Website stirs memories of Hampton days after war

I SOMETIMES ask myself why we can clearly remember some incidents from our past but not others. For example, I could still ramble on about the death of King George VI and about a miserable April Fools’ Day when I broke my leg.

The events were unrelated, about six years apart and not equally important ... Their only connection was in my own head when I happened to think of them in the early hours of the morning. I had allowed myself to lie awake wondering what I might write about in my next column.

I’d had a scotch or three earlier in the night and that might have had an influence upon my thinking ...

I’m very conscious that another reason why we reminisce is that we grow old. We can’t think of anything better to do than to relive old triumphs. We can regret old mistakes, invent missed opportunities and conjure up different interpretations of previous actions.

For no obvious reason I’ve just spent hours reminiscing. I came upon a Facebook address www.facebook.com/ Did-youdo-youlive-in-Hampton/. It’s a massive web-site loaded with the thoughts of Hamptonians.

They are people of all ages who have lived in Hampton and are reminiscing about life in that notionally boring suburb about a mile up the road from Hampton Court Palace.

The website was a complete eye-opener to me. With my family, I was “bombed out” of our home in Plevna Rd, Hampton in one of the first air raids on London in September 1940 .... I was just a tiny baby at the time. We all survived, roof-less, walls-less and pissed off.

After some chaos my dad found my mum’s false teeth next to an unexploded bomb. Three bombs had hit the home. We eventually spent the subsequent 15 years living next to the bomb site in the now semi-detached half of what remained of the family home.

My view of the suburb is therefore somewhat different from that of current Hamptonians as they commute into London Waterloo each day.

My brother and I were pupils at the local Percy Rd Primary School. The school gets a great write-up on the website. It was in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War and we were the stars of the school’s very successful football (soccer) team.

Brother John was the goalkeeper, already age-for-age the best in the business and on his way to representative football for his country over three Olympic Games and some 70 international caps.

I was the captain of the team because I was a bossy little bastard and, anyway, you always picked the goalkeeper’s twin brother. We were primary school champions for three successive seasons probably because we had the best-fed side in the championship. One of the team was the son of the local butcher and responsible for the beef sandwiches that we nibbled on at half-time.

Our dad was in charge of putting up the goalposts for our town team’s home matches. His best mate, “Jumbo” Slark, was easily the roughest centre forward in the West Middlesex League, incredibly ugly but fearless when going for a winning goal on a wet Saturday at the local Recreation Ground.

Hampton was more than just football. It had a public library next door to the mortuary. This was convenient because any borrower feeling unwell while in possession of an overdue book could arrange to pass away en-route to the library. This was cheaper than snuffing it shortly after paying an exorbitant fine.

I recall that the mortuary had a room reserved for those feeling particularly unwell while seeking final comfort from a well-thumbed novel or last week’s Woman’s Weekly.

I can’t now be completely sure of the accuracy of all these recollections but they won’t be too far off the truth ......