After all this bad press about Rayleigh I should say that it wasn't quite all bad. For example I have fond memories of sitting next to Ginty at the end of a wide, slidy church organ stool whilst he played, and being amazed at his foot-work. Even more amazing that he had lost two fingers in a circular saw accident in his youth, but still managed to play. Sitting here was a good deal more interesting than being in the congregation where I would have to sit perfectly still. Because an eruption would occur if my foot even accidentally just touched the next chair on which my aunt sat. It is hard for a boy to keep his feet still when they do not reach the floor.
Southend Illuminations c. 1960
Or there were the occasional trips to Southend-on-Sea, best if it was just our family going. My father would drive from one end of the esplanade (Chalkwell Avenue) to the other (Thorpe Bay) so that we could see the Illuminations. And if there was time to stop then...
Never Never land
Never Never land
...There was Never never land - an area of the cliff gardens transformed with weaving pathways decorated with fairy castles and goblins - all a bit dated and seedy in my memory but I appreciated sussing out where all the paths led to and figuring out how they wired up the coloured lights or animated the models.
...There was a fun-fair by the entrance to the pier. One favourite attraction was the Crooked House (built 1953) - with the usual perspective trick that makes a person appear huge or small depending on where they stand in the room. And then there was the pier itself, the longest pleasure pier in the world at 1.33 miles. I loved the pier shuttle train - back then it was electric and twin track. It was replaced in 1984 by diesel power running on a single track.
Southend pier train c. 1949
Southend pier train today
The pier, built in 1830, has suffered many injuries during its life - fires in 1959, 1976, 1977, 1995, 2005, and run through by a boat in 1984 - but has always been repaired as it is a major tourist attraction.
Cliff lift
West of Never Never land there is the cliff lift. I thought it too short to be worth the ride (I could easily beat it using the steps) but interesting none-the-less.
Golden Hind, c. 1960
Another attraction was the Golden Hind (only a replica and, sadly, not there now) with its wax-works torture chamber that James Watson has so aptly described here. Although I remember not been allowed to see the torture instruments, delicate children as we apparently were.
Very occasionally we would be treated to a Rossi's ice cream in which I remember the amazement of finding bits of real strawberry. Not so unusual now but, back then, ice cream could be different colours but generally didn't have bits in it.
But eventually it would be time to return to 10 Weir Gardens, Rayleigh. But even there things were not all bad - one of the better meals was Nana's steak and kidney pie which tasted entirely different to my mother's equivalent but even so was passable, ignoring the usual cat's hairs to be found in any food at Rayleigh. Cats were regarded in much the same way as the sacred cow is in India. The one table in the kitchen where all food preparation was carried out was teaming with them. I think I was young enough not to be too bothered by hygiene but I discovered later in life that the whole Rayleigh deal was very hard on my mother.
Site of 10 Weir Gardens
Incidentally Google Earth imagery (2013) confirms that 10 Weir Gardens has been demolished and is now but a private car park. The end of an era. I wonder if that 10-Weir-Gardens smell still lingers?
The Dartford crossing joins the two ends of the M25 orbital motorway around London where otherwise the Thames estuary would get in the way. It now provides four lanes in either direction using two tunnels (North bound) and the Queen Elizabeth bridge (South bound) and has just been fitted with automatic toll collection. The crossing was opened in stages. The west tunnel was opened first in 1963 providing just one lane in each direction. That was long before the M25 was even a twinkle. And that's where I come in. I must have been about 11 then. My parents were in the habit of making the journey to visit my Dad's folk in Rayleigh, Essex maybe twice a year and this post is going to be all about the various routes we used. So prepare to be very, very bored or maybe stop reading at this point.
I explained here and here a bit about Rayleigh. My older sister and I used to dread going there. The feeling of dread started about half the way along the Arterial road - but I am racing ahead of myself. Suffice it to say that the destination was dreadful but the journey I loved. I have always loved journeys (whether driving or as a passenger) - and generally like the journeying somewhat more than the destination, the destination being a sort of necessary evil means to an end. Whereas for Ali it is the opposite.
Google maps reckons a 2 hour drive from Alresford to Rayleigh. Back in those days it was more like 4 hours. Before 1963 the only way to get to Rayleigh was by going through London. The Dartford tunnel provided a route that happily avoided London altogether.
For the sake of those my readers (if anyone has made it this far) who might not be cognisant with South East England geography, here is a summary of the various routes on a modern map (there were no motorways in this area back then).
The various routes highlighted (click to enlarge)
The green and magenta routes were two ways of approaching London. Once in London you either went through the centre (imagine contemplating central London as a through route now!) or the North Circular road (shown in red). There was a South Circular but it was (and I believe still is) single carriageway and tortuous, so we rarely used it. And then the new Dartford route shown in blue.
After 1963 we almost always used the Dartford route, so my memories of the other routes must be from before I was 11.
We generally approached London on the A30 (green route). I am not quite clear on exactly how we jumped from the A31 (the magenta route and which goes through Alresford) to the A30. Either it would have been via Basingstoke as shown, or more likely further to the right through Aldershot (A331). It matters little because my memories are from further along.
We (I include my older sister, the younger one not yet having a say) used to beg my dad to go through central London because then we would get to see the pièce de résistance Piccadilly Circus with its amazing neon advertisements and the statue of Eros in the centre of the road back (as it was back then).
Piccadilly Circus and Eros
But again I am racing ahead. The A30 around Staines area passes through some very beautiful countryside. Indeed the very name "A30" is to me evocative of every good thing as (going in the opposite direction) it took us to our beloved Devon or Cornwall for our annual holiday.
Let's start at Camberley - I think my father was born (or something like that) there. Next comes Virginia Water. We would sometimes stop there to stretch our legs and it remains in my memory as a mystical place of dreams. That such a beautiful place (and name) should exist purely for the sake of enjoyment amazed me.
The cascade, Virginia Water
Totem pole, Virginia Water
The soil is sandy in this part of Surrey. Grey sand. The sort (my parents told me) that snakes liked, so we were to be careful on a hot day (because apparently snakes like to sun-bathe). The only poisonous snake we have in the UK is the Adder and it can be recognised by the "V" on its head. I think I have only seen one once in the wild and it was not at Virginia Water.
Shortly after this the fairy-tale red-brick building which is the Royal Holloway university rose above the tree tops on our right. Much more recently my niece was a student there, lucky thing.
Royal Holloway
And then, on the left, the water meadow Runnymede, another possible halt for a leg stretch or sandwich and, by coincidence, the place where King John signed the Magnacarta on the 15th of June, 1215. A bit before my time. And further to the left the vast reaches of the Royal Windsor Park and its famous castle.
We pass through Egham which always brought a chuckle (my father repeated his jokes often, it is a senile weakness I find myself slipping into) and Staines and then pass by two giant reservoirs on our left. All I can see from the road was a high, neatly grassed bank, but my father says there is water on the other side. So now I look out for these landmarks whenever I fly into Heathrow.
The road now hugs the edge of Heathrow airport and we see the giant tail-fins of parked aircraft and hope to get a close view of an aircraft taking off or landing. There are gigantic hangers marked BOAC or BEA.
After Heathrow the A30 joins the A4 "Great West Road" which is our artery into the depths of London. But this time we turn left and follow the North Circular Road (A406) which, back then, was single carriageway with only limited stretches of dual carriageway further along. It starts as Gunnersbury Avenue opposite Gunnersbury Park where we stop for mum to do some unspecified business with a charity there. It seems to take her ages while we have to wait in the car with nothing to do.
All these roads in and out of or around London suburbia have endless rows of semi-detached houses either side. I found it hard (and still do) to imagine how there could be so many people and why-ever they would want to live nose-to-chin along busy roads like these? I do not remember much else about the North Circular - it was mostly boring houses, but there were some interesting bridges especially where it crosses the river Lee.
1952 map of the North Circular (A406) crossing river Lee and Gants Hill
Gants Hill underground station
Gants Hill sticks in my memory: it is where we turned onto the A12 eastbound and so was the beginning of the end of London. I think we stopped there once for a bite to eat or maybe the loo. I remember the London Underground signs there although am not sure why this station of all the hundreds should be so special. Today the North Circular has been re-routed and passes to the west of Gants Hill.
Flyover at Gallows Corner
Miles upon miles of suburbia followed, punctuated only by the round-about at Gallows Corner where we turned onto the Southend arterial road (A127). It seemed to take forever to get London behind us. I can recall my father's pleasure when, in 1970, a flyover was erected over this round-about to favour traffic on the arterial road. The flyover was made of prefabricated units rather in the way I might have made a bridge using toy bricks. One ascended at constant slope, then suddenly the angle changed to horizontal and then suddenly again to the descent. Apparently this flyover was meant to have a lifetime of 15 years but it is still in use today.
And then the arterial road. In my time it was dual carriageway all the way past Rayleigh to Southend. It was, we were told, a marvel of engineering. Originally a single carriageway, it was largely built by hand in 1920 as the first road in this country made specifically for motorised vehicles.
Half way from London to Southend
As we travel from Gallows Corner towards Rayleigh the hedgerows seem to get shabbier and shabbier and that feeling of dread in the pit of the stomach becomes more and more evident. Dad points out the Halfway House which seems to me a mild wonder for just happening to be exactly half way. I do not think we ever patronised the place.
Basildon onion
The next landmark we look for is the Basildon "onion" which, my father informs us, is a water tower. Which in itself sets me thinking: how could such a small structure contain enough water for a town like Basildon? The new town Basildon with its high-rise flats was, Ginty told us, something out of the Apocalypse. This made it all the more interesting to us children even though we had little idea what he meant.
Recent view of "the cutting" A127 ascent to Rayleigh
1955 photograph of the Weir round-about
We are now dangerously close to Rayleigh. I try to suppress the fact and at least enjoy the last few remaining miles which end in the cutting as we climb the hill on which Rayleigh is built. At the Weir round-about (it now has an underpass) we turn left, then right along Glasseys Lane and right again into Weir Gardens. Number 10 was almost at the end on the left. The picture below is from Google street view and shows the property still standing but sadly overgrown now that my aunt has died.
10 Weir Gardens, from Google street view
We park and ring the doorbell. The door opens and out wafts that Rayleigh smell followed by a gushing Aunt Mary, Nana and Ginty and a jumble of dogs intermingled with the odd cat. Perfunctory kisses are exchanged (how I hated them). We bring in our stuff and then sit down to eat watery boiled smoked fish with bread-and-butter and start counting the days until we leave.
As there is probably a rule about how long a blog-post can be I will have to tell the rest of this story in a future post.
From left to right we have yours truly, my dad, Ginty, my mum, my older sister Margaret, Aunty Mary and Nana behind the camera. I started by writing about my father but soon discovered that a necessary precursor was an introduction to his family and in particular his father who we children called 'Ginty'. Ginty is an Irish name (as in Paddy McGinty had a goat) but it does not appear to mean grandfather as I had imagined.
Prior to meeting Nana Ginty worked on the railroads in Canada and it was in a sawmill there that his lost two fingers on his right hand. This did not stop him being a reasonably accomplished church organist and carpenter. He passed on his love of organs to his son and grandson.
He also played the violin.
On returning from Canada Ginty could not have had much money because it was a Miss Knight, who I think was Nana's aunt, who put forward the money to buy 10 Weir Gardens. Although she passed away before I came on the scene, she exists in my memory as a kind of dark but necessary shadow over the Bailey side of the family.
My father had a younger sister, my Aunty Mary, whose influence on my life deserves a post of its own, and an even younger brother who died in early childhood. Mary cared for Nana through her final years suffering with breast cancer which she had refused to disclose to the medical profession until it was too late, and continued to live at 10 Weir Gardens until she was too frail to look after herself.
Our family would alternate between spending Christmas at Rayleigh or having them stay with us. The latter arrangement almost drove my poor mother insane, and being at Rayleigh was little better. We children also suffered but differently. It was not exactly that they disliked children - it was more that they made us feel like we were a nuisance. As a result we hated going to Rayleigh. Even when visiting Mary in her later life, as soon as I came within about five miles of Rayleigh a terrible feeling of desolation and foreboding came over me, as if the very air had become heavy and grey. Even the place names still seem grey to me: Essex, Billericay, Wickford, Eastwood, Rochford, Chelmsford.
I have mentioned before that there were five dogs and cats without number. The cats had free access 24/7 to the kitchen (a window was left open) and this included all the work surfaces. So dog or cat hairs in the food were par for the course. And the washing up facilities were best not thought about - if it wasn't that hunger lends a rosy tint I might not have eaten at all whilst there. Actually this was more my mum's and my sister's experience as I was too young to make the connection. I could never understand then why Ginty always did the washing up - but I think I know now.
My memories of food at Rayleigh include smoked fish with bread and butter (swimming in the juice) - often a quick meal on arrival after a day long drive from Alresford (no motorways in those days). Nana's steak and kidney pie had a totally different taste to my mother's and yet it was one of her better meals in spite of the cat hairs. On one occasion I remember my sister and spreading butter on our toast and, on tasting, finding the butter was way off - I can vividly remember the taste being similar to strong blue cheese. When we pointed this out the grown ups told us there was (of course) nothing wrong with it and forced us to eat it (which we kind of did) - but curiously recanted when they got to taste it!
Unlike our visits to granddad's house or to Aunty Bee and Uncle Elf we were not showered with toys when we arrived at Rayleigh. Having said that there was the monkey up a palm tree - he would jiggle down the trunk when placed at the top; and a trolley on a ramp that would fill with sand (it had to be dry and clean) from a hopper, then run down the ramp under gravity, deposit its load and return to the top. Both were made of tin plate and had to be constantly supervised by grown ups which lessened their usefulness as toys.
It is my theory that the dark side of my memories came from the Knight influence. I have often wondered what Ginty made of all this. An example of the strangeness of Nana and Mary was that both appeared to dislike female company but positively adored both Ginty and my dad: they could do no wrong in their eyes. As a child one did not question such behaviour and yet it left a bad taste. It was OTT.
10 Weir Gardens had a very distinctive smell - a Rayleigh smell. It was a small house and rather too full of stuff, not to mention the dogs and cats which doubtless helped the smell along. And not just the house - the garden also smelt. It was an untidy garden, as if whatever you did in the way of weeding and edging it would still remain untidy. At the end of the back garden there was a stream - more mud than stream and also untidy as was the undergrowth beyond this through which you could get to the field beyond.
Interestingly my younger sister (seven years younger) does not have the same memories.
But the subject of this post is Ginty. He was the most normal Rayleigh-ite. He played music, kept a bevy of tape recording machines and made things out of wood. Although he, too, was somewhat distant from us children he did at least try to make me feel at ease.
When I was a bit older I overheard a conversation in which Ginty was telling my dad about meeting a man who spoke in tongues. I pricked up my ears and was pleased to find that Ginty had an open mind about such things: this raised him a peg or two in my estimation.
Ginty never learnt to drive (I know not why) and Nana's driving was hardly up to long distance so it was not unusual, when we were staying there, for my parents to take us for a drive and thus escape from the tendrils of 10 Weir Gardens. But everywhere I remember going in Essex was flat and dull and grey. Here is Nana in a typical stance on one such trip at Maldon, a particularly grey spot in my memory. Maybe that's why this slide has become so moldy. One bright memory though - here it was that Mary might possibly have saved my life - I had wandered out into the vast areas of mud and had started to sink: I wailed (I was very small at the time and knew no better) and it was she (may God rest her soul) who ran to my rescue.
I think I may have mentioned that Ginty loved organs. His ambition was to build an organ, but he neither had the financial resources nor the space to do this. He did make a few organ pipes and kept books on the subject, and during outings in the car would want my father to stop at random churches to check out their organs. I have in my possession a hand-written copy he made of the 1887 book 'Organ Building for Amateurs' by Mark Wicks. Strange to think that even photocopying was not an option then and yet you can now download this book for free from the 'net.
For interest here are some pages from the downloaded version compared with Ginty's copy.
Ginty's title page
Sample pages
I hope you can tell which is the original!
I used to have a book entitled something like "1001 things for a boy to do" which came from the same era - one of the things a boy could apparently do was to build a fully working steam engine from scratch. The nearest most children get to this sort of thing now-a-days is to create virtual civilisations using high-level tools in a computer game. Unobtainable as making a real steam engine might seem, some young people really do make organs and have found this book invaluable, see for example:
I found this invoice in Ginty's copy of the book. Nice to see pounds, shillings and pence again.
As for the violin... the house had only two bedrooms and a small bathroom upstairs so getting us all bedded was a challenge: typically I would be on a camp bed in Nana and Ginty's room, under which was the back room aka music room. There was a large wall clock at the foot of the stairs with a large tick and a loud and creepy chime on the quarter. It was here that I learnt how to not be able to get to sleep - I lay there unable to shut out the wailing violin downstairs punctuated by chimes and loud ticks and fearful of steadily approaching midnight when, I had helpfully been informed, all the woodwork in the house would come to life and would start to move around. Children can believe that stuff. The same as I seriously believed that (back at home) our neighbour (who shot game on Alresford lake) might shoot us when he mock brandished his shot gun, and for a while I lived in fear of meeting him in case he had his gun.
I am glad to report that I have since learnt to be able to get to sleep - but it took a fair bit of unlearning what Rayleigh had taught me.
Eschatology was another bee in Ginty's bonnet and another bee that my father inherited. On one occasion I begged to differ from my father in his eschatological beliefs and got such an ear-full that it has affected my opinion of the subject ever since. Here is the only other tangible memory I now have of Ginty (apart from a reed puller which is very useful for getting things out of small spaces): this time not a copy. Amazingly you can still buy this book and it is still highly regarded.
Frontispiece (click to view larger version)
This book is full of complex charts of which I include only one. I cannot claim to have read the whole book as it somewhat blows my mind: it is not that I necessarily either agree or disagree but rather that it is, well OTT. Here is the chart in question:
It is an explanation of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed (Daniel 2:31). Ginty made a humongous copy of this picture and coloured it beautifully, doubtless using it as a sermon aid (yes, I forgot to say, he was a Reverend for part of his life). Some while after his death Mary decided to give this masterpiece to my older sister, possibly because her husband is a Baptist pastor and she though he could or perhaps should use it. I have to record that in the course of time my sister disposed of said artifact. To Mary this was an unforgivable sin, such was her adoration of all things Ginty. This adoration was, well, OTT. It was not worth discussing anything that Ginty had done or made because it would almost certainly be taken the wrong way.
I have mentioned in a previous post the way Ginty saved my face when I fell into the watercress beds and wetted my "pants" as he called them: this above all other memories is when I started to respect him.
He had a particular smell: odd the things children remember.
Before 10 Weir Gardens and before my time they lived in a timber structure they called the "Cottage" in The Chase. Here it was that Ginty and my dad made wooden toys for a living. My own workshop in the Top Garden at home was a section of a larger workshop in which were cupboards full of half finished wooden trains and suchlike, left over from those days.
In my time Ginty had a workshop - it was only a small garden shed but it packed with floor to ceiling with boxes of this and that and all in perfect order. These things suffered from damp and neglect after his death so by the time I got to being offered anything there was little of any value, but I do still have some brass chain and some brass gimp pins from his collection.
On one occasion, when they were visiting us at home, I was drawing one of my marvelous mechanical inventions in my random free-hand style and Ginty saw it and tried to teach me how to draw proper engineering drawings using a ruler and a scale. On another occasion I was making a small box to house a battery and lamp to illuminate a china model lighthouse I had been given, and Ginty gently scolded my imprecision and helped me joint the corners properly.
Thus I have some fond memories of Ginty mingled with the horrors of Rayleigh.
Ginty died peacefully whilst sitting in his chair in the back room. They say he had some premonition and put his affairs in order beforehand. He lay in his coffin in the back room for several days before the funeral, Irish style - it was so when we arrived from Alresford for the funeral and I found the idea of a dead body in the house somewhat horrific. This was the first funeral that I experienced emotional feelings in.
