Prologue: The Village by the River
When I close my eyes and think of childhood, it is Sunbury-on-Thames that comes first to mind. Not the Sunbury of today, with its busy roads and rows of new houses, but the Sunbury of the 1960s — smaller, gentler, and more like a village than a suburb. It was a place where the Thames curved lazily past meadows and willows, where church bells drifted across the rooftops on Sunday mornings, and where the whole world seemed contained within a few familiar streets.
Life was simpler then, though we didn’t know it at the time. Neighbours leaned over fences to exchange gossip. Children dashed in and out of each other’s houses as though every home were their own. The corner shop, with its rows of glass jars, seemed to contain more treasure than any palace. Summers stretched out in golden haze, the river glittering at the heart of it all. Winters were marked by frosted windows, steaming coats, and the smell of coal fires in the evening air.
To be a child in Sunbury was to live in a small but endlessly expanding universe. The High Street was our city, the Green our stadium, the towpath our frontier. Each day offered new discoveries — a den to be built, a tree to be climbed, a rumour to be tested. We believed in ghosts at the Mansion, in the magic of lucky bags, in the possibility that our makeshift rafts might one day carry us as far as London.
Most of all, we belonged. Belonged to the street, the school, the river, and to each other. We were held in place by the rhythms of bells, the voices of neighbours, and the certainty that however far we roamed, Sunbury would be waiting when we came back.
Looking back now, I see how small it all was — a handful of streets, a stretch of river, a scattering of people. But to us it was vast, a whole world unfolding at our feet. And in memory, it remains vast still: golden, glowing, a village by the river where childhood stretched as wide as the sky.
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