by Chris Cowland –
When people ask me what part of England I’m from, I usually reply “Windsor.” Tens of thousands of overseas visitors flock there every year, it has interesting shops, cobbled streets, the Thames, and of course the famous Castle.
But if you look in my passport, it shows my birthplace as Slough. If you think Regina is ugly, just spend an hour in Slough. Famous as the location of the original U.K. series of The Office, it is home to around 850 factories in its industrial Trading Estate, and the source of much employment. That’s what brought my mother’s family from their village in Wales, and my father from East London soon after the war. Their houses had adjoining gardens, and that is how my parents met and married in 1951.
When I was born the next year, we rented a small apartment above the garage in Eton where my dad worked, and when I was four, we paid £1,000 for a small terraced house in the neighbouring village of Eton Wick.
You could see Windsor Castle from my front yard. You could not see Slough, a mere three miles away, but most days you could SMELL it. Slough was home to belching smokestacks, notably the famous Mars chocolate factory, home of the Milky Way, Crunchy, and of course Mars Bars. The north wind would waft a sickly-sweet miasma across our gagging village, and we would pray for it to veer to the northwest, where the sewage works were located. At least they had a smell-masking perfume.
At age four, I attended Eton Wick Primary School, which was only 50 yards from our house. Built in 1888, I still remember the flickering gas lights in the classrooms. We had metal nibbed pens and bright blue ink in desktop inkwells that needed daily replenishing. We would have epic ink flicking battles, my first introduction to mischief at school. This all ended with the invention of the first ballpoint pens, though these could be dismantled and made into pea shooters.
At 10, I began cycling four miles each way to my secondary school, Slough Grammar School for Boys. There I met my best mate, the flatulent Irishman Cormac, whose diet consisted of tea and baked beans. Cormac was the master of mischief.
In those days, caning and being beaten by a ruler or running shoe were everyday occurrences, but led by Cormac, we would always get our revenge. Our teachers parked their cars along the front of the school, but if you crawled on your knees you could avoid being spotted through the staff room windows. The simplest trick would be to pry a rear hub cap off a teacher’s car, insert a couple of large coins, then replace the hub cap. The teacher might notice a slight clanking as he drove off, then centrifugal forces would pin the coins to the outside. Until the next traffic light!
Word got round the staff room after the first half dozen trips to the local garage, so we had to find something more subtle. The humble kipper is not just a magnificent breakfast dish, but if you crawl under a car and insert one in an exhaust manifold, it heats up and smells like a burning Lucas electrical component after about five minutes of driving. Another trip to the garage!
So we didn’t have any real bombs, but we dropped a few stink bombshells in Slough. John Betjeman would be proud.
