Memories with Nick
KINGS HALL ROAD
George and I were born and grew up in Kings Hall Road in Beckenham, we were there until I was around 11. We have so many memories of this house from the circular wooden swing in the garden, to the boy who would become a lifelong friend that lived next door, the family of foxes whose den was in the back of the garden, to the conker trees that would mean we would collect conkers for battle each year. But there are some that stand out more than others.
One of my favourite memories from when we were little was of George and I jumping off the back of the orange sofa in the back room again and again and again while we watched a video of Mum and Dad skydiving, or video B was the chim-chimneny song from Mary Poppins (watch, rewind, watch again, repeat).
Others include our great musical and sporting mashups. Skating up and down the kitchen while listening to the Spice Girls. Or doing Holloway-Olympics in the green Room, which involved circular games of strength and skill, usually to the tune of Nelly the Elephant and the Joseph and his Technicolour Dreamcoat soundtrack. These were usually followed by a well deserved 'naughty tea', usually eaten on the floor under the table consisting of white bread, butter and hundreds and thousands sprinkles or the healthy option of fruit…. With hundreds and thousands sprinkles on.
There were arts and crafts galore, I remember regularly tuning in to Art Attack each day giving us ideas for new projects but most of all I remember making our own playdough and building sculptures in the kitchen.
Other highlights include chipping my tooth on a (thrown) snooker ball, breaking my arm after completing Sonic the Hedgehog, breaking my brother's arm in a pillow fight (sorry), having bucket baths in the garden, playdates with Smelly and the other girls, the piggy card at the dinner table, and all of the amazing Sunday lunches with Shirly and her ketchup, nanny and Grandad.
Of course, there was also our other mother Brenda and her wonderful girls. I remember so much of playing games with the girls, so much fun and smiles and love. So much so that we tried to smuggle Jess in the back of the car to take her to France, and bless her, she could only have been 3 or 4 and she didn’t say a word for a long long time because we had told her not to.
It was a happy place, full of love, and we were lucky to have it.
FRANCE AS KIDS
The other thing I really remember from when we were little was all of our time in France. We had a holiday home there, in a small village in the North of France, unforgettably for a child called Williman (Ville-maun).
It was close enough that we could reach it by leaving straight from school on a Friday and be there ready for bed, have a lovely weekend there and then be back to school on a Monday morning. We were living in Beckenham at the time, and though that was quiet, suburban and green, this gave us a young kids a whole different level of freedom to explore.
The cottage was small with initially just 2x bedrooms, one for us and one for mum and dad, a living room, toilet, and little kitchen, as well as a garage, but we later extended it so that it was a 3x bed house so George and I had a room each.
We owened a large woods set along a long hillside next to the house, where we would build dens and paths. Dad spent many a day in there digging this long path that lead all the way from the house through the woods, I have memories of helping out, but I am sure that we werent really much help at all. The woods were very rarely used by anyone, but we did let a local archery club use it sometimes, which meant that they would often erect targets through the woods, mostly the classic bullseye circle type target, but occasionally there would be one that would look more like a deer or other animal that people with bows and arrows like to stalk, and these would always make great props for the games we would play running around the woods.
Many a morning George and I would walk down the road to a little stream that ran through the village and we would splash around in that catching bugs and frogs and other such things. In winter the whole thing would freeze over and we would go down there and skid around on the ice on our bellies like penguins. There was even a tunnel that went under the road that we would discuss if we would crawl through, but I’m not sure if we ever did.
In the morning we would ride over to the next village to get some bread from the small local shop there. Sometimes we would be more keen than others to cycle the distance, but the reward of a kinder egg for anyone who made the journey was usually enough to make us don helmets. We would come home with baguettes in tow, grown-ups would have a wonderful type of French ham with it while kids would have it dripping with Nutella.
The evenings were quiet, and up until we got older (and more stroppy) we would normally not take a TV or any computer games, and so we would spend time playing cards together. Newmarket was our special favourite, gambling with pennies on who would win each round. Though many an evening we would spend our time at the Globe Café in the nearest town Hesdin, where without fail we would order the regional delicacy of ‘oeuf sur la platte’ otherwise known as, egg on a plate. Which we were required, by our parents to order in French. On the odd occasion, we would venture from our usual haunt to get a giant chip butty from the chip van in the centre of the square, at a place called Ches Christine.
We had other friends who had holiday homes in the village, the closest of which were our friends Rosemary and Ron. Their place had large barns, where you could sneak away into, some of them with climbing frames and other such toys for their then grown-up kids, others with random assortments of weird and old things peculiar enough to be exciting at that age.
Our times in Willeman were like the kind of place that you read about in a book describing things in the 20’s or 30’s before the world became a bigger place. It was comforting and safe, and gave us the freedom to be kids and have adventures and explore on our own, but at the same time it was foreign and different and introduced us to new things on a regular basis (even if it wasn’t anything new to eat at the Globe).
