Making Our Own Entertainment

A Memory of West Drayton.

Across from The Angler Retreat in Cricket field Lane is the river Coln. Down the lane on your left you pass the West Drayton Cricket Club with the river on your right. Next to the cricket field is The Coln Park Caravan Site where I lived in 1952. After the war accommodation was scarce and many people lived in caravans, these were spread throughout the district on many small privately owned sites where amenities where few or non existent. The council closed these small sites and moved us all to the council owned Coln Park site. This was a great improvement with concrete slabs to park the caravan on. The road was a hard surface and once a year they sprayed tar down and covered it with shingle. To this day if I smell tar I'm mentally transported back to my childhood. We got our water from stand pipes around the site and sewage was collected once a week.

We had come from a site in Longford. Speachley's Meadow as my mother liked to call it, but commonly known as Speachley's Yard. This was also the winter quarters for some of Billy Smart's Circus. I remember seeing the performing doves being trained to pull carriages and jump through hoops. Our caravan was at the back of the yard and we had to walked past the circus trailers to get there. The trailers were on both sides of the yard and each had a guard dog on a chain that would rush out to devour you as you walked by. The trick was  to stay in the middle as the chain would stop the dog in mid flight. If you stepped away you may be in range from the dog on the other side. The safe zone was a yard wide of no dogs land in the middle. For a five year old this was some training in self control. I remember the day the Speachley's Yard group arrived at the new site.  There was Granny Smith who would never have parted with her real gypsy caravan, though it had the horse shafts removed. I also  noticed we were the only group to have converted buses and railway carriages among our entourage.

Back by the Angler Retreat is where the 224 bus stopped before returning to Uxbridge. This was a single decker bus that had the driver in a separate, single seat cab separated from the passengers. On cold dark winter nights the conductress would hope up into the cab with the driver so they got some heat from the engine. There they would pass the fifteen minute wait for departure time by canoodling, The brown leather concertina flap that sopped the lights from inside the bus reflecting on the drivers windscreen also gave a degree of privacy. If the canoodling went on past the departure time, the passengers would start to stamp their feet and sing why are we waiting. This would bring the conductress back on board and with two dings on the bell she'd call out “fares please”. And off we'd go. I guess this is what they mean when they say you had to make your own entertainment in those days.