I left school aged fifteen not knowing what a GCE or a university was. I must have sat the 11-plus, but I cannot remember.
I was born in Torquay in 1944. My mother was not married and when I was a few weeks old, she handed me over to my grandparents, Nanna and Pop, who lived on Swinderby Road close to the centre of Wembley.
With the exception of a few brief months at the end of 1956 or 7, when I lived with my mother and step-father in Swindon, Swinderby Road was my home until 1966, when my first wife, Tricia, and I bought a house in South Harrow.
I have had it in my head since Christmas 2010 to write about my time in Wembley, after being prompted by family into reminiscing about my Wembley days. I am still not sure as to how I am going to do this. I recently sorted what few photographs I have, and Susan, who I have been with since 1975, and married in 1977, freed up some shelving in our office and suggested we could use it for books. This gave me the idea of gathering together what books I have from my Wembley days and found more than I expected, so I decided just to include what books I have from before I started work — hence the picture at the top of this blog.
With the exception of my John Betjeman Collected Poems they are all originals. My Betjeman fell apart years ago, so Susan bought me a new copy. Looking through them they all tell a story and have all played a part in making me who I am today.
I arranged them in no particular order before taking the photograph. I also took another photograph:
The two bus books are in the top photograph as well and the London bus maps are just a few of a collection which continues until I left Harrow in 1969, when Tricia and I moved to Birmingham.
There are fourteen books in the pile, of which four are local history related, three are bus books, three political in some way, two religious, one poetry and, top of the pile, a dictionary.
I bought the two London bus books and Betjeman, and asked my Nanna to buy me the dictionary. Our Democracy came from school. I gave Wembley Through the Ages and English Place Pames to my mother as presents and they came back to me when she died in 2006. Middlesex was always in Swinderby Road and left with me in 1966. The other books in the pile were given to me, three as presents and two not long before I left school. They were News From Nowhere by William Morris and What are we to do? by John Strachy. Somewhere, yet to be found, is a old hard back copy of God's Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell.
Taken together, this much remains of the world I had around me when I started work in 1959. All on the bookshelf in my bedroom at Swinderby Road. There were others, but they have gone. My Animal Stories by Rudyard Kipling and other story books were passed down to my children, as were a large collection of comic annuals, including Rupert the Bear. I also had selected volumes of the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, which I also passed to my children.
Looking through the books today I have been overwhelmed with memories, struck most of all by how much of the me I have become can be traced back to the schoolboy.
I like to say school passed me by. I remember finding reading and writing a struggle and that I was still trying to memorise the alphabet into my secondary school days. Once I did start writing I enjoyed the achievement and I still marvel at my ability to string words together as I write.
Top of the pile is Words,my dictionary dating from 1956. Nanna bought it for me on a shopping visit to Harlesden. It cost 2/6d (12.5p) from a hardware shop, which had the dictionary on show outside. I picked one up and looked through it, then I asked my Nanna to buy it for me, which she did. It has been a prized possession ever since. I took it to school with me and my then English teacher laughed at me and Words, pointing out as he did that it had been printed in Czechoslovakia. Other kids heard and joined in the laughter, but I knew it was better than any at school because it had a section of English grammar, an extensive biographical dictionary, a separate guide to 'well-known authors' and a world gazetteer. A few years later the school bought Words and I went up to Mr. Charlton, the teacher who had laughed at me, and pointed out it still said 'Printed in Czechoslovakia' inside the cover.
Fortunately, Mr Irvine became my English teacher and he got us to write about issues, then to discuss what we had written and why. At the time we were using a school textbook called Our Democracy, written specially for secondary modern schools. By then I was well on the way to being a socialist, thanks to my Uncle Dave and Auntie Nannie in Harlow, who I stayed with during school holidays (now I realise to give my Nanna a break). He was Secretary of the then Plumbers' Trade Union Harlow Branch and active in the Labour Party. People were always visiting the house and it was where I first heard people talking about politics. My perspective on things was also local, Pop was Wembley born and bred, my great-grandparents having arrived from Willesden in the 1890s when my great-grandfather started his own plumbing business and opened a hardware shop on Wembley High Road. Pop's friends were also local businessmen and shopkeepers. I heard lots of stories about Wembley whilst growing up, so when Wembley Through the Ages by Reverend Elsey was published in 1953, a copy found its way into 36 Swinderby Road.
Fares Please was a present from my mother in 1953 for my ninth birthday. By then I was well into London buses, having been riding on them alone from the age of four. I also had a collection of maps. My mother used to say I could read a bus map before I could read a book. Inside the cover my mother wrote my name as 'Robert K P Gillies'. My Nanna put a line through 'Gillies' and wrote 'Howard'. Given I was named 'Kevin' by my mother (which appears on my birth certificate) and 'Bobby' by my Nanna, it was argument Nanna won. My mother married my step-father, who I knew as 'Uncle Jimmy' until I started work, then he became 'Jimmy', in 1952, but I was not told about the wedding and it was a family I was on the edge of. Jimmy was a good man, who was brave to take my mother on, but I was never going to be a Gillies. This book reminds me of the tension there was between Nanna and my mother.
The next book in the pile, The Story of the Bible, is my Church of God Sunday School attendance prize for 1957 made out to 'Bobby Gillies'. I had found my way to the Church of God when I was about seven through a girl I knew, who was a couple of years older than me. We both went to the Church of England Sunday School at St John's Church and when she left, I left too. Writing this, I recall her Nanna, a lovely lady called Mrs Peart, telling me years later I was the little brother she always wanted — which probably explained why our brief teenage summer romance, when she was eighteen and I was sixteen, was always doomed. Ann went off to university. Had it not been for Church and Sunday School our relationship would probably have ended when she went to Wembley County School at eleven.
I met Tricia through Wembley South Young Socialists not long after Ann went off and I continued to attend the Church of God for another year. Then I went back to St John's Church opposite the then Wembley Police Station not far from Swinderby Road, where my connection was enough to enable Tricia, who was a non-churchgoer, to have a white wedding two years later. I got The Story of the Bible because, as my Sunday School teacher, Les Hardy, explained 'You are always asking questions, so this may answer some'. It was about this time that a boy called Geoff in my church class asked the question 'Is God vain?' and set me thinking about my own take on life. It is a tangible reminder of somewhere I enjoyed going and why I found it hard to leave. Had I stayed, I suspect my life would have very secure and happy in a different kind of way. My nickname at Church was 'Dodo'. I really was different to them in many ways. I was already living my life in a collection of compartments (and still do). School, school holidays staying with relatives, cubs/Woodcraft Folk, Young Farmers (yes, me!), all made way when I started work for Wembley South Young Socialists and my trade union. Rarely was there any crossover.
John Betjeman found his way into my life through the Home Service on BBC radio. We did not have a television until I was about seventeen, by which time Nanna was dead (she died in early-1960) and we only got electricity in the house in 1958. His poems mentioned Middlesex, Wembley, Harrow, Brent and Perivale, even one called 'A Wembley Lad'. I used my paper round money to buy a paperback copy of his John Betjeman Collected Poems. It is enough to say that he has a poem for everything.
News From Nowhere by William Morris and What are we to do? by John Strachy both played a formative part in shaping my take on socialism. William Morris offered a vision and John Strachy a reminder that socialism is as much about individual enterprise as collective effort; he argued that most small businesses are born of a desire to be free from exploitation in the belief that they can do just as well, given the opportunity, but when they are successful, large greedy companies move in and use their wealth to force small business under. It is a message Labour has yet to understand, but Strachy's analysis was correct in the 1930s and it remains so eighty years on.
The Pilgrim Shrines of England is another book which made its way back to me via my mother and I love. I have not been religious for over fifty years, but I remain spiritual and like plain, simple, quiet places where I can connect with eternity and a sense of what it means, for understanding it makes one one aware that it is different to nothingness. My summer with Anne included a week at the then small Othona Community at St Peter's Chapel, Bradwell-on-Sea, and through this book I also discovered Sempringham in the Lincolnshire Wolds. There are still places to visit and as I get further into my seventies so I more understand why. It is a thread which has run through my life and I am grateful for it.
The Book of Harrow was a Christmas gift in 1958 from Mac, an Irishman who assisted Les Hardy in running the Church of God Sunday School class for teenage boys like myself. We could be awkward and unruly at times, more interested in the teenage girls than Jesus. He obviously picked up on my interest in local history back then and gave this local history of Harrow. I treasure it for the gift it was.
Local history was nothing something we ever did at school, despite the opportunities it presented then (and still does) across every aspect of learning, including maths. Again I could go on, but I was reading books from Barham Park Library about local history from an early age.
Nanna and Pop were never into education, other than it teaching you basic skills. Both had beautiful copper plate writing, were able to read and keep accounts. If you left school able to do these things, what more was there to know?
My education really began when I left school, thanks to trade unions and the Labour Party. I got my chance to become a paid writer, albeit as a cub reporter, when I was sixteen or seventeen, but chose not to take it and I got my chance to go to Ruskin College in Oxford, but let that pass because I was married, buying a house and my wife was pregnant.
Somehow, these books stayed with me, they survived getting married at twenty-one, when the past was nearly forgotten as the future consumed me; moved in a cardboard box when I left Tricia to live with Susan in 1975, since when they have come through numerous 'culls' of books. This far into my life I am sure of one thing: they will all be there at the end for someone to deal with, and out there, on the ether somewhere, will be this rambling account of why they mattered to me.
