The George Yard and Groundhogs

My childhood home was, I am told, once part of the George Inn which, hundreds of years ago, straddled the archway that leads into what is now called the George Yard.  My parents now both being deceased, the house was sold and converted into the County Library.  When I last visited the Library I found that my old bedroom and the bathroom next door still exist much as I remember it.  Even the bathroom suite, and the towel rail with its secret fixing which I made myself, is still there.  This is surprising because much of the rest of the house was gutted in the conversion.  My bedroom was where the yellow square is in the Google Earth image below.

The view from my bedroom window looked down on Smith & Cockford, Builder's Providers owned and run by my parents (now Alresford Builders Supplies).

You can see from the earlier picture below (which predates me) that my parents did some improvements, but some of the sheds to the rear were still in bad shape and, with their rusty tin roofs, served as my childhood playground.  My friend from next door and I clambered over many of the roofs in the vicinity, often against the express order of the owners. The goal was to get from A to B without touching the ground and without being seen by any adult.  Or we would (from an allowed vantage point) hurl abuse at my father's workmen on their way to or from the very suspect convenience (which stank) provided for them.  In one shed there were two layers of stacked timber which you could crawl between to hide or to, once again, get from A to B without being seen when playing tag.  There was a large rectangular rainwater tank for playing submarines - you get a suitably shaped piece of wood and leave it for several days to become waterlogged, then drive in nails until it is on the verge of sinking.  The game is to see who can make a submarine that stays down longest (without aide) although which eventually surfaces.  As a result the bottom of the tank became filled, after a time, with failed missions and other debris which my father had to clean out to his chagrin.  This tank is the same one that supplied my venturi pump described in an earlier post.

Looking back from where this photograph was taken, the next two pictures are recent and show our house on the left, and our neighbour's on the right.

It you walk up the George Yard passing what was Smith & Crockford on the left, there is now the plot of a new house occupying what was our "Top Garden".  My workshop, marked by the red square is in the aerial view above, was in the corner of this garden and is where I would retreat to make my inventions.  My father built the swimming pool which you can see in the aerial view.  I plumbed in the filtering system and made a solar heating system (by diverting some of the pumped water to trickle down the plastic roof of the changing room  / shed).  The picture below is recent and was taken by slightly trespassing into what is now the garden of that new house.  Had anyone been there to ask I would have done so and I am sure they would have been happy to show me around.

An advantage of owning your own swimming pool is that you can swim naked.  It is better in every way - you are more streamlined, there is none of that clinging of wet material to the skin, the water does not feel as cold, no wet swimming costume to peel off and deal with afterwards, etc.   There are locations on the river close to where I live now where one can (with some care) get away with swimming naked, but I am not going to tell you where they are.

The pallisade fence is new but the low brick dividing wall, the fruit tree and the high flint wall at the rear with its inset arched seat are all as I remember them.  The wall was built by Bill Smith (no relation of the Smith in Smith & Crockford who died long before my time).  Bill was an old-timer.  He and his family lived in what seemed to me, as a child, little more than a shed with a tin roof.  They kept chickens and my mother would buy free range eggs from them.  It used to be said that anything Bill Smith built would last a lifetime.  The fact that this wall still exists and is in perfect condition is testimony to this, although Bill himself is long gone.  He used to let me "help" him and there is, in that wall, several pieces of green glass that I inserted all by myself.  If the present owner reads this, they can find the glass not far from the inset arched seat, to the left if I remember correctly.

A little further up the George Yard there were trash heaps to left and right.  These were doubtless meant to be for builder's rubble but sometimes there was more - so they were wonderful places for me - very, very occasionally I would find a prize - an old radio, or a discarded vacuum cleaner.  These I would haul back to my workshop, like an ant hauling food for its menagerie, where they would be stripped down and any useful components kept.

In my earlier years most of my "work" was in disassembling (parents should not necessarily discourage this activity, negative though it may seem - it is how I learn.  Adults call it "reverse engineering").  But later I did make stuff - here are some examples.

My earliest memory, having previously decimated various valve radios and stuff, was to construct my very first radio receiver.  Or so I hoped.  I figured that these parts once made up a radio, so my connecting them together I must surely stand a chance of making a radio.  This exercise was not completely without knowledge - I had a battery and earphones.  But it didn't work.

My other examples were later on in my career...

An oscilloscope - this was heavily based on a magazine article.  It used a 2.5" CRT, a special mains transformer, and valves.  Valves (vacuum tubes) are ideal for an oscilloscope because of their naturally high input impedance.  I did all the metal work myself, the source of aluminium sheet being an unused Green Shield Stamps placard  (bare aluminium on the reverse) which was surplus to my father's requirements.   .

An audio signal generator - again heavily based on a magazine article, but I could not afford the thermistor stabilising device so instead had a potentiometer which had to be carefully tweaked for lowest distortion.

An X-Y plotter.  This used a platen roller from a type-writer for the Y-dimension, and a pen drawn along a brass rod for the X-dimension.  The rod was milled (a friend of my father's who built model steam engines allowed me to use his milling machine) with a slot and turning the rod lifted the pen so gave the Z-dimension.  Z was actuated by a solenoid.  X and Y were actuated by d.c. motors driven by AD161 / AD162 power germanium transistors in a servo loop.  The position coder was a standard linear potentiometer in each case. The design was largely my own this time.  The chassis, this time, was made from Perspex (acrylic).  I had discovered that chloroform is a solvent for Perspex so, accompanied my my father, we had to sign the dangerous substances register at the local chemist to purchase a small bottle of the stuff, which promptly evaporated if you didn't screw the lid back on tight after use.

My crowning achievement was to use this device to plot a groundhog.  Dunlop had been running adverts for their tyres featuring this creature, and I had a younger friend Nigel at school whose claim to fame was the ability to draw them.  So my hand-drawn groundhog became a sort of icon for any graphics project.

Later - or was it concurrent? - I discovered the digital plotter at college and my first software program to make use of it had to have it drawing groundhogs subject to various geometrical transformations, but that is another story.

And then there was the railway room.