South Riding 15: West Wickham

A fairly common sight: what was a small garden front garden, now tarmac. A bit boring really. This time there has also been a growing of hedge to ensure privacy and a darkening of the front room. I prefer things to be more open.

The first thing I notice about the house is the change of windows and garage door. This is inevitable as we had the original metal, Crittall windows . Oh were they cold! No insulation at all – I can remember many a winter's morning waking up to the intricate patterns of frozen condensation on the windowpanes. It was actually quite pretty to look at (like snowflakes under a microscope) when you were snuggled under the covers; but the cold was a definite disincentive to getting up. 

The garage door is now up-and-over. When we were here there were two, traditional wooden doors, which opened out. I have recently seen adverts for the Vauxhall Meriva, which make a virtue of the rear door opening outwards from a hinge at the rear, rather than from a hinge in the mid pillar. When we lived here we had a car with a similar arrangement. One day someone left the rear door slightly open whilst the garage door was angled in a bit (i.e. not fully open), when my father tried to drive the car into the garage the two doors became perfectly aligned. The garage door stood firm but the car door crumpled badly. let this be a warning for any potential  Meriva purchasers.

Moving on from that trivial and irrelevant car anecdote. You can see from this street view that it is a quiet residential, suburban road that would have looked very similar in the 1920/30s when the houses were built.

We moved into this house when I was 13 and my sister 11 but the price meant that my mother had go to work to help pay for it. We were lucky in that we had our mother with us for our crucial young years. Lucky and, of course being children, totally unaware of how fortunate we were to have an emotionally stable and nurturing environment. Before the decision was made though there was a family conversation to check we were not upset by the idea of coming home to an empty house. We were quite relaxed (even quite liked the idea); it was my mother who needed the reassurance. 

Standing outside the house now I have a stream of memories, far more than I can report here, because I lived here at the time I developed self-awareness. But more than that, for society as a whole, it was a time of changing social attitudes and so it was exciting to be a teenager. 

The centre of these changes might have been West Central London but the suburbs were quite close and not a bad place to be. You could rub shoulders with David Bowie at the Three Tuns when he was setting-up the Beckenham Arts Lab (the picture shows how he looked then) and music was everywhere, with some amazing people playing small local venues. If I were to pick out one moment from a local gig it would be Peter Green and an intensely sad and beautiful solo on ‘tears in my eyes’. The song itself is a standard slow blues but I can remember being completely transfixed by the translucent quality of the guitar playing. George Harrison might have written 'While my guitar gently weeps' but believe me none of the guitar heroes, be they Hendrix, Clapton or Page, could make a guitar weep like Peter Green.

But it was not all 'white boy' blues, there was music of all kinds, and I was just as likely to follow the Mike Westbrook Concert Band as I was to go to Les Cousins to see Bert Jansch and John Martyn. I was far from alone in being happy to range over folk, rock, jazz or anything thing that seemed experimental - it was the spirit of the age. It somehow seemed all of a piece.

I believe that at any time there is always a dominant art form that erupts to drive and influence all surrounding creative endeavours. At that time, in the Sixties, it was music and for me it was a prism through which I saw much of the world.  Unfortunately I am not at all musical so I was forever condemned to merely appreciate, and never participate. Nevertheless I had the odd moments of insight. 

The platform for those insights was formed when I lived in this house.