On growing up in a scrap metal yard, in a railway station, with a goose

You don't think about the unusual things about your life until you see them in the abstract. And it's probably fair to say that my upbringing was... unusual.

Even after having known this for several years, it still remains somewhat surprising to recall that the place where I grew up has its own Wikipedia page. And when I say ‘the place where I grew up’, I don’t mean the city, town, or village. I mean the specific place. It’s a long story.

Until the age of almost ten, I was pretty much a North London council estate kid. First in Edmonton, then in Enfield. But in the late summer of 1981 all that changed, with an announcement round the dinner table on some midweek evening or other that we would be upping sticks and moving to somewhere else, to the Hertfordshire countryside. I threw, I shame-facedly remember, the mother of all tantrums. I remember that feeling of really not wanting to go very well indeed. This was really all I knew.

I still remember the first time we went to look at this new place, driving out of London—the M25 was under construction at the time—into Hertfordshire, through a village, heading towards an even smaller village. The match between Liverpool and Swansea City, the first following the death of Bill Shankly, was on the car radio. My face was pressed against the window. Why was there so much… grass around here? To my nine year-old brain, concrete was pretty much a naturally occurring substance.

In truth, we’d had a colossal stroke of luck. The company that my dad had worked for since the mid-1960s was moving to Peterborough. They offered him a job up there and a house in nearby March (the place, not the month), but my parents went to visit the area and didn’t like it. But there was also an alternative. Adjacent to the builders yard where my dad was a foreman, there was a scrap metal yard, and they could also offer him a house, as well as a job.

It would require a lot of work. This house—formerly the stationmaster’s house—hadn’t previously been lived in since 1973. But it was closer to my ageing grandparents—by the time we actually moved, both of my grandfathers had died—and better for my sister, who had already gotten engaged and was planning a wedding. My dad would end up spending a considerable amount of time that winter renovating that house, to such a point that it was, after a fashion, usable by the following summer.

This place was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The bigger village we passed through was called Colney Heath, the “Heath” of which was all that grass I’d seen five minutes earlier. The village we were headed towards was called Smallford, and the house was in the scrap metal yard, which itself was situated in this converted railway station. That railway station has a Wikipedia page, and it’s not the only website dedicated to the exact place in which I grew up. (Indeed, the latter of these two actually has a fairly recent photo of the house itself, though you have to scroll a long way down to get to it.)

The car pulled up at what looked like a repurposed level crossing gate. To the left was a squat ticket office. This, and the portakabin sandwiched in behind it on the station platform itself, was what passed for an office. Next to that was a large, square, red-brick building. This was the metal shed, in which the more valuable metals—primarily copper, brass and gunmetal—were stored.

Dad got out and opened the gate. About 50 yards up on the left was the weighbridge, also built into the platform, and the small wooden hut from which it was operated. There were skips and RSJs everywhere. And on the right, elevated but still hidden behind bushes and a couple of trees, there it was. The former stationmaster’s house. It would end up being our family home for the next 16 years.

It was certainly an unusual arrangement. Entering through the back door there was an outhouse, and then a small kitchen with the bathroom adjacent, separated only by a sliding door (which, as I would later establish, had no functioning lock). In the other direction there was a long, open dining room and living room, which was mostly notable for how few windows it had. To the left was the front door and the staircase up to three bedrooms and the toilet, which was separated from the rest of the bathroom.

There was a long back garden, which would later be partly turned into a vegetable garden, but also with enough room for a patch of grass which was big enough to tolerate a football goal. The small front garden had a weeping willow tree in the middle of it. The scrap yard itself ran down the left side of the house for about a couple of hundred yards to a huge black shed made of corrugated iron which looked like it was about to collapse for the entire time we lived there, inside which there was a crane, more metal, and more oil. A skip lorry was parked halfway down the yard. I loved it.

***

So yes, I grew up in a scrap metal yard. And yes, I grew up in a former railway station. Smallford railway station first opened in 1865. It closed to passengers in 1951, so pre-Beeching, and the single line track closed to freight on the 1st January 1969. The scrap metal yard moved in a few years later, with the builders yard in which my dad had worked since the 1960s next door.

A few weeks after we’d seen the house for the first time, we took my grandad to see it. He’d been a builder back in the day, and I know that my dad very much wanted him to be proud of the job he’d done. He was. Grandad’s health was already failing, by this point. I remember him being lifted out of the car, that day, weak and already aged well beyond his years. He died the following January; that trip may even have been the last time I saw him.

We moved in July 1982, on the day before the World Cup final. I watched the third-fourth place play-off between Poland and France on a portable television balanced precariously on an upturned tea chest, having spent the afternoon running around the garden with a ball for the first time. Within weeks, I’d assembled a goal in the back garden and found a net to hang off the back of it.

I went to junior school in nearby Colney Heath, and then to secondary school in St Albans. Our village was situated between St Albans and Hatfield, a new town which—unbeknownst to us in 1982—was about to go into a steep decline over the following decade. Secondary school was a couple of miles away and usually reached by bus. When older, I would walk the old railway line daily towards the city centre. St Albans would ultimately become not only where I lived, but also where I was from, even though it kind of wasn’t. I’d end up at college there too, and living there for most of my twenties.

It has to be admitted that some of the arrangements for this house were a little… improvised. Take, for example, the telephone. There was, of course, a phone line to the office, but British Telecom had advised that they couldn’t do a separate line to the house, the upshot of which was that the phone line had to be switched over between the house and the yard, according to whether the yard was open or not.

Incoming calls to the house during the daytime would be answered in the office and have to be transferred to the house. All the worse, the phone would ring in the house with every incoming call, but you couldn’t answer it from there because you could only transfer calls one way, from the office to the house, and not back again. If they transferred the call the phone would ring again, but with a single ring only. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the yard closed for an hour at lunchtime so you’d have to field a bunch of calls for that time telling people you’d get someone to call them back.

And on top of all that, the phone had to be switched over to the house in the evening, which my dad would forget to do roughly three times a week. Not uncommonly you’d hear the faint ringing of the phone in the office at about 5.45 in the evening and one of us—or to put it another way, me—would have to trudge over to the office, unlock, disable the burglar alarm, flick a switch, enable the burglar alarm again, lock back up again, and trudge back. This remained the case until BT finally agreed to install a separate line for the house at some point in the early 1990s. In many respects, it’s a good job they moved out when they did. Getting broadband installed there would have been a nightmare.

Other arrangements were similarly unusual. That level crossing gate would remain in place for the next 16 years. Unlocking it, opening it, closing it and locking it again would become a part of the strange rhythm of my life. The back of a Co-Op van appeared at one end of the garden as a shed. When I started playing the drums as a teenager, a portakabin was hastily lifted into the back garden, for the good of my parents’ sanity, if nothing else.

But having this yard around me changed something in me; it turned me almost instantly into an explorer. I wanted to know every inch of it, find every single oil-soaked corner, to try and understand this strange collection of buildings which, to a nine year-old, felt almost abstract. What was all this stuff? Why did people want to buy all this rusty old metal off them?

The most satisfying piles of scrap metal were those in which I could find just about anything. I quickly amassed a substantial collection of car badges and hub caps, elaborate and ornate designs from the 1960s and 1970s. Later, I would come to repurpose whatever I could find that was useful, up to and including a perfectly usable colour television which saw me through to my early 30s. In the early 1990s, Dad (so subsequently I) took possession of a bin bag full of defective titanium replacement hip joints. Guess what all my friends got for Christmas from me that year (they were hell to wrap, the spokes easily poking through the wrapping paper).

Though the yard wasn’t a car breaker’s yard, there was an MOT garage opposite the entrance to it, and it was not uncommon to find people pushing their MOT failures over the road and into my dad’s yard, accepting whatever he’d offer for the scrap steel (which was usually not very much, no more than twenty or thirty pounds by the early 1990s). Some of these vehicles were only marginal failures; the one that stuck the most vividly in my mind was a 1970 Triumph 1300 in navy blue which had a steering wheel the size of tractor wheel and which smelt of brown leather, which I took to tearing around the yard in.

Of course there was ribbing, when I started school the following September. I was Stig of the Dump, the kid who lived in a skip. But that passed when I found some friends and they visited it. And this interest didn’t end with puberty. When he had a job lot of wheelchairs come in the scrap and then promptly went on holiday for a fortnight when I was about 17, well of course we had races between about eight or ten of us, the length of the yard and back, at around 5 in the morning. He also had an air rifle, so of course we ended up playing a slightly spicier version of Tin Can Alley. Is it a miracle that no-one got seriously hurt? I couldn’t possibly comment.

When we first lived there, everything became impossibly quaint, very quickly. It was quickly decided that the amount of wildlife around our house would require us to keep a cat. She soon became an afeared hunter to the assorted local mice, voles and shrews, until she met her match. The first Boxing Day we were there, a honking noise started coming from the back garden. There was a fishing pit on the other side of the abandoned railway line to the house, and two geese had apparently decided that they fancied their food chances at ours better than in their natural habitat. And they were right.

These two geese quickly became one. The remains of the other were spotted on the railway line, presumably deceased at the hands of a fox, a few weeks later. But the other one kept coming back. Every morning it would appear in the garden, and late every afternoon, as the sun began to set, it would run down our long back garden, taking off, swooping to the left past the workmen’s shed, silhouetted against the sunset, back towards the fishing lake. It pretty quickly showed the young cat who was in charge; a handful of loud hisses and a very literal pecking order was established in the garden during the day.

As 1983 wore on, it became clear that the goose—which remarkably was never named by us—was rapidly ageing. Sometime during the summer, it gave up on the majestic take-offs down the garden and chose to start waddling across the yard and through a gap in the chain-link fence instead. Just over a year after it first arrived in our lives, it stopped turning up altogether and I think we all knew pretty quickly that this was going to be a permanent state of affairs. Like a lot of other things related to my unusual childhood, I wonder sometimes whether I might have dreamt the entire episode.

Of course, as I got older, living in such surroundings simply became that thing that I did. I remember the varying reactions of visitors, which ranged from appalled disbelief to absolute fascination. One, a photography student girlfriendish, spent an entire winter’s afternoon down the yard taking moody black and white photographs of iron joists, piles of aluminium, and car batteries, the quality of which have long served as a reminder to me since that there are photographers in the world and that there are photographers.

I came and went throughout the 1990s. I remember coming back home for the weekend for the first time from my student hovel in Liverpool and being staggered at how clean their house was by comparison. My sister briefly returned in the late 1980s after her first marriage lasted a sub-optimally short period of time and then moved out again, eventually permanently. I came and went—I was there, just home from a night’s clubbing and fizzing when the live announcement of Princess Diana’s death came through in the middle of the night on ITV—until I came and went no more.

By the time the 25-year lease on the yard came up for renewal in 1998, there was little energy to renew it. Dad was heading towards retirement age, and the others wanted out too. The bottom had fallen out of the second-hand steel market several years earlier and the business was losing money. My living there had become increasingly sporadic since the early 1990s, and by that time I was no longer living there at all. My parents moved out in September 1998, to a flat in Hatfield that they pretty soon came to hate, and then on to Horsham five years later.

That was now just over half my life ago. I live in West Sussex nowadays, by the seaside. Life has ultimately carried me on a journey which has resulted with me ending up in this little house with these two little people who love me to the moon and back. Mum’s gone and dad is starting to fade. My sister has adult kids of her own and passed 60 at the end of the year before last. There’ll always be a part of me that will be Little Brother and Number One Son, but at the same time I’m greying and wrinkling myself nowadays, in my fifties and with the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I’ve never been back. The platform at Smallford station has been renovated and even now has signs as though it’s still a functioning railway station, but these are all rapidly-fading memories, now. The house is still there, but my understanding is that no-one has lived in it since 1998, that it has been used only as storage space since, and that it will be unlikely to be used as a house again. I travel more freely now than I have at any point over the last ten years, and there’s a possibility that I will have to fit in a visit as part of some hare-brained Saturday football plan over the next few months.

I’m entering another reflective period in my life and when I look back, I often find myself thinking… what would I change? About my adult life, a lot. I wasted too many years, missed too many opportunities and procrastinated for too long. I didn’t know enough about the world, I didn’t think of my future, I often wasn’t curious enough, and I didn't chase my heart's desires. I’d like to think I’ve changed, in that respect.

But about my childhood? Very little. I had the freedom to roam wherever I wanted, so long as my parents had a rough idea of where I was. I was trusted, and I was always allowed to be unashamedly myself, no matter how eccentric that may occasionally have been. And I lived somewhere uniquely idiosyncratic, a place about which I have endless stories and memories which will be with me for so long as I live.