Moving thoughts

Memories of Bedford

My brothers and I helped my mum move flats last week. The day itself was reasonably straightforward - though with lots of hanging around waiting for solicitors to phone, as is normal - and it was a relief to help mum get the move completed after several months of problems and delays.

The Great Ouse at Bedford, with St Paul’s in the distance

As we were sitting waiting for a call in the old flat’s bare living room, on the large sofa that mum was leaving behind because it would have required a redesign of physics to get it out of the flat, I realised that her move a mile or so across town ends a direct connection I’ve had my entire life with the area of Bedford I grew up in, east of the town centre and north of the river, full of large, solid, red brick Victorian terraces and semis.

When I was born (in the North Wing hospital, not far away) we lived in a terraced house in Bower Street¹. A few years later we moved a few blocks west. Dad hired a removal lorry and excitingly drove me to playgroup in it - through a palimpsest of memories of memories I think I can just about recall that. Our new home in Waterloo Road, parallel to the Embankment, was a long house with a cellar where dad kept his bikes, and a garden with fruit trees; this is where my brothers and I grew up. In the early 1980s a tourist walked past the house as dad, my brothers and I were building a front garden wall (which was still there last time I looked), and he was so intrigued that he took a photo of us, which has become a thing of family legend.

Mum lived in the house until about twenty years ago, and then moved to a flat round the corner. So until now, this area has always been part of my life, without me really thinking about it.

It is not simply that these streets are familiar: they are carved into my mind, defining for me the very meaning of streets. Even now, images of them sometimes float into my head - the unusually large, tree-filled roundabout where Rothsay Road meets Castle Road; the ever-graffitied football pavilion in Russell Park; or the paths by flowerbeds by the river. The names of the roads - Albany Road², Howbury Street and Bushmead Avenue - are archetypal street names for me. Along these pavements and alleyways I walked, went to friends’ houses, cycled to school and delivered newspapers.

When I went down to Castle Road to get sandwiches for lunch for us and the removal men last week, the roads I walked down seemed as familiar as ever: some of the trees have gone, and others have been cut back; some of the front doors have changed colour, and some houses have had extensions or renovations. But mostly it’s much the same as when I was cycling to school along them as a ten-year old, or walking to get a school bus with an ill-fitting blazer and a violin slung over my back - though we had an Austin 1300 in the 1980s, so today’s cars would have looked like something out of science-fiction.

When I was 13 I started doing a daily morning newspaper-round for the long-gone Castle Road News: orange bag slung over my shoulder, I would cycle up Rothsay Gardens, along Goldington Road³ (where I dropped off a great bundle of papers for Chiltern Radio for them to discuss with the avid listeners of Bedford), and down Bushmead Avenue, including going round Russell Court, an old people’s home; and I would return home with inky fingers and an eclectic view of the day’s news.

(Fifty years ago, Michael Crawford played Frank Spencer learning to ride a moped on Bushmead Avenue in an episode of Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. There are no yellow lines painted on the sides of the road, but otherwise this could have been filmed yesterday. The traffic lights at the junction with Castle Road, at which Crawford stops and finds himself next to another rider wearing identical clothes, looked much as they do today. When I first walked home from Castle Lower school, aged about seven or eight, I met mum at these traffic lights so I didn’t have to cross the busy Castle Road on my own.)

A couple of houses on my paper-round had Polish papers delivered, and when I did Christmas cards each year for my customers (a lucrative if slightly cynical way of maximising tips), I would go to the Bedford Central Library (the Google of the day)⁴ and look up how to say ‘Happy Christmas’ in Polish so I could write it in their cards. I did the paper round until I went to university, and later as a student sometimes helped out serving in the shop, where I struggled to find regulars’ brands of cigarettes on the vast wall of names behind the counter, of which I knew nothing.

The bandstand on Mill Meadow

To the east of where we lived is Russell Park⁵, where we (and more recently our children) played at the playground and the tennis courts. Beyond that was a cycle route over the old railway (I can remember when the rails were still there, walking along them with a friend, vainly hoping to get some level crossing gates ahead to close) past Priory Marina to Cardington Lock. To the east too is the fire station - a friend’s dad was a firefighter so I once spent a happy afternoon there climbing on fire engines - and the athletics track, where I endured a year discovering I was no athlete, as well as dad’s allotment.

We lived two minutes’ walk from the River Great Ouse, with its walks along the Embankment where I have since strolled many times with mum and the kids and their cousins, and the bandstand on Mill Meadows over the arched suspension bridge, and the Boating Lake where I learned I was no more a rower than an athlete. The biennial River Festival is still going: I remember the glorious sunshine of the festival held just before I went to university, when I rode one of my dad’s old bikes in the procession, and it felt like anything was possible.

More sombrely, Bedford’s Remembrance Day procession used to start right outside our house and then march round to the Cenotaph by the river. When I was younger I suppose there must still have been Great War veterans among those parading.

We were not far from the Castle Mound - a small hill with grass on top is all that remains of the motte of what was once a large twelfth century castle - and the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, now just known as the Higgins. The town centre was in easy walking distance, including the Corn Exchange, the concert hall in St Paul’s Square where the Proms were relocated during the Second World War, and where dad sang in many choral society concerts, introducing me to classical music⁶, and where I played regularly in concerts myself as a teenager.

The Corn Exchange as it is today

I used to haunt the bookshops on Mill Street and buy CDs from Boots and WH Smith in the Harpur Centre. The railway station, from where dad commuted every day to work in London, was about a mile away from where we lived, and my upper school, in Biddenham, was further west along the river. When we ate out we would go to Santaniello’s or the Deep Pan Pizza Co by the Swan Hotel; or we would head up to the chip shop by Peacock’s, the auction house, where dad used to bid for bikes and typewriters and other interesting things to fill the house with.

And I have portmanteau memories of going round to friends’ houses at Christmas through frosty winter air to sing carols, drink mulled wine and open presents; and of endless languid sunny summer holidays cycling and exploring - it wasn’t all like this, of course, but I realise I was lucky to grow up here: it was a friendly area, with a good sense of community and few obvious (at least to me) social problems or crime (though there was a house fire opposite us one Christmas: ‘Baby’s Cries Save Family’ was the headline in the Bedfordshire Times). But like the fish that doesn’t know what water is, I couldn’t really say whether this area of Bedford was special or normal - it was just what I knew, and I can’t be objective about it. You would need to ask an outsider if you wanted to know what this area was and is really like.

I’m an outsider myself now, I suppose, with that last connection broken. I’m sure I’ll go back sometimes with mum, for walks by the river. When I do, I expect I’ll find old memories still waiting there for me, hanging round on street corners. And regardless, I’ve realised those roads are with me forever, defining how I see and think about the world. ‘Waterloo! - couldn’t escape if I wanted to…’, as someone once sang…

1. Bower Street was recently in the news when a hot air balloon unexpectedly landed there.

2. The Panacea Society, which was based in Albany Road round the corner from where we lived, with a chiming clock that counted the hours of my childhood, believed that Bedford was the original site of the Garden of Eden, a surprising claim for which I never saw any firm evidence.

3. Goldington Road is known to rugby fans as the home of the Bedford Blues - the ground is right opposite where the radio station used to be. I was taken to a match there when I was young but didn’t understand it and never got into the sport, so mostly went there only for the annual firework display, which is still a fixture in the Bedford calendar.

4. The inside of the library had (and probably still has) a large stone tableau on its entrance hall wall quoting the opening of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (‘as I slept I dreamed a dream’) which was written nearby in the county gaol. The gaol also inspired the prison reformer John Howard, whose statue stands in St Paul’s Square, and who briefly gave his name to the school I went to at 13.

5. I assume the name Russell Park is connected to the Dukes of Bedford, whose family seat is in Woburn Abbey, south of the town, and whose family name is Russell; ‘Earl Russell’ was a subsidiary title used, among others, by the nineteenth century Whig Prime Minister Lord John Russell, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his son, the historian Conrad Russell.

6. Dad also took me to a recital at the Corn Exchange by the Russian pianist Emil Gilels when I must have been about nine or ten. The only thing I remember is that the concert programme misnamed him ‘Emil Giles’, and a piece of recording equipment fell from the ceiling into the audience during the concert, thankfully not hurting anyone.