metropolitan land

After a brilliant start in Dublin near the Leopardstown race course, my life took a custard tart and we ended up in the suburbs that filter left and right off the Metropolitan Line. The purple one that shoots out of Baker Street. My father had an office in Holborn. “Let’s move my nutty family to Middlesex.” It must have made sense to him. For about five minutes.

We started out in Northwood. On ‘Farm Way’ in a house my mother named “ Foxrock” after our Dublin excitement.

Five years later we moved two stops up the Metropolitan Line to Pinner. Where my parents had found this house that they couldn’t rename. It was called “Brook House.”  It was on Moss Lane. There was a river that ran through the garden. It was still suburbia, but this time we had a large white house and lawns and trees and gooseberries and two greenhouses and tack sheds where we could pretend we owned a horse and a tennis court where we put up a big circular plastic swimming pool and a green slope that we turned into a Christmas tree patch. My father isn’t here to answer for this. But I can assure you although we Murrays lived in the suburbs, we were floating on it like truffle oil.

A mother that would avoid coffee mornings and head off to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain where she would do healing on a Friday night.

A father who was a member of the Octave Players, a nigh-on professional group of amateurs who had been denied a paid life in the theatre by the second world war.

We lived there. But I doubt we paid taxes.

My father put the television that he couldn’t make work into the middle of Moss Lane and told the TV company to come and get it before their equipment caused an accident.

My siblings and I went to school there.

West Lodge ( maroon) and St John’s ( purple) for my brother.

Northwood College ( navy blue) for my sister and I.

I am not going to ramble on about the extraordinary life I lead at the stagnant pudding that was Northwood College.

But for years…… years….Years when knickers stayed large. Socks turned into tights. Underarm hair grew.  Grey wool culottes were considered practical. Domestic science was sewing pink teddy bears.

Popularity came or didn’t. Sports triumphed, or didn’t. Academia beckoned, or didn’t.

I would get on that train from Pinner to Northwood. I would walk down Maxwell Road to the school. The walk seemed so long. The trees seemed so huge. The teachers seemed so tall.

This last week I went back to Northwood to have lunch with my old drama teacher, Bess. 

bess Jones. one of a kind.

Who, when I was flat lining at school, where I was even being overlooked even in Elocution, took me on as a pupil.

Lunch was lovely. But Northwood and Pinner looked like they were part of a miniature golf set.  Like Gulliver had been to visit and sat on them.

I remember Northwood station where I would watch the  NC schoolgirls who met boys; who knew how to put layer upon layer of mascara on their eyelashes, and roll their pleated skirts up and over on their waistbands so they were just a frill over their knickers. The straw boaters which, in the Northwood College rules had to sit on top of our heads, were bouncing between their shoulder blades.

Last week, it was just a station. A shoulder high station.

Or maybe I am 7 foot tall. Or maybe all of life needs to be looked at with pink sunglasses.

Middlesex.     by John Betjeman

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens


Runs the red electric train,


With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s


Daintily alights Elaine;


Hurries down the concrete station


With a frown of concentration,


Out into the outskirt’s edges


Where a few surviving hedges


Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.


Well cut Windsmoor flapping lightly,


Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green


Hiding hair which, Friday nightly,


Delicately drowns in Drene;


Fair Elaine the bobby-soxer,


Fresh-complexioned with Innoxa,


Gains the garden – father’s hobby –


Hangs her Windsmoor in the lobby,


Settles down to sandwich supper and the television screen.






Gentle Brent, I used to know you


Wandering Wembley-wards at will,


Now what change your waters show you


In the meadowlands you fill!


Recollect the elm-trees misty


And the footpaths climbing twisty


Under cedar-shaded palings,


Low laburnum-leaned-on railings


Out of Northolt on and upward to the heights of Harrow hill.


Parish of enormous hayfields


Perivale stood all alone,


And from Greenford scent of mayfields


Most enticingly was blown


Over market gardens tidy,


Taverns for the bona fide,


Cockney singers, cockney shooters,


Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters,




Long in Kensal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.