South Riding 3: Colliers Wood to Sutton

The next stage from Colliers Wood to Sutton may only have been a few miles but it represented a gap of 19 years and a separate world. When I lived in Sutton I was in my 20s, married, with an infant son, getting in on with work and my own nuclear family. I never thought of visiting the place of my childhood, even though I was close, mentally it seemed very remote. It might be a sign of age that I am now going back, trying to knit together the different phases of my life, whereas when I was younger I was only concerned with what was in front of me, immersed in day-to-day life. Changes and continuities, both personally and in general, now fascinate me. It is for example one of the reasons I love running by my canal because along it I can see the traces of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Anyway if I am looking for threads on this journey this section has one so thick it is the size of a cable: St Helliers, Carshalton, was the hospital where both myself and my elder daughter were born. This would not be unusual in fixed communities where generations of families stayed put; but we had moved about. It is almost random chance we share a birthplace.

As I cycled nearby I wondered how my father got there to visit my mother during her stay. At the time he had no car, so he must have gone by bus but it would have been an awkward journey and I don’t know how long it would have taken or how he managed his work day. It is a small detail but one I will never know. I do know that at the time the National Health Service treated new fathers almost as if they were a nuisance which had to be managed. St Helliers is a big hospital and the maternity unit was round the back, via a convoluted route. Fathers were allowed only one hour visiting time, strictly enforced, but timed not from arrival at the ward but from when the front gates swung open. All the new fathers used to gather outside and then run to the ward so they could spend as much of the hour as possible with their wives and new babies.

It is in such details that we can see some of the big changes in social attitudes.

My parents are both dead and I can no longer ask about the details of their lives: neither their lives before children nor the things I didn't notice as a child. I regret I did not ask enough, was not interested enough, when I was younger. I regret they both died comparatively young.

These thoughts washed over me as I cycled this section of my route. A wave of sadness on an otherwise an enjoyable day.