Among the several buildings comprising my parent's business Smith & Crockford was an ancient shed in some disrepair which was used to store disused building materials and ladders. It was a wooden structure with earth floor and part corrugated-sheet-iron roof. The other part was where sheets were missing, and many of the existing sheets were paper thin for rust. It had a sort of upper floor by reason of the lumber stored there. In all it was a wonderful playground. Of course, strictly, we were not allowed to climb on the roof because it was considered so dangerous. But we did. We being my older sister (until she grew out of such things) and Ian, the boy from next door. My sister is three years and Ian was a year older than me. We knew how to navigate that roof. We did not chance the rustiest sheets. We gambled on those that were mediocre. And we disdained the few shiny new sheets. We crawled through tunnels formed from stacked lumber. We ground glass bottles to dust in an old plumber's vice. We made milk by mixing crushed chalk with water, and added it to tea made from builder's sand mixed with water. We made an obstacle course around the "top" garden which was adjacent to this shed: the course involved various dare devil feats and you were chicken if you could not complete it or touched the ground. I remember edging my way along the top rail of a tall fence surmounted with metal spikes which would have impaled me had I fallen. And then walk unwavering along the rounded top of a 6ft masonry wall.
Next door was Ian's parents' grocery store which had a separate bakery at the end of the yard behind the shop. Ian and I would pester the baker for cakes and occasionally won, more often got shouted away. Or we would filch eggs and watch them explode when thrown against the brick wall we traversed to get from my to Ian's property. We only took eggs with no shells, thinking these were unsaleable. Or, if the store room was unlocked, Ian would take bottles of fizzy drinks one by one and drink the top half inch or so on the basis that nobody would ever notice. As far as I know nobody ever did. In those days bottles were not sealed like they are now.
The bakery had a slate roof which was definitely out of bounds. Slates break very easily and are difficult to repair, as I repeatedly tell people here. But we clambered over the roof none-the-less, with great care I should add - it was never our intention to damage property.
In my parent's "top garden", which was about 50 yards along the builder's yard behind our house, was a raised rain-water tank that communicated via a valve and underground pipe to a second, underground tank which had an overflow onto the vegetable garden. On opening the valve water would thus come out of this overflow and water and soil make mud and mud is great to play in. Here it was that I made dams and reservoirs and invented the venturi pump. How could I have known it had already been invented?
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| His Master's Voice |
My workshop was in the top garden. My father had plenty of other work areas associated with the business so was happy for me to take over part of this shed. Here I collected resistors and suchlike from old radio sets and, when I got a bit older, actually made things that worked like an oscilloscope, a servo-controlled XY pen-plotter, an audio signal generator. Here I first savoured Rossini's overture to Guillaume Tell on a '78 using a phonograph with a steel needle, through my beloved balanced pentode audio amplifier, the beginning of hi-fi.
We now live together with several other families and I am so thankful that we have about 15 acres of land, not all cultivated, thus providing plenty of opportunities for children here (that includes my three granddaughters) to explore, whilst still being in the relative safety of our property.
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