The Fairway

A Memory of Northolt.

I was born at 28 The Fairway in 1946. There was (is) a wide grassed area down the centre of the road making it a kind of dual carriageway. In the years following the 2nd World War there were, "Pig bins", on several sections of the grass where waste vegetables could be disposed of to be fed to pigs.

There was a concreted service alley behind our house and the dust cart would come through there to collect the bins. The lorry was a bit like a Nissan hut on wheels and sections of the curved, "Roof" could be slid open for the bins to be emptied in. The rag and bone man would also come through the alley with his shout for "Raaaahbone", which would be for things that are now found in charity shops. But the coal man came through the front of the house with hundredweight sacks of coal and emptied them into the coal bunker in the back garden. They wore a kind of leather hood to protect them from the coal dust.

My Mum had a Co-op number which I remember to this day (294314) and it was my duty to recite it at the front door when the Co-op insurance man came, or in the shop. I was fascinated by the Co-op tokens which were like metal coins and of various shapes; some oval, some with a hole in the middle.

My school days were spent at Wood End Infants and Juniors, then Horsenden Secondary Modern Boys. My favourite teacher in the Juniors was Mr Young. He would tell us the most interesting stories about India, some of which, though purported to be true seemed a bit far fetched.
At Horsenden our last teacher (in 5A) was Ben Avery. His subject was maths, something I had struggled with throughout school. He made it interesting and suddenly I grasped it; from then on I enjoyed it. I owe Ben a lot.

The church in The Fairway, St Barnabas, was only partly completed before the war. When I was a small child it was an open building site into which my friends and I would sneak to play. Behind it and adjacent to Girton Road was a piece of waste ground known as, "The dump". It had a small circular track which had been used by the local cycling club; called the Wood End Wheelers. it was our playground.

The shops at the top of the Fairway were on Oldfield Circus. The Home and Colonial store had a system for sending money from the counters upstairs for change to be returned. It was driven by compressed our in a tube that ran behind and above the counters. The shop assistants would put the customer's money in a shuttle tube that in turn was placed inside the transport tube. It then disappeared upstairs and shortly returned with the correct change in it. I found this fascinating.

We would go fishing in the Grand Union canal near the Rockware Glass factory, which seemed to be like one huge clanking machine. There were never any workers visible but automatic conveyors were constantly moving glass and dumping it into various places within the grounds. Other sights and sounds I remember: When the wind was in the right direction we could often hear the sound of Rockware working in the night. The furnace from the Bath Works would light up the sky red sometimes. The air raid sirens were still tested regularly after the war - a very eerie sound. I also remember the dense smogs we had in the 1950s; so dense that I got lost once walking to Horsenden for school, down Wadham Gardens. The air was yellow.

David Jagger.