I grew up in Bishopstoke, where my parents live to this day (in the same house that we moved into in August 1960, when I was a mere eight months old). Then, as now, the top end of Church Road, from the top of the hill down past the Foresters, was semi-rural in character.There’s been relatively little new building there in my lifetime - three bungalows replaced an old timber yard (I can only vaguely remember the yard being there) and the garden of the big house up the road was built on and is now Bishop’s Court. There was a gravel pit on the west side of the hill, overlooking Allbrook - that’s been filled in and grassed over and is now a field, but I can remember seeing hundreds of sand martins’ nest holes in the back wall of the pit.
Across the road from parents’ house is a small rec and a couple of fields, with a footpath that leads past the fields to a (very) steep wooded hill that takes you down to the water meadows of the Itchen, with a small stream (called Bow Lake for some reason) dividing woods and meadows. This was our playground. We’d play in the woods and stream and, in the summer, swim in the river - which was, as chalk rivers are, fucking cold. Now and again we’d be chased away by fishermen, who paid large sums to the local farmer to fish the river - they stil do, come to that. There were also a few patches of unused land, all now built on - next to the Foresters, at the top of the hill near the old allotments (Dartington Road these days). The latter had an old underground water tank that perhaps should have been locked shut, but wasn’t. Inside was just a giant cistern, with a commensurately enormous ballcock - but no water. Presumably it once would have provided water to the village, supplied by the pumping station at Twyford (well worth a visit in itself if you like things such as huge steam engines and Victorian industrial architecture).
We road bikes all over the place - I remember cycling up some way past WInchester on more than one occasion, which wasn’t bad going on the single-speed bikes we all had. There was a dirt motorbike track on the edge of Stoke Park wood, along the road that leads to the cemetery from Stoke Common Road - we’d ride our bikes round that as best we could, wishing they had engines (a piece of stiff card stuck to the forks gave a decent enough motorbike sound for us, though).
One TV show I remember better than most others is Batman - the proper one with Adam West. We would watch it religiously; it was always shown on consecutive evenings, with the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder apparently doomed at the end of the first episode, only to escape and eventually triumph in the second. We’d watch transfixed, and get very indignant at our parents, who would roar with laughter throughout the show. It was only years later, when I watched the same programmes as a teenager, that I realised why they’d laughed - those shows were brilliantly written, and worked superbly on more than one level. To a child they were gripping and serious, to an adult they were camp and hilarious, with any number of fantastically funny lines, invariably delivered totally deadpan.