1930s: The towpath to adventure

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With no small effort, I managed to avoid being born at 12 East End, Sawley. East End was a short, narrow, muddy lane to a farm where my grandfather had worked as a labourer before his retirement.

My parents lived there in the first years of their married life and, in my teens, I went back to see the tiny cottage.

It had suffered a flood from the nearby River Trent. Old Sawley was close to Wilne, where the River Derwent joined the Trent. It was a dark, dank cottage with a door so small my grandfather had to bow his head to enter.

It would seem that, despite the concerted efforts of my mother and the midwife, I refused to enter this world in a farm labourer’s cottage.

After hours of valiant effort, assisted by a very persuasive husband, my mother sought the comfort and care of the Nightingale Home, London Road, Derby. Throughout my 77 years, I’ve met many Derbeians all over the country who were born in that home.

My father served his apprenticeship at Bush Electrical Engineering works, at Loughborough, well known in Derby as the maker of the town’s trolleybuses. After, he moved to Rolls-Royce and needed to be closer to work.

So, some time around Christmastime 1930, we moved into 13 Benson Street. The bleakness of a cold, recently completed new house failed to dampen my parents’ enthusiasm for the move.

The rest of the street was not yet complete and we were one of the first families to move in. Except for the last few months of her life, my mother lived there until she died. She liked the street for its neighbourliness and the convenience of the buses into town, but she longed to live in a country cottage with a big garden.

Looking back more than 70 years later, I think there was no finer place to spend your childhood than Benson Street, on what was then Derby’s western fringe. Why should this street of council houses, with neatly trimmed hedges and plaster cast ornaments of a boy with cherries or Diana and her Afghan hound, be a boy’s paradise?

It was because it was an entirely new neighbourhood populated by migrants whose fathers had converged on Derby for its employment opportunities.

We came from far and wide. Mr and Mrs Slavin and their son, Dennis, came from Scotland, but most came from some rural part of the East Midlands and, apart from the odd grandparent, we were all of the same generation.

A regular visitor was my grandfather, who always walked from Sawley. It was he who took me for my first walk along the canal towpath to Shelton Lock, where he had a pint of beer and bought me a packet of crisps while we had a brief rest in the garden of the Navigator Inn.

The canal was a playground, a source of adventure, and it was just at the top of our street. To get to the water, the path took us over an uncultivated field which we called the “top green” to distinguish it from the small triangular green at the other end of the street, which we called “little green”.

The canal teemed with wildlife along the banks, within the reeds and swimming in the water. Our nearest point of access was a reed-free bank, which we called “Croc’s Mouth”. It was a good launching place for boats.

But the real attraction of the canal was its direct route to a different world. I was nine, almost 10, when I first walked to Ingleby to gather bluebells. We formed a small band and Dennis Slavin, who was the oldest, led the way, seeming to know all the topographical details.

It was a bit of a boring trudge until we were clear of Chellaston. Beyond the village, we came to a railway bridge and, on the corner of a lane, there was a cottage. A man sat outside and, as it was a hot day, told us we could take a drink from a bucket of freshly drawn water. We passed the cup from one to another.

As we approached Swarkestone, Dennis pointed to the lane leading to the church and said it also led to a mediaeval tilting ground. Although I didn’t know it then, in May 1938, that cottage was Foster’s cottage.

Ten years or so later, I worked with Jack Foster for Rolls-Royce at the Grange, Littleover. Jack built a filling station in the cottage garden which ran alongside the road.

He told me of an incident there when he was a boy. One Sunday morning the family was awakened by the house shaking. Alarmed, they looked out of the window for the cause and there was an elephant using the upright corner post of the ancient, timber-framed cottage as a rubbing post.

The circus was making its way to town, leaving in its wake some problems, the most chaotic of which was a large heap of dung on the crest of Swarkestone’s hump-back bridge over the Trent.

I was nine at the time but determined not to be gullible and Dennis’ stories tended to leave me sceptical. Was the bridge that stretched over wetlands to Stanton by Bridge really a mile long? Was it built by two sisters, one of whom had lost her lover in a flood? Was this really the point at which Bonnie Prince Charlie was defeated?

Eventually, we reached Ingleby. Phew! What a long way on a hot day. Over a grassy hill and by a backwater, we reached the unbelievable Anchor Church, with its rooms, doors and windows carved out of a sandstone cliff face. It had seats carved out of the stone and a pit.

Was that pit, as Dennis had said, really a cockfighting pit? Was there really a tunnel through the hills which the Anchorites made to the monastery at Repton?

It was an exciting day which ended with giving my mum a bunch of limp bluebells. That was the longest walk I had ever taken. Maybe, my grandad had walked to Derby and back from Sawley on cattle drives as he so often told me.

As my childhood continued, I was to find many more occasions to think how lucky I was to have been born in Derby, and in Alvaston in particular.

The Co-op bike I received on my 10th birthday was a magic carpet to even more adventurous journeys.

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