As time goes by

During the past month I have been engaged in the laborious task of checking the text for Volume 2.  Checking for meaning and context, for spelling and punctuation, and maybe for repetition, if a similar point had been made on the previous page, for example.  Readers will have realised something was up, since there was no blog last week.  It is only when sitting in front of a computer screen, morning after morning, that I realise how much I really do not know, and that in spite of a fairly massive photo library, how many subjects remain partly or wholly unrepresented in my collection.  But then, where would we go if we knew everything, and what would happen to our interest in photography, and in the places we discover, if our image collection was already complete?  

During the past fortnight I have met, or spoken to by phone or email, people who are arranging to spring a Christmas surprise on friends or family with a copy of St Albans' Own East End – and of course I have to be part of that surprise if they live in St Albans.  It is a very personal relationship an author has with his readers if they come face to face with a book's author at their own front door.

Recently some interesting events have been happening at Smallford, with a surge in interest in the little district traditionally known as The Horseshoes.  A few residents are beginning to garner recollections and offer local knowledge about the place where they live.  Although well-known by a few, it does surprise others, that there was, in the 1930s a greyhound track, which then became a motorcycle speedway track.  Today, it is still possible to discern where it was, between the footpath on the east side of the garden centre and the pond to the west of Popefield Farm.  The latter building does, in itself, have a considerable history with documentary references in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  I was fortunate enough to be able to be welcomed inside in the 1950s to what I recall as a very solid structure with strongly constructed staircase and a kitchen with a range at the rear.  But when you are a child you do not take that much notice of architectural details.

Also this week I was speaking to someone who also grew up on the Beaumonts estate at the same time as me, and whose father was also in the Home Guard, training on the vacant ground where Hazelwood Drive north is now.  So her father is probably in this photograph, which I publish again in the hope that more faces might be identified.  My father is sitting second from the right end of the front row.  Can we locate one or two more of our fathers, grandfathers, uncles or next-door neighbours?