With a shiny new degree in Eng.Lit and headed to London University in September to qualify as a teacher. I saw this notice in the college student handout.
Conditions were ideal: “very pressing problems”, ”appalling conditions”, “very deprived children”. I could be useful and help change the world. We really did think we could.
I had room and board. What more did I need? Those were the days.
Some people enjoy their high school and college years. I did not and I had a lot of catching up to do. This was the time to start.
I was in London, in Westbourne Grove, North Kensington, W11, just up from Portobello Road, right by the Westway motorway still under construction. For all the urban rot and decay, this was an epicenter in the known universe of happening places.
The Grove
“The Grove” – as those in the know called it – was a place of vibrant squalor, protest, poverty, and social change where macrobiotic met psychedelic and the student dropouts and American draft dodgers rubbed along with the local population. A few years before it was the setting for Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and in 1958 the scene of the Notting Hill race riots. This was an area built in the 1860s but already condemned as unfit for habitation in the 1930s. By the time I arrived, the area had deteriorated further and was now awaiting slum clearance.
And what a summer it was – packed with firsts and all the drama that was 34 Tavistock Crescent. The Neighbourhood Service meant a constant flow of people in need of help with housing, and legal skirmishes of all kinds.
The house was a revolving door for those struggling with homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. There were student summer volunteers and homesick Irishmen working double shifts building the Victoria tube line. I knew I had landed in the right place.
It was a place of ever-shifting cultural contrast. Rhaune – who had a bit of a chequered past herself – believed in second chances for those who had fallen foul of the law.
With John Hopkins, Rhaune was a founder of the London Free School which led to the start of the International Times, the UFO Club, and the multicultural street festival that was one of the roots of the Notting Hill Carnival. By 1969 this annual event was attracting thousands, and that August the streets rang to the sound of the steel pans.
She started a children’s playgroup. When Muhammed Ali with the photographer Gordon Parks dropped by on his visit to London for his fight with Henry Cooper, Ali sat right down with the children in the first-floor front room.
Shanty Town
The adventure playground – Shanty Town (think Desmond Dekker and the Aces) – was behind the house in what had once been the back yards between two streets. The entrance was on St. Luke’s.
By the summer of 1969 the houses on the Tavistock Road side were empty, the people rehoused and the windows boarded up as the street waited for the demolition that was to change the whole geography of the area.
This was the summer of the moon landing, and Woodstock and British troops deployed to settle sectarian unrest in Northern Ireland. Pat and Eddie declared themselves ready to volunteer and fight.
The soundtrack for the summer was everything from “Sugar, Sugar ” to Thunderclap Newman and Credence Clearwater. Christine Perfect sang “I would rather go blind”, the BBC banned Max Romeo and Desmond Dekker had the first reggae. #1 on the hit parade with “Israelites”.
When the summer ended I stayed on in the house and the next summer I applied for a job as a Greater London Council Playleader. The interview took place in an office building by the Edith Cavell Memorial on St. Martin’s Place. They asked for my qualifications and were singularly unimpressed by my academics.
I got the job because I had worked on a playground and that was enough. I was to be in charge of the setting up and running of a playground for a magnificent sum of 20 pounds a week. I actually think my real qualification was my own childhood years playing in my own personal adventure playground of Lydiard Park.
Looking back now it seems like an awfully big responsibility for someone who didn’t really have a clue about what she was doing.
The Golborne
My patch was a bare parcel of land in W10 – a literal wasteland – across the railway tracks north of Tavistock Cresent. The area was in the process of being cleared but they were still streets and the houses teemed with children who needed a safe place to play for the summer. It was close to where the just demolished Southam Street had stood, made famous in the street photography of Roger Mayne, and by the Golborne Road where Kelso Cochrane was stabbed to death in a racially motivated attack in 1959.
A council lorry came and workmen put up a chain link fence and some scaffolding. They off-loaded a heap of bricks, some planks and ropes and with the help of the kids who just started to show up, we built a pop-up summer playground. I don’t remember who worked there along with me but I do remember the children and what they built with those planks and bricks. It changed from day to day as imagination turned a pirate ship into a fort and a castle and a royal palace. And next day something else.
We had a portable shed to store basic tools and art supplies and to shelter from the rain. I don’t remember a wet day although there must have been some. I do remember that a bus turned up one day and took everyone to see the Cutty Sark at Greenwich. The kids sang “We all Live in a Yellow Submarine” all the way across London. And all the way back.
I remember no permission slips or safety precautions – just a first aid kit with some plasters and a bottle of TCP. And I don’t recall any injury worse than a splinter, a hammered finger, and a bruised knee.
What did I learn?
Among a whole lot of other things, I learned that kids are survivors with a seemingly infinite capacity for invention. I already knew that the joy of play was not dependent on expensive toys but on the tools and room and time to build and make. The play dens and shelters came and went. The kids created and recreated the structures to meet their emotional needs and from their imagination. And they played in them, over them, and around them before starting all over again.
Disputes are not common and often more easily settled without adult intervention.
That watching out for the marginalized and fragile makes all the difference.
That all kids are hungry for love and attention but also for the freedom to be without constant supervision. That accidents and incidents were few and that when it comes to play adults can be both essential and irrelevant and kids do it best.
And when September came around, the playground was dismantled, and I started my first year of teaching on the other side of London.
All a long time ago now. But I still think about it.
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What a terrific post! The accompanying soundtrack that it referenced was my soundtrack as well. I was in and around London at that time but a few years younger, only in secondary school in 1969. I followed the hit parade, so was introduced to Desmond Dekker's "Israelites" and revelled in the official forbiddenness of Max Romeo's "Wet Dream" (and of course, "Sugar, Sugar"), but it wasn't for a few more years that I was to become immersed in the subject matter of your post--which you lived and I mostly just studied and followed from afar. My father had come to from Bombay in the 1950s to study in London, where he had met my mum. He lived in Notting Hill for a short while. As a college student, living in the U.S.by then, I attended UCL for a year and followed Race Today avidly, when it was edited by Darcus Howe. I came to love reggae and ska and to study Black British literature and culture. Your experience reminded me of Beryl Gilroy's experience as described in her book, Black Teacher (a forerunner of To Sir, With Love). I imagine you've watched Steve McQueen's Small Axe films. Wonder what you thought of them?
On another note, I love that you described the children as survivors with tremendous inventiveness and that you refrained from using the current catchword "resilience" which, in the US at least, is often used to justify not providing adequate support or material resources for people decimated by COVID or displaced by climate-induced natural disasters. And your important observation that children mostly do very well left to themselves (albeit with an eye of the welfare of the vulnerable) reminded me of the Opies' book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren.
Thank you! What a pleasure this was to read. J
Wow! So much to respond to here Josna.
Thank-you for this comment. I'm going to start with 'resilience' and you are spot on with the thought that this is primarily an excuse not to give kids the support they need and of course, I don't mean coddling. This usually takes the form of a belief in the importance of "grit" - one of the educational fads I found more than usually distasteful. I actually wrote several posts on the topic. Even took the so-called "grit test" and was found to be entirely lacking in this psychological ingredient.
Grit Hits the Fan https://www.josieholford.com/no-more-grit-hits-the-fan/
Operation Grit https://www.josieholford.com/operationgrit/
The Chronicles of Grit https://www.josieholford.com/the-chronicles-of-grit/
I topped all that off with the imagined new cleaning powder "Grigor" which has equal parts of Grit and that other dubious educational substance - Rigor: https://www.josieholford.com/enough-with-all-the-grigor/
It's years since I read Gilroy's book. I remember reading it with a sense of shock, astonishment, and outrage. And much preferred it to Braithwaite's (Too bad Sam Selvon and Andrea Levy didn't try school teaching. Or maybe not, it might have eaten them up from within!) I've never seen the Small Axe films. That's something to look forward to. Watching the "Mangrove" episode would be a useful corrective to the upscale smuggery of most of W11 today. (Such a laugh to think they named an expensive boutique hotel The Laslett. If they only knew the half of it.
I loved your post about all the Penguins and I've also read a few of your older posts. I'm struck by how much they intersect with my own experiences. I didn't live on a farm but once had a large garden on Long Island and know all too well the epic struggle with potato beetles and the essential activity of squishing them at every stage from yellow underleaf egg colony to ravaging adult. (Home-grown potatoes do taste different.) And Top of the Pops and TV in the year 1963. Now I have to go read them all. What an interesting life!
And of course - that Opies book is an essential text! I wonder how much of that lore and language has survived the last few decades of childhood.
More anon. And thanks again.
What an experience! It makes me a bit disappointed in the tame month of June I had in London.
Love the look back and how you tell it. I'd say more, but previous commenters have already said it better.
Your latest post hit a serious nostalgia nerve - so I rummaged around and found my diary from 1970. I met you in a basement club (the Dorian) on May 9th 1970 and I still remember you talking that night about the work you were doing with children at the playground. The diary entry for the following Saturday - ‘Went to see the adventure playground - super!!’. You had just qualified as a teacher and I was just about to apply for teacher training college - your enthusiasm for working with children was completely inspiring. The entry for 9th of June reads - ‘J. went for teaching job interview - and got it!! Came to tea and impressed my grandparents.’ The old and dilapidated housing was not quite so inspiring…. There was one crumbling ‘short-life waiting for demolition’ house where we lived in Stockwell which we had to have fumigated by the council as there were bed bugs (!!!!) living behind the wallpaper. The street was very dilapidated but there was a neighbourly feel about it - people sat out on the high front steps and chatted to each other on warm evenings. For some unknown reason my diary stops on Tuesday 23rd June 1970 and the last entry is ‘Interview at Furzedown teacher training college on Monday!’ I was accepted and the rest, as they say say, is history….
Thanks for bringing back that brilliant summer, Josie.
In Kent. In bed. Early morning. Air b and b. 2022. But I am not really here. I am reliving that past era of your blog before we met in 1971. Somewhere I never was. Knew nothing of before this haunting, disturbing blog post. Only names not the full force and flavour of your past. And here once lived my mother and father. I know only this from family research. I may not have known all that but I have known you ever since and it is the most enriching part of my life. Thank you for it all.
What a world! I was in London round the same time living in a bed-sit in Bina Gardens with a nursing friend. We had beds that pulled down out of the wall and a shared bathroom, but it was all very clean. I was looking after a rich senile lady in her flat in Mayfair. She had a full day and night staff of housekeepers and nurses. The pay was lousy, but I was very broke. A very different world from where you were. Later we moved to Hammersmith which was more lively.
Great post - fabulous experiences!
And how many people lived to have their picture made under the chin of Ali the Greatest!! Good on you! I loved it
Children are certainly survivors. My brother got in trouble for playing in the bombsites, but that's what they all did. To them it was exciting. I don't think there was such a thing as a bored child and none of them were molly-coddled. Children need protection from abusive adults but as a result I think now they are over-protected. You are right too about the creativity of children and their need for freedom from supervision. In 1957, aged 9, I was in Phnom Penh. My parents seemed not to know what to do about my education, so for almost a year I was allowed to be a street urchin with an Australian girl I had met. No one worried about us and we had a grand time. We were issued a small amount of pocket money and let loose. We ate street food, went to movies and did naughty things, like swimming in the roof top water tank (which decanted slim into the kitchen sink which rather ruined things). We also disturbed some ill-humoured Frenchman's siesta in the Hotel Le Royale, while we were searching for criminals in the attic...we were not short of imagination. I lost a year of education, more really because there was a period of backwards-forwards from American to French to English and back to American. It all counts as experience, doesn't it? 1969 was the year I went to work for BA. I could not have imagined 2022 if I had tried. It would have seemed impossibly far away.
Wow. Extraordinary stories there. Would love to hear more. Thank you.
Strange to learn about your Notting Hill experiences. I left Headlands in 1965 but didn’t start at Imperial College until October 1966. There were no halls of residence to speak of and for my first term I shared a room with three others at the impressive sounding Hills Hotel, Princes Square, Bayswater, placed there by the university. Rooms there were largely occupied by long term residents but some were available on an hourly basis for other activities. We nearly froze to death that first winter, the only time I have slept fully clothed in bed wearing an overcoat. After Christmas we found a two bedroom flat to rent in Coville Terrace, off Portobello Road. Shortly after we moved in Panorama did a special edition on slum housing in London and our road featured as one of the worst. I was fairly innocent only child from Swindon and the two years I spent there taught me a great deal about the big, wide world of grown ups. Rats, a landlady who collected rent in a Chauffeur driven Rolls Royce and lived in the Savoy Hotel, a drug dealer two flats up offering free heroin, a sex worker on the top floor, police body searches as we walked down the road, a bedroom where what looked like patterns on the wallpaper turned out to be mould and finally the drug dealer being beaten with a rounders bat in the hallway so badly that it stained the walls and carpet but they were never cleaned. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention the day the ceiling collapsed on us while we were asleep.
My flat mates and I could cope with all this because we knew that it was temporary, we would be leaving before too long with a degree and the certainty of a decent job and a bright future. To have grown up as a child in that environment with little expectation of a better life must have been awful.
That is brilliant Mike.
Yes – that is exactly how it was. The rats the filth, the perishing cold, the collapsing ceilings and the people! I had all that in the back of my mind as i wrote. It was an amazing time, an extraordinary place and the living conditions were appalling.
I remember the winter. It was impossible to heat those huge rooms and anyway the windows were broken. You slept in your clothes and whatever else might help. And next day you had to take an interminable journey to Abbey Wood and try and be presentable for your first teaching practice. And yes – this was Rachman territory although by my time he was dead.
But in spite of everything – I would not exchange that time and those people and experiences for the world.
Where else would I have met the emaciated heroin addict Paul whose family had given up on him and who died of an overdose in the top floor bedroom; Tony the child molester (he did not work out too well on the playground!); the wonderful Goldie, whose family rented the basement; Eddie the cook who – when drunk and sentimental – would tell me how he would cut his right arm off for me; the lesbians six houses down who lived by prostitution; the rock musicians getting high and about to break into the big(ger) time; Mel who sat across from me in the kitchen, took a knife from the drawer and started to slice her wrists; visiting the gay dive the Robin Hood on Inverness Terrace; and the transvestite who had a cannabis tincture prescription and shared it generously. (Dip your cigarette and it went green. Burn off the alcohol. rewrap with a Rizla. Et voila! – a legal marijuana smoke. Not actually something I ever went in for once the novelty wore off.)
And Rhaune herself. What a set of contradictions! And that is a whole other story for another time.
I know it sounds like a catalogue of horrors. It was. And it wasn’t. But it was all surely a big eye-opener.
So much more too, the crunch of the discarded hypodermics as we walked down the front steps, the enormous man who stepped through our ground floor window next to the front door because Rose on the top floor hadn't buzzed him in. 'OK lads', he said,' just passing through' and there was no way we were going to argue. The blind musician from the Portobello Star pub who I helped cross Bayswater Road, only for him to grab my crotch and suggest we went back to his place, the Greek restaurant where we had moussaka twice a week as it was the cheapest hot meal for miles, making half a pint of bitter last all evening so we could listen to the music in the Portobello Star, saying at the college library until it closed because it was warm, walking the streets in the early hours because my asthma was so bad I couldn't sleep and being questioned by the police (so easy in those days to plant a few pills and make up the arrest number - still I was white and educated so not so likely as others in the area), revising to Whiter Shade of Pale and eating biscuits for supper, 'adapting' the gas meter so that we only needed one 10p piece from January onwards. I went back last year on a trip to London, to see the old flat. We paid 7 guineas a week plus gas and electric. Currently a flat the same size as ours, although in better condition (!!) is available at around £1.575m.
All such a long way from Cricklade Road!
More great anecdotes from another time, another world. Brilliant to read.
I think everyone had one of those gas meters. I had one in Cardiff although I hadn't done the "fixing". It was either that or shiver all evening. And yes - the college library was a safe haven for keeping warm. There was also one for the gas ring in the shared kitchen It took pennies - the big sort.