Feeling My Age

Sometimes travelling in distance can be a bit like travelling in time. Found myself revisiting the scene of some of my earliest childhood memories this weekend… For a full set of pix see the slideshow on Flickr

In the early fifties Huntingdon was still a small county town, chartered by King John in 1205 and with Oliver Cromwell among its former MPs. It was the small, sleepy hub of a small, sleepy county – there were so few people with telephones that my grandmother’s number was Huntingdon 351. The whole population was something like five or six thousand and this 1951 snapshot shows The Causeway completely empty of cars.

My great uncle was rector of St Mary’s parish church there and lived in the imposing red brick vicarage from 1938-1970, while Dad, Mum and us two boys settled in nearby Godmanchester, just a mile up the River Ouse. Every Sunday my atheist father required his two sons to attend morning service at St Mary’s. Perhaps out of family loyalty or perhaps – as he claimed – because he wanted us to know what we were rejecting if we opted to follow in his godless footsteps.

In the seventies – long after Uncle Alexander had retired and the rest of the family died or moved away – Huntingdon got swallowed by the neighbouring country of Cambridgeshire. Visiting it today the population has more than quadrupled. A vast concrete flyover has been driven across the nearby watermeadows while the ringroad brutally gouged through the town centre is like a badly-healed razor scar across the face of an old friend.

So Huntingdon may be much bigger but it’s also much diminished compared to the county town of which my grandma was the first woman mayor in 800 years. Back in 1954, that was quite a big deal. Today, wandering past the closed arcades and charmless redevelopments along its high street, it’s hard to imagine anyone nowadays giving a toss one way or the other.

That said, even if it was possible, I wouldn’t go back and live amid the quaint rural racism, sexism and homophobia of 1950s Huntingdon, not for a million quid in old money. The good old days are definitely here and now.

This immaculate late 1950s Morris Commercial J-type with its custom ice cream van body still regularly plies for trade outside the Royal Festival Hall at the South Bank Centre in London.

The GPO used a version of this van both for Royal Mail deliveries and for their engineers with Post Office Telephones. Yes, kids – there was once a time when Royal Mail, Parcel Force, Post Offices and British Telecom were all part of the same nationally owned company – which was run as a public service rather than as a way of extorting money from the public for the benefit of its shareholders.

According to Wikipedia the only difference between the Morris J Type van launched in 1949 and the equivalent Austin 101 born in 1957 was the badge above the radiator grille. This one says “Morris COMMERCIAL” – both models rolled off the same assembly line at the Nuffield factory in Oxford and were eventually discontinued in 1961 after nearly 50,000 had been made.

By comparison, Ford introduced the Transit van in 1953 and haven’t stopped making them to this day. As of last year they’d built six million of the things – I even briefly owned one myself. But that’s another story altogether.

If this doesn’t take you back, just for a moment, to postwar Britain then you probably didn’t live there. Writing this blog helps remind me of that vanished world we grew up in – while at the same time making me heartily glad to be in the here and now. I do miss the people – particularly close family like my dad, mum and grandma. But at the same time they impressed themselves so deeply on us all it also feels like they’re only just out of reach. Even though two of them died more than half a lifetime ago. Their diaries, the photographs, the objects and furniture we’ve inherited, their sayings and quirky family names for things are still very much with us.