Qualia compilation 2: Edwardian railways

This qualia flashback is to early 1970, our last winter at Croft Garden, Hanwell. It is a regular, returning one. Very familiar, very comforting. 

It's my second term at Gunnersbury Grammar, all homework and heavy textbooks in brown paper dust-covers. Latin, algebra, chemistry, poems to be learnt by heart. And detention for forgetting to wear your cap to school. Meanwhile, my parents are preparing for a house move - from Hanwell, across the Uxbridge Road and the Great Western railway line, up the hill to the posh end of West Ealing, by Cleveland Park.

My first encounter with what would be - to this day - our family home was on a foggy evening in January or February of that year; my parents had narrowed the search down to this house. My father took me to see it, half-an-hour's walk from home. I immediately took a strong liking to the place. It had atmosphere, it had spirit of place, it was posh, it was 1930s, Art Deco, eau-de-Nil wallpaper; it had hardly changed since it was built. Oak floors, oak doors, oak staircase.

On the way home, we walked down to the end of Cleveland Road, turned left to Castle Bar Park Halt, as the station was called at the time. Seemingly in the middle of a misty moor, no houses to be seen, just two dimly-lit concrete platforms, each with a shelter, and a footbridge standing astride the line. British Rail Western Region. Cream lettering on a brown background informed us which platform was for us. In the far distance, to the north, I could make out pinpoints of approaching lights through the fog, the diesely purr of a green railcar, running the shuttle service between Greenford and Ealing Broadway. We alighted two stops down the line at West Ealing station, and walked home from there, less than a mile away.

I was profoundly inspired by our evening expedition, something out of the ordinary routine of homework and black-and-white television. From Ealing Public Libraries I had borrowed O.S. Nock's Steam Railways of Britain in colour (Blandford Press, 1967), and read about the different railway companies that existed before their nationalisation in 1948. [Incidentally, I loved those Blandford Press books - whether about trains, planes, military uniforms or armoured fighting vehicles, those beautifully evocative colour plates and detailed descriptions had me entranced!]. The steam trains represented a bygone era I could just about remember from earliest childhood - on my way in a push-chair with my mother to nursery school on The Avenue, over the railway bridge by West Ealing station, clouds of foggy vapours would engulf us as the trains heading in and out of Paddington passed under.

But it was a different England in those Blandford Press illustrations. They brought to mind Edwardian England, country railway branch lines, clerestory coaches pulled by tank engines through oil-lit halts, milk churns standing on the platforms. Decades later, I bought the book online second-hand (one of many O.S. Nock titles to bring back childhood memories).

My way to reach out to that vision was to recreate it through Lego. Individual blue lengths of straight or curved rail, over which flanged wheels would travel. But the wheels were too small, so I adapted bigger wheels (with the rubber tyres removed) to act as the locomotive's driving wheels. Articulated bogies to ensure the loco could negotiate the curves. No doubt laughably unrealistic by today's standards, but I was happy with the result - I felt a satisfaction with the train, and felt a connection with that past that somehow I felt as tangibly as with my own early childhood. 

Pushing that train around a track on the carpet, stopping at the platforms and halts and junctions along the way, I was in different world.

Croft Gardens was cosy, it was what I'd known since birth. But out there was a new world to explore. Our house move - shortly after my transition to Big School - was another part in a major turning point in life, a farewell to childhood and toys, a further step into adolescence. Black-and-white 405-line television would turn to 625 lines in colour, and with BBC2, too. My father's home-developed b&w photography turned to colour as low-cost mail-order processors turned rolls of film into glossy prints. My formerly monochrome world was acquiring brightness, contrast and colour.

So many memories, shaped by play, imaginative play, bringing to life what I'd read about and seen in books. Inspired play that would take me to other places, to other times.

This time five years ago:

The great taste of Polish India Pale Ales

This time six years ago:
Lublin - pearl of Poland's East

This time eight years ago:
70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

This time nine years ago:
Tarkovsky's Stalker: a zone of my own

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw's big billboards

This time 12 years ago:
Pace of development falters