Praise Paglesham, stan Stambridge, carry a flame for Canewdon & root for Rochford

There’s no serpents to be found here in this Essex village of Canewdon although countering that lack of a newsworthy beast, it is, at least, situated on a hill; a high point towering over the surrounding flatlands, common to this interstitial place of marsh and inlet.

Nothing to bring on a nose-bleed or altitude sickness mind — no Everest this — but, that height was significant in 1962-3…

Anyone who knew our Mum, also knew that she was a prodigiously fast distance walker. And we were expected (unless still pram bound) to accompany her and keep up.

And keep up we all did. The (in-)famous snows of that year meant that — at least in memory — I was having to stay alongside Mum and at least one or two — and easy passage for them pram encased siblings — whilst frantically trying to get through a fall of snow that, again in memory and the subsequent re-telling, towered high above my 6 year old body, forcing me, like an Oates, to bravely strike out, fearing though that I was – at any moment — about to be engulfed by the collapse of this white overhang; not to be seen again, despite the increasingly frantic searches by my family and friends until the spring thaw — my body iced up — to be hacked out of the perma-frost by the local village bobby.

Mum had decided that — despite the record breaking snow — she’d take us on the usual walk up the hill from Stambridge to the shops in Canewdon

There’s a lovely little documentary simply entitled “Snow” from Geoffrey Jones in the BFI National Archive that illustrates perfectly the way this looked.

I can see us in my memory as though I’m watching us all from the air; a proto-drone.

In the next few years that is. Else it’s all going to be quite a lot underwater.

In August 1964 I’d have been coming up to my 7th birthday. It may be a false memory — as I can’t exactly work out when we moved to this area — but I honestly believe I saw this rally. If we were living there, it’s a racing certainty we’d have attended, as this is Scotts Hall Farm, Canewdon where Dad worked.

I can remember I went to Stambridge Primary School. I don’t think the others were old enough yet to join me. It still had an old Anderson Shelter style bunker in the grounds which was, naturally, out of bounds to the kids, as it was almost totally derelict, full of jagged concrete, broken bricks and random, rusty metalwork, thus, of course, irresistible to us all. I don’t recall anyone dying whilst we clambered over this, but more than one of us regularly wound up with cuts, bruises and scraped knees.

Also here was where we practiced “the whip” — we’d line up, join hands and the two kids either at the end of the line would put on roller-skates. Then we’d start to circle, Patti Smith “dervish twirl” like, getting faster and faster and faster as we rotated, so that these two were, pretty soon, traveling close to the speed of sound. You can see how this ends, can’t you?

See that flint wall?

Into this flew the one kid who’d not been able to retain his grip on the person next in line. To this day, I’m convinced that when we all — with a horrid fascination, familiar to anyone who’s ever slowed down at an accident — rushed over to look at the gaping wound in his head, we saw his brains dribbling, dribbling out. Earlier that week, I’d been appointed a classroom ‘monitor’, or some such, almost certainly on the basis of “set a thief to catch a thief”. It meant I had to help dole out the daily bottles of milk we were all forced to drink [there’s a whole rant about Thatcher bubbling away in my head, but that’s for another time] and dust the blackboard at the end of the lesson and I was also supposed to help with keeping order. Proto fascist institution “divide and conquer”, I realise now, but after the ‘spilt brains’ incident, they demoted me anyway…