Memory Dump – William

I find myself looking back a lot these days. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, or don't have enough to do now that I've given up working for a living; but I prefer to think that it's my newly awakened interest in art that is causing me to revisit the images of my past. And the more I recall, the more incidents come to mind (the more I remember, the more I remember - existentialism rules OK!).

Lying in bed last night waiting for sleep (a long wait, sometimes), I had the idea of sharing some of my memories with my family - partly for your interest and amusement (I hope); partly to set them down in an organized way; and partly to make a record, however trivial, of some of the things that made me what I am. The passage of time tends to "improve" memories; I'll try to avoid this vice as much as I can, but recollections do change and total accuracy is therefore not guaranteed! Do with these stories what you will; keep them, delete them, ignore them... it's up to you. For my part, I'll try to keep the series coming, though I can't promise how regular or frequent these anecdotes will be. If you enjoy them, let me know; if you have questions, feel free to ask them. By the way, the pictures in this posting are just a random collection of photographs of the sweet little boy I used to be - they don't relate to the story.

My first story is about William.

After I was born, my parents and I lived in south west London, in a suburb called New Malden. But the marriage started to fail in the late 1930s. My parents separated; my mother went off somewhere or other, my father enlisted in the Army, and I went to live with my grandmother, Lorna Normann (as she had become after her second marriage). At the time of this story, my grandparents lived in a block of flats called Emerson Court, located on Wimbledon Hill. I was about five.

It isn't much of a hill by today's standards, but in 1938 vehicles were less powerful, and automatic transmission was unknown. Even synchromesh was an new-fangled, expensive extra for smaller engines. Crash gearboxes were the norm and double-declutching was an important driving skill, especially when changing down to go up a hill. It was a difficult manoeuvre that took much mastering, though eventually it would become second nature. You had to disengage the clutch, go into neutral, engage the clutch again, blip the accelerator just enough to speed up all the cogs, slip the clutch again, engage the new gear, re-engage the clutch and accelerate away (providing you hadn't by then stalled the engine or stripped the gearbox) - all in all, not easy! You can imagine, too, that it was a noisy process, especially for a heavy lorry, and on Wimbledon Hill, it always happened just outside Emerson Court. The endless racket of revving engines and grating gears was one important reason why my grandparents moved to Raynes Park shortly before the Second World War (though why they picked a block of flats a mere hundred metres from the hugely busy, 15-track main railway line between London and the south of England, I have absolutely no idea!)

If Wimbledon Hill was difficult for lorries, it was even more so for horse-drawn vehicles; there were still a few about at that time, though they were vanishing fast. Milkmen, bakers, and rag-and-bone men could manage the hill with their light carts, but the bigger vehicles - brewer's drays, carters, and so on - had more of a problem. Cue William.

At the bottom of the hill, on the left hand side going up, was a horse trough where animals could get a drink before tackling the hill. Beside it was a small wooden shed that was William's daytime residence. William was a heavy horse, and he was kept there to be hired by any team that wanted more horsepower (literally) to get up the hill. Given the diminution in horse-drawn traffic, William had a lot of time on his hooves.

I remember being buttoned up to the neck in my stiff tweed overcoat and taken for a walk. Were my mittens joined together by a string running down the sleeves of the coat? Probably. I seem to recall blossom on the trees, so maybe it was springtime. I don't know who took me out, but it might have been a nursemaid or nanny; domestic service was still common in those days, and my grandmother was wealthy enough to afford it. The highlight of the walk was going to call on William (after making leaf boats to float in the horse trough, of course, and watching stones sink in it). He must have been a big horse, probably quite old - in the eyes of a five-year-old, totally enormous and rather scary. But if you were really, really brave, you could hold out a sugar lump on the palm of your hand ("keep it flat, or he'll bite off your fingers!"), and William would dip his head, gaze at you thoughtfully with a great, round, brown eye, and wuffle the sugar lump into his mouth; all the while, you forced yourself to stand still and held your hand so flat that the tendons stretched; I always used to worry about my thumb, especially when the lips curled back and those great, yellow teeth came into view.

One day, William wasn't there any more. I was told that he'd gone to the country and I hoped he was having a good time. The stable disappeared with him, but the horse trough remained for several years - I used to look out for it whenever I went up or down Wimbledon Hill in the bus, gazing down from the top deck and thinking of William. It was dry by then, of course - no-one could be bothered to keep it working as there was no longer any demand for its services; eventually it went to the country, like William.

This Memory Dump was first distributed by e-mail on 23rd May 2005.