Ok, so we all have to start somewhere. In my case it was at about seven am one wet morning in 1942. May the 11th to be exact, when I was dragged screaming into the world, in a dingy rented room near Brentwood High Street. That room by the way, is now part of a dentists surgery. So if they ever put up a plaque outside 114 High Street, Brentwood to celebrate my birth, it will be a sort of poetic justice.

I'm also told that I was a breach birth, in other words came out sideways and was born awkward. A condition that has remained with me ever since. I also read somewhere that anyone having an awkward birth is destined for greatness. Well I've proved them wrong. Now no way could I have been described as a beautiful baby, anything but. Which is probably why my mother promptly announced, that was it. No more like me, which again is probably just as well. All over the world on that day, men and women were bravely fighting Hitler. laying down their lives so that those like me, being born on that day, could grow up in a world free from war. Makes you think, doesn't it. If they only knew I was about to join them, they might well have, laid down their arms, and started learning German.

THE STATION AREA OF BRENTWOOD IN THE LATE FIFTIES

Mind you the war left it's mark on me. For I suspect the Germans were not very happy with the idea of the birth of little Dennis and decided to do something about it. Mind you that something was a bit drastic, dropping a bomb on me. But it has to be said that I wear my war wound with pride. Across the back of my neck is a long scar, the result of having twenty odd stitches placed in it when I was 18 months old. I like to tell those interested that it was gained when some passing German pilot, totally lost over Essex. Decided to dump his bomb load on Brentwood, where the resulting blast blew me from my high chair, into the fireplace. From where I was dragged out, and rushed to St Andrews Hospital in Billericay where the medical staff had a field day with the back of my burnt neck.

Truth to tell, that German pilot was not to blame. True he dumped his bomb load, and yes I as under it at the time, but truth to tell it seems little me was at the time happily rocking back and forth in the said high chair, and got just a bit too energetic. So energetic in fact. That with the bomb blast, and glass and bits of house flying around, over went the chair, with me in it, straight into the open fire. Result one very burnt Dennis and a customer for that wartime hospital burns unit. Little wonder that for ever after that, mother never could find it in her heart to trust me into the care of grandma in who's flat, and fire I had taken a dive.

My Mother had met Father, then a driver for the Post Office Telephone service when on leaving home, in the early stages of the War, she had come to Brentwoodas part of her personal ard effort to work as a bar maid in the nearby Railway Hotel. It was for Father a case of romance over the beer glasses, and within a year they had married, little Dennis being the result of their horizontal pleasure.

THE OLD HOMESTEAD

As latest addition to the family Rookard. That room where I was born, was part of a flat at the lower end of Brentwoods High Street that was soon left for another rented Two up, Two down cottage. This was located in Railway Square, a street of shabby cottages. Strangely it was a return home for my Father who having being born in 1899, had been brought up in a cottage down at the end of the road. But over the years that Railway Square cottage, along with all the others in that pot holed road had deteriorated into little more then two staggered terraces of down at heal slums. Those living in the road being down on their luck, or in poorly paid jobs. Not that I was aware of living in a poor household, I just took it that having gas lamps downstairs and oil lamps and candles upstairs at number 8 Railway Square, was the natural order.

Mind you we had a bit of a problem with the rats. These wondered through the house from time to time when the behavior of the aged horse living in the stable next door got to much for them. And no self respecting Rat wants to share the stable straw with a nag that spent most of its time stamping it's hoofs. It was an evil horse that one. It lived behind a shop next door, that was the sort of corner shop that sold everything, including Tizer, this for us kids who could not afford the pocket money to buy a full bottle, was dished out at a penny or so a cup. but mostly, the shop dealt in vegetables.

THE VIEW OVER THE BACK YARD FENCE. I SUPPOSE THESE DAYS YOU'D CALL THEM SLUMS BUT DID NOT SEEM THAT WAY BACK THEN IN THE LATE 50's

The horse and it's cart had the task of wondering the streets, collecting and delivering these vegetables. It's only other task, being to remember how to get back most afternoons from the pub with its tired and emotional driver, Arthur. I came to know that family quite well, for unlike my mother and father who seemed to be in a state of armed neutrality most of the time, The Gilders led by mum and dad Horice and Hilder, with daughter Betty and son in law Arthur seemed to be, and indeed were the sort of family where anything went. and life was for the living.

I found the same thing in the nearby home of my Aunt Evea and Uncle Raymond. Where their Daughter, Audrey used to wheel me around in a pram, and when older, use to delight in loading me down me with countless copies of radio fun comic and film fan magazines. But what amazed me was the family dog. Now not having a pet of my own, this hound took on a whole new fascination.

From the point of view of breeding, it's mother had played the field with the result that it was definitely of the Heinz 57 variety. Small with black and white markings it considered its self part of the family. This was not all that surprising, as Aunty Evea took the view that it was unnecessary expense to buy dog food, when she need only lay an extra plate for the dog. This strange habit it loved, and no Sunday meal was complete without the dog getting it's rightful share of the roast meat, two veg and Yorkshire pud.

I don't know just how far back my memories go, but I can remember being taken in my pram and just after on various shopping trips with my mother into Brentwood high street. I suppose my earliest memory must date back to around 1944 when I was but two years old, and was held up, by the lower traffic lights in the High Street, to see General Montgomery and one of the Continental Kings in exile being driven to the Army's barracks at Warley on some inspection.

Not that I like being dragged shopping, well no youngster ever does. But one sure sign that I was getting bigger and growing up was always for me the marble counter in the local branch of the Home and Colonial. This was a grocery store, and because in those days cheese, sugar tea, coffee, bacon and the like were sold lose, long white marble counters that were cold to the touch, were the order of the day.

Standing there, alongside my mother gazing up at this seemingly high marble cliff. It was my ambition to be able to see over the top of these counters, as the years went by and I grew taller inch by inch, that counter top came closer and closer to my eyeline, until the day came when by standing on tiptoe, I could at long last see over the top.

This was a time of rationing, for during the war and the end of the late forties where a time when almost everything brought was subject to payment plus a coupon or two from a ration book. The side result of which were that sweets were on strict ration, so throughout my childhood I grew up with few if any sweets, with the only sweet drinks, like orange juice and a blackcurrant drink coming from small bottles that were doled out with coupons by the Ministry of Health. It's been said that this nation was the fittest in it's history due to rationing, and I can believe that. We all had very little to eat. Not surprising when a great deal of the nations foodstuff had been for the last few years of the forties been shipped in by convoys that ran the rich of being shot up and sunk.

Because of the high cost in men and ships, Fresh tropical fruits were almost unknown. Or so expensive, as to be out of reach of my parents. But late one year I got presented by some friendly soul with a strange looking fruit. This was the first Orange I had ever seen, and with the comment that we would keep it for Christmas, duly given a place of honour in a bowl on the sideboard, where all could see. It stayed that way for more then six months by which time it had become nothing more then a dried husk. I had better luck with my first banana. Not that I was able to eat all of it, for as a family treat, it had to be divided with great ceremony into three and covered with custard. Little did I realize that just over the bridge on the other side of the railway lines lived the fabled middle classes. where oranges and bananas were part of the normal diet.

Not that this coupon system of rationing was not above being fiddled. For the Black market was in full swing and if my parents had the hard cash, anything could be got. Our problem was that as family we did not. The only snag was that a family not only were issued with ration books, they were told where to spend it, so it paid to be friendly with your local food store owners.

But as rationing ended, and more food became available we came up against another problem that today with family freezers would not normally happen. By the early fifties meat was always in plentiful supply, but without a freezer or fridge, which even if we could have afforded them, would have been useless in our non electrical home, That shoulder of Lamb or side of beef would have to be served up for every meal, as it didn't keep. Much indeed was the meat that had to be thrown away during those long hot days of summer after three days, because maggots had started to crawl out. Any less and suspicions of the local butcher, George Farrow, flogging of meat that was less the fresh were raised.

KINGS ROAD SHOPS AROUND 1965 BUT NOW LONG GONE FOR OFFICES

But as rationing ended, and more food became available we came up against another problem that today with family freezers would not normally happen. By the early fifties meat was always in plentiful supply, but without a freezer or fridge, which even if we could have afforded them, would have been useless in our non electrical home, That shoulder of Lamb or side of beef would have to be served up for every meal, as it didn't keep. Much indeed was the meat that had to be thrown away during those long hot days of summer after three days, because maggots had started to crawl out. Any less and suspicions of the local butcher, George Farrow, flogging of meat that was less the fresh were raised.

Apart from meat, Mr Farrows well patronised had another use for my parents. On one great occasion in 1949, father found himself in position of a large white five pound note. Now this was at a time when the most an unskilled man could expect to earn was in the region of £2..10 shillings a week, (£2.50p in today's money) So the sight of a five pound note was unusual in our family to say the least. So unusual in fact that as a tiny tot I was given a special treat and allowed to actually hold this large white crisp paper with the incredible sum of £5 written large on it, proceeded by the words, that the Governor of the Bank of England promise to pay the barer all of five pounds on demand.

There was only one place we could change this note into real money. That was George Farrow's Shop. The note was duly present which much ceremony, and the cash presented back to my mother in the form of ten shilling notes. For a few days we were rich.

Indeed so rich that we were able to visit a sister in law of my mothers in Southsea, here I spent my days on the beach, where one fine summer afternoon an incredible sight met my eyes, for joining a large crowd I gazed in wonder at two elephants from a local traveling circus slashing happily in the water. They were the first live ones I had ever seen, and it was a bit of a shock to realize they were so large. They had been brought down to the seashore to bathe and cool off.

On another day, I was pointed out a large ship far out to sea, as it rounded the Isle of White, I was told with great pride, that this was departure of The Queen Mary from Southampton, which was slowly making it's sedate way towards France, before an onward journey to New York. I must have said something to the effect that I wanted to go for a trip on that boat, for I remember being told that "there would be plenty of time for that sort of thing when I grew up."

Back at the old homestead, the big event of the week, in the late forties and early fifties was the collection of the rent, for the house like so many others in that slum area was owned by a local landlord. This one, an old style ex London copper by the name of Reeves, had half a dozen similar slum house's scattered around the area. The income from which kept the wolf from the door.

After the war he had found himself as part of the victorious British army marching into Hamburg. Where he had met and married a local girl. She became the despair of his life, so on each visit, after the ritual marking of the rent book and a relaxing cup of tea in hand, he would regal my mother with the latest episode in the private Anglo German war the pair of them waged. He was also given to telling stories of his time in the force. He did however have one deaf spot. That in undertaking any form of repair. Small wonder when he knew that within ten years the Council would buy it off him for a goodly sum, bulldoze the lot and rebuild the area.

At the time we did not see it that way, for Railway Square, and the area surrounding the station was a little working class enclave in the heart of middle class Brentwood. A village of artisans if you like, and a place for a growing child to explore. At the lower end of Railway Square, where it joined Kings Road lay an old wooden weather boarded black tarred Mill belonging a seed merchant and milling company called Mathews. It was here that the areas farmers, gardeners and others would come to stock up with sacks of Fertilizers, seeds and other supplies. And where during long hot summer months a little pocket money could be earned helping around the hot and dusty warehouse. Great fun could be had, playing with the internal millers crane that run from top to bottom of the three story building through flaps in the floorboards. The Mill and the seed store lay at the back of the site

THIS IS OLD BERT WHO HUMPED THE SACKS AROUND INSIDE THE MILL AND ALLOWED US KIDS TO SORT OF HELP HIM !

with two wings on either side of a covered area. One side was taken up with more stores and a small office equipped with an old lady and an ancient upright typewriter, But on the other side of the covered yard, with it's entrance facing Kings Road was the shop. Here almost hidden between piles of heavy sacks of various products on offer, was a well polished oak counter, on which were placed a set of highly polished brass scales for the weighing of smaller amounts. The larger amounts being loaded and delivered around the areas farms by a lorry that had seen better days.

If the Mill formed one side of the entrance to Railway Square, the other side was formed by the side of the Railway hotel. Like all pubs then, it was divided along a strict class system, with the Salon bar having it's own entrance and catering for the areas upper crust who could well afford the extra penny of so charged for the use of a small bar with carpet and easy chairs.

THE IMFAMOUS RIALWAY HOTLE IN KINGS ROAD JUST BEFORE THEY PULLED IT DOWN FOR MORE BLOODY OFFICES.

Tucked between this and the pubs other larger bar, was it's Snug bar, little more then a cubby hole for off sales, being no more then four to five foot square, it was somewhere to stock up on bottles of beer or tobacco to take away, without having to enter the pub proper. This was also the place for us Kids to buy for a penny, when we had it, large round arrowroot biscuits, which would be dug out from a large glass jar placed on the bar. These were ideal for munching, between sucks through a straw of the delightful Tizer as we sat in the late evening on the pubs steps as our parents drunk the night away within. The fact that the areas dog population, having walked their owners to the pub were also rewarded with these very same biscuits did not bother us at all.

Just so long as some wet doggie nose did not poke it's way into our bags of crisps with their little blue bags of salt, or snatch the biscuits from our hands. The working class section of the Pub, and by far the largest, was it's L shaped Public Bar. This stretched around the bar counter, where the mass of the areas population assembled. Placed in a prime position, the pub had an interesting history, having once been a coaching Inn, coming into it's own when the railway first pushed out from London to end at Brentwood towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Here the old house drawn coaches would collect their passengers from the station for their outward journeys into the wilds of East Anglia. But the heyday for the Inn and it's stables was to be short, for within a few years a large army of Irish navies descended onto the town to attack the last great obstacle to the railway companies ambitions, and with hand tools only carved a cutting through the clay of the Brentwood Bank, creating in the process the Shenfield Common Tips, so beloved of generations of bicycle ridding kids for hurtling up and down at high speed.

But if the coaching trade had left the area, the Army had not. For close by at Warley was the Warley Barracks. which whilst the regimental Headquarters of the Essex regiment, would when they were serving elsewhere be the barracks for any number of other battalions. For the town, the change overs were great occasions, For the departing Battalion would headed by it's regimental band and colours would assemble on the parade ground in full dress uniform for the towns official good-byes. Then march the mile or so from Warley Barracks down Warley hill, over the railway bridge, and doing a smart left turn, march into the goods yard where along side a platform, normally used for goods wagons, their special troop train would be waiting to carry them either up country to there now posting, or to a port for embarkation overseas. Depending on who had been assigned to Warley, these departures where either ones of sadness for the departures of friends, and boy friends of the local girls, or ones of joy at getting rid of a bunch of hated local army lodgers. This was certainly the case with one Scottish Regiment in the middle fifties, who in their time had caused fights in every one of the towns pubs, as well as taking on the areas Teddy Boys in a massive high street fight that almost became an official riot.

A few days latter, another troop train would draw slowly in the goods yards, to disgorge another thousand of so men and officers, and the whole process would be reversed, this time with a smart right turn over the bridge and up Warley hill to their home for the next three years, the road being lined by a population wondering what the men of this regiment would be like. Over the years, like all Garrison towns, Brentwood eventually become home for many who had first come to Warley dressed in Khaki, there to meet their collective doom by marrying a local Essex Girl.

THE FEATHERS IN RAILWAY SQUARE, A PRIME EXAMPLE OF THE BACK STREET PUB NOW LONG GONE

All of which meant that for the Railway Hotel, The Railway Tavern just across the road and the Feathers across the road from my Railway Square home, trade was good, with many the nights enlivened by the fights and general noise at closing time. The Feathers however was very much a local back street pub, drawing it's public bar trade from those living within staggering distance. Pride of the pub was it's darts team. On the nights they were playing away, the pub would be empty as players and supporters travelled to distant parts of the town. But come a match night and silence was the order of the day, as the local master lined up the distance and angle required for his arrow to make double top. Come the end of the match and wonder of wonder, great plates of food would appear to be consumed with relish by the home team and their invaders.

It's true to say that for the regulars, The public bar of the Feathers was a home from home with it's Christmas club for saving cash and it's social events. Indeed once accepted as a regular, and you knew you were a regular when the barmaid remembered your name and what drink you wanted without having to ask. The very idea of using another pub was unthinkable.

So trips with the darts team to a strange pub were always an event. As too were the pub outings. Piling into a coach loaded down with beer, the entire pub crowd, sometimes reluctantly taking wives with them would head for the coast, boozing all the way there and back as their coach drifted from pub to pub on it's reluctant way home.

They were also into organising parties, and Railway Square had it's fair share, and I still have a photo showing a little Dennis pressed up with the streets other kids, at a long table set in the middle of the road, for a Victory in Europe party in 1945, which was followed a short time latter by another street party for Victory in Japan.

The saloon bar trade of this pub was very different, for being a back street pub it attracted friends of the publican and those sets who had found "This delightful little pub dear," but who when fed up would swan off to another new "delightful little Pub," find. These were the folk who could afford private cars, which with much slamming of doors and much drunken shouting of goodnight to each other, would roar off into the night long after closing time. This along with the army bucks treating their girls to a good time, a process that often involved a fight between suitors of the same girl, made for some interesting late evenings.

Close by the Feathers were two old weather beaten Essex cottages, clad in black tarred weatherboarding. Like mine, they too were lit by gas. In one lived the Bradfords, relatives of my boyhood pall Ted, Whilst in the cottage alongside lived his elderly granny. Stone deaf she was a white haired old lady, who had lived an adventurous life, being a nurse on the first world war battle front and bringing up a large family under conditions of utter hardship.

Most of her washing was done in an open to the elements lean too, outside her kitchen in a great old black iron kettle drum like device, underneath which a fire had to lit to heat the water. When it was wet, this lean too became our playground, inventing all manor of games as the rain bounced off the corrugated tin roof to be collected in the water butt. She'd had a hard life had old Mrs Woolinough. But regardless what we said to her, she always had a smile on her face. and being stone deaf, we could make as much noise as we liked.

Mind you it did not pay to play footy in the road outside, for there was always a chance that the ball would rather then fall into the cottage garden, would fly across the road in the opposite direction, landing over the fence and into the garden of old man Parmeter who would refuse to let us have it back. He gained quite a selection of tennis balls that way.

As Ted and I grew older, the spirit of adventure would take us down the road and into Kings Road, where a number of shops formed the heart of this Village within Brentwood. If it was meat you wanted, The Butchers shop run by the brothers Farrow was the place to go. One of them, George was a giant of a man, large and the very cliché of a rotund happy butcher. We was also a Conservative Councilor, and so could always reward his voters with that little bit extra come election time, at which he would be returned time after time.

My other memory of his shop was that once having got your meat, payment was offered to a little old lady who spent her life in a small box like office, the money being passed through a hatch, and change pushed through to the grateful out-stretched hand. As one of the few local shops handling large sums of cash, the shop soon became known as a surrogate bank, ideal for the cashing of cheques should one of these strange unknown pieces of paper arrive. After all no working class family ever made use of a bank, No for them the Post office savings bank or the co-op with it's divvy system was good enough.

On the other hand a little down from Farrows lay Jarvis the Grocer. Old man Jarvis was a hated figure, with an abrupt manner, and so local gossip went, a habit when slicing cheese, ham or bacon thin, of holding a well placed thumb on the scales. But these rumours may have had more to do with an increasing cost of foodstuffs, rather then bad practice by the owners. Battle lines between customers and shop owners were finely drawn around the station area then, where throughout the fifties, few earned more then £10 a week.

Apart from lower Kings Road Butcher's and Grocer's, a number of other shops all managed a roaring trade. For hair cuts the place to go would be Lowes, located at top of the grandly named parade, our hair was lost in a small room behind a shop that acted as a tobacconist as well as the place to obtain shaving kit. Here the order of the day was short back and sides, none of your nancy boy styles mate for the two bothers Lowe who run the shop. Making conversation with a small child sitting on a plank, draped in a sheet to catch the falling locks of hair, across the arms of their chair as they chopped away was also not their style, other then to mutter the barbers tradition incantation, as he whipped the sheet away of "something for the weekend." It was years before I understood what they meant, and had I wanted three Durex in a pack, they would have been the last ones I would have asked. Although I did wonder what secrets were contained in that "family Way" advice booklet that according to the poster, the Durex company would send to any young man planning nookie in the bushes.

Lowes shop was located alongside one of those corner shops that sold everything, in particular ice cream. This concoction produced by Walls, was served up in hard round blocks jammed in cornets or small square slabs, just as hard between two wafers, which as it melted tended to run down between your fingers. But ideal if you had just had your pocket money and wanted something to munch as you sat on the low concrete wall at the bottom of the parade watching the steam trains drawing into and out of the station, book in hand to collect the numbers. It has to be said however that whilst those of us from the Square used old note pads, the richer kids from the better off parts of the town used the longed for, but never obtained Ian Allan train spotters book, where the owner would draw a line through the locomotive spotted.

On the other hand, next to this shop was the areas local fish and chip shop, from which when open would issue that delicious aroma of fat being fried, oil for frying being one of those foreign concepts that had no place in his dingy emporium. Where your hot steaming fry up was dumped between sheets of last weeks Daily Mirror, before being covered in salt and vinegar.

For years the shop under it's various owners had always had a good trade, for when first opened, alongside it had been Brentwoods first cinema, that opened in the twenties to show silent films had soon become known as the local fleapit. There my father and his mates had spent many happy hours laughing at the antics of Charlie Chaplin. But by the time I had come on the scene, hard times had overcome the cinemas owner who had long gone leaving the building to become a paper wholesale company, and Brentwoods film fans to trudge up the hill into the high street to patronise the Palace where Stan Sedgewick acted as manager and the newer Odeon that built in the nineteen thirties battled it out for the local film lovers custom.

Not that our local chippie lost out, for with the troops and locals, it still did a roaring trade come the pubs closing time. But, although good and cheap, much was the disgust when during an early fifties potato famine following a hard winter, the price of chips went up from 2p to 4p a bag. A cost that strangely never came down again. Our first lesson if you like in the joys of inflation and profiteering.

Still if you wanted entertainment by window shopping there was always Jacques Vinalls ironmongers. Here displayed in it's window would be all manor of tools and goodies for the building trade, and inside racks of draws in which were stored nails, screws and other goods. As the Do it Yourself boom got under way in the fifties, the shop took on a new lease of life. with it's sale of wood and softboards from a lean too area at the back of the shop. Here if you were lucky could be found off-cuts of wood dumped in a large bin, which as we grew older, became for the building of soapbox carts and gang dens very handy.

Just up Kings Road, the row of shops housed Bert Bears Shoe repair shop, well not so much of a shop, more a passageway between two shops that had been roofed over. Here shoes and working boots could be soled and healed. Rumour had it that this very same Bert, had in his youth been a cricketer with the Essex County Team, and had opened his business when he retired.

For our supply of comics and sweets, we had the delights of Lazsells, a newsagents, complete with delivery service, where alongside the days newspapers and magazines would be stacked copies of the Dandy, Beano, Radio Fun and the lion. Like our parents, we each tended to have our favourite reading starting with the Dandy and Beano, very much the lower tabloid end of the market.

Comics like the Radio Fun, Lion we regarding as only being of interest to our more middle class friends. For those comics were very much published and aimed at different classes of readers. This changed as we grew older and could understand more of the words, progressing to the more violent much loved comics, many of them American, making the transatlantic journey as ballast on cargo boats working out of the Port of London.

Naturally our school teachers had other ideas on which comics we should read. They being much given to pushing the Children's Newspaper at us. This was very much the Times of the comic world, Light on drawings and strip cartoon, few if any photographs, and heavy on the words. The paper, also organised each year a national schools handwriting contest, which we were tempted to enter by our teachers. As my handwriting consisted of a page of ink stained miss-spelt scratchings, I did not stand much of a chance, as joined up writing was not style, still isn't for that mater as I still prefer to write in black capitals, the better to understand it later.

But in the middle fifties came a comic that was welcomed not just by it's young readers, but by our parents and teachers. This was the Eagle, that published in full colour featured on it's front page, the adventures of Dan Dare. We tended in the main to ignore the uplifting and moral stories which were planted craftily by it's editor, a cleric who had strayed into publishing, but loved the centre pages. These were given over each week to a cut away drawing by Artist Ashwell Wood for some aircraft, ship or locomotive. The were fascinating and many were the hours spent pouring over them. I have to say they did wonders for my education.

Later when we needed paper to draw on, we would hang around a small printing works alongside the Railway hotel, making a thorough nuisance of ourselves. But it was thrilling to be in that workshop. To stand with the smell of printers ink in your nose, your ears deafened as the floor vibrated to the sound of those great noisy letter-press German made printing machines at work. Printing out posters, and programmes for any number of local events.

After a time we were even allowed to help, and hours would be spent watching the selection of a type face, and seeing it being placed in the frame that once inked would when printed show the wording of the posters the way right way round and not in the reversed type face. For one of my friends that miss-spent time proved of some use as a future career, for when he left school he managed to get a job with them. The company sending him away to Barking college on day release to learn the art of printing. From my point of view it left a lasting love of the smell of printers ink and those wonderful great thumping machines, now alas a long gone part of our industrial heritage.

As indeed is most of that part of Brentwood, for as the town grew, and the building boom got underway in the early fifties many of those childhood buildings were demolished to make way for offices and shops. One that went was a small shop kept by an old lady near the junction of Kings Road and Queens road. She had died and the agents decided to auction off the larger items of stock, and sell of the rest in one great sale.

For two or three days trestle tables on the road outside groaned under the weight of piles of stock. with box loads of candles, pocket knifes, ironmongery of all sorts and tins of various foodstuffs. My parents were able from that close down sale were able to stock up with enough Gas mantles to last two years or more. As these very delicate net mantles, which burnt gas to form a warm glowing light were quite expensive, that box brought for pennies was a bargain

A little way down from this shop, across the entrance to Fairfield Road were a double fronted shop that became home to a local tyre distributor, who apart from selling conventional tyres, was into distributing giant types for farming machinery such as tractors and combine harvesters.

These were stacked up around the back of the shop, and were ideal for the playing of hide and seek. Also good for play were the smaller car tyres, which formed the bases of hoop races. Mind you one of the races almost got me a criminal record, for in the lead charging along Fairfield road, I made the great mistake in allowing my tyre to roll it's wobbly way out into Kings Road, and into the path of the local officer of the law.

This was not a place to hang around, so race forgotten, I and the rest of gang took off as fast as a feet could carry us. Unfortunately that Policeman, had the latest in crime fighting aids, a push bike. We were soon caught, I being singled out for the traditional dressing down, and in the process taking on the roll of the gangs Mr Big time criminal.

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