Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

We finally moved to 26 Hob Hey Lane in 1956 or 1957 when I was seven or eight years old. It was once again, the setting to plenty of my favorite childhood memories. We lived in a semi-detached house my parents had purchased, which was more impressive than the house at 3 York Avenue. In retrospect, the family seemed to be moving up in the world – perhaps finally joining the ranks of the middle classes, which was my mother’s unspoken goal. 

History of Hob Hey Lane

I never gave a second thought about the meaning of ‘Hob Hey’ Lane. Out of curiosity I googled it and found ‘Hob Hey Wood’ more than 5 miles to the south of Hob Hey Lane. According to the website, “The word ‘Hob’ is from the old English diminutive of ‘Hobgoblin’ and ‘Hey’ from middle Germanic ‘Haie’ meaning ‘protected wood’. So, you have, ‘wood protected by a goblin’, or more probably ‘Goblin’s wood’!”

Hob Hey Lane was an old lane with a long history that had evolved over time; the long lane comprised mainly older houses, but some newer houses built in a style suiting the lane. It had more trees and adjoining fields than York Avenue, which was a so-called newish housing estate at the time.

When we moved in, there was a field with sheep behind the house. My brothers and I even found some bloody skin-like remains of lambing. There was also a small copse on the other side of the road where I used to climb trees; and behind the copse there were fields and a farm. Although the house was newish, it had some ‘old style’ details such as lead-paned windows. I remember that well because in a fit of rage one day, I threw a shoe at the window, but only broke one of the small leaded panes. 

Buildings and Progress

During the time we lived there, they were already building new houses behind the house; those were so-called cheap and tasteless tract housing, or what they call in the US, cookie-cutter housing. This is the type of middle class housing you see everywhere in Britain today.

I suppose this is what you call ‘progress’, as it is better than the post-war prefabs or cheap working class blocks of flats, such as the Grenfell Tower in Chelsea constructed in 1972–74. Chelsea is the richest borough in London, but due to poor public administration, 72 people were killed in the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 owing to a lack of public funding regarding maintenance and refurbishment.

Now when I was young and easy, I was lucky to live in Hob Hey Lane.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

I was lucky to live in Hob Hey Lane as a boy. I had lots of friends, brothers, a dog, and other pets I could play with. We were also surrounded by everything –  verdant uncharted countryside, farms, derelict abandoned houses and factories, railway stations and lines, streams, ponds, farmer fields of wheat and vegetables, sweet shops, bike tracks, derelict army stores, woods with conker trees, orchards, derelict greenhouses with exotic fruits, access to guns and other ‘weapons’, hedgerows with birds’ nests, and a boatload of other things that enhanced my boyhood days.

My mother followed an out-of-the-house policy. The only time we were in the house was on Sundays, when we would play monopoly on the dining room table. This is understandable because the house would soon become chaotic with four brothers milling around. To my mother, we were ‘terrorists’ in her house, enemies of her organizational skills and a disaster waiting to happen. My mother would say, “Go out and play”, because, outside there, we would not do a lot of harm. Of course, we had to get home before it got dark, but we had hours at our disposal where we could roam far and wide and do what boys love doing the most – being boys.

Mothers Throughout the Decades

All these things are perhaps difficult for a reader from the modern day to understand on two counts. First, we are now living in an age of mass paranoia (in the 2000s). Mothers typically behave like over-protective ducks, keeping their children under the wing, and rarely allowing their children out of their sight. This means that these mothers, as opposed to our mothers in the post-war period, want their children to stay indoors most parts of the day.

When I was a boy, we had a name for such boys – ‘softies‘ or ‘mummy’s pets’. We delighted in ‘capturing and torturing’ these ‘softies’, if they ever made the mistake of wandering too far from mummy’s nest. Second, being a housewife was a full-time unpaid profession at that time. Although my friend Tom Cockfoster’s mother had a paid job – that was the exception to the rule amongst the 1950s’ middle-class women. In other words, women in Britain in the 1950s and before were so-called ‘house slaves’

Woman Is The Nigger Of The World

In this context, that is, the idea that British housewives were no more than ‘house slaves’, we can refer to the fact that slavery was abolished in the USA in 1865. However, as of today, almost half of the world’s population (women) still fulfil one of the conditions of being a slave, which is that a slave is a worker that receives no wages or very low wages. In this context, one is tempted to recall a line in one of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s songs, “Oh woman is the slave to the slaves.”

Woman Is The Nigger Of The World
Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is, think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it, do something about it.
We make her paint her face and dance
If she won’t be a slave, we say that she don’t love us
If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
While putting her down we pretend that she is above us
Woman is the nigger of the world, yes she is
If you don’t believe me take a look to the one you’re with
Woman is the slave to the slaves
Ah yeah, better scream about it
We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother hen
We tell her home is the only place she should be
Then we complain that she’s too unworldly to be our friend
Woman is the nigger of the world, yes she is
If you don’t believe me take a look to the one you’re with
Oh woman is the slave to the slaves
Yeah, alright
(…)
Songwriters: John Lennon / Yoko Ono