George H. Fage

My Old Man Was a Barrow Boy and Gran Was a Piccadilly Flower Girl

Published by the author. Revised edition 2007.

Dad took us to Regent's Park where there were as yet no lights and no railings around the Park. I was allowed to fire the [Very] pistol and down came the flare on a small parachute. The flare lit up the field for some hundred yards radius and suddenly there were couples jumping up everywhere clutching their underwear and clothes and beating a hasty retreat!

In 1945 Dad had just been demobbed from the RAF, returning home with 'a big pram' full of WW2 souvenirs. The family was living in North Gower Street, then called George Street, a few minutes walk from the park. It was 'a paradise for local people...The mums often took some bloater paste sandwiches and Tizer and we would have a picnic...plenty of room to run about and play games, such simple pleasures'.

There were some fearsome tales of the canal circulating amongst the local kids. The most popular was that of people drowning by being pulled under by monster weeds. That did not stop us, in the summer we would often dive for pennies at the Primrose Hill end. There were several bridges over the canal inside the Zoo and it is the people crossing the bridges that we solicited. We only ever caught half the money thrown as the bottom was covered with scrap metal. (No supermarket trolleys!) If we did not catch it on the way down, it was gone for good. There must be hundreds of pounds buried in the mud

Accounts of other youthful exploits in the park follow.