Bedford Park 150 – Julian Borger remembers his sixties childhood

Image: Bedford Park community comemmorating the 80th anniversary of VE Day with ‘The Big Sing’; Photograph Torin Douglas

Memories of growing up in Bedford Park

Bedford Park is celebrating 150 years this year. The first ‘garden suburb’ was advertised as ‘the healthiest place in the world’, at the end of the new railway line so residents could live in clean air, but near enough to town that they could make their way into London to pursue their business interests.

The estate’s developer Jonathan Carr purchased the first 24 acres of land in 1875, and his vision was realised over the next few years, as the houses, stores, church, a club with a stage, and the Tabard Inn were built.

To mark the 150th anniversary we are publishing a series of personal accounts from some of those who have lived in Bedford Park, about what it was like growing up there, in association with the Bedford Park Society and Torin Douglas, from St Michael & All Angels Church.

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Julian Borger, world affairs editor at The Guardian newspaper, remembers Polish and Czech families, refugees from Hitler, featuring largely in the neighbourhood when he was growing up there in the sixties and seventies. He also remembers a notorious criminal living there.

A Sixties childhood in Bedford Park – by Julian Borger

The first images that come to mind when looking back at a childhood in Chiswick are all connected to the horse chestnut trees – their white candles in spring, dappled shadows in summer, and the spiky green fruit in autumn with the big polished seed inside, the conker.

We children would spend our Octobers pitting conkers against each other, each one holed with a meat skewer, threaded onto knotted string so as to be whipped against an opponent’s, until the inferior conker disintegrated.

There was also a complicated game I half-remember involving glass marbles and the slotted drain in the middle of the primary school playground. I cannot recall any of the rules, other than that they were complex and open to constant re-interpretation.

At home, cars were rare enough on our street as to be able to play football –  or a strange tennis-cricket hybrid randomly dubbed ‘French cricket’ –  across the full width of the road, unobstructed by parked vehicles.  A car might turn up every quarter hour or so, forcing a pause of a few seconds, but not so often as to disrupt the game.

Balls must not have been allowed at school as we played football in the small triangular playground with a very rough sphere made of small milk cartons stuffed inside one another and then bound my multiple layers of Sellotape. They would typically disintegrate before a game could be decided.

As we got older, the football games graduated across the road to Acton Green, with a real ball and jumpers for goalposts. Football was an all-consuming presence in our lives. My friends and I played every dry evening until dinner time or until it got too dark to see the ball, whichever came first.

Even when I joined the local cub scout pack in St Michael’s church hall, almost all our time was devoted to football, either practising or in competition with other packs. I only earned one badge in my whole cub career: for orientation, a life skill made all but redundant now by GPS.

Image: Julian as the oldest child in the group, on the left

Refugees from the Nazis, and a notorious criminal

Recalling the names of my fellow footballers, I realise most of them ended in -ki. Our neighbour was a certain Mrs Nagorska, and there was a shop on Bedford Corner selling gherkins, fermented rye soup and kielbasa. The Poles at that time had come to define Chiswick more than any other community, a byproduct of the war, and the nearby RAF bases.

When I was born, in 1961, the second world war was as recent as Barack Obama’s inauguration or the death of Michael Jackson are today. My best friend’s family, and the other end of Fairfax Road in Bedford Park, still had an Anderson shelter, an earth-covered bunker which took up almost all their back garden. When we had toy gunfights in the street, we were Tommies battling Jerries, with mock-German accents.

Image: Julian with his father Robert

My father had been a child refugee from Nazi Vienna, and there were others up and down our road who I now realise must also have been flotsam from the war: Mrs Nagorska next door, and a Czechoslovak family at the other end, who had inherited the Anderson shelter.

There was one minor celebrity on the street, a small wiry man from Belfast, Sam Kydd, who starred in a detective adventure series called Orlando.  The only other source of notoriety that I can recall was a house around the corner which was the family home of Andrew Newton, who played a key role in the biggest political scandal of the age.

Newton was a pilot who claimed to have been hired as a hitman in 1975 to kill Norman Scott, the boyfriend of the then Liberal party leader, Jeremy Thorpe. He failed to kill his target as his pistol jammed, but not before he had shot Scott’s great dane, Rinka, the main casualty of the whole murky affair, along with Thorpe’s political career.

Images: A sixties childhood in Bedford Park

The beginning of an interest in world affairs and a suitcase full of boots

It was an overwhelmingly white neighbourhood. In my early years, there was one black person nearby that I remember, the father of two boys who would sometimes play on the street with us, racing around the block or finding stag beetles to joust against with twigs.

In the mid seventies, a family arrived on the road from Uganda, fleeing from Idi Amin.  My parents got to know them as they found they were being ripped off by the same builder. My mother, Wyn, went on to become lifelong friends with the mother of the Ugandan family, Gwen, and an adopted auntie to her children.

The friendship drew her into the fringes of Ugandan politics. It turned out that Gwen was related to Yoweri Museveni, now the country’s aging dictator but then a dashing young revolutionary leader fighting to end the country’s long succession of murderous tyrants.

In the mid 1980’s, when I was working in Africa, my mum came to visit me bearing a couple of enormous suitcases. When I complained they were too bulky to take with us on safari, she reassured me that much of the weight consisted of oversized boots for Museveni’s National Resistance Army, then fighting an intense guerilla war, and were to be delivered to a certain hotel on the first day of the holiday. In return, she was awarded several cows after the revolution.

I have not been back to Fairfax Road for years. There is no one left from our time there. Mrs Nagorska is long dead, the Czech family moved away to run a hotel in the Midlands decades ago, and the Ugandans are mostly back in Africa, though one of Gwen’s sons drives a London bus.

There is an American actress living in our house now, and the road is more uniformly prosperous than it was in our day. No one in our family could dream of affording to live there now, but we had our chance at least, and my 18 years there gave me as joyous and halcyon a childhood as I could possibly imagine.

Julian Borger is the world affairs editor of The Guardian. He will be speaking at the Chiswick Book Festival on September 13 about his family memoir, ‘I Seek a Kind Person’.