Cranford Lane
A Memory of Heston.
I was born in 1956 when my parents (Dennnis & Ena Barr) lived at 10, Lime Tree Road, Lampton. Like someone else here, my paternal grandparents were in Hogarth Gardens and I started school at Heston Infants. My main memory of the school was getting the ruler across my hand for sticking drawing pins in a new bench in the playground! My parents divorced in the early 60s and Mum and I went to live with Nan in Cambridge Road, Hounslow Heath. By 1965 Mum had remarried (Ken Wayne) and we got a council maisonette at Harlech Gardens on Cranford Lane. We moved in when the estate was only partly built and I remember having great fun playing in the half built blocks at the weekends when the builders were not there. Best friend in Harlech Gardens was Colin Brawn (the boy that never cried!). We loved to play football in the courtyard below the house (there were few cars parked there then) and I have a vivid memory of England's 1966 World Cup victory after which we rushed out to have a game. I went to Berkeley School for a couple of years (Mrs Roots class). Classmates included Malcolm Cracknell (his father was Headmaster at Norwood Green), Richard French, Denise Woodward, Fiona Pryle?, Jonathan Tuck and a girl with the surname Quelch, Rebecca I think. I played goalie for the school team and well remember letting in 7 on that very sloping pitch at Springwell School. I had a paper round from the newsagents on the parade opposite Harlech Gardens and delivered around Northfield Road. I scraped through my 11 plus and went to Isleworth Grammar in 1967 (Headmaster Courtney, Mr Uren, scary Dave Littlewood for Geography and the lovely Mr McGibbon for English).
Other memories of living there include the playing field down Brabazon Road, the footpath across the big field to Henley's Corner, making camps in Cranford Park woods, the little smallholding opposite the Rising Sun where Mum would send me to buy some veg. Such long waits at Lampton Corner for a 110 or 111 to get home from school that I would often get the 120 to Heston Church and walk the rest.
We ended up living in Cranford Lane quite by chance. Little did I know then that, when I researched my family history 40 years later, I would find that many of my ancestors had also lived there in the 1860s and 1870s. They all worked on the brickfields that used to lie behind Harlech Gardens and the Rising Sun etc over towards the canal. So, perhaps it wasn't chance that I came to be there at all.
David Wayne (now living in Devon).
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Attendance at church services entitled membership of the youth club held in the church hall supervised by John Woodman's dad. Most weekends we had a bike ride - often to Runnymede or Laleham where we swam in the river and picnicked. Spring often gave us the chance to pick daffodils at Mann's farm which was near Norwood Green - sadly, it is now buried beneath the M4. Spring also was time for the Heston Fair where with 2 'bob' or half-a-crown if you were lucky, in your pocket you could spend many happy hours watching if you weren't riding the whip, or the chair-a-planes or the dodge 'em cars or rolling pennies down the chute on the roll-a-penny booth.. Anyone remember the huffing puffing steam engines the 'gypsies' as we called them used to pull their waggons? One was called "Little Giant". Does the annual marathon still come through Heston? It used to stretch from Windsor to Chiswick stadium. So many memories. It all seems so far away now that I live in Southern California, but my heart is still in Heston. Tom Johnston. Upland Ca. USA