Re: Nostalgia thread
Posted by:
Jazz_Sue (---.in-addr.btopenworld.com)
Date: September 07, 2007 11:59AM
My childhood was spent a scant few hundred yards from Battersea Park and the Ffestival gardens, Sarf Larndon. Those were the days when there were remnants of the Festival of Britain in residence - the Guinness clock (wonder what happened to that?) the wonderful fairy grotto (with an incredibly realistic - to a 6 year old - 'lava pool'. Very Ffairyland!) An outdoor theatre showing kids productions like 'Toad of Toad Hall' and 'Tales of Beatrix Potter'. Then there were the adrenaline junkie attractions - the deadly dangerous Tree Walk with its scary giant garden gnomes, and the delights of the all-year-round Battersea ffunffair (sorry, couldn't resist that one) It was all so innocent, and colourful. Things you could really stash away in your memory, rather than the eagerly forgotten, and seemingly endless, groups of heavily sweating professionals with their personal trainers, taking up every spare corner of the park with their physical jerks and boring the pants off people like me. What's wrong with a good walk I ask myself? Anyhow, one of the things the park had in the sixties was a little train that ran on tiny tracks, joining up various equally miniscule 'stations'. It was a lovely ride through woodland gardens, and it even had bridges, a railway crossing, terminus buildings and a tunnel! It cost just a few bob for the full route, and became a standard way of parting with my pocket money - that, and a ride on the water slide in the fair (too much of a coward to go on the Big Dipper!)
I left the area in the seventies, and was glad to. Battersea was being 'tarted up' for the Chelsea crowd, and it was becoming depressing. By this time the fair had dropped one too many teenage girls from considerable heights (see 'Big Dipper', above) and was no more. Ditto the Tree Walk, Guinness Clock (the first to go) and various other childhood attractions. It was only recently I returned, and it was even more depressing - apart from the numerous Physical Jerks with their £75 ph PT's, the grotto had been reduced to a few lumps of rock in the ground, the fountains are now a swimming lido (the only thing that looks like it might actually be fun) and - worst of all - the little train, its tracks and all the buildings had been ripped up and long since disposed of.
I spent a winsome hour walking the walk, talking the talk by making sad little 'choo choo' noises, and trying to ignore my three kids tapping numbers into their mobiles for the nearest men with white suits.
Jump forward a further two months, and I decided to celebrate the end of my marriage with a camping trip to Eastbourne, in Sussex, with the kids. There's a nice park there, called Hotton or something, that in some ways is eerily similar to Battersea in its heyday. Right down to a board advertising 'Miniature train Rides.' I finally found the 'terminus', a strangely familiar little station set along equally familiar tracks and woodland. With a strange feeling of deja vu, I waited with my young uns, clutching my ticket in my hot little hand, until ...
Yep, there she came! 'My' train, fully restored and in all her familiar glory, chuff chuffing up the track! I had a very happy half hour, revisiting old 'haunts' and realising the 'steam train' was actually a diesel truck in disguise. The driver couldn't tell me where the train had come from, only that it had been there for 'some years' - as had he - and was a very successful source of revenue for himself and the park. I am convinced this is none other than the original Battersea Park railway; transported, hook line and sinker, to the seaside environs where such innocent pleasures are still welcomed.
It is now my life's work to discover the whereabouts of the Tree Walk, the Big Dipper, and the mortal remains of those three teenage girls ... (the bottom of the Water Slide pool would seem to be a safe bet)
Sorry for this prolonged preamble. It's just that, at my age, it's only stuff old enough to count as history, that I can remember.