À la recherche du temps perdu

This is one of three weblog postings about the events of one day: Friday 6 November 2015. The other two postings are Friday 6 November 2015 and The Chess Valley.

When I was young in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I lived with my parents and brother on the ground floor of a modest two-storey terraced house in Willesden, a grimy, working-class suburb in north-west London. My parents were poor, and the rent was cheap. At the back of the house were railway lines including what was then the Stanmore branch of the Bakerloo line (now Jubilee line), a non-stop section of the Metropolitan line, and what was the Great Central Main Line (most of which fell under the Beeching axe) and is now the London to Aylesbury Line operated by Chiltern Railways. Whilst I remember the soot-blackened wall at the boundary of the tiny garden, and have some sense both of the clickety-clack of iron wheels running over fish-plated joints, and of the hum of industrial-sized electric motors, I have no visual memory of seeing a train on the lines. I wish that I had. Maybe the wall was too high to permit a small child sight of the trains.

That trains ran along the tracks I was in no doubt, both then and now, for we would catch Bakerloo line trains both from Dollis Hill tube station to the north west, and from Willesden Green tube station to the south east. From Willesden Green we would travel into central London, often changing trains either at Finchley Road tube station onto the more-limited-stop Metropolitan line, or at Baker Street tube station, a station so complex for a young child that it has appeared in my night-time dreams, often nightmares, ever since. From Dollis Hill (a name with which I have been proud to be associated ever since I discovered in the 1970s that it was the home of the Post Office Research Station, where Tommy Flowers designed and built the Collosus machines, the world's first ever programmable computers, for and in collaboration with Alan Turing) we would travel out of London, most often to Aylesbury, where, every-so-often, always on a Sunday it would seem, the four of us would visit my maternal grandmother, appropriately referred to by my brother and me as “Nana Train”. Apart from the delights of a television (my parents could not afford one) on which it was possible to watch Gerry Anderson’s exciting marionette shows, Supercar, Fireball XL5 (my favourite) and Stingray ("Standby for action! ... Anything can happen in the next half hour!" Thunderbirds came later, and I was too old for Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons), and an upright piano at which my grandmother was accomplished and would often play for us, even the journey was a refreshing break from the humdrum routine of pre-school, and later nursery school, home life. We would catch the Bakerloo line train to Wembley Park tube station where we would change onto the Metropolitan line. We would take this through to Amersham where we would disembark and wait for a “green diesel”. I believe that these diesel multiple units (as I now know to call them) would simply ply the route between Amersham and Aylesbury, although their journey might have begun at Marylebone station. I have neither memory nor knowledge of how we travelled from Aylesbury railway station to my grandmother’s flat. Imprinted on my memory, however, are the names of the final stations on the Metropolitan line. Almost a litany, the names were rich in promise, and the places pregnant with potential: Rickmansworth, Chorleywood, Chalfont and Latimer, and Amersham, the terminus. Intriguingly, there was an alternative  terminus: Chesham. Little did I understand quite how rich in promise those places are, lying in and on the edge of the Chiltern Hills.

There were occasions, however, when we did visit Chorleywood. I have this abiding memory from when I was either four or five years of age, right at the beginning of the 1960s, paddling in a shallow gravel-bedded river at a place named Chorleywood Common. Leaves dappled golden sunshine. Emerald-coloured river weed quivered in the burbling and sibilant flow of the water. It was a magical place, like a little bit of heaven. I may have been taken there only once, and we moved away up north not too long after. The occasion has been secreted away in my memory ever since. The memory is a single, albeit multi-layered, image. I have no memory of travelling there, although I am in no doubt that we travelled by the route outlined above.

I am reasonably confident that we visited Chorleywood Common, although not that river, on several occasions. I can imagine young parents in their early to mid twenties, taking their young sons to run free in the open air, to shout without being hushed, and to burn off energy bottled-up by life spent in a contained urban environment. As I walked over Chorleywood Common recently, I could feel my feet wishing to take flight, taking me to hide behind tall trees, and to explore bracken thickets. Apart from that sole image of paddling in a river, I have no explicit memory of any one occasion in the past, but simply being there recently whispered to me that this was all familiar from a very long time ago. Moreover, commons and heathland with copses, spinneys, avenues and rides, whilst admittedly far from an acquired taste, was not the kind of terrain with which I subsequently became remotely familiar, and I am guessing that the pleasure I experience now when encountering such terrain arises from those occasions before the formalisation of my memories.

I am getting a little ahead of myself. To backtrack, I was recently offered the opportunity to visit the area to the north west of London. On examining a map I happened to notice the small town of Chorleywood, and from deep in my memory I remembered the name and the promise that it carried. To be precise, the name that I remembered was Chorleywood Common. A different kind of image with which I associate the place name is an E.H.Shepard illustration of a verse by A.A.Milne in When We Were Very Young, called 'Market Place':
"...
I had nuffin',
No, I hadn't got nuffin',
So I didn't go down
to the market square;
But I walked on the common
The old gold common ..."

Then I saw on the map that that there is a river that, by all accounts, has a gravel bed. I am in no doubt that somewhere along the River Chess (I never knew the name of the river when I was a child), between the M25 and Chenies, is that magical place from my childhood, and as though rising out of the mist of my past, the idea of visiting Chorleywood Common, of walking along the river, and of searching for that place in the river where I paddled when I was very young, slowly clarified in my mind. Almost immediately I could hear the voice of Alan Bennett reading Wind in the Willows.

I turned my attention to an online search. This revealed photographs of the River Chess, a Chess Valley Walk, and a delightful weblog posting about how the place was magical in the childhood of other people too. I determined that I would drive there and walk the stretch of the River Chess in search of the paddling place of my memory. In planning the trip, I also hoped to create some new gentle memories, including looking for the footbridge that was mentioned in the weblog posting, seeing some of the less common flora, and perhaps some bird-life, and maybe even once again paddling in the gravel-bedded river.

Tempering mounting excitement, and reining in my expectations, however, I considered it possible that the image in my memory may be inaccurate in some way, or has been distorted by subsequent experience. I also wondered whether I might pass the spot and not recognise it, for much can change in fifty years. Indeed, Google Maps coldly informed me of the distinct possibility that the place for which I intended to search was brutally obliterated many years ago beneath concrete and tarmac that is now the M25.

It is a long journey from the North Downs of eastern Kent to playing in a gravel-bedded river, watched over by parents who have both since died, on a summer's day in the Chilterns.