Dad's Drive to Nowhere...

 

... well, West Bromwich

It happened fifty years ago this weekend just gone, on a thundery Sunday evening. As always happened during a storm, our mum had insisted on turning off everything electric: radio, television, even, on this occasion, light bulbs. This was all too much for our dad. A semi-pro musician, he was usually out on a gig on weekend evenings, but this particular Sunday saw him at home. Perhaps a gig was cancelled? He didn’t often get the chance to stay in and watch television, so maybe he was looking forward to having a night off. We’d been listening to Tom Browne’s Top 40 rundown, between six and seven, a regular Sunday evening fixture, most likely accompanied by sardines on toast. The show was followed, as always, by the Cliff Adams Singers’ showcase, ‘Sing Something Simple’, but I’m not sure we got this far, as the aforementioned storm was gathering and our mum swung into action.

This had all happened before. Three years earlier, we’d had the radio on one Saturday lunchtime when a storm broke. Our mum came in and turned it off, halfway through the Gunter Kallman Choir’s recording of ‘Daydream’, a song which instantly lodged itself in my memory forever (for a fuller account, see my earlier post, ‘Daydream – A Time Detective Story’).

This time, the gathering storm brought on a premature twilight, and with the lights off, I was struggling to read my Fireball XL5 Annual, while our dad couldn’t see to read last night’s Birmingham Evening Mail.

Suddenly, he got up from his chair in the front room and announced that we were all going out in the car. I dare say our mum asked what this was all about, to which dad replied that we couldn’t do anything in the house – no TV, no radio, can’t see to read – so we might as well go out for a drive. Never mind that it was semi-dark and raining. So we all climbed into his recently-acquired Harvest Gold Austin 2200 and set off. Where to? Nobody knew. Probably not even our dad.

I can’t recollect whether our mum took part in this ‘jaunt to nowhere’: it being a Sunday evening, she probably had things to do, like the ironing. In my recollection, there is a blank in the nearside back seat where she customarily sat. So perhaps she stayed at home.

Our mum’s reaction to thunderstorms was peculiar: she never showed any fear, but clung onto the notion that you had to turn off everything. There is some logic in this: a direct lightning strike can blow out the entire ring main and cause serious damage to anything that’s plugged in (whether it’s turned on or off). Once, during a thundery summer evening in 1970, I found her in the back room, with the french windows opened onto the darkened garden. When I asked why she had the doors open, she replied ‘if the lightning gets in, it can get out again’. Which was possibly something she’d heard in childhood, growing up in rural Ireland.

Back to dad’s drive: we headed off in a more or less dead straight line from where we lived. Passing through Mere Green, our nearest shopping centre, we went straight over at the roundabout, and kept to this course, without deviation, taking us alongside Sutton Park and ultimately to the Queslett Road. All the time, the storm was going on, but in the car you couldn’t hear much of it. We passed the Scott Arms at Great Barr, still sticking to the same route. By this time, I had only a vague idea of where we were, as beyond the Scott Arms was unknown territory. I saw a vivid orange lightning strike up in the grimly overcast sky as we headed towards our ultimate destination… West Bromwich. I only knew where we were because I noticed a signpost as we entered the town: the name was significant as my best friend’s dad was the local MP, and we’d never been there before. We drove up the High Street in the premature, thundery twilight, passing darkened shop fronts and a distinctive church spire, before looping around the town and, I believe, returning via the same route.

I don’t remember what, if anything, was said when we got back, and I never thought to look into the reasons for our dad’s unusual outburst: he was always a very gentle, placid character, not given to impulsive acts. Was there something else bothering him? He’d been through a few rocky years at work, losing a job at GEC and bridging the gap by taking a summer season drumming with a small ensemble at a Pontins’ holiday camp back in 1971. In 1972 he’d worked, briefly, for a wallpaper manufacturer called Coloroll, before finally settling into what would be his last full-time job, as distribution manager at an electrical component manufacturer in Walsall. I’m uncertain as to the exact timeline, so that last appointment may still have been undecided on that thundery evening.

What I do know is that it remained with me, that strange evening of lowering grey skies, the ominous atmosphere of the rainy suburbs, with the streetlights coming on early. My diary even mentions it: the page is filled with a huge zig-zag of biro lightning accompanied by the entry: ‘it thunders.’ And, at the bottom of the page is a further entry: ‘go out for a long time.’ This is how I can be so precise as to the date.

The page from my diary. The 'Randall & Hopkirk' entry, done in the manner of the series titles is interesting in retrospect...

This year, we’ve had a few similarly thundery Sunday evenings, but I held off until the nearest to the actual date – 24 June, 1973 – to recreate Dad’s drive, picking up the route at Thornhill Road, Streetly. The evening was clear, so the atmosphere was completely different, but I wanted to see how much, if any, of the route I could recall. As we drew close to West Bromwich, along a stretch of dual carriageway, I began to remember.

West Bromwich itself, however, is much changed in fifty years. A new urban expressway has sliced through the town, and the High Street is now semi pedestrianised, making it impossible to continue on the route we would have taken in 1973. Arriving in the centre, the eye is assaulted by an architectural abomination: a huge purple brick with blob-shaped windows, outlined in cerise. A sign proclaimed this to be the local sixth form college, but it was formerly an arts facility, known as ‘The Public’, dedicated to ‘interactive digital art’ (whatever that may be), and slammed by the government as a ‘gross waste of public money’. Its infantilised appearance, like a kid’s drawing made reality, is utterly at odds with its urban surroundings. We took a quick look up what remains of the High Street before heading back.

Later, consulting a vintage street map (shown above), I was able to see how radically the road network has been reshaped over the past half century; but I also noticed something else: the street where we lived just made it onto the map at its top right hand edge. On the extreme left hand side of the map is West Bromwich. It felt like a map of our world, circa 1973. West Bromwich was as far as you could go without going off the map, and on that curious evening, it marked the limits of our dad’s escape route.

We never went back. West Bromwich High Street underwent pedestrianisation in 1974, making it impossible to recreate our dad's car ride. When I next passed through the town some time in the 1980s, it was mostly unchanged, just rather run down and with a noticeably different demographic than had been the case fifteen years earlier. Returning in 2023, one gets a sharp, slightly shocking reminder of how radically the British urban landscape has been transformed in half a century, and not necessarily for the better.

Life returned to normal. Dad’s ride to nowhere was a complete one-off. Nothing like it every happened again, although that same year he did drive the family to Aberystwyth for a day trip (no mean feat) so we could look over a potential holiday destination. We never went back there either.

One thing came of that unusual evening. It was the very last instance of our mum’s thunderstorm paranoia. When evening storms came in the future, the lights, and even the television stayed on. My dad had made his point. All it took was a car ride to West Bromwich.

High Street, West Bromwich, 1974, during pedestrianisation.