The RAF Estate

A Memory of Ickenham.

We lived on the RAF estate in Ickenham during the late 1950s, in a semi-detached house at 14 Nettleton Road. Every RAF home mirrored the next; their furnishings were also identical. You could move from Scotland to England (which we had done) and find identical curtains, carpets and cutlery in your new home to those you had left behind. The best thing about living on an RAF estate I suspect, was that there was no shortage of people your own age. We played on the bars together and wafted in and out of each others houses, following the delectable scents of home cooking. My mother made a mean sponge cake, which she would drench with diluted golden syrup for pudding at supper time. It would lie in a lake of custard...she also made wonderful Cornish pasties, with raw meat and vegetables that retained their own taste while they cooked.
We children used to walk in a group to Park Road School every morning and back again in the afternoon. There was only one single-storeyed home along the route and we all thought it frightfully innovative. We believed a witch lived in it and the day she appeared, as if from nowhere, and gave us a big packet of home-grown apples, we were terrified. The last house before we turned into the estate had a glorious English country garden and it was there I learnt the names of various flowers and was told that dropping litter would earn me a fine of 10 pounds. Really scarey, that! I believed it implicitly for years and always looked around for the local bobby if any of my friends dropped a piece of paper.
I remember ballet concerts at the local hall, although I don't remember which local hall. My sister was confirmed at St Giles, on a night thick with pea-soup fog! So bad, in fact, that my father was persuaded to drive us to church that night. He was no church-goer; still battling emotionally with the fact that so many good men had died defending their country during the Second World War.
We were not allowed to play in the woods without an adult present, in case the Gypsies 'got' us. My mother used to tell us to look for four-leaved clovers when we were bored and in the summer heat, we would often languish in the thick, green grass in front of our homes; the RAF houses had no gardens in front, just grass. I wonder whether the grass was so lush because our fathers had so little time to mow them? Daddy used to putt-putt off to work in Uxbridge every morning on a bicycle to which he had added a motor; although he rebuilt an old car, I don't think he could really afford the petrol it used. My brother was at boarding school in Abingdon and both my parents seemed permanently frazzled.
We used to walk in nearby woods over some weekends and, as special treat, were bought crisps that had a tiny blue screw of salt somewhere in the packet, but no other flavouring. At least once each summer, Daddy would buy us each a peach so big it would fill my palm. My sister planted her peach pip next to the back wall one year and years later, on a visit to the UK, went to see the house. She was delighted to find her peach tree still growing there, outside the dining room window. My father sorely missed the things he had grown up with, like fruit, biltong and steak, but he introduced all sorts of vegetables from home into our garden, asking his own mother to send him the seeds and we ate them young and tender, years before they appeared that way on supermarket shelves: baby corn, gem squash and cocktail tomatoes.
We left the UK in 1959, when my father retired from the RAF, as disabled. Since he had been advised to live in a warmer climate, we returned to his country of origin: South Africa, leaving my brother behind, still at boarding school. In South Africa, littering is almost a national pastime, although it's easy to pick out the kids with British parents; the ones who know better than to drop litter!


Added 09 July 2009

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Comments & Feedback

We too lived on Nettleton Road, though I can't recall the number. We moved in shortly before Christmas and it seemed odd to me to live on an RAF estate - we'd always lived on RAF camps previously, with their own guard house and Naafi. I went to Breakspear school for about six months, before going to Vyners. My father was nearing retirement and my parents bought a house in Ickenham, which enabled me to complete my secondary education without changing schools or attending boarding school, as my sister had.

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