Barnham Junction

For several years before the War and for 20 years after it, my father Wilf Richards commuted to London via Three Bridges from Barnham Junction.  He drove from Middleton to the station and although my father was a dear and lovely man, he was a hopeless driver.  Born in 1892, he was from that generation who’d gone into WW1 on horseback and who’d learned to drive before there was a test.  Stalling and jerking, he’d crunch his way up through the gears, though the fourth remained an unattainable mystery to him.  He drove so slowly that the milk float or a sprightly pedestrian could overtake him.  He would leave at 7 am, drive up the Yapton Road past PC Luck’s house and Comet Corner where the old stagecoach stopped.  Up towards Bilsham where our family admired the handsome farmhouse covered in Virginia creeper.  He’d grind and buck through Yapton, past the old windmill and under the railway bridge to park in a friend’s garage near the station.  He never learned parallel parking but that didn’t matter as he only ever drove to the station or to the golf club.  He stopped driving when he was 93 and a gentle sigh of relief was heard from all road users in Middleton and Felpham.

This 3½ hour daily commute wasn’t particularly arduous for dad.  He’d devour The Times from cover to cover, do the crossword and sip tea.   On the return journey, he and three friends had a table reserved for them and they’d play bridge.  Once, they were so absorbed in their games that they overshot Barnham and were surprised to find themselves pulling into the train’s final stop at Portsmouth Harbour.  Dad hung on every word of those opinionated bridge-playing friends.  He’d proffer a view to us on the latest topic with, “The train says….”

If mum needed the car she’d take him to the station and I would go along for the ride.  A vivid memory is that of visiting the Livestock market opposite the station. Steaming, bellowing cattle being unloaded into the forecourt, farmers shouting and bantering with each other, squealing pigs and bleating sheep, muck everywhere.  Rabbits and chickens were in cages in the large open area and there were stalls of market garden produce.  This weekly market closed in 1949 when I was five but it made a lasting impression on me.

Sometimes we’d see friends off at Barnham Junction.  On one of these occasions, my brother and I thought it’d be great fun to roller skate down the ramp from Platform 1, round the sharp corner to the ticket hall.  Madness I know, but one could do that sort of thing in those days.  I hadn’t realised how fast we’d be able to go and within seconds from starting, had the terrifying image of the white tiles on the wall at the bottom of the ramp rushing up towards me.  My brother stylishly glided around the corner at the bottom.  I alas, did not.  My pride, not my knees, took the biggest dent.

One post-Christmas treat in the late 1940s was a day trip to Olympia in London for Bertram Mills Circus.  No need to become enveloped in nostalgia here with misty images of a mighty steam train moving majestically out of Barnham.  Southern trains were electrified and were freezing cold, the loos were unspeakably filthy and all the seats were deeply imbued with the smell of nicotine.  However, there were diverting posters urging us to Visit Skegness, a proper, non-schematic map of Southern Railway routes so we could follow our journey and an advert with a picture of a Ptarmigan which taught us the useless rule about a silent P in spelling. I adored train journeys and remember being captivated by RL Stevenson’s poem From a Railway Carriage:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

By the time we reached the south London suburbs, the train had slowed.  There were bomb sites with mountains of rubble and where plants grew out of walls.  The train diddly-durred across the bridge and came to a halt into the hurly burly, smoky whirl of Victoria Station.  (Aside, It’s a slight mystery to me why modern trains don’t go diddly dur.  We were taught then that there was a gap so the track could expand in the summer heat without buckling.  What happens when today’s continuous track expands?)

It was from Barnham Junction that I left home to work and live in London.  My trusty bike came too and mum asked that I phone home to reassure her of my safe arrival.  This I did and told her that the cycle ride from Victoria to Earls Court was fine apart from one nameless, huge and busy roundabout.  It turned out to be Hyde Park Corner – quite scary for this country girl to negotiate.

I often surf back to the places of my childhood via google earth.  This has led to a discovery.  I’d always thought that Barnham Junction was at the centre of the village but now discover that the old village is south of the tracks and that a church has stood on that site for over 1000 years.  How did I miss this on those bike rides in childhood where I loved visiting the old villages in West Sussex with their walls of knapped flint and their beautiful churches?  It’s time to put the bike on the train to Barnham Junction. Will this silver-haired septuagenarian wheel her bike sedately down that ramp to explore the area or will she be tempted to zoom down and do a wheelie skid at the bottom?  You bet!

 

Photo of Barnham Junction by Ben Brooksbank via Wikipedia

 

Unloading at Barnham Market

 

The ramp today - still perfect for roller skating?  Photo by Bashereye

The right then left-hand turn at modern Comet Corner.  Dad would still be waiting by the red lorry if the junction was like this in his day