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Ralph Swift, born 1933 at Wimbledon, went to Morden Farm County Secondary School in Aragon Rd before attending Wimbledon Technical College at Gladstone Road. He now lives in America.
I suppose my memories of Morden are locked in a time frame from the 1930's until I left the area to join the Royal Air Force in 1951. I have rarely been back since and then only fleetingly.
Although born in South Wimbledon at Grandma's house on Cowper Road, my parents actually owned their own property at 46 Rutland Drive in Lower Morden and my earliest recollections of that home are standing on the gatepost, supported by my mother, and waiting for my father to come home from work on his bicycle.
He worked at Standard Upholstery in Mitcham as an upholsterer, a trade he subsequently worked at until he died in Cromer in Norfolk in 1981.
My first school was at the top of George Hill on the London Road as you leave Morden for Epsom. I subsequently attended Morden Farm County Secondary school on Aragon Road and from there to Wimbledon Technical College on Gladstone Road in Wimbledon.
I was six years old when World War Two started and a pupil at Morden Farm CS. We were waiting for our new house to become available at 181 Lower Morden Lane and living temporarily on Tudor Drive.
Dad was in the ARP (Air Raid Precaution) organisation and shortly to become an Airman in the Royal Air Force. In those days only the north side of Tudor Drive was partly developed and the southern side was mostly open fields and wood, the fields extending all the way back to the rear of the houses on Aragon Road.
Even on the north side of Tudor Drive there was open land backing onto Wolsey Crescent at the London Road end. At the 'Beverly Hotel' end it was open fields from Aragon Road to Lower Morden Lane.
In the field at the 'Beverly' end of Lower Morden Lane, and in front of the old cottages, stood four huge Elm trees and a tall straight Poplar together with the foundation of an old farmhouse, a vivid reminder of the community's agrarian past that was about to be swallowed up by the expansion of the suburbs.
Fortunately for me, this expansion was halted for the duration of the war and I was left to enjoy the open fields and its reminders of past times. Many a happy summer hour was spent with friends sitting in the lower branches of those magnificent Elms, hidden from the world but able to observe all that was going on around us.
There were another couple of these very large trees to the south of Tudor Drive, one of which stood beside the footpath that leads from Aragon Road to Tudor Drive alongside the (then new) school fence.
This particular tree anchored the remains of an old farm bank and ditch that angled toward Tudor Drive. Atop the bank stood a fringe of hawthorn bushes, and a little further down, and leaning drunkenly, an ancient wooden five bar gate spoke of the milking herd going to and fro in times not too distant.
Even in the schoolyard, and providing welcome shade on a hot summer day, three Elms remained, carefully protected from the penknives of would-be name carvers or those intrepid youngsters wishing to scale them.
I really miss those incredible Elm trees, and even from a distance of sixty years I could probably locate the point at which each one stood, in all its glory, within a mile or two of my old home. We shall never see the like of them again in our lifetime nor yet perhaps for two hundred years to come. I am grateful that I was granted the privilege of seeing them and living with them.
The remnants of an agricultural, and far more elegant, past were to be found all around Morden, if one cared to look. I still recall the wonderful horse troughs that were placed at intervals along London Road all the way to Epsom and beyond.
They were huge black and pink granite creations carved from a solid block with a horse trough at the top, and underneath another shallower trough for dogs or short-legged animals such as sheep.
At one end they had thoughtfully provided a brass bowl with a brass cup chained to it for the use of thirsty travellers, shades of the stage coach that once plied this route as the racing public made their way to the Epsom races and spa.
There was one at the top of George Hill, another at Stonecot Hill if I recall, and certainly one by the clock tower at Epsom.
Our back garden at 181 Lower Morden Lane yielded a veritable pile of mellow red bricks and old clay tobacco pipes when we started to 'Dig For Victory'. I rather think our house had been sited on an ancient farmyard or barn floor, and certainly the favourite haunt of some bygone farmhand who dearly loved his pipe-ful of 'baccy". The evidence was all around us.
There were still two farms on Lower Morden Lane during the war, one with a dairy herd, horses, pigs and a hay barn that stood opposite the entrance to Cardinal Avenue. From this farm, twice a day, issued a herd of about twenty milk cows, all under the control of 'old Tom' the cowman and milker.
They would make their way down Lower Morden Lane at a leisurely pace, go around the roundabout at the 'Beverly' and were pastured in the cow field opposite the shops and Co-Op on Grand Drive.
Should you happen to be driving your car down the lane at this time then that was your misfortune and you had to control your speed to that of the cows.
The other farm, known if I recall as 'Peacock Farm', was no longer a working unit apart from a few chickens and geese, and in my early days a few pigs were housed in sties situated against the woods that bordered the golf course that was later to become Morden Park.
The golf course was still being played upon when I lived on Rutland Drive. The whole boundary fence both alongside the London Road and Lower Morden Lane was constructed of wooden posts about four feet tall, painted white and ten feet apart with a tubular rail between, so much more elegant than the chain link fence of my latter years and great for doing a tight-rope act on or merely somersaulting around.
In my faintest recollection I see the brook running alongside Lower Morden Lane, right against the footpath. I may have seen it as a three or four year old when my parents used to walk down the lane or perhaps it is just something I saw in a book that caught my attention, I cannot be sure except to say that at one time it did indeed run alongside the road but was later diverted to the far side of the wood.
There were three more Elms just where Lower Morden Lane joined the London Road. If you went into the park at this point and stood about fifty yards from the wood that parallels the London Road, and if the sun was low in the west and casting long shadows, it was possible to make out the slight rise that indicated the line of the old Roman road (Stane Street).
A footpath ran from the London Road to join Lower Morden Lane a bit further down, and if you crossed the stream and entered a small wood you would come across a perfectly rectangular pond with a small island at its centre that was obviously man made.
It was no doubt dug as a landscape feature when the old park was the private residence of one of the landed gentlemen. This pond was a great source of newts and tadpoles, including many of the great crested newts that are fast becoming an endangered species.
Our method of catching them was simply to tie a worm with a piece of cotton, throw it in the pond and wait about two minutes or watch the worm carefully until it was taken and then slowly draw it to the side with the newt holding on firmly to the worm; it rarely failed.
There were some elegant though slightly seedy large houses on the London road leading out of, and just outside, Morden together with a very impressive and large barn that I thought was a tithe barn and would have been a listed building, but on my last quick trip through it seems to have disappeared.
It stood alongside the footpath that leads you over the underground railway yards. Also on that road and close by the bridge that carries the railroad over it stood a few huts. I went to cubs and scouts there. They used to be called the 'Searchlight Huts' and were probably a throwback to the First World War.
Finally, there were also some, what had been, somewhat stately houses on the London Road between Lower Morden Lane and Tudor Drive, one of which was used by Salmon Brothers as a building supplies yard.
All the land that stood opposite Canon Hill Road on Grand Drive at the 'Beverly' end of Lower Morden Lane was cow fields way back to the cemetery and over toward Motspur Park.
The corner of that cow field would flood and make an ideal ice rink for us boys during the colder months. Not more than a few inches deep, it provided a great place to go if you were uncertain of the ability of the ice to support a crowd of youngsters.
We had a long rope hung from a large Willow tree that overlooked the river at that point, and since the river was about ten feet below the field it provided an ideal place to really get a good long swing in a huge arc over the river and back onto the bank on the far side of the tree. It was alternative entertainment should the ice prove to be a bit thin.
The war to a ten year old was a great source of entertainment, for little did we know of or understand the dangers and heartbreak of it all. It provided us with shrapnel to collect, bombed out buildings to explore, unexploded doodlebugs (V1's) and a fireworks display every night as London, just ten miles away, underwent the full force of the Blitz.
There were dogfights to watch as our Spitfires and Hurricanes tackled the enemy intruders. Parachutes floated on the evening breeze or searchlights penetrated far into the night sky to pick up that distant silvery object that was causing my mother such concern.
We had lost a couple of windows and there were tiles missing from the roof where the shrapnel had landed. One memorable summer afternoon the back of the house received a couple of bullet holes, no doubt the residue from one of the many conflicts that were going on far above our heads.
On an even more memorable night a nearby bomb caused the bedroom ceilings to come down. It also opened up the horizon when a stick of bombs tore a gap in Aragon Road and Lynmouth Road, and you suddenly realised that the land had contours beneath its covering of suburban dwellings for you could see the skyline beyond the gap instead of more houses as you expected.
Then there were the bomb holes that exposed the underlying clay that London stands upon. Beautiful sticky yellow clay with the consistency of soft dough. We soon learned that a quarter pound of this lovely stuff, impaled upon a six-foot willow wand, could be hurled a hundred yards easily.
Two bomb craters set about this distance apart would provide both ammunition and shelter for two opposing gangs of urchins determined to move the landscape a quarter pound at a time from one crater to the next.
Our aim was not too accurate of course and the distance was variable but that did not matter. The beauty of it was that you could hear an incomer by the whistling sound it made. On one occasion I was stood at the bottom of my muddy pit and heard that characteristic sound.
I turned to my companion to warn him of the impending missile only to see a very large yellow spider explode on his forehead and spread back toward his ears. He had a look of blank amazement upon his face, then his eyes slowly turned up in his head, and without moving his feet he went backward standing perfectly to attention.
I had heard the expression 'poleaxed' but I had never witnessed it until that moment. He was quite unconscious of course, true testimony to the effectiveness of a quarter pound of London clay at a hundred yards. We called the local Air Raid Warden and they wheeled the victim off to the first aid station where he eventually 'came to', suffering little more than an enormous headache and concussion.
However, that little incident curtailed somewhat our ballistics experiments with clay, for we were banned from bomb holes thereafter.
Many of the houses in our area were known as 'Tudor Style' and as such sported diamond shaped leaded windows. The glass having been removed by a bomb blast left the lead, this lead cut into half-inch lengths made superb catapult ammunition, which we made full use of, but fortunately not against each other.
We became very proficient with the catapult.
When I think back on what we young lads got up to, and add the always-present danger of a wartime injury of some sort, it is quite remarkable that we had so few really serious incidents. Despite the violence all around us, we grew into adulthood without much in the way of scars, either mentally or physically.
I sometimes wonder if we perhaps protect our own children far too much from the natural learning process. Kids are remarkably good survivors.
We saw little in the way of sweets or 'candy' as they call it here in the States, none of the exotic fruits or soda that the modern children are so fond of. We had dried milk, concentrated orange juice (rarely), powdered eggs, and very little meat except our own home-grown chickens and rabbits.
Vegetables came from the garden, there wasn't much coal or hot water in the winter, and we wore heavily-darned socks and patched clothes. No television, we would crowd around the radio to listen to 'In Town Tonight', 'Tommy Handley' and similar popular programmes of the day.
If you had an old mechanical hand-wound gramophone you could listen to some music of your choice provided you could obtain some scratchy records from a friend, otherwise it was just whatever the radio saw fit to give you.
The cinema provided a break from reality and that was the only place to get news in pictures. The pantomime was your theatre experience, usually once a year.
Many of our school lessons were conducted in the air raid shelter and always with your little gas mask box at your side, which went with you practically everywhere. Yet we received an excellent education.
Despite the desperate times that England was going through it was a happy and fulfilling childhood, and proof once again that children are resilient creatures. It certainly did me no harm.
My notes so far have dealt mostly in generalities. That was in order that readers familiar with the area would perceive some of the enormous changes that have taken place there during the last 60 years.
More specific recollections of the war years and my impressions of that time in history bring us much closer to the thoughts and feelings of a young lad going through those times.
Perhaps my earliest memories are of the 'phoney war'. We had been primed to expect all hell to be let loose, but the reality of it was that nothing at all happened at first.
Great pains were taken to install black-out curtains for every window of the house. In our case, dad made fitted wooden frames that clipped into the window openings and were covered with a thin but lightproof material, and covering that, heavy curtains that could be drawn across. He also taped each and every pane to prevent the glass from splintering.
Dad also joined the ARP and became an ambulance driver/air raid warden. A bomb shelter was constructed in the garden. There were two types as I recall, Anderson and Morrison, I believe the one in the garden was an Anderson shelter, a pit was dug and concrete footings built and they were capped with heavy steel corrugated arches and finally covered with a layer of earth.
They were cold and damp and really did not get any use until the bombing started in earnest, and then filing down the garden each night with your blankets and hot water bottle became a ritual.
There was a communal shelter, on the corner by the police station, for those apartment dwellers or any folks not having garden space. The later Morrison shelters were constructed of heavy steel plate and wire mesh sides and were inside the house, usually sitting like a large table and using up much of the space of the average size room.
At least they were warm and dry but great care was taken each night to extinguish the fire in the living room, partly to preserve the coal ration but also to try and prevent a fire from starting should the house receive a hit.
Then the bombing started, at first a bit of a novelty to be gossiped about over the back garden fence. Then the realisation set in that this was going to become a nightly ritual, and the longer it continued, the greater the likelihood that you would become a victim.
The menfolk were disappearing fast, called up and volunteering and the main burden of the worry began to fall upon the shoulders of, and show up on the faces, of the women, most particularly for those having a large brood of children living at home.
Yet, the human spirit is indomitable and as the conditions became harsher so did the resolve of those folks. Everyone was in the same boat and there was a wonderful sense of all pulling together, an esprit de corps that will probably never be equalled until another national crisis descends upon us.
Enough has been spoken and written about 'the Blitz', so suffice it to say that it was something that had to be endured. You emerged from your shelter into the morning air thick with the smell of burning wood and that distinctive aroma of burnt paint.
You looked toward the billowing clouds of smoke from the direction of central London, checked your own roof for missing tiles and the windows for broken panes, the ceilings for any new cracks. A rainstorm could mean further hardship if they were not patched up or covered over.
Then you set about your daily business just grateful to have survived another night with little damage.
We kids set off looking for shrapnel and shell caps, and gathering dandelion leaves for the rabbits housed in the back garden, before going to school. There just wasn't much incentive to stay abed in an air raid shelter.
I recall one Sunday morning: I was with mother at Mr and Mrs Lawrence's house a couple of doors away. They were discussing an article that filled the front page of the 'Sunday Mirror'.
It would appear that the 'Doodle-Bugs' had arrived. Sure enough, from that time on and at regular intervals day and night, one could hear the distinctive sound somewhat like a large single cylinder motorcycle, the sudden quiet as the engine quit and then you listened for the whistle of wind over wings to try and gauge if it was headed in your direction.
If you heard the whistle you dove for cover; if not, then there was a good chance it was headed elsewhere. Either way, you waited for the bang and then scanned the horizon for the tell-tale column of smoke.
We children immediately mounted our bikes and were off to see the damage. Many a time I arrived at about the same moment as the rescue crews and observed those unfortunate householders tottering about in the first stages of shock, or those temporarily deafened by the blast sitting on the kerb and holding their heads in their hands.
Even then, we kids were just awed and excited by it all. I cannot ever remember a time when I found it scary. The population of London was also coming to grips with the inconvenience of it all, as many had decided to sleep in their own beds again and all but ignore the bombardment.
If you were on the street, a quick glance upward at the sound of the doodle-bug to see which way it was going and then carry on with what you were doing.
The arrival of the rockets (V2, I think) was yet another reason to hang over the fence and discuss the progress of the war. These rockets were something altogether different, the result was much the same, but their method of arrival had everyone talking.
There was no warning of any sort, no sirens, nothing you could hear or see. A sudden huge explosion followed by the roar of the arriving missile. These things were travelling at above the speed of sound and hit you before you could hear them.
The first one I witnessed landed at Worcester Park, a couple of miles away over the fields and was probably one of the first to be used against Britain. Fortunately, we did not have to endure the rockets for too long, for the war was going our way by then and it was just a last desperate fling by 'Herr Hitler'.
Other things I recall: sitting on the back fence on an overcast day and watching the clouds just to the south being whirled apart like smoke rings as a string of bombs fell unexpectedly.
A beautiful summers evening, the sun low in the western sky. A large bang just to the north attracted my attention and on looking in that direction I saw a great cloud of golden rain twinkling against the background of the smoke plume.
It was, I suppose, office paper that had been sent aloft and was now catching the rays of the setting sun as it twisted and turned slowly to earth and rode upon the breeze. Eerily beautiful.
One of my last recollections of the war was being over Morden Hall Park catching sticklebacks in the River Wandle and hearing all the church bells ringing for miles around to signal the end of hostilities.
They had been silent for the duration of the war and were only to be rung if invasion had begun. This was a real indication that the war was over and life would be changing, hopefully for the better.
Dad would be home from the war, and the car would be taken off its blocks where it had sat for the duration of the war. Maybe you would be able to see out of the bus windows at last if they removed that glued-on mesh that protected us from flying glass.
Sweets were not to come off ration for several years yet, but at the end of the war we were all hoping to be able to visit the sweet shop again. At last Mum might be able to get me a new pair of plimsolls, our footwear of choice, as my last pair had served me for a couple of years and had been obtained from one of the clothing exchange schemes that kept us kids supplied with half-decent clothes to wear.
They were all hand-me-downs but serviceable. My plimsolls were no longer really useable having been glued together and patched up until there was nothing left to patch. I longed for a new pair of plimsolls, the new type that were just coming out with the slightly thicker soles, and black, not the ghastly brown ones that I had had to endure.
And, just maybe, I would get to taste a banana !!
Ralph Swift, USA., 2002
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