folk music it was at Harvey Road School that I first got interested in folk.  We used to listen as a class to William Appleby's programme on the radio - "Singing Together".   We also did a bit of Country Dancing - poor old Leila Hobbs always seemed to get stuck with me as her partner. And some of the boys, including me, did Morris Dancing which we demonstrated at the Croxley Revels in May.

When I was eight I joined the choir at All Saints church. There was choir practice on Wednesday and Friday evenings under the guidance of our choir master Lou Horton. And three services on Sunday – Holy Communion at 9.45, Matins at 11, and Evensong at 6.30.  And other services on special days such as Christmas, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  And for a number of Saturdays there were weddings. And a bit later I was invited to join the so-called Angel Choir who had an extra practice at Lou Horton’s house on Saturday evenings with Tizer and Jusoda to drink.  This all took up a lot of time, especially in the summer when we added in Choir cricket on a Thursday night.

Another highlight for me at this time was going to Watford to see the football. My first match with the first team was in November 1958 when I saw a 1-1 draw with Reading in the FA Cup but I had been to a few reserve games before that. And living in Croxley I got to see the team close up as they used to train at the John Dickinson sports ground just off the Green. Ron Burgess became the manager and big Cliff Holton also had a lot of input into team tactics I recall. My friend Lee Harvey and I (among others) acted as unofficial ball-boys. My heroes were Mick Benning who, because he came from Croxley,was especially nice to us young lads, Bobby Bell the hard-tackling right-back from Scotland and Vince McNeice who played centre-half. I have been a fanatical Watford fan ever since, a season ticket holder in the Rookery despite living down in Hampshire since 1972.

Around this time we moved down the road from number 88 to number 29 Watford Road. This is a big semi-detached property just up the road from the Duke of York pub with a very large garden adjoining the back part of the grounds of Yorke Road school. So having lived close to Harvey Road school when I attended Yorke Road school I was now living near Yorke Road school and going to Harvey Road school. Not that the distance between the two was very far anyway!

The new house was great for us boys. There were plenty of rooms so we now had a bedroom each. Grannie had her own bedroom and toilet downstairs and there was a third floor flat that my parents let out to a series of young couples.  Best of all was the garden where we could play football and cricket, and we rigged up a tennis game where the ball was attached to a frame by elastic and you could give it a good old whack! We also had a swing. Andy and I were both given a bit of the garden to look after for ourselves. I remember being overjoyed when I got some runner beans to grow.

We had a cat called “Chocolate” or “Chocky” for short. It was basically black but in the sun its soft fur underneath showed up dark brown. For a while my father kept chickens and we also had a pet rabbit called “Whiskas”

The joys of growing up in the fifties and sixties in Croxley Green meant that for a lot of the time we were allowed out to play on our own, on the Green, down in Croxley woods and by the river Chess, playing football and cricket at Barton Way rec and later venturing further afield on our bikes to places like Sarratt or Langleybury.

In 1960 I passed the eleven-plus and secured a place at Watford Grammar School for Boys. I really wanted to go to Rickmansworth Grammar – the girls I knew were going there – but my father had been to Watford and he very much wanted me to go there too. Later Andy would join me there. Grannie died in the summer of 1960. She knew I had a place at Watford but didn’t live long enough to see me start. I must admit that I found the first year at Watford quite challenging. Going from being one of the brightest pupils in the Primary school to just one of a cohort of about 120 clever boys was a shock. We were addressed by our surnames not our Christian names. Everything was very formal. We had to play rugby rather than football which I didn’t like – I was still quite small and lightweight in those days. It didn’t help that my father had been a good rugby player and had carried on playing for the Old Fullerians, as the old boys team was called, until his late forties and several of the teachers had been in the team with him. I just didn’t measure up. Here is a picture of some of our class in my first year at Watford Grammar school when I was in form 3B. I am second from the back in the middle row.

But gradually I settled down at the grammar school making new friends to go with those who travelled with me to school on the train from Croxley Met to Watford every day – Graham Horwood, Alan Rawlinson and Lee Harvey to be joined by John Simpson who lived close to the Station on Valley Walk. To begin with the trains were brown slam door rolling stock but were later replaced by the silver trains. That was good because the brown trains had windows and we would sometimes get set upon by local lads who thought it was amusing to steal the caps from the “grammar grubs” and throw them out of the windows.

Two of my new friends from Watford are still good mates and I see them regularly at Vicarage Road – Dave March and Chris Turner.  They both lived the other side of Watford in Oxhey so the bikes were handy for us to visit each other. Dave sat behind me in class and would occasionally taunt me by poking me in the back with his ruler. But we were good mates and we later became dinner monitors together.

My mother had started working in the Watford Registrar Office as assistant to Harry Barlow who lived in Langleybury and I would cycle over to his place from time to time and enjoy a shandy with him in his local pub. Later my mother took over from him as Registrar but before that she had another part-time job as a librarian at Wall Hall Teacher Training College. Chris’s mother worked there for a while so that helped to cement our friendship. I remember going over to the college library when I was revising for my A levels.

In the summer after my A levels Chris and I, together with a couple of others from the school, teacher Dave Spearman, and lots of visiting students from Europe, attended an educational camp at Cuffley. It was a wonderful experience and just great before going off to Warwick University in October. I have a picture from the local paper of some of the group meeting with the then local MP Shirley Williams. That’s me at the front clinking tea mugs with Mrs. Williams. Chris is second from the right at the front, the other side of Mrs. Williams.

Throughout the sixties, as well as being part of the choir at All Saints church, I went to the church youth club. There I became very friendly with Ann Williams and Pat Wright. Ann went to Watford Girls Grammar School and we also started to go into the St Mary’s church youth club on Saturday nights – by now my voice had broken and I was no longer in the Angel Choir! Pat went to Rickmansworth Grammar school and fairly soon she became my first real girl-friend. We went to the cinema together, for long walks in the countryside – she even came to the football with me!  The relationship never survived when I went to university but we continued to remain friends. Both Pat and Ann have become Church of England vicars while I have rather lost my faith.

I can’t complete an account of my childhood in Croxley Green without telling you about my good friend Ron Sharp. Ron’s grandmother, known to us only as Mrs. Sharpe, lived in Yorke Road with her daughter Daphne. Ron was the eldest of three brothers (the others being Stephen and Michael). Sadly at some point their mother had passed away and they went to boarding school in Essex close to where their father lived and worked. But in the school holidays they lived with their grandmother in Yorke Road, which of course was only just round the corner from us. Ron and I became great friends and, as I have recounted in another blog, we learned to play the guitar together and had lots of fun jamming sessions together in the downstairs front room at number 29 – what had been Grannie’s bedroom was now mine.  Before that the three brothers also joined the church choir and I vividly remember Ron coming to my rescue when one winter’s day I came under snowball attack from another member of the choir. I know who he was but it is a long time ago and I shall leave it at that!

Round Britain Quiz

Question: The owner of a goat well known to Val Doonican and the custodians of Top of the Form and Broadcasting House should put you in mind of a famous traveller who walked the Broken Road. Who is he, and what did he do in the war?

Answer: Val Doonican regularly sang the song "Paddy McGinty's Goat". Paddy Feeney hosted the BBC radio and TV schools quiz "Top of the Form". Paddy O'Connell hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme "Broadcasting House". This should put you in mind of Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, also known as "Paddy". In 1933, at the age of 18, Leigh Fermor set off to walk across Europe. He later wrote about the first two parts of his journey in the highly regarded travel books, "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water". In the recently published "The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos" Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron completed the trilogy, putting together early drafts and diary entries kept by Leigh Fermor.

In the war, together with fellow officers in the Special Operations Executive and members of the local Cretan Resistance, Leigh Fermor kidnapped the German Commander on the island, General Heinrich Kriepe. He then took him across the mountains to the south of the island from where he was transported by submarine to Egypt.

The story was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde, "Ill Met by Midnight".