A talk by Rodney Dale delivered to the Chesterton Local History Group on 15 November 1999, a personal account of life in the area during the Second World War and afterwards.

(New Chesterton is to the East of Cambridge City, and the West of Old Chesterton)

The roots of the talk lie in my book Halcyon Days, sub-titled Recollections of Vintage Motoring, which brings in the Chesterton childhood because that’s where I lived between 1939 and 1954. Some of what I will say is peculiar to the area, some to a wider context of Cambridge, and some is general to the times.

 I should also say that the Chesterton peculiar to my experience is New Chesterton [lying between Cambridge to the West and Old Chesterton to the East], but you’ll be able to work that out as we go along. I will try to avoid using phrases such as: ‘Of course, in those days we uster ...’ and ‘I remember on one occasion ...’

 I have quite a good memory, but I did have to check a few points so some of what I say may be the results of research rather than recollection. I will work from a script, to pack more information into the time available.

 When war seemed likely in 1939, my parents decided to move to Cambridge. My father was unfit for military service, and had some idea of doing a PhD in Anglo-Saxon. The rumour was that Hitler wanted to preserve the university for when he invaded, and would therefore avoid damaging it. If the rumour were that widely known, one wonders why the place didn’t become more crowded. After much house hunting, our choice was between Tralea (3 de Freville Avenue) and Craigielee (142 Chesterton Road), both leasehold at £80 a year. I’m glad to say with hindsight that we chose Craigielee, because it had a cellar and had a two-storey building at the end of the garden looking on to Sandy Lane. I should say that I was five when we moved in in 1939 shortly before war broke out — too young to understand much — and nine when the war finished — by which time I understood a whole lot more.

 The household comprised my parents (Donald and Celia Dale), my mother’s parents, me, and Torty the tortoise (6d from Woolworth’s, Muswell Hill Broadway, whence we had come). Later, the Mansfield family from Sutton Valence near Maidstone moved into Tralea; Mickey Mansfield and I both went to the Perse School, and became best friends. He died in 1982.

Preparations for war were very real. How the manufacturers of brown sticky paper tape kept up with the demand I don’t know. Every window pane was criss-crossed with it, to prevent glass from flying all over the place should it shatter. As time went on, the tape dried, lost its adhesive properties, and curled longitudinally, but no one seemed to mind very much. Public buildings took grander measures with sandbags, or sometimes brick-built blast walls. For example — the Perse (upper) School, where I went later, was enclosed in brick-built blast walls, which made the classrooms very dark. The assembly hall at the Perse Prep, then at 52 Bateman Street, had great timber props to support the ceiling, with fascinating double wedges to keep them tight.

 At some stage, we went to a dim public building and were issued with identity cards, and ration books printed on strange paper with coloured whiskers embedded in it. Our identity numbers later became our national health numbers. I’ve been TADA16/3 for over 60 years, and I can never understand why having an identity card is supposed to be such an infringement of civil liberty. We were also issued with gas masks in their fibreboard boxes; fortunately I was deemed old enough to have a small adult model, rather than the ‘Mickey Mouse’ type with red rubber ears — designed to amuse the children, I suppose. I can still summon up the smell and the feel of the rubber mask on my face, the effort of breathing, and the technique of exhaling raspberries, underlaid by a concern that the mask wouldn’t work properly if it were ever put to the test. Because we had to carry our gas masks everywhere with us, we acquired green canvas cases with leather shoulder straps. I have no doubt that women’s magazines of the time were full of helpful advice on how to carry a gas mask elegantly.

 In 1940, men came and cut down our railings — and everyone else’s — to provide material for what was known as ‘the war effort’. Numerous corroborative stories have emerged to show that giving up one’s railings was a futile sacrifice; I knew early on that our railings, and those from North View next door, had been dumped behind a row of garages in Miss Onyett’s yard off Sandy Lane. The pots and pans collected were no use either — the only possible value of the exercise was to make those who made the sacrifices feel better.

 My grandfather went up to Nicholas Brothers at 32 Carlyle Road to buy yards of 2x1 to make frames which were then covered with black paper held on by drawing pins and more sticky tape. Every night, there was the ritual of lifting the frames into position on the windows and securing them with wooden turnbuttons, and occasionally carrying out an external inspection to make sure that there was no light showing. Motor vehicles acquired pinholes over their sidelights, and finned dimmers over their headlights. Kerbs were painted white. I remember nothing of any Home Guard activity, but there were Air Raid Wardens to tell you what to do if there were an Air Raid, and many houses displayed a discreet plaque by the front door — ‘Stirrup Pump Kept Here’.

 We ourselves didn’t have a stirrup pump, but for some reason our garden was one afternoon the scene of a stirrup pump practise. To my resentment — you know how territorial children can be — the garden filled with people. My father fetched a bucket of water. Then the stirrup pump man showed the assembled company how to place the barrel of the pump in the bucket and anchor the stirrup with the foot. The 30-foot hose, crisp and rotten, snapped off at the root. The convenor went away to fetch another pump. Everyone stood round in silence because they hadn’t been introduced. He came back with a new pump and all was well. A piece of curved brick was laid at the far end of the lawn to simulate an incendiary bomb, and the man showed how a second person should crawl towards the fire with the nozzle of the hose held forward above the head for maximum effect — on the fire, that is.

 I found recently that the holder of a Stirrup Pump — a Street Party Leader as he was called — paid 7/6 for the privilege of being ‘authorised to take possession of a Government-owned Stirrup Pump on loan on the understanding that the pump will be kept ready and available for firefighting purposes whenever the need arises’.

 I soon found the Chesterton Recreation Ground, otherwise known as the Rec, and was enthralled to find there a Millars cement mixer which ran all day to feed the men who were rapidly building air raid shelters for Pye Works staff along that side of the Rec. Air raid shelters appeared in many streets as well, as did the huge black static water tanks against the anticipated needs of the fire service. Shelters and tanks occupied half the carriageway, but since there was little traffic they didn’t have the disastrous effect they would today. After the war, Mickey Mansfield and I spent many hours after school observing the two Ruston Bucyrus caterpillar machines — in real life one a skimmer and the other a shovel, but for that task equipped with great iron demolition balls to start the process of clearing about 100 shelters from the streets. Another feature to be removed after the war was the tank trap, a great ditch that started just south of Babraham Road and ran almost due north to Ditton Meadows. I sometimes visited it with friends — we went to the fields where the trap crossed Queen Edith’s Way — and marvelled at the rich fauna it had acquired, particularly the newts. I was deeply affected by the monstrous act of burying all the wild life when it was filled in . . . what would happen today, I wonder.

 The Pye Radio tower was built on the river side of St Andrew’s Road in about 1942 or 43; rumour had it that it was for transmitting to North Africa. I saw it being built from our rear attic window; up and up it went. It remained a prominent landmark until about 1960; I was working at Cathodeon Meadowcroft Laboratories when the sit-up-and-beg bicycle belonging to Bruce Cooper, our salesman, disappeared one day and reappeared hanging from one of the arms of the tower the next.

 My father started the war teaching English at March Grammar School, travelling by train, leaving home on Sunday night, and returning Friday evening. He didn’t enjoy this very much, and later the Ministry of Labour directed him to become a porter at Addenbrooke’s Hospital — which was of course at 25—29 Trumpington Street, in the days when its medical and surgical staff took up all of 2 1/2 columns in Kelly’s Directory.

 My grandfather failed to convince the war office that he was not too old at 69 to serve in the army — as he had done in the Boer War and the Great War. He managed to find a job as payroll accountant at SEBRO in Madingley Road, catching the works bus early in the morning in order to clock in at 7.15. SEBRO stood for Short Brothers Repair Organisation, and they built Stirling Bombers from reclaimed parts brought from all over the place. The Stirlings were then flight tested by Short Brothers at RAF Bourn — necessary to approve the SEBRO invoices — and then scrapped, since the RAF had no use for them.

 The sound of an air raid siren starting up still makes my spine tingle. There were a few daylight warnings — one trapped granny and me in Mitcham’s one afternoon for what seemed like hours, but there was no enemy action (as it was called). Granny had gone in search of cloth with a price such as ‘one and eleven—three a yard’, for which you got a strip of pins in lieu of a farthing change from a florin. I had gone on my tricycle; we had of course left it outside, and there it was when we at last escaped. I was once detained by an air raid with some friends in the hall of the Perse Prep over lunch, until we were rescued by Dr Watt — the father of Stuart — who lived at that excitingly mysterious tile-hung house that was 48 Milton Road (opposite the end of Gilbert Road) of which all that remains is the monkey-puzzle tree that used to stand in its front garden.

 For all the false alarms, there were 34 air raids on Cambridge — by accident or on purpose — but compared with other places there was very little damage and loss of life — 12 people, a cow and a chicken were killed. The first bombs fell on Vicarage Terrace on 18 June 1940, and accounted for 10 of the 12 human fatalities, but no one could know that future raids would never be anything like as bad. Newspapers and news bulletins were very carefully angled to withhold specific information, while optimising the feeling that we were all in this together and not going to let the enemy get away with it — ‘Britain can take it’ was the slogan of the Blitz. At the same time, another slogan — ‘Careless talk costs lives’ — was continually drummed into us, and incidents such as the Vicarage Terrace raid, or the bomber that came down on the allotments between Milton Road and Scotland Road, were not widely discussed at the time.

 There was a lot of fire watching — indeed, it was my father on the roof of the Leys School Sanatorium (then acting as an annexe to Addenbrooke’s) on 16 January 1941 who reported the incendiary bombs that fell on the Perse School that night. The only local bomb damage I ever saw was on 7 August 1942; one of many incendiary bombs that came down that night fell on Doris Arnold’s hairdressing salon next to V&R Finch, greengrocers and fruiterers, in Chesterton Road then as now. I was most upset at the sight of the higgledy-piggledy charred timbers and damaged equipment, and wanted to rush home and empty the ten shillings or so I knew I had in my money box to present to Miss Arnold to help rebuild her life. My mother persuaded me that it wouldn’t be a good idea, as Miss Arnold would have ‘other arrangements’. I didn’t know what they might be, but it all seemed very grown up.

 For safety at night, until we got blasé about it, we would take refuge in the cellar. My father had built a pillar of tin trunks filled with books to support the ceiling, but the structure was never put to the test. Another wartime smell I can even now conjure up — the peculiar clinging dampness of the cellar, augmented with the taste of Horlicks tablets. Later, while others were building Anderson shelters in their gardens, or Morrison shelters under their tables indoors, Father — who had a different way of looking at things — tricycled down to the Atlas Stone Company in Coldhams Lane (with me on the luggage grid) and ordered a reinforced concrete shelter which was duly erected around the three-piece suite in our sitting room, after the floor had been strengthened — the cellar didn’t run under that part of the house. A little access trap remained, and there was some talk — possibly humorous — that we would hide down there were there ever an invasion. Father found that Mrs Bell, who kept the village store at Milton, was able to supply sardines ‘under the counter’ and he stored many a tin beneath the floor against possible later hardship. The concrete shelter, I should say, exuded a dry cold (unlike the cellar’s damp cold); its doorway was opposite the fireplace, but we never lit a fire lest some explosion should blast lighted coals into the shelter.

 Soon after we arrived in Cambridge, my parents and I ascended the Castle Mound and tried to pick out the landmarks before the marker slab was removed ‘for the duration’ as we used to say. Later, climbing the mound was banned, presumably the idea was that a German spy, not knowing of the ban, would go up for a look round and be arrested. Ted Tetley (Harrow and St Catharines), the father of a school friend, was caretaker of the Shire Hall, and many a Saturday afternoon would Gordon and I crawl up the scrubby side of the Mound, thrilled at the illegality of it.

 Talking of spies, my grandfather made quite a nuisance of himself by reporting loitering figures to the War Office, and then being even more of a nuisance when no action appeared to be taken. He became convinced that Conder the hairdresser, next to the Tivoli cinema, was the centre of a spy ring, but I’m sure there was some more innocent explanation for whatever was going on. I must say I didn’t like havig my hair cut at Conder’s — the man was peculiarly rough — and I was soon a regular patron of ‘Dodger’ Farren whose salon was the front room of his house at 20 Herbert Street. All round the walls were waiting chairs, no two the same, and you chose whichever you thought was the most comfortable, remembering where in the queue you belonged. An added attraction of this hairdresser was the constant debate in progress — everybody was drawn in, and it was often very thought provoking, though I can remember no topic apart from the raging discussion about the difference between ‘tinning’ and ‘canning’ which arose one day out of my school homework.

 I was soon sent to Chesterton Preparatory School, an L-shaped building of corrugated iron through a twitten at the end of de Freville Avenue, headmistress Miss Dorothy Hodder to whom I took an instant dislike although I’m sure she was a perfectly reasonable person. I found that the school was overflowing with out-of-control children running about pretending to be dive bombers, and that there was no opportunity of doing any of the exciting school work which I’d enjoyed in London. Of course, Chesterton Prep had been suddenly inundated with evacuees and poor Miss Hodder and her colleague Miss Jarman must have been even more dismayed than I was. I begged my parents to remove me, and I was sent to the Perse Prep School in 1940, moving to the Upper School in Hills Road opposite the Catholic Church in 1944 where I spent the rest of my school days. I later found that Chesterton Preparatory School had been founded in 1911 by none other than the great Perse Headmaster Dr Rouse as a ‘Prep for the Prep’ — to prepare boys for entering the Perse Preparatory School. Chesterton Prep lasted until Miss Hodder retired in 1972, but Dr Rouse had severed his direct connection in 1923 when the Perse governors questioned the propriety of his running a private school while serving as Headmaster of another — even though, he said, he had planned to hand the school over to them free of all encumbrances.

 The tricycle on which I had ridden to Mitchams was quite an advanced chain-driven model and, when not at school, I spent much time riding round and round the de Freville Estate, getting to know every nook and cranny. I went for a walk round the other day, and was overwhelmed at the amount of building that has taken place since I knew the area. In the late forties, as we cycled home from school, we were intrigued to see one of the little Chesterton Road end-of-garden buildings, which gave on to that part of Montague Road now for some reason renamed Hamilton Road, emerge as ‘The Hobby’ — with people actually living in it. Now every such building has been converted into a dwelling.

 Back to the early 1940s; I often rode down to Mrs Nunn, the confectioner in Cam Road, for a 1/2d water ice in a cardboard tube — very sticky — or the creamy 1d cylindrical Walls ice wrapped in a strip of waxed paper. In those days of corner — or at least local — shops, I also visited Tiplady’s in Belvoir Road, and I think Barron’s on the corner of Kimberley and Aylestone Road.

 There were many shops much closer to 142 Chesterton Road. A little further along on our side to the west were the shops up a slope — first in 1939 Mr Richardson, tobacconist and confectioner, portly in his knitted fawn cardigan, nicknamed ‘Tit’, once a town rowing coach who would proudly show his faded newspaper cutting dating from the 90s describing how he had been so busy shouting into his megaphone that he’d cycled into the river on a bend. The shop was later run by his widow, who then became Mrs Noutch, and handed it over to an American named Shreeve who was in due time followed by Lister. Next door to that was Mr Beckermann the tailor, who really did sit cross-legged on his table. He gave way to Norton the masseur. Then came Eric Marsh, the butcher, who gave way to AA Francis, and last in the row was Miss Venner (fruit and vegetables), who gave way to Mr Hall.

 I spent many hours in the back regions of Miss Venner’s shop putting the world to rights with her and sometimes Dennis Applin who lived at 39 Humberstone Road. Dennis delivered greengrocery on Miss Venner’s tradesman’s bicycle and went to what was called the County School (which was supposed to be at loggerheads with the Perse, though I never noticed it). But he had another life — as Chick Applin, the danceband leader — quite big at one time, but I never got to the bottom of it, and would be interested to know more about it.

 Our end of Hawthorn Way was dominated by Hallen’s Showrooms opposite 142. To the west was Matthew’s off licence (I think run by the Mr Hall who later became a greengrocer), and to the east Alex S Thom, the pharmacist. Mr Thom (‘Sandy’) was a bird watcher in his spare time; he had a strange Scottish accent and his enquiry as to whether my mother had ‘read his pamphlet on the mous-tached warbler’ met with a puzzled stare. Mr Thom’s other claim to fame was playing chess with the stone-deaf lawyer Thorold Gossett at 138, who gave up shaving when his wife died and consequently sported a bigger and bigger beard. [Sandy Thom died in 2002.]

 On the Hawthorn Way sides of Hallens were HF Norman, hardware, and Stanley Gibbons, the Lemona Stores (which later crossed the road). You could scarcely get into Norman’s shop with its — yes, another smell — its smell of paraffin, firelighters, creosote and oil and everywhere built up to the ceiling with shelves of goodies. It never occurred to me that there might be some items of ironmongery Mr Norman didn’t keep. Mr Norman also had a travelling shop, also piled high with goodies, but I’m not sure what area he covered. The Lemona Stores, by contrast, seemed to have scarcely any stock at all. It was a subject of continued debate how he managed to make a living. Mr Gibbons had a peculiar method of locomotion which included sudden sharp turns on one foot to get him to where he wanted to be. It was said that he had been injured by a recoiling gun in the Great War, which had affected his muscular control. One tended to buy only prepacked goods from him, as he would open a paper bag by blowing into it, sometimes producing a plosive cough for good measure.

 Back to my tricycle. Before long, I had explored — and mapped — the whole area; I toyed with the idea of selling copies of my map but suspected that its coverage was too limited to be of much use to grown ups — and anyway, how was I going to copy it? I found out all about jellygraphs from the Milton Road branch library, but it made rather an unsatisfactory mess and the venture was quietly abandoned.

 When Mickey Mansfield arrived at Tralea, he brought with him the much-heard-of-but-never-by-me experienced soapbox on wheels, or ‘trolley’ as we called it. I was probably a bit large for the tricycle then, and we spent endless happy days pushing each other round and round the block, talking incessantly as children do. We had read about the ‘skate’, the ground contact wherethrough trams derived their power (the other conductor being the overhead wire), so we fastened a cast-iron piece of clothes-airer frame to the trolley to make it into a tram. We were unwarrantedly surprised to find that the skate wore away quite rapidly as it scraped along the pavement, making a somewhat embarrassing noise, though not embarrassing enough to outweigh our joy at having it. Later on — it must have been after the War — when we were early teenagers, we fixed a sail to the trolley and had a spectacular crash after wildly accelerating down Haig Road and into Cam Road. During the war, cars had been fitted with finned dimmers to cover their headlights, and we had fixed one of these finny things to the back of the trolley, and it did my knees no good at all when we crashed.

 The buses were Eastern Counties, red at first but soon grey. Eastern Counties seemed to have Cambridge and land to the east covered, while the initially green Eastern National served the west. There were a number of small companies as well — Burwell & District, Long’s, Premier Travel, Weedon’s and Whippet. Some — by no means all — buses pulled gas-generating trailers. There was also an open-topped bus with an outside staircase from Westcliff-on-Sea, a much-prized ride, but seldom on one of the routes I used. Cambridge bus routes were easily understood; the 101 ran from Green End Road to the Station, 102 from Perne Road to Meadowlands, 105 from Strangeways to Drummer Street, 106 from Girton Corner to the Red Cross and 115 King’s Hedges Road to Newnham. The 101 took me straight to school. Having got on at de Freville Avenue for a time, I found that the Haig Road stop was better, because it was earlier on the route. Even so, it could be difficult to board the bus, especially when the weather was inclement. At first (in 1940) there was no queuing; the bus arrived and all the big people surged forward, leaving behind the little ones at the back having to wait for the next one. At some stage, compulsory queuing was introduced, which made life much fairer. I felt very secure enclosed by the crossed straps of my leather satchel and my green canvas gas-mask case. False security, because before I understood the principles of the manly act of stepping off a moving bus, I left with my back to the bus instead of facing it; however, my satchel and gas mask helped to save me as the road rose up in my face. By that time, we had lady conductors, or ‘clippies’, and the one who had witnessed my fall stopped the bus to ensure that I was OK, and gave me kindly instruction on how to perform the manoeuvre safely (if I felt I had to do it).

 For the years of my bus travel to and from school, the 101 went to the traffic lights at Chesterton Lane, turned left, and ran straight through the centre of town to Station Road Corner and then up to the Station. Riding on top of a bus meeting another bus in the narrows of Sidney Street was quite exciting, for it was not until the early 50s that the one-way system in the town centre was introduced amid much debate as to which way round the Trinity Street—Market Street—Sidney Street triangle traffic should go. Mitcham’s Corner was quite simple — you could come up Victoria Avenue from the Midsummer Common direction, past the hilarious sign saying ‘River Trips Over the Bridge’ and turn either left or right into Chesterton Road. Another permanent traffic-control feature was the policeman on point duty at the junction of Market Street and Sidney Street (‘outside old Heffers’). Traffic lights were few and far between, as were pedestrian crossings. Even after the war, when things began to return to some sort of normal, there was very little traffic by today’s standards, and not much to help the pedestrian wishing to cross the road safely.

 Our part of Chesterton Road didn’t go anywhere you couldn’t get to more directly by Milton Road — ‘anywhere’ being the considerable military site (known to us as the tank field) that is now the Science Park. An occasional tank would stray past 142, either on its own tracks or on a tank carrier with three rows each of eight wheels. As the D-day invasion approached (although of course we didn’t know it was approaching), flail-tanks (for killing mines on the beaches) started to gather at Milton. We frequently saw 60-foot long ‘Queen Mary’ trailers for shifting aircraft, and of course more ordinary military vehicles, one of which lost its way and embedded itself in the turreted corner of Mr Brady’s house at 11 de Freville Avenue one evening. That drew the crowds.

 Milk came in bottles closed by cardboard inserts, with a press-out circle in the middle, either for a straw (school milk) or to make it easier to remove the top. The cardboard annulus could be wound with raffia or wool to make elements for tablemats. There were often little black hairs floating on top of the school milk — but no grown-up would ever believe me, so the next question of where they came from could never be asked. All home milk was boiled, which resulted in a delicious thick creamy skin which Granny gave me as a treat. Milk deliveries were made by horse-drawn milk float; we got our milk from Mr Ebden’s dairy in Cam Road, and later from Chivers Home Farm Dairies — I think they took Mr Ebden over. The Chesterton milk horses were Tommy and Mary; Mary died when she retired, but Tommy and his float were bought by the Horse Saving Society, started by my sister and her little horsey friends — but I’ve jumped forward to 1958.

 Horses were far from uncommon. There were at least two mobile greengrocers on the Chesterton Road round, one of whom, Mr Scott (‘Scotty’) had an inimitable cry: ‘Any key-abbages, key-arrots, walnits’. He seemed to be on good terms with Miss Venner, even though they were in direct competition. Other horse users included the baker, and the coal merchant as well as the occasional rag-and-bone man. All this equine activity resulted in a great deal of dung, but the economic system included a couple of old boys with handcarts who spent their lives going round collecting it. Bicycles played their part too; real errand boys from the butcher and grocer of course, whistling tunes in those days when there were proper tunes to whistle, and people knew how to, but there was also an itinerant chair-seat caner (fascinating to watch) and the ubiquitous knife grinder.

 It seems to me, no doubt with hindsight, that there was much more of a hierarchy then, but it was a pecking order where the people above were far more aware of their responsibilities than those below were of their rights. If people fulfil the one, other people don’t need to demand the other. My grandfather used to leave a tin of cigarette ends hidden behind our front wall for a particular tramp, who would otherwise have had to pick them up from the gutter. It was a politer (some might say stuffier) world — men raised their hats to ladies, and held doors open for them. We wouldn’t dream of walking along with our hands in our pockets, or of eating in the street (though one sometimes did take on the forbidden thrill of eating a halfpenny bun fresh from Webb the baker on the way home from school). When the National Anthem played, you stood properly to attention, even if you were alone (as my Grandfather taught me) — none of this twiddling and looking around as seen on TV. Words such as ‘damn’ and ‘blast’ were frowned upon; ‘bloody’ was the height of taboo — ‘a coal-heaver wouldn’t use language like that’ said shocked Granny when I daringly tried it out on her. I don’t know what they got up to in the forces, but things — as we all know now — were destined to change after the war.

 My sister arrived in 1941; she was born in Nurse Kingston’s private nursing home at 37—39 Milton Road. She was issued with a baby’s respirator, which enclosed the whole body and had a little concertina to keep the air flowing. This lived in the air-raid shelter and, as it turned out (and thank heavens), was never used. In due course a regular feature of our week was the Sunday afternoon walk. We would start by going up Hawthorn Way to Milton Road. The big house Hurst had given place to the Hurst Park Estate, but its lesser companion, The Limes, still stood, the surgery of our family doctors Oakden and Walker. Doctor Oakden, I now find, was also ‘Honorary Anaesthetist to Addenbrooke’s Hospital’. The Limes, it was said, was falling asunder because it was built on sand. St Lawrence’s Roman Catholic Church now stands there, presumably built upon the same sand, but with more faith. So we’d continue up Hurst Park Avenue and Leys Road to Arbury Road and up to Histon Road. Arbury Road building stopped not far beyond Leys Road, after which it was, as they say, ‘all open fields around there’. There were some farms to go with the open fields of course: Manor Farm, now the Manor School, and Arbury Camp Farm at the top where, on the other side of Histon Road (which is actually Cambridge Road Impington at that point) stood the finger post pointing to ‘Chesterton 2’ and the pond which in Autumn served as the focus for a particularly thick pocket of fog. At the end of Arbury Road we sometimes turned back; sometimes continued the circuit by walking south down Histon Road. It was — and is — about 3/4 of a mile to the end of Gilbert Road, past the cul de sac of Roseford Road on the left and the Clive Vale Nurseries on the right, shortly before the Scotsdale Laundry. It was on that site that another school friend [the sadly deceased] Gerald Turvill (son of the laundry) established the Scotsdale Garden Centre, the first in Cambridge when the term ‘garden centre’ was unheard of, later moving to the present site on Shelford Road, Trumpington. Back to the walk — we turned down Gilbert Road; there was no Carlton Way, indeed, Hall Farm was still working there. Further on Courtney Way, another cul de sac, and then down Gurney Way, leading to Ascham Road, with the Open Air School at the corner. The Open Air School was founded in 1916 to educate what were then described as ‘delicate children’ — ie those who were physically or mentally handicapped. It moved to the Ascham Road site in 1928. In the late 1950s it became the Roger Ascham School and then, when it moved to a new building on the site entered from Courtney Way, the Lady Adrian Special School. The old Open Air School buildings are now the Secondary Support Centre.

 Down Ascham Road and past the Milton Road branch library which did a lot for me. When you went in, adult books were in the central section, children’s (or juvenile) to the right and the periodicals reading room to the left. I read my way through the works of the likes of Gunby Hadath, Hugh Lofting, Arthur Ransome and W Heath Robinson & KRG Browne; at least once a week I’d be in the reading room going through Practical Mechanics, Practical Wireless, Wireless World, Meccano Magazine, The Motor, Autocar and anything else that took my fancy. It was heaven — public libraries should be opened, not closed. But the walk we’re on is on a Sunday, so we couldn’t go into the library; we might turn left along Milton Road to look at Hobday’s Nursery, or go straight across, down Chesterton Hall Crescent, and turn left to 142, passing 233 where the brothers FH and AWE Chapple then had their dental surgery, in a house which is still a dental surgery to this very day.

[The talk, as delivered, then went on to some tales of vintage motoring, all of which — and more — are to be found in my book Halcyon Days, published by Fern House in 1999.]

References:

Bowyer, Michael: Map of Cambridge air-raids

Cambridge Borough Council: Map showing removal of defence works 1946

–: Minutes of Air Raid Precautions Committee meetings

Falconer, Jonathan: The Short Stirling goes to War Alan Sutton 1995

Kelly’s Directory of Cambridge

Mrs Rowlandson: Lady Adrian Special School

Spalding’s Directory of Cambridge

Williams: bus timetables

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