Here's Dennis's latest.......
Whiteheath and Blackheath
"I remember, I remember, / The house where I was born". Well, not exactly... I was born in a hospital, like most people, and it was probably just as well. But if there were such a house, it would be in Whiteheath. "Where's Whiteheath?, I hear you ask. Well...near Blackheath. I can still see my Birmingham classmates rocking with helpless mirth when I had to give the schoolmaster my address - "So come on, which one is it, boy, Whiteheath or Blackheath?"... I hated school much of the time, like most normal people, but fortunately I had Whiteheath. Or Whiteheath Gate, to be precise, although only maps ever call it that. On them you'll see that it once straddled two counties, Worcestershire and Staffordshire, and when you crossed the border the number of potholes in the road inexplicably increased.
In a far-off time, before Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council was so much as a twinkle in a bureaucrat's eye, the village of Whiteheath lay untroubled, surrounded by canals and stagnant pools full of newts and frogspawn in the spring, pit mounds of sticky grey earth, quarries, marl-holes and abandoned mineshafts, linnets' nests and grazing barge horses. What more could any lad want? Well, probably not the Blackbatters, a gang with an unexplained but evidently huge grudge who would periodically invade our field from over where the Blackbat mine had been. But that was rare.
"Hindsight is an alarmingly precise science", as somebody once said, and fifty years later you can see that none of this could last. On my return, on this miraculously sunny day during a glacial winter, I find that the vast open field where the Titford Colliery had stood long ago and which once had views to West Bromwich and the Rowley hills has been turned by persons unknown into an urban forest - sorry, Urban Forest - with huge trees now towering over the gardens.
It even has a rural stile to put you in the right ecological frame of mind as you enter and then pick your way along a muddy path down to the canal arm fringed with rushes where I used to dream of catching a pike. Nothing stirs down by the water. "By Jove, Carruthers, it's too quiet here, I don't like it..." But the unseen natives have left us a reminder of their keen aesthetic sense in the form of a Tate Modern installation, Three Shopping Trolleys on a Bed of Reeds. I find I'm strangely moved.
Out onto Birchfield Lane, the old turnpike road from Blackheath to Oldbury. The New Hotel where my Dad used to drink is still there, with a new moniker (as is currently the fashion), The Whiteheath Tavern, but - alas - minus its splendidly appropriate painted sign which once hung outside, the winding gear of a coalmine. I used to sit in its backyard, drinking Vimto and scoffing crisps. There was always a huge pile of coke there for the boiler, the old blue brick yard wall is till there. Running by the side of the pub to Richards Close was a long sloping passageway called The Gulley down which we would frequently thunder on roller skates, not worrying too much whether we'd be able to stop before we hit the street and the wheels of a passing dustcart... Compare and contrast with now.
The Methodist church is still there on Birchfield Lane. I remember it being built to replace the old one opposite and seeing it regularly thronged with people, it's a St John's Ambulance centre now. The Bull's Head pub, however, outside which we used to wait for the Midland Red 217 to Oldbury, is still in the same line of business.
The oldest buildings were a row of ancient cottages going towards the old Gate pub on the corner. You actually stepped down off the road into the tiny sweet shop run by a very old lady, Mrs Brain. It was like returning to an earlier archaeological level. I remember scampering about with a friend in the back gardens when the cottages were being demolished.
The semi-rural village of Whiteheath which I remember has virtually gone. It clustered around a row of Victorian shops by the crossroads, in front of what is now the brightly coloured high rise Lancaster House, currently being renovated in the Chinese style with a pagoda roof. The grocery shop - was it Sammy Hadley's? - stood on the corner opposite the Gate pub and there were several others in a row, including the fish shop run by friends of my Mum's family, Bade and Annie, where I used to collect wet fish on a Friday. Annie was a nice lady with at least one finger missing from her hand, but it never affected her dexterity with the potato slicer. Across the road from the shops there was a piece of waste ground where from time to time a travelling fair would pitch camp for a few nights, all loud generators and candy floss. Beyond that were the steep grey "tocky banks" which hid a large pool where I used to fish for roach. The thirsty village had at least four pubs - the New Hotel, the Bull's Head, the Gate and the Vine. The Whiteheath Gate pub still stands, the Vine is now the Fox Tavern. The landlord of the Vine supplemented his income by keeping chickens and once took me and his son named Randy (I presume Randolph), who I used to play with, to Kidderminster Cattle Market, which was like stepping straight into a sepia Edwardian postcard. At some point early in the 1960s the English Martyrs Catholic church was built next to the former Whiteheath fairground, it's one of the few points of reference from those times that I still recognize.
I was a bookish youth and corresponded with Big Chief I-Spy at his Wigwam-By-The-Water in Bouverie Street, London virtually every week about something or other - a rare Victorian post box I'd come across on holiday or the finer points of the Renault Dauphine. The Big Chief, God bless him, lived to be 106 and he deserved to: he always replied with patience and encouragement to my interminable ramblings, even sending me biros with red ink (his followers were known as Redskins in those un-PC days). I amassed a collection of his slim volumes without which, of course, no journey then was complete - I-SPY on a Train Journey, I-SPY on the Pavement and so on. Unfortunately getting hold of the tribal paper, The News Chronicle, to decode the Chief's arcane puzzles and messages (the answer to one riddle was the word "tintinnabulation", which wasn't even in Pears' Cyclopaedia) and to see if I'd won a prize posed a considerable logistical challenge The paper shop in Whiteheath - which later doubled as a hairdresser's - was fine for Thompson's Weekly News or the Sports Argus, but the Chronicle was a bit special. So I had to jump on my Raleigh bike and pedal up to the New Inn in Blackheath, next to which was an old newsagent's shop which alone stocked it in the area.
Blackheath was a proper town with character, of course, and the Gateway to the South for me and my faithful Raleigh whenever I sped down Gosty Hill and out to Halesowen and Clent. It had at least two cinemas, one of which, the Rex, is now buried somewhere under Sainsbury's. It boasted various fish and chip shops run by the Westwood family, my Dad's cousins: if my calculations are correct, one of their shops lies beneath the aforesaid supermarket too. At the heart of the town was the Market Place, remarkable for its mysterious public conveniences built underground like a modern eco-house, with pillbox turrets showing above the surface, decorated with innumerable bull's-eye windows. All gone now, of course, and replaced by Blackheath's answer to Paris-Plage, a windswept shingle desert island, complete with boulders and wilting cordylines.
Unlike Oldbury, "Blackheath bleibt doch Blackheath" - Blackheath remains very much itself around its central square. The Midland Bank, Burton's and Broadmead may now be, respectively, the HSBC, Home Zone and Home Furnishing, but the buildings are still there. I had my first suit made at that Burton's shop, in a fetching shade of iridescent brown as I recall, (despite the irrefutable wisdom of the old saw: "Never trust a man in a brown suit") and bought my first transistor radio from Broadmead (spelt K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M..."- how one annoying Radio Luxembourg advert can nevertheless summon up a whole lost era!). We even purchased our first television set on hire purchase in Blackheath, an Ekco, from a shop at the top of Oldbury Road, just below where Wilkinson's is now. Although it had a screen not much bigger than a postcard, we watched in January 1952 along with the rest of the world as Captain Carlsen doggedly refused to leave his doomed ship, The Flying Enterprise, which was listing for days in the wild North Atlantic. When, later that month, our brave old King stood at the airport to see his daughter off to Kenya, my mother said:" He'll catch his death, he's not wearing a hat" (everybody wore a hat then). The rest you know.
And then there's Blackheath's celebrated market. What can one say about it? I warn you, whatever you do say will probably be wrong. I was convinced it was just the place to buy myself a pair of long johns against the cold (I'm not vain when it comes to thermals) or a string vest (there are a lot of holes in that story...), but I found neither - although I was probably looking in the wrong places. Yes, I admit, I was greatly distracted by the scent of herbal sweets coming from Teddy Gray's stall and beguiled by the plangent harmonies of the Everly Brothers drifting over from somewhere else. It's all there in the Market, books, cheese, fruit, even a café. My Dad would take me to the fish stall there on a Saturday afternoon to buy mussels which we'd boil up. We ate them with fresh bread and butter while listening to Sports Report on the radiogram. "... But now 'tis little joy / To know I'm farther off from Heaven / Than when I was a boy". Indeed so.
The way home to Whiteheath took us both back past the railway station, scene of many later departures. How little it's changed, that booking and parcels office on the bridge. But the smell of anthracite has gone for good.
© Dennis Wood 2010