My Home Town

I saw a piece of news on Yahoo (plus the Daily Mail website) that amused me last week.  The centrepiece at this year's Guy Fawkes celebrations in my old home town was a 40 foot, firework filled effigy of Wayne Rooney, in Man U kit, carrying in one hand a signed contract and in the other a bag of cash...a nice little skit on the recent story where the money grabbing Scouse scally announced he was leaving the club because he wasn't convinced they matched his ambitions (cue accusations of him saying that his team mates were crap) only to change his mind within a few days and sign a new contract for double the wages.  Probably all down to his agent, who is on something like 15% (rather than the more normal 10) of all earnings - which on a deal this size (depending which story you believe anything from a hundred and fifty to two hundred grand a WEEK, plus image rights) is a fair bit of wedge, over a 5 year contract.  But anyway, Shrek is now injured and away from Manchester to recover, first on a family vacation in Dubai (wish I could take a vacation when I'm not fit for work, instead of having to get a sick note and stay at home chained to my laptop!) and now in the US for rehab (what????).  All of which hopefully means the dust will settle before he has to apologise to his team mates for shooting his mouth off about them, and his manager for messing him around, the rest of his employers for rubbishing them in such a public and undignified way, and perhaps most importantly set about winning back the supporters who ultimately pay his scandalous wages.  I hope the celebrations went off ok last weekend, and the rest of Wazza's career doesn't go up in smoke like the dummy undoubtedly did.

But the story made me think about my home town.....something I haven't really done for a good few years really.  It's always there in the background, but like your big toe or your nose or some other part of your body, it's part of your life and you take it for granted.  But that shouldn't be the case, because for most people - maybe everybody - your home town can shape who you are in a way that nowhere else can.  I've been to many places over the years, for a few hours or days or weeks, but with the possible exception of Warsaw, where I live now, nowhere means as much to me as there.

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Edenbridge is a small town on the Kent - Sussex - Surrey borders, about 30 miles from London.  It's a quiet little place where very little actually happens, and it's been that way for hundreds of years.  Its name apparently comes from the Old English "Edhelm's Brigge" - though whether Edhelm was a person (local landowner, baron, war-lord or whatever) or just the old time spelling of Eden, the river over which the bridge was built, is not clear.  The earliest mention of the place, historically, is in the Domesday Book (completed in 1086), the chronicle commisioned by William the Conquerer to find out exactly what he'd got himself into after winning the Battle of Hastings twenty years earlier and also (probably) to figure out how best to tax the living daylights out of everyone to pay for the invasion in the first place.  It's likely the place had been around for a while before then, though, as it's built on an ancient Roman road that apparently ran from Lewes in Sussex to London (what the Romans were doing in Lewes is anybody's guess, it's not even on the coast!).  The main road (built directly over the old Roman one) runs straight through the middle of the town, for about a mile and half either side, and to the south the Roman one continues as an unpaved farm track called, with great imagination, Roman Road.   There are built a number of farm cottages and a quite impressive old manor house that used to be owned, when I was a youth, by the playwrite John Osborne ("Angry Young Man") and his wife, the actress Jill Bennett.  In those days, the late 60s early 70s, it was widely rumoured that their place was the venue for some fairly liberal nude bathing parties that my mum insisted on calling sex orggies.  Good luck to them, I say.....

That. incidentally, is probably as close to scandal as Edenbridge has ever come, at least to my knowledge.  No murderer or terrorist or gangland figure has ever come from the town (or at least the town doesn't admit to it), although the Kray twins' sister Dolly lived there for a while in the 70s, when a couple of new housing estates were built by the Greater London Council and populated exclusively by families moved out from (primarily) the East End of London.  But more of that later.

When I was a boy, in the 50s and 60s, it was a small country town - maybe even a village - surrounded by the lovely Kent countryside.  It was a sleepy place where it was quite possible for us kids, even at 7 or 8 years old, to go off and play in the fields or go fishing or whatever, on the long summer days until darkness fell, without our parents panicking about us.  Accidents happened, but I don't remember any fatal ones.....I fell in the river a few times but it was then only a few inches deep so all I got was wet and a spanking from my mum when I returned, dripping, home.  I also had a propensity, when playing football or cricket (as we did virtually every day in the appropriate season, in the fields behind my mate Tony's house), for diving or sliding through cow pats.....going home covered in shit drove my mum to despair and earned me more whacks - though they were never hard enough to do me any lasting harm.  There was a gang of about 8 of us, all the same age give or take a year, who grew up and went to school together, and got drunk together, and  eventually went to each others' weddings.  We had a wonderful time, and I haven't seen any of them for very nearly forty years.....I'm not even sure they are all still alive.  I hope they are, and I hope they are all happy and in good health.

It was an idyllic time then.  I was playing darts for one of the pubs in the town at 14, and getting pissed during the matches, and although the landlord and the other old guys in the team knew I was underage (as did invariably our opponents) and hence illegal, no-one was bothered.   I was not the only one....half the team were at school and under 18....but as we were quite good and won the odd game the pub welcomed us.  I was also playing football for one of the two clubs in the town, that formed a junior section when I was about 13.  Of course, our little gang all signed up straight away - a few us were decent footballers and got better as we grew older, but without ever looking likely to play at more than local league level.  I was fortunate enough to graduate to the senior reserve team (men not boys) at 15 and play well enough to stay there for a season.  I remember one game, one of my better performances (even got a headline in the local paper for it...."Keeper Saves Rout"), where our veteran centre forward, 48 years young, flattened the opposition goalkeeper.  Their centre half remonstrated with him: "Careful, he's only 17."  To which Stan replied, "So what? Our goalie's only 15."  Happy days......

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But by the late 60s the town's character was changing.

At first there was a bit of a boom.  A factory estate opened on the northern edge of town that rapidly became the biggest employer, and available work moved from mainly agricultural labour to light manufacturing .  There was a wide variety of industry there, from paper mills to a factory making bottles and another specialising in industrial sized air conditioning and central heating ducts.  John Surtees, the racing driver, formed a Formula 1 team and sited his factory there too, which brought a rare bit of glamour to the town.  More houses were built, including the two GLC estates I referred to above.   As the population grew the shopping choices grew too, and the little corner grocery stores, butchers, fishmongers and the like, that I had grown up with, after an initial boom were reduced to bit players or closed completely as the supermarkets moved in. 

Then it all went pear-shaped, as it did throughout the country, as a recession came in, successive Labour and Conservative governments buggered things up and seemed to spend most of their time repealing each others' laws designed to solve the various crises, and thus making things much worse.  Factories closed, farms went out of business, unemployment rose and Edenbridge, like so many other small towns and villages the length and breadth of Britian, lost its innocence.  Like everywhere else, the changes have become permanent. 

In my childhood the majority of people living in Edenbridge had been born there, spent their lives there, and generally died there.  That changed with the 60s expansion as people moved in, whether they wanted to or not, from London and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere, and there became a bit of them-and-us attitude.  I can remember my dear old mum, as placid a woman as ever walked this earth, and Edenbridge born and bred, raging angrily about "those bloody Londoners" after one particularly difficult day at work (she served in a tobacconists) fending off shoplifters and just generally rude people (and I'm sure not all of them were from the new estates!).  I can also remember the kids from those estates taking the piss out of us local kids because of our Kentish accents - and because there were more of them, and they came in the main from tough areas of East London and were consequently streetwise in a way my country generation never would be - there was precious little we could do about it.  Unless we fancied a punch up somewhere....and that started happening on a regular basis too.

Society was changing across the whole world, and our quiet little corner of Kent was not immune to those changes.  People no longer were content to stay in Edenbridge all their lives, and began moving away, to seek work and make their lives elsewhere.  In fairness, the bloody Londoners gradually integrated into their new society, and became in their turn Edenbridgers (if you can call us that).  This I think accelerated when Maggie introduced legislation that made home ownership more popular and widespread, and people were able and encouraged to buy their previously council owned properties (often at bargain prices) and become part of the new home owning entrepreneurial democracy the Conservatives were working so hard to introduce (and that exists to this day).  My mum bought her council house (this was after my dad died) where she had lived since the early 1940s for I think about 7grand.....a good price for a well maintained three bed end-of-terrace with a big garden, within walking distance of the town centre and all local schools and amenities (to lapse into estate agent speak if I may).  Even the little Church Street society I lived and grew up in changed as a result of that....with half the houses now privately owned some of the more colourful characters were moved out by the council, and replaced with new tennants more likely to want to buy (and hence boost council coffers and reduce council expenses).  Among the families to go were the Miles' and Jenners, who lived next door to each other at the end of the road, gardens backing on to the railway, who were both reckoned (probably mistakenly) to be of gypsy origin and had over 30 (yes thirty) kids between them.

The scenery was indelibly changed too.  Behind my house, during my childhood, was a row of about 30 prefabs of wartime origin - little flat roofed, two bedroom bungalows made of asbestos.  In the early 70s the residents were moved out and rehoused by the council, the bungalows demolished.  Behind them had been an extensive area of allotments, then open fields across to the railway and behind the town station, and across the railway, more fields. But the allotments were also sold off, and the majority of the fields (that had been a wonderful playground during my childhood) too, and very soon the entire area became another housing estate: not council this time but typical suburban professional detached and semi-detached modern houses, with gardens half the size of our ex-council one.  So as young people moved out of town, seeking work and a future elsewhere, other families, mostly young professionals, moved in to these new estates to replace them, and the town's transformation from a country village to a suburban town continued and gathered pace - a new boom.  More chain stores opened to replace the old shops, new car dealerships opened their doors, as the population grew and demanded more consumer goods.

We still had our little entertainments.....the darts matches, the cricket club, now three football clubs, joined in an expended and modernized recreation ground by a rugby club and a hockey club.  We had a festival in the mid 70s to celebrate our Domesday Book appearance that consisted of a number of concerts and organ recitals in our lovely old church (parts of which apparently date from Norman times....), film shows in the school halls (our cinema closed in the 60s, its building used by a succession of supermarkets and now an antique shop), a five a side football tournament that my team won (I have one of only 6 medals in existance somewhere), and on Festival Day itself the High Street was closed for a massive town-wide street party featuring an ox roasted over an open fire, old fashioned beers served out of traditional oak barrels, dancing, fancy dress competitions and a medieval football match that involved the two main town clubs battling to push a massive ball (about six feet across) from one side of the town bridge to the other - one team north to south, the other south to north - and of course both teams and the ball ended up in the river: we called it a nil-all draw.  But it was great fun, and everyone got totally pissed afterwards.

Every year - and this brings us round full cirlce to my opening paragraph here - we celebrated Guy Fawkes Day with a big bonfire and fireworks party, preceded by a parade of the Guy (there was always only one) from one end of the town to the other, then back again and to the bonfire field.  There were marching bands, groups of "pioneers" illuminating the procession with flaming torches, and various clubs and organisations entered floats into the competition.  These were generally on the back of open lorries, and of course everyone was in fancy dress - both the walkers and those on floats  - and were based on popular TV shows or fairy stories (for the kids), movie characters: all kinds of stuff.  My football club always had a float, and we always had crates of beer on board so we got pissed before we got anywhere near the bonfire.  We also were placed at the end of the procession as we always had a water fight with the town Fire Brigade - we threw water bombs and buckets of water at them (one year we managed to hide a generator and pump on the truck so gave them a good soaking with hoses) and then on the return pass they would turn the high pressure hoses from their fire engines on us....and since the Fire Station was right next to the river they had an unlimited supply of water.....and basically wash us away.  It was all good fun, and always drew an appreciative crowd,  It all stopped after one year in the mid 70s when things got completely out of hand.  Some idiots threw a couple of fireworks onto our truck, set fire to the decorations (that year we were doing Up Pompeii, so we were dressed as Romans with tunics, bare feet and sandals.....bloody freezing in November!) and our right back had a foot burned.  Some of us piled of the truck to try and catch the arseholes, but they disappeared into the crowds, while the rest of used some of our water supply to put out the fire.  The crowd found it hilarious.....  Then, after we'd given the Fire Brigade their annual dousing, on the return leg the local Youth Club float ....full of bloody Londoners.....positioned about three places ahead of us, thought they would join in the fun and showered the Fire Brigade and their equipment with flour bombs.  In so doing, they did several hundred pounds worth of damage to uniforms and pumps.  They also refused to contribute towards to cost of the damages, leaving us to stump it all up out of meagre club funds.. We decided after that to drop out of the parade....all the fun had gone out of it somehow.

Another annual event was the Edenbridge and Oxted Agricultural Show.  In my childhood this was a huge affair, the biggest in the south of England and one of the biggest anywhere.  It took place every August Bank Holiday Monday, and started off as an opportunity for local farmers to have a good time and compete with each other to show off the best cow, or pig or sheep or whatever, but over the years it grew and grew.  Not only livestock was on display but flowers, fruit and vegetables, agricultural goods and clothes, Land Rovers, tractors, you name it.....  There was a show jumping competition which featured some of the best competitors in the world at that time - peeople like Harvey Smith and David Broome.  And thousands of people from all over the country used to visit for it.   It was a goldmine for local clubs and organizations who used to run produce stalls, or tombola or bottle stalls....many a club (our football club included) wouldn't have survived without the annual windfall the Agro Show brought in.   But again, over time as society changed and Edenbridge became less countrified, its popularity waned and the show moved out of town to another site a few miles away.

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In 1978 I married and we moved out of Edenbridge, to a bigger town about 20 miles away, where at that time I was working.  We came back regularly as both our families lived (and in my ex-wife's case still live) there.  Most weekends we would go back, initially by train but eventually (once I'd passed my driving test - at the fourth attempt) by car, so that the kids could see their grandparents and so on.  We saw changes to the town, but it seemed a gradual change, nothing really spectacular.  Then my mum died, and my sister sold the house and with her husband retired and moved to Norfolk, and our kids grew up and we went back less often - and when we did, not always into the town itself as my in-laws lived a mile or so outside.  My marriage broke up and I moved to Poland, as my life changed, and for many years I didn't go near Edenbridge, or even think too much about it.

There was a gap of maybe 6 years.  And then a couple of years ago, I went back.  I had taken my youngest son Kuba, then 2 1/2, for weeks' trip to visit family.  We hired a car, drove to Norfolk to visit my sister, back down to Kent to visit my other sister and her family, and of course my older sons, and on the way back to the airport I decided to route through Edenbridge to lay flowers on my parents' grave and tell Kuba a bit about them (not sure he understood a word of it but still....it's the thought that counts, I suppose).  And I almost didn't recognise the place.  There was a new ring road for a start, that came out onto the High Street where the old Fire Station had been, by the river.  The High Street hadn't changed that much, but at the top of the town, as I found when we headed off to Heathrow, was the other end of the ring road and a set of traffic lights.....now there was an innovation!  Where previously there had been a bit of parkland, by the original GLC estate, there were now more houses.  The old Ennia insurance building, where my sister had worked for many years, at the junction of Station Road and the High Street had been replaced by flats.  All the way up the road, under the two railway bridges northward, there were new buildings going up, or coming down; the factory estate looked different, less busy somehow; the Albion pub, beyond the most northerly railway bridge (an old watering hole of mine) had also been closed and turned into maisonettes.

We drove through, and on to the airport and caught our flight, and all the way I was trying to absorb what I had seen.  The signs said "Edenbridge", but it wasn't the town I remembered.  I've been back since, and drove round to the house I was born in and grew up in, and my mum lived in until only 10 days before she died at 79, and it was different.  The front garden, her pride and joy, had been part paved to provide a parking space for two cars.  Where in childhood the road had been my first football pitch or cricket wicket, it was now an extensive parking lot - there was hardly room to turn around: my three point turn ended up an eight point turn.  The river has now been dredged and is cleaner and deeper now, but I saw no evidence of local kids playing in the surrounding fields (my mate Tony's) or fishing.....probably all indoors on X-Box or watching TV I guess.

I found it sad, really.  Edenbridge is still my home town, it's where I lived the first 25 years of my life, and had some great times (and some shite ones too)....but in another sense it's changed so much, almost beyond recognition in fact, that I find it hard to think of it as that.

But I guess that's the price of progress.  And growing old.