Charles (Chas) Richmond Cooley is looking for a home for his young wife Florence pregnant with their first child. They grew up in Inner London, south of the Thames, in the district around the Elephant and Castle near the Old Kent Road but now they live in a crowded flat on Holmdale Road in Swiss Cottage. Somehow, Chas came across this little development in Hillingdon. Chas tells his brother Percy (Perce) Victor Cooley about the pair of houses being built on the plot.
Chas puts down a deposit of 300 pounds on the property to cover himself and his brother. The total purchase price for each house is thirteen hundred pounds. Perce and his wife Gwen purchase the next-door house. In 1947 soon after Chas and Florence move in to the house Eric Paul Cooley is born. He is the first, the eldest, of the four Cooley boys born on that corner plot. With a shock of dark hair with fine features inherited from his mother, Eric has the distinction of being the first grandchild for the paternal grandparents - Arthur and Anna Cooley. Chas and Florence have another boy in 1949 – Paul Anthony Cooley. The following year 1950, Perce and Gwen have a boy – Keith David Cooley – that’s me. Three years later, they have another boy – David Raymond Cooley to complete the quartet of Cooley Boys. It is the period of post war austerity with rationing of food, petrol and other essentials, a limited selection of food, a grey regimented “state” culture from the Government controlled BBC, one television channel, on the radio the Light programme has Workers Playtime and the Archers, eventually it becomes Radio Two, the Home service and the highbrow Third programme. This is the environment Eric grows up in.These are memories of those times, the early days in the Fifties when we – the Cooley Boys - played together all the time, and then the Sixties when we began to go our separate ways. For the first few years, there was no fence separating the back gardens and we could roam from one to the other. I remember it was huge for me when a fence was erected dividing the garden into two. It was wrong I told my Mum and Dad. I felt it was the beginning of separation from Eric. He was my surrogate older brother. I wanted his attention, Paul was too close to my own age, which often led to competitive friction, and my little brother was, well, too little to be much more than a spoiler. Like a much older brother, Eric was sometimes distant but I could see he had all the freedoms and opportunities I aspired to when I was older.
We played together on the streets - games of hopscotch marked out in chalk along Denecroft, exploring the back alleys. Eric made our first trolley, four wheels from an old pram fitted to a plank of wood with rope attached to the front wheels to steer. You could run and jump on the trolley, or you could get somebody to push you, or find a hill to coast down.
We spent every Christmas together. The tradition was that on Christmas day Perce’s family would go next-door for dinner with cake and games later in the evening.
We sat at a long table with Aunts and Uncles from both sides; pulled crackers, wore paper hats, and ate roast chicken with stuffing. On Boxing Day everyone came over to our house.
Upstairs in the loft at 1 Denecroft Eric had built an amazing model train set. He also had a dark room where he developed his photographs because from an early age he followed his Dad’s enthusiasm and talent for photography. Occasionally Dave and I were allowed up there to play.
The big snow of 1963 exemplified Eric’s sense of fun and playfulness. It was the coldest winter since 1739. It started snowing in the first week of January. Over a foot of snow soon laid on the roadway outside our house. The four of us played in the garden and on the roads that were not ploughed for days. We were all off school
because it was the tail end of the Christmas holidays. Hours were spent rolling the snow to create huge balls of snow, which we coalesced to make snowmen. It was so cold we all wore long trousers except Paul who insisted on wearing shorts the whole season. Eric insisted on not wearing a hat, one of those hated red and white bobble hats Dave and I were forced to wear.Eric loved the Goon show, he was always talking about Eccles and Bluebottle, Minnie and Major Bloodnok. He mimicked the voices, the surreal jokes from Spike Milligan, which I never really got until years later.
Being the eldest Eric led the way, beating the path we would all follow, first to Oak Farm Infants and Junior School. I would see Eric occasionally at morning milk break, out of concern for proper nutrition every school child got a free third of a pint a day; or at morning assembly. At twelve years of age, Eric went to Abbotsfield Secondary Modern School soon after the disastrous general election when the Conservative party under old style Macmillan won yet again despite the Suez canal debacle a few years earlier. The school newly constructed of brick and concrete stands up on a hill overlooking the Oak Farm estate. In brand new school uniform dark blue blazer, badge edged in red, school cap perched on his head Eric rode a new three-speed bicycle up the hill.
Eric took the building course because it was a vocational Secondary Modern school. Mr Treays, one of the woodwork masters would try and lift Eric off the ground by his long sideboards. For technical drawing his form master was Josh Collacot. Josh tried to teach us technical drawing, without much success in my case. Josh’s standard punishment for anything, for example dropping a T square on the floor, because it damaged them, was the question "Wack or stop in, boy?". With the almost invariable reply of "Wack, sir" you were given a fair wack with........a T square! Apparently, that didn't damage them. If you did answer "Stop in", you were promptly told "No stop in tonight, only wack". When I arrived in Josh Collacott’s class much to my chagrin Eric was known for his neat and accurate draughting skills, skills I could not seem to emulate.
Every Easter Josh used to organize trips to Spain, Tossa del Mar on the Costa Brava, forty miles or so north of Barcelona. In 1964, I traveled to Tossa del Mar and so did Eric. We went across the Channel by ferry, train to Paris, caught the overnight express down to Perpignan in southern France.
From there it was a coach ride over the border to Tossa. It was April but the sun was warm on our lilywhite skins when we lay down on the beach. Eric was one of the older boys who would sneak into the out-of-bounds bars at night for a little alcoholic refreshment. In the early Sixties things began to change, Eric built his own crystal radio then bought his own transistor radio. At night he listened to American pop music on Radio Luxembourg.
As well as being the pioneer at school Eric showed us the way in the Boy Scouts. Each of us followed Eric into the Cubs and then into the 5th Hillingdon Scout troop at All Saints Church. I remember my first overnight camp in Elstree. Eric and the older scouts had a campfire where they put on pieces of corrugated asbestos roof. As soon as the pieces heated up they would explode in loud bangs strewing asbestos shrapnel all over the place. Eric and the older scouts were wild. Sometime in the early Sixties the Scout troop had summer camp at Span Farm, Wroxall on the Isle of Wight, a little way inland from Ventnor. When I visited Eric in July this year he took us to Span Farm, showed us the field where we pitched our tents. He still remembered those halcyon summer days when the local girls would come down from the village of Wroxall to fraternize with us at the Scout camp.
Eric always seemed to know more than I did about adult matters whether laughing at jokes I did not understand or a knowing smile on his face when sex was mentioned. He constructed models of all sorts of aircraft from the Second World War I tried to learn his skill and facility in assembling the kits. Mine never seemed to match up.
Eric loved cars, I may be wrong about this because my knowledge of automobile engineering is somewhat impaired. He inherited his Dad’s a Ford Prefect when he was barely eighteen.
By 1967 I was in the Sixth Form at school and the Cooley Boys had lost the cohesion of ten years before, each of us were taking different paths into adulthood. Cultural upheavals of the Sixties were under way. After leaving school in 1968, I moved out of 112 Grosvenor to go to university in Nottingham. Soon after Eric moved to the Island and the days of the Cooley Boys in Hillingdon had come to an end.
Several years later another plot of land became important for Eric, this time in Bembridge but I think you know the story from this point on..
