Northolt Wonderland

A Memory of Northolt.

I was born in Barnet in 1942, but the Germans bombed our house and killed my dad a few months later. I was sent to Wales to avoid the Blitz. (BlitzKrieg - Lightening strikes) after 5 years I found myself in Millway Gardens in Northolt in a small maisonette with my twin brother and my mother and grand mother. We went to Islip Manor Prinmary school which had just been built then in 1948. It was so bright and beautiful and smelt of fresh wood and paint. I had a great teacher called Mrs Whiffin who inspired me to appreciate and love nature. We would collect sticky buds and wild flowers to watch them grow in the classroom. My best friend was Michael Frieth and I also had a mate called Andrew Tyler, who was very handsome and a big hit with the girls! I was in love (at 12!) with Margaret Picket and have thought about her almost every day since! - but I have never been able to trace her. Anyway I feel so blessed to have grown up in such an amazing and diverse place as Northolt with its many attractions including Steam trains rushing North from Kings Cross and the "look-out hill" on the derelict racecourse, where we stared at the sky and watched the planes coming over from Northolt airport!
At that time I lived next door to a french family who had three sons. One of them, Johnny Talbot was my best friend outside school. We would go to Mad Bess Woods on the other side of the A 40 opposite Northolt Airport via Lord Haylsham's playing fields at the back of the primary school. It was always very exciting and spooky as there was an old sewage plant there with deep wells many with newts and sticklebacks in! it - it had no sewage in it thank god! We would also take a picnic and walk over to Northolt Aerodrome and spend the day watching aircraft take off and land and where there were refreshments and rides to be enjoyed! Northolt was a commercial airport then and is now an RAF base. Other wonderful leisure options on tap in Northolt included the old Roman settlement at the back of St Mary's church, where we would catch Newts in the moat and scrape the ground to find ancient pieces of pottery!
Close to the School and to Millway Gardens was a large, beautiful park with a spinney that surrounded it, The Cricket season was always busy there and I grew to love the game - and the left-over sandwiches at half time!. Saturday mornings we would go into South Harrow where the main attractions were the Saturday morning Pictures at the Odeon (Hopalong Cassidy) and the market under the South Harrow station arches, where it was possible to by cheap second hand records and much more!!
When I was 11 years old I was entered into an art scholarship, at Harrow art school - so from the age of 12 I became an artist and later in the 1970's became a creative director and film producer for many big consumer Ad agencies and produced TV commercials from Bounty to British Airways and Renault cars! It was bliss living in Northolt and despite travelling the world making TV commercials, I have never been as happy as I was then!!