Northam – I Walk Alone

More Change – the demise of the gasworks

My walk over the bridge at Mount Pleasant on 1 February got me thinking about the old gasworks. I’d seen the gasometer from my rickety perch on the footbridge and wondered how much longer the familiar landmark would be around. For years, there’d been rumblings about the gasometers being demolished since Southern Gas Networks no longer use them and maintaining them is costly. I wrote about them and took several photos on a walk back in 2017. In 2022, when they announced they really were going, local residents had mixed feelings about their demise. Some saw them as an eyesore, others a piece of history. Personally, I sat somewhere in between. I knew the demolition work had started, so on 7 February, I thought I’d have a closer look while there was still a chance.

Homeward bound

Thanks to the blue bin lorry driver’s rather rude and distracting interruption, I never did get round to the final instalment of my epic foggy walk on 11 January. To be honest, I toyed with the idea of leaving it as it was, with me walking through the beautiful misty parks and chatting with the park keeper. The trouble was, I had some wonderfully atmospheric photos I didn’t want to waste, and the area set the scene in both Plagued and Land Fit For Heroes. That area was Northam, and it is well worth a look around.

Land Fit For Heroes

Plagued was never going to be a standalone book. Even as I was writing and researching it, other characters were clamouring to have their stories told. Their voices were so loud, it was hard to decide who to listen to at times. Three voices were especially loud, Lenny, Laura and Percy, who’d all had bit parts in Plagued but demanded their place in the spotlight. It took a while to quieten them enough to work out their story, and even longer to research and write it. Now it’s done and thanks to all the wonderful people who helped me along the way, Land Fit For Heroes is now in print.

Where have all the pubs gone?

In the first half of the twentieth century, the pub had an important role in working class men’s lives. It was a place they could escape to at the end of a hard day’s work and somewhere they could gather with their friends. One of the things I noticed when I was researching Plagued and Land Fit For Heroes, was how many pubs there were in working class areas back then. Almost every street corner had one. Looking for a pub where my characters could go for a chat and a pint, I was spoilt for choice. In Plagued, I picked the Prince Consort in Netley and the Junction Inn in St Denys for Thomas, Joe and Bert to meet, The Cowherds, the Engineers Arms and the Park Inn were also mentioned. The Park Inn is now a lap dancing club and The Engineers Arms is derelict, but the other two pubs are still open. The same cannot be said for many of those street corner pubs. So where have they gone?

The rise and fall of the Railways

Gasworks train Britannia Road Southampton

Railways have played a pivotal role in my life. One of my earliest memories is of Pappy sitting me on the railway bridge at Bitterne to watch the trains, and my first full time job was in a British Rail Data Input Centre. It was there that I learned to touch type. It’s no surprise then, that the railway loomed large in my first two novels, Plagued and Land Fit For Heroes. My research told me that one of the big changes between now and then was the role the railways played in people’s lives. The main characters in both books lived in houses backing onto the railway line and the rumble of passing trains would have been a background to their lives. Hospital trains took Thomas across France and from Southampton Docks to Netley Hospital. Mary worried about her son, Eric, crossing the line on his way to school and she travelled on trains to visit Thomas in hospital. The trains rattled Laura’s windows until the General Strike came and quieted them. Percy and Lenny crossed the railway bridge and passed the busy Terminus Station every day on their way to and from work. The whole of Northam was crisscrossed with railway lines back then, but most are gone now.

Coming soon…

Times of change and strife are often the ones that stand out in history and the years between the wars were certainly filled with both. The men who came back from the Great War had been promised a land for for heroes, but what they got was very different. The war left behind both economic and political turmoil, and what peace there was, was uneasy. There were still wars being waged, the Turkish War of Independence, the Polish Soviet War, the Irish War of Independence, the Rif War, problems between the Italians and Libya, the Americans and Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic to mention just a few. Politically too, the world was changing, with the slow rise of both communism and fascism. America may have experienced a period of financial boom in the early 1920’s but Britain faced an unemployment crisis more persistent and severe than any since industrialisation. The ordinary, working-class men who had come back from the war faced terrible hardships. In Southampton, the men of the docks were some of the worst affected.

Northam – a picture is worth a thousand words

Researching the historical facts for Plagued was a learning curve The research took longer than the writing. Finding out what Southampton was like over a hundred years ago was helped by old maps, Kelly’s Directories, history sites and a great deal of reading and walking. The one thing that really brought Northam in 1918 to life though, was the wealth of old photographs I found. Today I’m going to share a few of them with you.

Memory lane

My big writing project, inspired by my paternal grandparents, was completed (I promise all will be revealed soon, bear with me) and I had tentatively begun a second big writing project. This one was inspired by my mother’s parents. Where my memories of Pappy are still vivid and much of his story was told to me first hand, my memories of Nanny, Laura White, are far more hazy because she died when I was just four. I knew even less about my mother’s father, Leonard White. He died when Mum was barely more than a child and she had never talked about him much.

Mixed blessings

Northam Road, Southampton early 20th century

Those of us born in England after the middle of the last century have been privileged to live in relatively prosperous and peaceful times. We may have had our trials and tribulations and seen many changes but, until COVID19 arrived, our lives had not been touched by famines, plagues, or world wars. For most of us it came as a shock to realise that we were not immune to such events, our science and technology was not invincible. Each of us had to cope as best we could. For me, the writing project I’d begun in 2019 helped keep my mind occupied but, in some ways, it was a mixed blessing.

Surviving the pandemic

It seems like a lifetime ago that I last sat here writing a blog post. Now I’m here I hardly know what to say. So much has happened since I told you about my wet walk around the medieval walls with Kim, and our desperate search for coffee. That day seems like a world away and a lifetime ago now. If we’d known what was ahead would we have appreciated the rain a little more, or the freedom to walk in and out of shops with never a thought of masks or social distancing? We could never have imagined what lay ahead, or believed that a Saturday morning at parkrun, followed by a chat over coffee in The Bellemoor would become a distant memory. Neither could we have known that one of us would catch a deadly virus and survive it. Perhaps it was better that we didn’t know. We wouldn’t have enjoyed our walk at all if we had.

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