Busk Crescent

A Memory of Cove.

Late in 1945 my parents moved to 25 Busk Crescent, in Cove. The house was on top of a hill and overlooked the Farnborough airfield. From the front bedroom you could see aircraft landing on the runway. The house was one of a string of brand-new red-brick semi’s, built on the crescent and down Fowler Road, bordering an estate which had been constructed in the 1914-18 war. We were one of the earliest tenants on the street and the plaster wasn’t even dry. They said we were not to distemper the walls for at least six months. For some time there were no paths or fences, just mud and a few planks to walk on. Eventually a concrete path was laid to the street. At the back about ten feet of wooden privacy fence was attached to the house wall, and then a series of concrete posts supported three strands of galvanized wire to divide the gardens. Each house was provided with a really solidly built, flat-roofed, shed a few feet from the back door. A dividing wall split the small building into unequal halves. The smaller half for coal and the larger for general storage.

The houses on each side of ours were already occupied when we arrived. Doris and Tom Martyn and their kids Roy and Alan were in the adjoining semi. Verdon Over and his wife, in number 23, shared the driveway. They had four kids: Beryl, John, Daphne and Jennifer. The middle two were about my age but we were not in the same classes at Tower Hill School. Several years later when the Martyns moved out, Jack and Peggy Budd and their brood of kids moved into number 27.

A few months after we moved in, the war in Europe ended, the blackout was rescinded and eventually the street-lights were fixed up and came back on. They were gas and somebody came by every now and then to wind up the clockwork timer, to replace the delicate mantles when they broke, and to relight the pilot flame if it blew-out in a storm. On a foggy night, the glow of a gas street-light had a certain ambiance quite lacking with high pressure sodium.

On the corner of Busk Crescent and Weir Avenue, there was a public phone box. When we passed by as kids we always went in and pressed button ‘B’ and it was surprising how often a few pennies would drop out.

At the bottom of the avenue was the RAE coal depot. Trains of little trucks full of coal were pushed by an old steam tank-engine along the spur that came off the mainline at Farnborough station. The track ran down the middle of Elm Grove Road, across Victoria Road, and then, when the big corrugated iron gates were opened, through the woods to the coal yard. Unloading was effected with an old steam crane equipt with a clamshell bucket. I don’t recall that we were ever chased away as we walked along beside the wheels of the old loco with steam hissing around us.

Close to the coal yard was a storage building for aero-engines. The huge empty packing cases were stacked up at one one end of the building and they were an ideal place for climbing and hiding. For some reason, we were often chased away from there.  

St Christopher’s Road connected the crescent to Cove Road at Tower Hill, where the closed-up Instone’s Garage occupied the corner. At about the halfway point, housed in some very dilapidated old wooden buildings left over from the first war era, there was a social club that had a rather sordid reputation. I don’t recall the official title, but it was fondly referred to as the ‘Bum and Tit Club’.