Church Hill

A Memory of Camberley.

In 1958 when I was 3 year old, we moved from a small flat on the London Road, near the bank where my father was branch manager (TSB), to Belton Road off Church Hill. I watched our new house being built on a sloping plot of land. My parents lived in that same house until their recent peaceful deaths. The roads around Church Hill became my childhood play places, especially on long summer days - often in large plots of land, now built on. We played hide & seek, climbed trees, made 'camps' in rhododendron bushes, explored private gardens, and played 'dares' like running up long driveways to big houses. The Leafy Lane, joining Park Road with Belton Road and the top of Tekels Drive, was a favourite 'scary' place - a footpath passing a hidden mansion with dog warnings on the gates. Privately owned Tekels Park was a wonderful haunted place of mystery and imagination. We came across a hidden pond there once - delightfully dark and sinister. Years later this same area apparently caused problems for excavators trying to build the M3 - a miry bog (and fighting back?) I walked down Church Hill to go to school, to the shops, to the cinema (1 shilling 3d) and to Brownies (in a hut along Lower Gordon Road). Bus rides back to the top of the Hill from the bus station cost me a penny ha'penny. I could walk down the Hill to go to the Blue Pool with a friend who lived on Upper Park Road. Or up the Hill, past the church onto Crawley Drive and down Sandy Lane, if I was visiting a friend who lived on Branksome Park Road. Great was our excitement one day to discover a 'secret path' (through the private grounds of a house on Church Hill) between our homes which cut the walking time from fifteen minutes to two! I walked up the Hill to go to Sunday School in St Paul's Church, at 3:30 pm, and when I was older, to choir practice on Friday evenings, and to Sunday services. We had parties in the Church Hall (I expect they still do). Later (1971) I joined the fledgling Youth Fellowship - about a dozen of us. We had Bible Studies in the choir vestry on Friday evenings and a Sunday youth meeting in the Hall after the 6:30 service. We had the annual church fete in the beautiful grounds of large house near the top of Waverley Road. In 1976 I got married at St Paul's, the service taken by Rev John Rawlings (an associated minister and also RAE chaplain at Farnborough). I have been back many times through the years and of course there have been changes - the main ones being: far more traffic; more pavements instead of bushy side paths; new housing developments in place of the large old houses with their sprawling gardens. Church Hill is a busy artery from town to the motorway. But the roads around on either side are still quiet, leafy and residential - holding the same promise of unexplored haunts, 'secret' footpaths, and bramble-hidden ancient walls, from long-gone mansions.