Four: Out and About in Shropshire
Out with Mother – The River Severn – At the Circus – Eye trouble
The cinema – The South Shropshire Hills – Round the Wrekin
Viroconium
TRANSCRIPT OF LOCAL RADIO INTERVIEW FOR THE ‘SHROPSHIRE CHILDHOODS’ PROGRAMME
PRESENTER: . . . in this popular series about young Shropshire lives recalled, often from more than fifty years ago. Today I’m talking to Graham Brown whose parents moved from London to Shrewsbury in mid-1939, only a few months after he was born. They left the town in 1951, so he spent the first twelve years of his childhood in Shropshire. Now, Graham, I gather you lived in Radbrook Road during that time, and your father was away from home through most of the War. Did your mother take you down to the town itself very often?
GRAHAM BROWN: Oh, yes. My mother walked down the hill to Shrewsbury for shopping often more than once a week and, until I went to school, I went in the pushchair or – later on - walked with her. There were two public seats on the route, one quite near our house on Porthill Road, the other halfway up, or down, Porthill itself. When we walked, I always pestered her to have a rest as we approached these seats. She occasionally allowed me to sit on them both, but only on the way back from town.
PRES: So was it simply a tedious trail round the shops every time?
GB: Actually, in those days, I didn’t mind the shopping. We went to the small, old-fashioned food shops, particularly in New Street and Frankwell where my mother had become a regular customer. I listened to the chat and watched the shopkeepers do their stuff, weighing things out or slicing corned beef or whatever they did. In those days the shopkeeper or his assistant served you over the counter with every single item. You read out your shopping list one by one and he added it all up at the end. So it generally took a long time. There were one or two wooden chairs in the shop, near the door, for people to wait.
PRES: It’s a far cry from the supermarket checkout, isn’t it? And then, presumably, a large order would be delivered home by a boy on a bike, later in the day.
GB: Yes, that’s what happened. Just as well, really, because my mother’s shopping trips often included meeting one of her friends for tea and cakes. They usually went to Morris’s at the top of Pride Hill, the place at that time for women in Shrewsbury to meet – strictly not somewhere to go carrying big bags of shopping. Upstairs was a grand, darkly panelled tearoom, the smell of polish everywhere, stained glass coats of arms in the windows and a high minstrels’ gallery at one end. The tables were large and circular with gate-legs, cakes came on silver cake-stands and the waitresses wore black dresses with white aprons and little white caps. They took our orders on a note pad attached to their waist with a length of material or fine chain. Many of the clientele would have been ‘county set’ with tweedy suits and cut-glass accents. I never felt comfortable in Morris’s, apart from when I was eating my cake. I had to sit there quietly for ages while my mother and friend enjoyed their conversation, boring me stiff. Experiences like this have been one of the small child’s wearying burdens through the ages, at least since the invention of ‘childhood’.
PRES: Yes, I can recall that sort of experience. Before those days, of course, kids would be small adults, working in the fields, in the factory, down coalmines, up chimneys, about the house or anywhere else their masters might put them to work. I suppose all those teas at Morris’s just merged into one another?
GB: More or less, except for a particular occasion I’ve never forgotten. During one of those periods of enforced unspeakable dullness I experimented, the hard way, with how a gate-leg table works. I’d realised there was a part of the table beneath the tablecloth that would move. This intrigued me, so, without looking under the cloth to see what the consequences might be, I slowly nudged the gate-leg further across with my foot. Eventually it reached the fatal point where it no longer supported the table flap. The flap suddenly folded down fast and the entire cake-stand with its contents fell into my lap. Luckily the silver teapot and hot water jug were standing on the central, stable part of the table. Women sitting nearby flicked their eyes across to our crisis while waitresses moved briskly around in a show of efficiency and apparent unconcern, all coolly behaving as though nothing of any consequence had actually occurred.
PRES: How did your mother deal with this? Were you punished?
GB: No, I think I may have received a second sticky cake to help me recover from the ordeal, though probably along with a severe warning about keeping my inquisitive feet to myself in future.
PRES: Ah, yes, the carrot-and-stick approach. Are there any other places in Shrewsbury that stand out in your memory of this time?
GB: Yes, I can certainly think of a couple. Our route into town took us across Porthill Bridge, straight up The Quarry to St Chad’s and down the steep, narrow Claremont Hill to Barker Street, where the Midland Red bus station was. Almost at the bottom of Claremont Hill on the left was the men’s hairdressers where I was taken for my first haircut –
PRES: - and there’s still a men’s hairdressers there today, more than fifty years later.
GB: Yes, you often find that – a specific trade being carried on in the same location for generations, sometimes for centuries. Well, they made me sit on a special attachment fitted across the arms of one of the large chairs and I recall feeling almost as though they were performing invasive surgery on me. When I was old enough to go on my own, I found other barbers for myself. There was one in the old Market Hall and another in Frankwell. That one was much more interesting and entertaining, especially on Saturday mornings when small groups of old boys would sit and reminisce, quite often about the floods of earlier years – always topical in Frankwell.
PRES: Indeed. And what was the other place that impressed you so much?
GB: Ah, that was more important than haircuts. On the right, just into Barker Street where the estate agents cluster today, was T. Sidoli, the Italian ice-cream shop. Sidoli’s had a van shaped like an ice cream cornet which came round the houses, but any visit to town meant negotiating a quick visit to the shop, usually before we started walking home again. You couldn’t manage that journey without an ice cream, but my mother and I disagreed about the fundamentals. She believed, probably rightly, that you got far more ice cream when you bought a wafer than when you got a cornet. From my point of view, the cornet was so much easier to handle, as the contents of the wafery sandwich would spill out all over your hands and drip onto your clothes as you walked along. Whatever the outcome, I knew that an ice cream on the way home was never to be taken for granted.
PRES: And did your horizons become broader as you grew older?
GB: Oh, yes, particularly once I’d learned to cycle. We went all over the place on bikes. One of my mother’s friends was Phyllis Cook. She lived out at Cruckton on a smallholding with a son Bill about my age, though he was never at the same school as me. I found this one of the longest, toughest and least interesting bike rides we ever did. It took us up Mytton Oak Road and then well beyond Bicton Heath right out into the country among nothing but farms and fields. At my age, infinite stretches of green fields were some of the most uninteresting environments I could imagine. It was all the same and there was nothing to do.
PRES: But you had no choice about it. You had to go.
GB: Yes, but I always enjoyed it once we’d got there - that trip had its rewards. One was an assortment of rusty, discarded farm machinery to play on under the railway embankment. There was also some venturing onto the railway track itself. Bill Cook would know when the next goods train was due and we put our ears on the rail to hear it coming. He put a ha’penny on the line for the train to flatten. We hid down the embankment until the train had gone past and then usually couldn’t find the ha’penny again. But the star reward for this gruelling ride was Bill’s unwanted comics. In spite of my parents’ earlier refusals, I was eventually allowed The Beano at home but, perhaps because they lived so far from anywhere, Bill had stacks of comics: The Dandy, Knockout, Radio Fun, Film Fun and the ones with mostly writing and very few strip cartoons, like Hotspur and Rover which carried serial stories about boys in football teams. We went to the Cooks’ place only now and again, so there was always an enormous pile of comics to bring home that kept me going for weeks.
PRES: Did your mother find other ways of helping you to spend your time during the day?
GB: Oh, yes. With my father away – or, later, at work – I was always doing things with her. She read to me a great deal – I think she saw that as the most important of our activities together – but she also included me in her own, adult life. I frequently went out with her when she visited friends for the afternoon. From time to time she took me round with her when she was doing door-to-door collections for the Red Cross. She also introduced me to the cinema, mostly when there was a film she wanted to see and I wasn’t already playing at someone else’s house, and so had to be taken. We generally used two cinemas, the Empire, which I think was along Mardol somewhere, and the Granada opposite the railway station.
PRES: Can you remember any of the films she took you to see?
GB: I can certainly recall 'Destination Moon', which must have been an extremely creaky sci-fi job in the later 1940s. Even so, it really stirred my imagination. I remember walking home after we’d seen it. I was asking all sorts of questions that were completely beyond her - about space travel, and gravity, and exploring the moon. Apart from that one, I can only think of two other films from this early part of my life, before I was old enough to go to the pictures on my own. The first is 'Bambi', the first film I ever saw. My mother wanted us to see it together and I expect we both cried. Apart from the action and the story, I found that I was interested in the technology of film itself. How did they manage to have moving pictures up there in front of us? Were there people behind the screen making it all work? Would we see them after the film was over? Where did the animals go after they left the screen? Above all, how did they make the music come out of the ground all the time? Faced with this entirely new experience, quite unlike anything I’d ever known before, these were the kinds of questions that occurred to me. I must have asked my mother about them but I suspect that, after one or two more trips to the cinema, I probably took it all for granted just like everyone else.
Then we saw 'The Spiral Staircase', a black-and-white thriller. I think it’s been remade fairly recently. This was surely one that I wouldn’t have seen if my mother had had somewhere to leave me for the afternoon. It was about a girl who couldn’t speak. She was dumb right through the film until very near the end when she did manage to speak into a telephone when she was about to be murdered. There was a very tense bit where she was looking in a wardrobe while we knew there was a man hiding among the clothes hanging up inside it. My abiding memory is of the non-stop rain. I think it rained throughout the entire film, adding the necessary atmospheric effect to an already claustrophobic setting. It may have been quite an unsuitable film for me at whatever age I was, but I’ve never forgotten seeing it.
PRES: And then, when you were old enough, you went to the cinema on your own, or with your friends – did you go, like so many children then, to the Saturday morning shows?
GB: Yes, one or two of us regularly went to the Empire on Saturday mornings. We saw Flash Gordon serials, the usual handful of short, funny black-and-white films with Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and their contemporaries. We also began responding to the iconic structures of the Western. This became the dominant film genre during the late 1940s – and, in fact, right through my teenage years in the 50s. Gary Cooper, Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Jeff Chandler, James Stewart – they all rode and strode across our screen, playing goodies and baddies, robbing banks or protecting pioneer settlers from the Indians whose land they were taking away. There were brassy women in off-the-shoulder dresses holding court in the town’s hotel bar, singing to the out-of-tune piano and winking at the hardened cowhands. Nearly every film had a destructive fight in the saloon, a Main Street shoot-out, a stagecoach full of frightened women being chased by Indians or the US cavalry charging over the hill. Any self-respecting Western would have some or most of these predictable but essential components. Later, in the safety of our back gardens at home, we would act them out in every detail until the sun went down in the West.
PRES: And that’s a perfect image to bring our conversation to an end. Thank you, Graham, for sharing some of your childhood memories with us. In our next edition, we’ll be hearing about daily life on a Shropshire farm during the 1940s . . .
*
FROM THE MEMOIR
Living in Shrewsbury, there was no avoiding the River Severn. In my early life it was with me or near me wherever I went. When the winter floods came into the lower parts of the town, it was a good deal nearer than most people wanted. It affected the people who had shops in Frankwell as well as the people like us who wanted to get to them, or simply to cross the river into town. Porthill Bridge would often be out of action because The Quarry itself was flooded on the far side. Welsh Bridge was closed because its approaches on either side were under water. Kingsland Bridge was the only answer for us because of its height above the river, though it annoyingly brought you out at the wrong end of the town. It was also a very long way from T. Sidoli’s ice cream shop.
Michael Evans’s grandfather lived, and my father worked, on The Mount. This is the high cliff on the Frankwell side where the Severn has taken a tremendous bend back on itself before approaching Welsh Bridge. We played in fields up there, with glimpses of river through the trees and sometimes went down to the little beaches on the bank. I had no idea that this was the longest river in Britain, though I did know that it rose high up in the Cambrian Mountains in mid-Wales. My father had told me that. It was part of the territory he worked in his job.
For much of its course, the river forms the border between Wales and England, eventually becoming an estuary as it flows into the Bristol Channel. Its earlier value for settlements, transport and water-borne trade is made clear by the Roman, medieval and later towns on its banks at strategic locations, such as Newtown and Welshpool upstream of Shrewsbury. Below the town downstream, the Industrial Revolution towns of Coalbrookdale, Coalport and Ironbridge wouldn’t have developed or flourished without it. Further down, you find Stourport, the first purpose-built canal port, then Worcester, Upton, the abbey town of Tewkesbury, Gloucester and eventually Bristol.
Down there in the last, tidal stretch of the Bristol Channel is something we had heard about but could never experience in Shrewsbury - the Severn Bore. This is the twice-daily tidal wave that couldn’t be more different from the usually placid and meandering river that we knew. The explanation for this huge wave is:
a combination of the second highest tidal range anywhere in the world,
and a rising river bed with a huge amount of water flooding in on the
rising tide being funnelled into a narrowing river channel . . . a giant
wave which crashes its way upstream on the rising tide, sometimes
reaching 2 metres in height and travelling at some 16 kilometres per hour.
One of the more quaint things I knew about the Severn was the coracle. Rowley’s Mansion, then the Roman Museum, had an old one just inside the door as you went in. This small, oval bowl-shaped boat with no apparent bow or stern is just big enough for a man to sit on a plank seat across the centre and paddle it along. They constructed a lath frame, usually from ash or oak, and stretched a horse or cow hide over it. Certain parts of the river had different uses for the boat, and so different appropriate designs were developed. So, for instance, there was a Welshpool, a Bewdley or an Ironbridge coracle. They were used for netting fish until that was made illegal in the 1890s, for laying down lines of hooks, angling with a rod, carrying eel traps or simply for transport. Many people used them to cross the river in places or at times when there were fewer bridges. Apparently coracles were still in use on the stretch between Bewdley and Welshpool in 1914, and one Dick Brown was still using one at Bridgnorth in the 1930s. The Rogers family of Ironbridge is world famous as coracle makers, certainly since the early 19th century, and Eustace Rogers, if still alive, would be virtually the last living coracle maker.
Shrewsbury coracles were still used for angling in 1939, the year I came to the town as a baby. They had their own design, and their makers, among whom the Davies family were well known, lived mainly in the Frankwell neighbourhood. We kids always imagined that the Severn was the only river where coracles were used, and that this made it, and us by association, a bit special. We were quite wrong. I know now that there were vernacular coracles on tributaries of the Severn and on many Welsh rivers, like the Towy, Conwy, Taf and Cleddau. They were also used in Scotland and Ireland. But at age eight or nine you prefer not to know about that sort of thing. It would seriously interfere with your fabricated self-image of living in this unique ‘coracle country’.
The nearest I came to the experience of a coracle afloat was in a rowing boat. You could hire them from the Boathouse Inn and this provided my mother with enjoyment for herself and diversion for me. During the summer the river was low and gentle and even rowing against the current was relatively easy. Later on, my father taught me to row on the boating lake in Dulwich Park during one of our London visits. I loved being in touch with this other element. All its sensations excited me: standing on the pontoon and feeling the water moving the world beneath my feet; seeing it through the slats rippling and shining; hearing it gurgle and slap, nudging the other boats tied up alongside; the rocking about as I stepped into the rowing boat that rocked even more, and more dangerously. And then being pushed off from the bank by the boatman, suddenly adrift while my mother sorted out the oars and decided which way we would go.
I held the ropes of the rudder, feeling that I alone was in complete control of the boat and entirely responsible for its progress and direction. It only slightly occurred to me that my mother’s work with the oars had rather more effect than anything I might have been doing. Sitting in the rowing boat gave me a new and refreshing view of the familiar world. Everything along the river banks, the views of the town and the nature of the river itself, all looked and felt so interestingly different from our very special position on the surface. On sunny weekday afternoons, we had the river largely to ourselves, and my mother sculled us quietly along through the timeless, untroubled world so perfectly evoked in The Wind in the Willows. I often looked for Mole and Ratty, and could see many places along the banks where a water rat could easily have his home. Seeing the river from the river brought that part of the story vividly to life.
We only came to grief once. We’d gone upstream from the Boathouse towards Welsh Bridge. In front of one of the piers of the bridge was a tiny island in midstream with tufts of grass and a small, spindly tree. When the river is particularly low in the summer, this stretch becomes very shallow and pebbly. Seeing the river bed so close and so clearly presents challenges to even the most fearless boaters and my mother may have been dithering about which was the best arch to go through. In the event, facing the wrong way as the rower inevitably is, she couldn’t see that we were gently heading straight for the beach of the little island. At the same time I could see perfectly but naturally assumed, as children do, that one’s parent knew exactly what she was doing. So I sat back and dabbled my hand in the water as the boat’s bow ran aground on the pebbles, right in the middle of the River Severn.
The boat was stuck, and we both seemed to think that any sideways movement we made would cause it to capsize and tip us both into the water. The last thing either of us should do was to stand up in the boat. While I watched more or less helplessly, my mother got one of the oars and began prodding over the side at the island. Terrifying grinding noises came from beneath the boat as we scraped over the pebbles. As she managed to move us further and further off the beach, my end of the boat was left to wave about in the river while the bow end was still stuck. She eventually managed to float us free. We carried on upstream, and took the greatest care to avoid that bit on the way back. What I realise now is that the river was so quiet and shallow that we could both have got out of the boat and dragged it off the island, standing in water that probably came no higher than our ankles.
After Welsh Bridge, the Severn becomes much deeper as it flows along parallel to Smithfield Road, approaching its next loop where it doubles back to run along below The Mount. The land on the Frankwell bank was open, empty meadow, now partly occupied by short- and long-stay car parks. This is where the fair and the circus came. Writing about the arrival of Sleary’s circus in Hard Times, Dickens describes the place where it sets up as ‘the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled’. This part wasn’t spoiled, but it did seem to have an identity problem about it, a huge field that should have been out in the countryside but found itself instead on the side of a town. Bertram Mills circus came every year and I used to decorate the sides of my Dinky Toy lorries in their distinctive half-and-half dark green and dark red livery. Apart from the circus acts themselves, I was always mystified and intrigued by the strange foreign names so many of the performers had. They were always The Amazing or The Stupendous Somebody or other, and often members of the same family. Thinking about them now, I’d expected to remember a few of them, but their names have gone completely.
*
RECENT LETTER FROM MICHAEL EVANS
Church Eaton, Staffordshire
October 2003
Dear Graham
Since we were last in touch, I’ve realised that this scene has been stuck in my mind ever since it took place. I wondered whether you have similar memories of it. My mother Mary took you and me to the Pat Collins Fair down at Frankwell one summer and we pestered her all through the afternoon to see a sideshow called The Wild West Show. It put on a series of performances right through the day, so we had to queue for tickets while a huckster in a cowboy costume gave us his spiel in an American accent. He told us what we would see and what souvenirs we could buy afterwards. Once inside and seated, we found that this cowboy was the Master of Ceremonies. He was probably the only one in the show who could do a passable fake American accent.
Two particular stunts stood out: the knife throwing and the snake. A woman dressed and made-up like a Red Indian squaw stood against a wooden board while a cowboy threw big knives in her direction, placing them all round the outline of her body and even pinning the skirt of her costume to the board. Before he threw them, he invited people sitting near the front to feel how sharp the knives were. The MC talked us dramatically through all this, building up the tension, and the ‘squaw’ let out squeaks of fear and horror and squirmed erotically as the knife-man prepared for each throw. For the climax, the knife thrower was blindfolded and the ‘squaw’ screamed louder.
Another cowboy did some juggling with daggers and revolvers. Then, after a cowgirl had done clever things with a long whip, it was time for the snake act. This involved a tall, voluptuous woman in a sort of swimsuit with shiny bits all over it. She oozed her way around the small stage for several minutes, making eyes all over the place and wiggling, while the MC explained the tremendous risks she was about to take in handling one of the most dangerous snakes in all the Wild West. It seemed that every time she did this act, she took her very life in her hands, and today’s show could be her last one if anything went wrong. I don’t think either of us had ever been very keen on snakes, especially big, live ones at close quarters, and I was beginning to wonder whether I’d had enough of this Wild West stuff and might be much happier outside the tent.
In the event, I managed better than I’d expected but you definitely had a bad time with it. The other cowboy came on again with a very big snake indeed. He draped it round the woman’s neck and left the stage quickly. The snake slowly writhed its way all over her body while she carried on wiggling and smiling and making eyes at us. From his safe distance, the MC announced the approaching climax when she would take the snake’s head in her hands, bring it right up to her face, its forked tongue flicking in and out, and kiss it. That’s exactly what she did.
I looked round at that moment to see how you were reacting. You’d gone very pasty, you were fidgeting and looked extremely uncomfortable. Mary obviously noticed this and took you outside. I stayed with the show and afterwards Mary bought us each a big, black-and-white signed photograph of the whole Wild West troupe, including the snake wrapped round the woman. When we got home, we tried some non-dangerous knife throwing for ourselves with bits of wood. We also tried out our American accents but fortunately there was no way we could have experimented with snakes.
Best regards
Michael
[MY COMMENT: Michael has recalled this vivid scene with complete accuracy. I remember it very clearly in exactly the same way and, like him, have never forgotten it. When they reached the snake-kissing bit, I know I went hot and cold all over, and the ends of my fingers and toes tingled as my blood pressure plummeted. Mary took me out of the tent, pressed my head down between my knees, and got me breathing deeply until I recovered. I kept the souvenir photograph for years after.]
*
ANOTHER CAMBRIDGE AFTERNOON, 2002
Some of things she reads amaze me. After an unsuccessful skirmish at Galloway and Porter’s reduced-price bookshop, I’m back in my mother’s sitting room. I find she’s embarked, of all things, on a massive biography of Goebbels. Why on earth? I wonder, but know better now than to ask her to explain it. We both know she has a considerable appetite for biographies anyway, like many English people, but it beats me why a small, elderly lady in her early nineties should want to read this particular one.
- I’m glad you’re back in time, dear. There’s a television programme in a few minutes, about some of the history and places that we used to know well when we lived in Shrewsbury. I know they’re talking about the Romans, so we should be seeing Viroconium and perhaps the Wrekin - possibly something on Church Stretton as well.
- Ah, that would be good. You know, when I woke up each morning in those days, I could always catch a glimpse of the outside world through the side of the curtain at my bedroom window. Without moving my head from the pillow, this narrow slit showed me the colour of the sky and a small segment of that tall silver birch tree that stood by our front gate. Just from that tiny peep I got an idea of the day’s weather. I could see if it was particularly sunny, windy, or rainy – and, the thing I always wished for, I could see when there was snow on the leaves. This conditioned my mood, at least for the next few minutes while I was getting up.
- So if it was grey and rainy, you were probably grumpy while you were having your breakfast - oh, it’ll be on in a moment. Pass me the remote thing, will you, dear? I’ll need to adjust the sound.
I push the set into position and hand her the control. Despite the latest model of hearing aid, Mum still has difficulty and dabs away at the remote pad, raising the volume to a level where anyone in Regent Terrace can hear the whole thing clearly.
TV VOICEOVER: . . . of the Roman town of Viroconium, also called Uriconium, at Wroxeter near Shrewsbury. It’s about six miles out of Shrewsbury just past Atcham, near yet another of the River Severn’s many spectacular bends that almost turn the river back on itself in a knot. Today’s Severn crossing is the adequate, though relatively unspectacular, road bridge at Atcham that carries the former A5 across the river a little to the northwest of the Roman town. The Legions were in this part of the country partly to subdue local tribes but more particularly to push Roman rule further northwest and contain the wild and unpredictable Welsh tribes. There are other early, but much smaller, Roman military settlement sites dotted around on this stretch of Watling Street which contributed to this branch of the imperial project. Except when flooded, the Severn here is quite shallow and pebbly and the site would clearly have appealed as a military garrison location around AD 60-90 because the river could be so easily bridged or forded.
The continuous and significant presence of the military provides the substantial basis for a civilian settlement once the soldiery has moved on. Considerable economic activity is generated in both the town and the surrounding area as the goods and services needed by the soldiers are produced and supplied. Some of the excavations here show clearly that buildings originally intended for a particular use were actually completed to suit another purpose entirely later on. For a large example, it is thought that the new civil town’s forum, developed following a visit by the Emperor Hadrian, began life as an uncompleted baths complex. You can see the huge inscription commemorating Hadrian’s visit in the Shrewsbury Museum in Rowley’s House.
So Viroconium had two separate and distinct consecutive identities. It was first a military garrison, a fortress probably built by the Fourteenth Legion. The Military Western Command was transferred to Deva (Chester) around AD 78. The town then became a British tribal city of the Cornovii, some of whose ancestors may once have lived in the fort on the summit of the Wrekin. Some of the more recent descendants of those people could easily have watched as the Romans pushed their straight road further up the Severn and laid the foundations for Viroconium. The town straddles Watling Street which itself forms part of the continuous Roman route of 490 miles from just beyond Hadrian’s Wall right down to Richborough in Kent, then the main port for the continent.
On the ground at Viroconium, you can see that the most obvious excavated buildings are the huge Baths, the Basilica, a square indoor market, the forum and a public washing place. During the development of the town over more than a century, the original military plan remained as the street-grid for the later civil town. This street system was mostly occupied by the conspicuously large many-roomed ‘mansions’ of the most senior tribal figures. Some of these houses even had flushing lavatories and private baths. Water from a nearby Severn tributary was supplied to the town by aqueduct. At the fullest extent of its later development and expansion, Viroconium was the fourth largest town in Roman Britain, and -
- I don’t recall going there very often, dear. Did you go with your friends?
- Oh, yes, quite often. It was a good cycle ride in the summer, and then we’d come back and look at the exhibits in Rowley’s Mansions – I’m sure that’s what it was called then.
TV VOICEOVER: . . . from where the Romans would have a good view of the Wrekin nearby. As you enter or leave Shropshire along Watling Street, the Wrekin is the first, or last, significant physical feature that you see. This long, low mound a mile or so to the south of the road is about ten miles southeast of Shrewsbury. The Wrekin is visible from miles around and from many different angles. It’s sufficiently far away from the south Shropshire Hills to stand quite distinctly on its own, just over 1,300 feet high, rising out of the great, flat Severn Plain. Seen end on, it has the conical shape we might associate with an extinct volcano. It was certainly formed by volcanic activity, but was never a volcano itself. It contains some of the oldest rocks in existence, some possibly up to 2 billion years old, before there was life on Earth. The Britons who lived here were the Wrocensaetan, or Wrekin folk, and their Iron Age earthworks, still visible, enclosed a 20-acre fort on the summit. Today, the great thing is the 360º view the summit provides. In the best conditions, you should be able to see the Malvern Hills 40 miles away; Wenlock Edge, the Long Mynd and Caer Caradoc; and even the Berwyns just inside Wales.
Several legends have offered explanations for the presence of the Wrekin. This one is probably the most widely known. The people of Shrewsbury had deeply offended a Welsh Giant who decided to punish them. He would dump a gigantic spadeful of earth into the Severn so damming it, flooding the whole town and drowning its entire population. Having set out for the town one day, he lost his way, and had to ask directions of a local cobbler he met on the road. The cobbler showed him his sack, full of worn out shoes, and said: ‘Shrewsbury is so far away that I’ve worn out all these shoes getting here.’ This was too much for the Giant who dropped his load of earth there and then and went home. The pile of earth he left became the Wrekin, and the small amount that fell off his spade when he first put it down became the Ercall, the foothill to its north. It has a secure place in Shropshire folk patois. When you find something you wanted after considerable difficulty, you say: ‘I’ve been all round the Wrekin to get this.’
There’s no real evidence that the Romans made much use of the Wrekin, though it would clearly have provided an excellent lookout position. They were much more interested in parts of the south Shropshire hills where they engaged in metal mining, particularly for lead. The most well known town here is Church Stretton –
- Ah, now this is what I’ve been waiting for, dear. How many dozens of times did we go there?
- I’ve no idea, but it was your number one favourite place, no question about that. Whenever you said we were going there, I knew it would be a beautiful, settled summer’s day. I would have seen it, round the edge of my bedroom curtain, a cloudless blue sky with the silver birch leaves shining golden in the sun against it – and sometimes, on days like that, I used to hear an invisible light aircraft buzzing high above.
TV VOICEOVER: . . . and the town had been a popular spa for part of the 19th century. Here are examples of the architecture reflecting this holiday atmosphere. The most noticeable developments in the town came during the final decades of that century when a number of large well-heeled houses were built, often in a very ostentatiously half-timbered style. You can see some of them in the town itself. Others are perched in magnificent positions on the valley sides as you walk out to Cardingmill Valley. There’s little to be seen here of early English buildings, though St Laurence’s church, much altered since, was originally established in the early 12th century, and the original tower is still standing. And here is the King’s Arms pub, said to date from about 1760.
But those Victorian visitors came at the end of a long, though erratic, history of population among the Stretton hills. There was settlement here in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages and you can find their usual signs of prehistoric field systems, barrows, dwellings and hill forts around here. Caer Caradoc itself, one of the hills to the east of Church Stretton, is topped by a hill fort. By the time of the Conquest, isolated farmsteads had probably given way to small grouped settlements, later developing into proper villages. The density of the population fluctuated over the intervening centuries, much as it did elsewhere in the country. They endured the damaging effects of tribal wars, harvest failures, the Black Death and other lesser plagues, livestock diseases and land enclosures. The potential for work in the quarries and coal mines during the 16th and 17th centuries brought new people in to settle and new swathes of arable and pasture came into use on both lowlands and uplands.
Not all the 19th century visitors were here to take the waters. Church Stretton also attracted substantial numbers of natural history and geology students: the first trilobite fossils found in the British Isles were discovered at Comley quarry, only a couple of miles away. The area has rocks from the Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian periods, up to 570 million years ago, named after the ancient British tribes who lived among them. This is one of those places where evidence of the relatively recent past becomes utterly insignificant alongside the awesome stretches of geological history. The Church Stretton valley itself started forming around 50 million years ago, while more recently the familiar deep valleys in the Long Mynd were cut by the persistent flow of melt water from the receding ice sheets and snow fields only some 20,000 years ago.
One of the few ‘industrial’ objects around here is the reservoir – originally called New Pool - at the end of a narrower and steeper valley off to the left as you walk up Cardingmill Valley. Unlike some other places nearby, such as Coalbrookdale in the Severn Gorge, the Stretton area was never particularly maimed by the intensive activities of the Industrial Revolution. There was the South Shropshire Coalfield, and there were lead mines and stone quarries. There’s still quarrying today around Clee Hill and near Wenlock Edge. But they’re all far enough away from here to prevent any real damage to this beautiful scene. The only damage these days – and it’s very noticeable in places - comes from the feet of the thousands of walkers and ramblers who flock here whenever there’s a fine day.
Finally, to the Stiperstones, one of the neighbouring uplands in the Stretton Hills group. This is the mainly rocky, craggy ridge to the west of the Long Mynd, its southern end littered with a loose, grey scree of quartzite boulders broken up by the action of the last glacial period. The whole thing is topped by a forbidding rock formation known as the Devil’s Chair. Instead of the soft, rounded greenness of the Mynd, here you find harsh, hard, sharp and threatening outcrops. They’ve mined lead here since the Romans, and much more recent abandoned workings and old mining cottages are visible today on the lower slopes. Weather on the Stiperstones can change quite suddenly and often seems worse than it is at that very moment elsewhere in the hills and valleys around it. It’s a relatively gentle climb and a very good walk along the ridge where the view of typical south Shropshire is magnificent – small, narrow valleys, the patchwork of pasture, arable, small woodlands and hedged fields, twisting lanes, cottages and farms. For the full tonal range of the colour green, stand on the top of the Stiperstones and look down on Shropshire.
- Oh, that was good, dear. Some beautiful scenes around Stretton. It’s such a long time ago, but I can see it all so clearly . . .
And my mother, skipping back over the decades again, sees herself once more as a young woman, enjoying to the full the early summer of her life in the places she loved most.
*
FROM THE MEMOIR
Church Stretton needed a whole day and so the weather had to be right. It was a case of the correct clothes, the map, the picnic and the rucksack. All this had to be got ready in time for the bus that would take us out of town through places like Bayston Hill, Stapleton, Dorrington, Longnor and Leebotwood. As we bowled south down the A49 in the Midland Red, the rounded green hills of the Long Mynd would come into view on our right, closer and bigger until we were actually among them, the Shropshire Plain left behind us. It was only ten or eleven miles at most, but to me it was sufficiently longer than any other bus journeys we took to make it feel like a real journey. You felt you were actually going somewhere else.
Getting off the bus at Church Stretton, I always had the feeling more of a coastal resort than of a small market town. The hotel and some of the larger buildings all had the air and appearance of belonging on a sea front rather than here, very much inland indeed. I didn’t know then that the town had once been a spa. We walked up Cardingmill Valley from the bus to our picnic spot near the circular pool. This was filled in long ago and is now part of the National Trust car park, though the old sign announcing the depth of the water (‘3 feet deep opposite this point’) still stands there. Nearby a lifebelt hung on a post. You could swim here in pure hill water that dribbled down into it in a cold stream from high on the Mynd. While it’s a long walk for a small boy, there was plenty to distract me, at least on the way there. (The walk back was always much more of an ordeal). With a day of sunshine, hills, streams and rocks ahead of me, I didn’t really notice. I was happy to jump along on the tight, springy, sheep-cropped turf and leap across the stream that ran beside the road. At times, I was left behind when I found a narrow bit and started building a dam with pebbles and bits of turf. I seem to have spent a good deal of my boyhood wanting to dam streams. The great moment, the climax of the project, as all young dam builders know, was when you decided enough water was trapped behind it and let it all go, with a gigantic, surging rush.
A swim in the pool, the picnic and then my father and I would often leave my mother and make the trek further up the valley or up to the reservoir. The path went higher and higher up one side of this valley, so that you were soon looking down a steep drop with nothing much to hold on to except small tufts of grass. This is where I became aware of my father’s vertigo problem. He held very tightly onto the grass at his side and would not dare look down to his left until we reached a wider part of the path. I also have this problem in some situations but never as severely as he did. It became so bad that, by the time he was sixty-five or so, he couldn’t bring himself to walk across the Thames on the old Hungerford Bridge at Charing Cross. When we reached the reservoir, the inert mass of water gave me the creeps. It’s not particularly big as they go but to me it seemed huge, unnatural and very threatening. I could only just manage to look at it. Perhaps this was my punishment for damming it downstream on the way up.
One summer I came on a weekday with my mother and her friend Eileen. The protocol in those days required the friends your parents knew well to be called ‘Uncle’ or ‘Auntie’, so she was Auntie Eileen. She and my mother had been close friends ever since living in London before my parents were married (she always called my mother ‘Duckie’). When the war had started Eileen joined up and went into the Army, spending most of her time driving officers around in a jeep. She was still a soldier now, spending a few days leave with us. Church Stretton was the ideal place for this blazing hot day. After the picnic, Auntie Eileen decided she wanted to sunbathe near the pool. She laid out her towel and then calmly and without the slightest warning – or embarrassment - before my wondering youthful eyes took off her khaki shirt to reveal her truly splendid chest and the piece of female underwear that I had never actually seen before in this way – if at all, apart from when hanging on the washing line. Was I even aware of it then? Unfortunately for me, still trying to come to terms with this and enjoy its unexpected pleasure, she quickly decided to lie on her tummy to get the sun on her back. Lust may not have been active in me at that stage of my development, but I was certainly very curious and extremely interested in this unforeseen treat. She remained like that for the rest of the time, chatting away with my mother until it was time to go. So, rather disappointed that I’d already seen all I was likely to see, there was nothing for it but to go off and look for new places to make a dam.
I came here once with Michael Evans and his father Tom, who showed me different parts of the hills, such as Ashes Hollow and Caer Caradoc, and the All Stretton and Little Stretton villages that we didn’t normally visit, mainly for transport reasons, I imagine. As we were leaving the hills that day, I remember Tom stopping the car for us to watch a thunderstorm sweeping blackly across the top of the Stiperstones. I’d always slightly dreaded the place and this experience reinforced it. It would have played very well at that precise moment in a film of Wuthering Heights or The Hound of the Baskervilles.
But Cardingmill Valley had made such a deep impression on me over so many visits that I never really thought those other parts of the hills were quite the same for me. A small piece of my being is permanently lodged there. On reflection, the attraction of that kind of moorland country at a relatively young age may have laid the foundation for what I came to feel about Dartmoor in my early twenties. That belongs to a later part of the story but it too holds part of my being, and each visit makes me look forward to the next.
*
From the age of nine or ten, given good weather, two or three of us would cycle to the Wrekin with our picnics at least a couple of times during the school summer holidays. It was one of the longer bike rides we ever did in those days. The traveller Celia Fiennes wasn’t very impressed by ‘The Reeke’ but we could easily spend the entire day there, climbing it and then playing out our fantasy adventures around the summit. We knew the legend of the Giant, and it seemed to us to fit the case extremely well. What annoyed us about it the first time we went there was the Ercall, the bit of soil that fell off his spade before he dumped the rest. Knowing no better, we made the bad mistake of climbing it first, only to have to come down the other side of it and then start on the Wrekin proper.
One very important aspect of the Wrekin for us was its height. We understood that anything over 1,000 feet was, technically speaking, a mountain. So we were not just climbing any old hill. We were mountaineers, probably intrepid ones at that. When asked at home where we’d been and what we’d done that day, the reply would be: ‘Oh, we’ve been to the Wrekin. Mountaineering.’ The other thing was the volcano issue. With a healthy disregard for the facts, for us it was definitely a volcano. In fact, it had to be a dormant volcano with the potential for unannounced re-awakening and destructive eruption any minute. We had no problems in defining precisely where the lip of the crater began and ended as we stumbled about among the lumps of recently cooled lava and ash. Taking immeasurable risks, we identified areas of increased heat on the ground that would give us clues as to where the next red-hot fissure would appear.
Apart from the hill itself, we were always fascinated by the names of the Shropshire villages nearby: Wrockwardine, Eaton Constantine, Cressage, Buildwas, Leegomery. But it was the names of the features on the Wrekin’s summit that gave us the real material for our adventures. Here were rocky slits and outcrops called Hell’s Gate, Heaven’s Gate, Raven’s Bowl and Needle’s Eye. They were exactly what boys needed to generate a wild and threatening landscape of the imagination. Some were good places where we could shelter from dangers. Others concealed the very dangers that would eventually confront and challenge us.
We may already have seen black-and-white films like The Lost World or Journey to the Centre of the Earth, but they were not really necessary. We seemed to have no trouble inventing danger and colossal, vicious monsters for ourselves and, naturally, in engaging in exhausting battles with them as they crawled relentlessly up from their fiery caves in the depths of the still smoking volcanic magma. When we had seen them all off, the crater imploded to seal them in forever, or until the next time we came. Then we could climb back down, jump on our bikes and cycle home to Shrewsbury along the very road the Romans had laid down for us.
*
Viroconium provided another of our regular summertime cycling destinations in the Wrekin area. Following a visit there, we quite often popped into the Roman Museum when we were in town. The Roman money and weaponry attracted us particularly, but the best thing was the metal helmet, used either to torture prisoners or to punish an over-talkative wife. It had an attachment that fitted across the wearer’s mouth and held a sharp blade underneath their tongue. The slightest movement of the tongue would have a fairly predictable effect on the wearer. We had no trouble making our own short list of people we would like to engage with this device.
This old stuff and the site itself fascinated us kids for the same reason that we played our games on top of the Wrekin. It all provided outlets for our apparently infinite youthful imaginations. Show us an Iron Age fort and we became warriors and vanquishers of volcanic monsters. Give us some Roman remains, especially actually there on the ground rather than in a museum display case; show us strange Latin inscriptions carved on stones or the outlines of long disappeared buildings, and we would insert ourselves into the scene and act it all out. We could become the wild Welsh tribesmen resisting the relentless progress of the Roman Empire. We could creep up, cross the river and attack the garrison. Or we became Roman centurions moving through the streets of Viroconium, then charging out to see off our impudent attackers, chasing them through the shallow river and across the countryside, killing them with our lead-weighted javelins. Or we became citizens of the later town, working the market or attending public meetings in the forum.
With imagination at the age of nine or ten practically anything is possible, and was. Interestingly, it rarely had the same thrill or magic when you tried it again. New scenario and new scripts were needed each time. We could never enjoy a straight repeat. But there was no need for buildings with walls or roofs. You can rebuild the town in your mind and adopt the temporary identity of someone whose name you picked up from an inscription. We readily turned ourselves into Valerius of Lugdunum, Titus Flaminius, ‘the departed Placida, aged fifty five years’ (probably unaware that this had been a woman) or ‘the departed Deuccus, fifteen years old’, and then relived their life for them. The detailed descriptions of the individual objects in the museum often left us cold. We wanted to be those people who lived here nearly two thousand years ago, doing the things they did everyday out on the green plains of the River Severn.
I don’t think we ever had to pay to look round Viroconium in the late 1940s. In those days, there were hundreds of what have since become ‘visitor attractions’ all over the country, just sitting there. Dartmoor today contains the best part of a thousand prehistoric and later objects, stone rows and settlements, standing there in the landscape, just waiting for you to find them. There was certainly no structured tour at Viroconium, culminating in the obligatory exit via the shop to buy your postcards, replica Roman coins or pendants. Today the site is under English Heritage’s control, there’s a visitor centre and a car park, so there may also be a shop. Very little has escaped the late 20th century urge to commercialise the visible bits of history wherever we find them.
*
One last thing: during my boyhood years, I walked with my mother everywhere, into, out of and all around Shrewsbury and other places nearby. But there was one walk I dreaded from an early age. An attack of measles when I was just over four years old exposed a hereditary eye defect. The result was that, after I’d been at school for a while, we found that I couldn’t see the blackboard properly. Sitting at the front was no help. And so began, at about four-and-a-half, my life-long relationship with the opticians. My mother and I began a series of walks to the Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on Town Walls at the town end of Kingsland Bridge. It was a lofty, substantial nineteenth century building in red brick of – to me - forbidding aspect. The building has since become mansion-type apartments for sale or rent. The waiting area was a huge, open, echoing hall, with rows of long, low wooden benches, with people of every age and description, waiting. We must have resembled the hapless immigrants being processed at Ellis Island on their way into America.
My particular dread came from having to wait first for drops to be put in my eyes, which hurt, and then having to wait again while they took effect before my eyes could be tested. I hated and came to fear it all: the waiting; having anything done to my eyes; the stinging pain of the drops going in; and the ache as I waited for my pupils to dilate. After all that, a simple eye test was nothing. Such was my hatred, fear and resistance to all this that my parents later found an optician called Mr Gavin to look after me. He was a very tall, gentle man who knew instinctively how to handle a child in these circumstances and remove his fears. He looked rather like a younger version of the journalist Alistair Cooke and had his consulting rooms in St John’s Hill.
But, before that, eye tests became the biggest terror of my young life and led to a repetitive nightmare. I would be walking down a long hospital corridor, compelled to open each door and look inside to see what was happening there. At first, what I saw was more or less benign and unthreatening. Further down the corridor, the treatments inside the rooms became increasingly frightening, until I knew that the next door I opened would show me some kind of eye operation taking place. I saw powerful lights flashing on bright steel surgical instruments. I knew that when I opened the final door, always the moment when I awoke, terrified, I would briefly see myself undergoing such an operation. Long after Mr Gavin’s calming approach, and many years after I no longer needed drops for eye tests, at times of anxiety or tension this dream returned, its chilling horrors haunting me well into early adulthood.
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