(click on photo to enlarge)Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Virgil), ‘Perhaps one day we'll look back even on
these things with joy.’ I think that time has come.
I haven't always been this old. In fact I was quite ridiculously young some time ‘between the end of the
Chatterley ban / And the Beatles first LP’, as another poet, Philip Larkin, famously wrote. Not long after those innocent bike rides to Clent I told you about earlier, something very odd started happening to me which involved a lot of Radio Luxemburg, Tru-Gel in my hair and an iridescent brown suit made by Burton's in Blackheath. I wasn't the only one to enter this chrysalis stage. With a few exceptions – those chaps who were reluctant to leave behind Meccano and model steam engines – we were all silently and purposefully heading in the same direction, like programmed robots in a B-movie. But how do you meet a girl when you almost never
see one ? When you have three punishing hours of homework every night and six at the weekend ? If you're stuck at a boys’ school in Birmingham that takes an eternity on a Midland Red ‘bus to get to? But there was, I have to say, one girl named Anna who always got on at Causeway Green, demure, brown eyes. We talked for weeks, I asked her out to see Cliff in
Summer Holiday, biked round and round her street, and then lost my nerve at the last minute.
Happily, contemporaries faced with a similar problem had found the solution. If you couldn't join a youth club or get introduced to your sister's classmates, there was always the Saturday dance.
At Langley Baths the pool was boarded over for the winter and transformed into a dance hall full of teenagers looking like…well, brooding extras from
Mad Men. Ditto church halls all around the district. And thus it was, my friends, that I ended up one evening in 1964 sitting next to a girl named Jackie at the back of a cinema in Quinton named – now was it the Danilo then, or the Essoldo ? (which amazingly is still standing and called the Reel Cinema) – occasionally looking at a film about Helen of Troy that was already ancient itself. How had such a hopelessly longed-for result come about ?
Simples : the dance at Quinton Parish Church Hall the week before…
Quinton, like other border towns between the Black Country and Birmingham such as Bearwood and West Smethwick, had not yet had a noisy motorway driven right through the middle of it. I wouldn't say Quinton was exactly rural then, but at least it was quiet and had a palatial pub with towers at its heart, the King's Highway, now buried somewhere under a modern store. I had relatives in Quinton, and was also taken there every six months to see a half-mad Viennese dentist who talked like Henry Kissinger and refused on principle ever to use local anaesthetic. He always told my Mum that I was like a racehorse – I think it was meant as a compliment (better than a bargehorse …) and, as I moaned under his agonizingly slow drill, he would quiz me about Caesar’s
Gallic War, on which he believed, quite inexplicably, that I was
some kind of expert. Quinton was also the home of my friend, the future archaeologist Mick Aston, whose eyrie at the top of his parents’ house was full of his brilliant Alan Sorrell-type drawings reconstructing Iron Age villages and which often resounded to Ray Charles’
What’d I Say ? Our charismatic and now sadly deceased mutual friend was Martin Elliott, the ultimate girl magnet and later the photographer responsible for the Athena poster
Tennis Girl. Martin left the Fonz standing – he was confident, handsome, a snappy dresser and full of comical stories about his latest
amours told with that characteristic wink. But he was also enough of an Everyman to make every boy think he could one day be like him – well, this one anyway, right down to driving a zippy red sports car like his.
Anybody who remembers the 1960s will recall how, out of nowhere, ten-pin bowling suddenly arrived in our midst from America and for a year or two was an extraordinary craze – extraordinary, that is, considering the generally modest pleasure it afforded those who played it.
The Art Deco Warley Odeon of my childhood, with its façade of cream tiles, situated at the intersection of the Wolverhampton New Road and the Hagley Road, had been in decline for some time. It was now reborn as the Top Rank Bowling Alley, and all self-respecting teenagers sooner or later made their way there. There was an odd ritual which involved collecting sanitized bowling shoes of the right size and waiting around a long time for a game.
You generally learned how to play by the end of the evening - that is if the sinews of your arm held out that long. The bowls felt as heavy as cannon balls. Anyway, Martin Elliott and other friends congregated there from time to time. The ceaseless clatter of skittles wasn't conducive to conversation, but there was always a sense that something nice could happen at any time, perhaps you might meet someone… ‘Youth lives on hope, old age on remembrance’. There's no trace of the Warley Bowl now, it lies beneath an office block called TriGate House.
Less fashionable, perhaps, but no less pleasant was a walk with Mick, Martin and my old friend Ian Davies, all of Oldbury Grammar School, to Thimblemill Road Baths, somewhere on the borders of Bearwood and
Smethwick. If the
Schwimmmeister turned the other way or had slipped out for a fag, Martin would inevitably do a ‘bomb’ from one of the boards, temporarily emptying the deep end… There was a Friday night ritual which on the way home which meant fish and chips (or just chips for Mick, a vegetarian even then) on the hill past the Abbey pub and a stroll across Warley Woods. Odd the things that stick in your mind : when I got home I'd watch the ITV detective series
It's Dark Outside, a very stylish
film noir. For some reason I remember Anna Cropper as the secretary and a smoky, smoochy, late-night jazz theme, a bit like Miles Davis’ sublime ‘Blue In Green’…
Bearwood always had a ‘bus depot and was the place we'd change to get to my great aunt's house in Winson Green. It later became part of the deadening daily ritual of school. When I wasn't chatting up Anna (
v. sup.), I was jolting through Bearwood on the ‘bus, desperately revising something ghastly and probably pointless for a test.
With all that far behind me, it's nice to look around Lightwoods Park again. It's lost its paddling (or was it boating ?) pool and aviary, and the late eighteenth-century house is boarded up, but the bandstand's still there, as well as a Shakespeare Garden full of flora mentioned by the Bard. But it isn't the park I spent much of my adolescence in. To get there we have to drive back up to Thimblemill Baths and past the lovely, glassy lake which presumably held the water to drive the original thimble mill, and down into West Smethwick Park.
How many hours I passed fishing from the jetty where the water runs down a cascade on its long journey to the Trent ! I think too of my Dad, sent by his mother as a boy to collect water from the healing spring at the other end of the lake to bathe her sore eyes. Yes, ‘perhaps one day we'll look back even on
these things with joy…’
© Dennis Wood 2011