My Home Town

A Memory of Burgess Hill.

I was born in Burgess Hill in 1947 and lived there until 1971. I lived in St. Wilfrid's Road and went to Junction Road Primary School. Our headmaster was John Freestone, who was quite a well known singer, and a very kind and gentle man. Once I was sent out of 'Music and Movement' for hiding under a table, and when he came by and saw me, instead of telling me off he said it was a pity I'd been sent out. I've read that he thought we were too regimented and that he wanted a less authoritarian approach to our schooling.
Beside the red brick school building there was a grassy field with three or four air raid shelters underneath it, visible only as long humps in the grass and short flights of steep concrete steps down to their doors. They were always locked up, but once I got to see inside one, and was surprised that it was circular inside, like a huge pipe. My dad worked for Seeboard, and it was one of his jobs to test the air raid sirens, that made one of the most horrible sounds known to mankind.
There were fields all along one side of my road and I remember cows bellowing at night and my grandmother saying, with sympathy, that they were giving birth to their calves. There was often a row of fresh cow-pats along the road after they'd been driven to Knight's Farm in Mill Road at milking time. Our milk was delivered by horse
and cart but sometimes my mum sent me round to the farm for an extra pint, and I remember the wide concrete yard that seemed vast when I was small.
Once,mum gave me a ration book and told me to go down to Stubbing's shop at the bottom of Mill Road to see if I could get any sweets with it. That little shop was a grotto of earthly delights to us children later on, where we bought Penny, Halfpenny and even Farthing chews, and began the ruination of our teeth with Wagon Wheels, Spangles, Refreshers, slabs of toffee and those little round lollipops that look as if they're made of pastel coloured chalk.
On dark winter mornings lights from bicycle lamps slid across my bedroom window as men cycled past our house on their way to the Keymer Brick and Tile Works, and in the late afternoon they all came back again. Once I was knocked down by one of the bikes because I was playing in the road and ran in front of it.
There wasn't much traffic in our road because I don't think anyone living there owned a car at that time, and it wasn't a through road, but ended in the stony lane that crosses the railway line between Burgess Hill and Wivelsfield Stations. My brothers and me always knew this lane as The Bumpy Lane, and if we were in it when we heard a train coming we rushed onto the bridge for the thrill of being temporarily blinded by a dense, billowing cloud of smoke. I loved the sound of goods trains rumbling along at night when I was in bed, and the steady chuff-chuff-chuff of steam trains pulling out of Wivelsfield Station.
I used to go with my mum to buy apples and tomatoes at a nursery in Cants Lane, and sometimes we walked past the brickworks, where there were red danger notices, and we peered down at the deep clay pits through gaps in the trees and bushes. I remember a little train pulling trucks, that disappeared behind a cliff of earth, and I remember the lovely horse chestnut trees on both sides of Cants Lane with their white candles of blossom in spring and their plentiful supply of conkers in autumn.
Sometimes us kids walked home from school past the gasworks in Leylands Road, and hung round the gates mesmerized by the strange apparatus in the yard,especially the cylindrical tanks in which vapours swirled behind
glass portholes. Not surprisingly we were often brusquely ordered to go away but we knew we would have to go back some time to have another look.
I was obsessed with pond life and spent hours fishing for luckless creatures with two pound jam jars tied onto lengths of string, but when work began on the Noel Rise estate all the ponds near our road were filled in and the landscape changed for ever. Beautiful mature trees were uprooted and the builders' trenches became temporary
refuges for doomed animals trying to escape, such as red ramshorn snails and newts. A girl up the road gave me a pair of sticklebacks rescued from one of the dwindling ponds, all the more poignant because the male was smart as paint in his blue and red breeding finery.
I explored half built houses whose doors and window frames were painted with a pink undercoat, walked on planks over newly laid concrete floors and wandered between tall stacks of breeze blocks and mountains of sand.
One of the neighbour's boys tied up a length of thick rope in the horizontal canopy of an enormous oak tree that we used as a swing, when we weren't clambering over the thick branches or climbing the huge, earth caked root ball.
Traffic lights came to London Road and new estates were being built. I've read that in the 1950s the town doubled in size and was the fastest growing town in the south east. It's only looking back now that I realise what a haven of rural peace Burgess Hill was, and what has been lost, though I realise that many people have made their homes there and make the town what it is today. It's of no consequence to people what was there before they were, and I know that everything has to change.