Newbury Way And Rayners Gardens

A Memory of Northolt.

I'm Steve and the earliest memories are of Newbury Way, a lower half of a 2 bedroom maisonette with an open coal fire and larder including a concrete slab to keep stuff cold. I recall riding my three wheeled bike around the block on the pavement, and playing in the park by the railway lines, it had swings a roundabout and a thing called a witches hat. The steam trains rattling passed on their way to somewhere full of people sitting at tables with lamps on and being smothered by the hot steam and smell of smoke. Cross rent a tipper trucks appeared dumping loads of clay all over the place to raise the ground level where I think came from the "Hanger Lane underpass" construction site, it made a great playground and remember lighting bangers into milk bottles and chucking them into the deep puddles until a bulldozer arrived and smoothed it all out.
There was a bunch of us kids that would be out all day exploring the neighbourhood venturing across the railway lines ,into the back of the American Air base and all over the place. Walking past the pig farm on tiptoe so not to tread in the slurry running across the pavement is a memory and the council setting up a wooden hut that stank of putty and paint ready for a new coat of paint on the houses. The workers would arrive and lift the paving slab and relay them level and sweep a cement slurry on top to fill the gaps. Paying the rent in the rent office before the swimming pool was built and playing on that boggy piece of ground searching for bits of old bikes to make a "track bike" then riding down the "Redhill" I think it was called by the Flats. A converted old coach bought groceries once a week that sold most things including paraffin the electric bread van and of course the milk float delivering creamy milk that the blue tits would peck through the tin foil top. Playing around the back of the flats at Dabbs Hill Way in a dumped old black car and building a massive bonfire. A makeshift sweetshop on the green at Newbury way soon disappeared after a few years replaced by a phone box. The kids I remember were Paul Tucker, Jimmy Fisher, Steve Martin, Philip Lawson, Mike Wooster with many more I cannot remember their names. There were two older boys living above us that had Lambretta scooters followed by a bubble car that I had a go in round the block. My dad had a grey Hillman that would never start, that the milk float would push to get it going.
I became seriously ill and lost a whole year from school and thanks to Doctor Foot probably would not be here now.
Later as a kid we had to move to the other side of Northolt (near Kingshill Avenue) to a larger house as I was sharing a bedroom with my sister. I will post up my memories of this area later. I continued school at Vincent though and found that by walking I could keep the bus fare for sweets. I had a Saturday job in Sainsburys at South Harrow with the old style counters before the supermarket was built down the road, saving all the wages for a scooter to get to school on. I left in 1970 and apprenticed at Heathrow.

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