Today's challenge - The place you grew up - was an interesting one for me. I grew up in a West Midlands town called Halesowen and lived there from the age of four until I was twenty one; which means that I have a broad spectrum of memories of the place and it was terribly difficult to pick any one particular point in time to write about. However, I think the memories between the age of six and eleven are probably the strongest and so I decided to head back to the Halesowen of the 1980s...
The place I grew up
I grew up in a terraced house on a hill in a West Midlands town called
Halesowen.
I always liked to think that we lived at what was the
sweet spot of the hill as, whenever it snowed, it was always just outside our
house that cars would run out of puff; wheels spinning impotently against the
gradient, their engines redlining for a few seconds before the driver would finally
admit defeat and reverse in order to trundle sheepishly back down the hill.
On the opposite side of the street, just down the
road from where we lived, were a number of factory units. I’m not entirely sure
what they did – although I still remember the occasional acrid chemical smell
that would drift from them on the breeze – but the factories were important
because, once the workers had gone home for the night, their car parks were our
playgrounds. I learned to ride my bike on the factory car park, riding around
and around in circles with my dad steadying the saddle, until I suddenly realised
my dad was standing watching me and I’d been riding on my own for the last five
minutes (the shock of which caused me to immediately fall off – but it was
worth it, I’d earned myself a Flash
Gordon sticker album!).
The road sloped sharply downwards – making it ideal for
high velocity skateboarding; a practice that would likely have given my parents
fits if they’d known about it. But we were young, we were invincible and danger
wasn’t even a concept, let alone a variable that factored into our decision
making process. At the bottom of the road, a right turn took you onto the main
road that led into town but, in order to do that, you had to tackle the
tortuous slope of Furnace Hill which always seemed impossibly steep. At the top
of the hill, should you veer from the main road, you could eventually reach a
path that led you to a brook where we would swing on a rope and dare each other
to venture into the abyss black culvert from which the flow of water emerged. We
rarely went far.
However, if one ignored the temptation of the brook,
you could cut through the grounds of the high school to emerge on the other side
of Furnace Hill, almost in the centre of Halesowen now, the spire of the millennia
old church the focal point of the view.
There were only a
few places that I enjoyed spending time at in Halesowen but, one of them, was
so popular with me that, during the school holidays, I’d make a daily
pilgrimage to it; scaling Furnace Hill on the way there and my own road on the
way back.
The Library.
I was a voracious reader in my youth. I had devoured
the entire collection of fiction possessed by our school library by the time I
was six and had moved on to reading encyclopaedias so joining the library was an
amazing experience for me. With thousands upon thousands of books to choose
from, I dove in with gusto; and never more than during the school holidays when
I’d get up early in the morning and set out with a plastic bag full of the library
books I’d finished. I’d traipse up Furnace Hill, trudge into the centre of
Halesowen and into the library. Empty my bag at the counter and wait as they
scanned the books back in. Then I’d walk around the library and pick eight new
books to read before walking home, plastic bag again bulging, and spend the day
tearing through them. The next morning, the process would be repeated. Eight
books a day, six days a week for six weeks at a time. It’s safe to say, I did
my fair share of reading as a child.
The more I write, the more I realise that all my
memories of the place I grew up are positive. Maybe that’s just the way my mind
works; I don’t tend to bother dwelling on the bad, such memories have a
tendency to simply evaporate from my head. And maybe that means my vision of
the place is one that has been filtered through rose-tinted spectacles but,
since they’re my memories, I guess
that’s allowed…
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