Growing up on the council estate of Walcot in Swindon was not a bad experience in the '70s and '80s.
 |
| Buckhurst Field |
There were no distractions from real life by way of electronic gizmos, 24 hour television or the internet. To keep busy, the children of the estate would actually go out and make the most of their free time, which for my family meant making use of the large expanse of grass in front of our house known as Buckhurst Field. With four boys out of a brood of five children, my parents had their hands full and were no doubt grateful for the active imaginations and sporting interests of their offspring which meant that, especially during the summer holidays, our daylight hours were spent on the field.
With such a large litter, the house could be crowded, particularly when our mates were round. The
Madness song,
Our House, described our home completely; listen to the lyrics and that was the Rivers' house back in the day. To keep ourselves amused, we would be on the field playing football, re-enacting the FA Cup Final we had just witnessed on our big box of a television kindly supplied by Telebank. Or, the Ashes, as we took it in turns to be Ian Botham playing in the middle of the field with the cobbled together stumps and other hand-me-down cricket ephemera that everyone supplied as best they could. When there was no cricket equipment to be had, we used to play in front of our house using the lamppost as the stumps. We still used to use a real cricket ball, though and play right into the night-time - the lamppost provided its own floodlight, although it took a strong will to stay at the crease whilst the dark, red ball came hurtling at you from out of the darkness - playing until midnight during the summer holidays was a regular occurrence.
The other inherent danger came from the crease itself. With the bumps and ridges any ploughman would have been proud of, if the ball hit the right divot, it would take off like a rocket in any number of directions and once went straight through the living room window...mum was not chuffed! The reason for the divots was that, when we were younger and had not yet found the pleasure of hitting leather with willow, the area in front of the lamppost was home to the street's marbles arena where many a bejewelled glass ball would be won and lost as the local children population would take each other on, seeing who could get all their marbles into the hole. Thinking back, it must have annoyed the hell out of the neighbours as the ball hit the metal cover on the lamppost and its ringing clang told the street that
Geoffrey Boycott was heading back to the pavilion.
One of the abiding memories for any child growing up on Buckhurst Crescent was the regular visit of
Jennings and Edwards Funfairs. My mother's purse never contained enough money to keep her brood fed, so there was never any disposable income to spend on fairground rides. That being said, the day the field was transformed into our own Alton Towers was always an exciting one. Watching the lorries arrive and witnessing the construction of the rides was quite a thrill for the local children and we would often get told to "clear off" by the hard-pressed men trying to put together the giant kits of Meccano whilst trying to keep hold of all their fingers; having gangs of interested kids getting in the way did not help the sense of an industry devoid of any notion of health and safety.
The location of our house, no. 27, lent itself to being the locus for our rich friends (they were going to spend money at the fair, so they must be rich was our thought). Our front garden would take on the semblance of a car park, as children from all over the area dumped their bikes on us as they went off to the fair. With hindsight, a small charge for each bike would have got us to the fair as paying customers rather than interested spectators. However, when they collected their bikes and went home, the fair was still there, in front of our house. In the summer, the bedroom I shared with my three brothers would get pretty stuffy - think of eight feet and four bottoms and I think you can guess the rest. Anyway, with the choice of inhaling "eau de brothers" or having a summer breeze blow through the chamber, the windows were open throughout the summer months. This was okay most of the time, but, when the fair was on the field, the noise was incessant and went on way past bedtime. For reasons best known to the fairground folk themselves, a generator like the one pictured above, would be parked in front of our house and would make a great thumping noise most of the day and night.
The chair o planes ride always seemed to be at the edge of the fair, in line with our house and when it started up, especially if it had the tilt top, would set the generator thumping faster and louder; annoying if you're trying to sleep. More annoying was the call of the pubescent teen put in charge of the ride. Often, in order to drum up business, one would hear over the PA system the call "one more car, two more riders" as the ride had to be balanced before it could be started up. Paying customers would wait an interminable age, dangling from the ride in a chair hung from what looked like the flimsiest of chains, as the last empty positions were slowly filled.
Coupled with the Carny call were the songs played as the customers were sent on a stomach-churning five minutes of "fun". In the age of cassette tapes, the ride had a limited collection of tunes with which to entertain the riders. There were three songs in particular that seemed to be played over and over to those brave enough to trust their lives to two lengths of steel chain as they were exposed to the centrifugal force of the ride. The first song that springs to mind was
I Feel Love by Donna Summer. The next in the list was the Yvonne Elliman version of
If I Can't Have You with
More Than a Woman by Tavares a close third. To this day, these to me are "two more riders" songs evoking the smell of the diesel generator, hot dogs, burgers and candy floss, and the noise of the funfair.
As a child, we didn't have much, but we did have Buckhurst Field. It may not be an all singing, all dancing piece of electronics that can play videos, connect you to the internet or thrust you into imaginary, computer-generated worlds, but it was all we needed back in the 20th century and it was our X-Box.
