Donald Bullock

Donald Bullock was born in Clapham's Alvin Street on Barton Fair Day in 1932, over Bill Keeling's newsagent's shop, where his parents lived in a rented room. The first of their five children, he attended Kingsholm Infants' School and Oakbank Open Air School, then the notoriously Dickensian National School in Gloucester's London Road, before moving on to the Gloucester Central School for Boys.

Mercifully, he says, there was then no such thing as television, and he and his peers spent their unshackled and crowded outdoor lives both in the earthy market-town centre and about the hills and vales, rivers, streams and pools of its surrounding countryside.

As he has written elsewhere in his captivating prose: 'We were an energetic set, and every dawning day came packed with adventure, much of it money-making. We roamed errands about the town, mingled and earned at the cattle and fruit markets, carried parcels at the stations, searched and climbed for birds'-eggs, (a normal boyhood pursuit in those days) and gathered colourful wild flowers by the armful from the roadside verges and meadows.' (Well before the widespread use of weed-killers made them sterile). They picked wild strawberries, blackberries and mushrooms, slept out in tents on Chosen hill to music from their home-made crystal sets, and, in winter, gathered and sold holly and mistletoe, bundled and sold firewood and undertook snow-clearing for their neighbours. They went pike-fishing at Walham and Ashleworth pools, (often having to break the ice first), and on the River Leadon and, as Christmas approached they gathered and sold holly and mistletoe by day and went carol singing in the evenings.

He and his peers knew every inch of the Nunnies - 'that adventurous stream of secret worlds, bounded by its willow-draped sage greenery, that slid and babbled between the Cheltenham and Tewkesbury roads and on to the river…' and, like his peers, he both caught many a redbreast and suffered many a 'bootful' in his years of 'bamping' there.

What coppers came their way had to be earned, and they spent them frugally. They made their own fishing rods and tackle and became experts at fishing every nook of all the local waters: the Leadon, the Severn and its plethora of streams and riverside pools, and both the Gloucester and Stroud canals. He can still make a professional-looking float in a minute with a pigeon quill and a razor blade...

An ancient and upright bike occasionally came their way, and they used it energetically to broaden their horizons. One pedalled, one sat on the crossbar and the other ran alongside, often to Highnam, Minsterworth or the Lassington or Newent woods, sometimes further, taking it in turns to pedal, sit or run.

After leaving school he worked in The Gloucester Citizen's photographic department where he spent, he says, the happiest and most interesting few years of his life, until he was forced by family circumstances to leave his haven for a series of better paid but sadly cramping jobs.

He duly became a busy self-employed television engineer, but found time, over the years, to write for many publications, and he remains regularly published today.

Now retired, he is working on the completion of 'Hovels and Haydust', his moving, eye-opening, sometimes tragic and often hilarious account of one boy's childhood in and around a Gloucester long since gone forever. He has never, he says, known boredom, and vigorously recalls his boyhood days as though they were of yesterday.

Some of the happenings portrayed in this book were originally published as magazine articles in the mid-eighties, whilst other fragments have been extracted from the manuscript of his forthcoming book Hovels and Haydust, and endowed with greater local detail.

A Note From Donald Bullock

As the 'Thirties dawned I was born into the parish of Clapham, as had been many of my family, and although my people were to move house often outside its perimeter, I grew up steeped in its society, its streets, its shops, and its characters. It was an invigorating place, Clapham, and, with its wonderful and embracing culture, delightfully and earthily unique.

In the nineteen-eighties' I wove some of my memories into a commissioned series of purpose-illustrated articles for a country magazine, and one of these, upon Clapham and its folk, evoked widespread interest and many letters. When I later came to write my 'Clapham' chapter for my boyhood autobiography Hovels and Haydust I increasingly felt that the conception, life and wanton destruction of Clapham justified a book of its own.

The result, offered here, is a much expanded and researched version of that chapter with an added blend of historical facts and photographs, a wealth of other people's memories and my own childhood recollections of the Clapham culture into which I was born. I hope that in some small measure the whole might help to keep its memory alive.

One final word. After so many years, memories can play tricks. There may be mistakes and there will be omissions. I would be grateful to hear from anyone with constructive comments, information or photographs, so that in the event of a further edition the book might be improved.