Humans of Shepherd's Bush - Number 11

Mike Walsh - childhood in Little Percy St

"I lived on Little Percy Rd in the 1940s; it was a street surrounded by bombsites but it was still our playground for street football, cricket & marbles.

The only trouble though was the chance of smashing a window, or being told by an angry neighbour to go and play in the park. But when we went to Ravenscourt Park with our football gear there was a problem.

All the signs read Keep Off The Grass, so if we put our ball down and kicked it around, a big man in a brown uniform with a bright metal badge pinned to the hat on his head would come marching along in his new leather boots and his little walking stick which had a spike on the end (used to retrieve sweet wrappers that had been left on the grass) & shout, "Go on, out of it, gone on away with you. Don't let me catch you around here again!"

So we couldn't play on the street & we couldn't play in Park. What could we do? We did what kids always do, namely play on the street & pray that we didn't break a window or have a neighbour threaten to take our ball away: "Mister can we have our ball back?"; and that's how we learned the tricks of street football & gutter passing.

And when the Wimpey office was built at the top of the road, we marked out cricket stumps on the side wall & used our Len Hutton or Denis Compton bats to look professional. And that was life on Little Percy in the 1940s."

The Shepherd's Bush Blog offers a personal view on life in Shepherd's Bush. If you would like to contribute a story, email us at shepherdsbushblog@gmail.com. And don't forget to add your opinion in the comments section below.