Far away, over the hill

The lure of the city is still there despite choosing to live in rural Northwest Cymru. From here it’s an easy journey to start exploring the hidden depths of Liverpool. While just scratching the surface, in my mind I revisit another key port, at the other end of the country, namely Portsmouth where I was born.
In case you can see straight through the inverted snobbery, I'm not really from that gritty city. I was brought up on its genteel edge just south from where suburb and countryside were separated by the long hill of Portsdown, where Lord Henry Palmerston had built forts facing north in case those cheeky French made a surprise attack from inland. At its eastern flank, modern buses waited in lonely overgrown rural laybys seemingly at the very limit of civilisation, to take shoppers from postwar social housing to new fangled supermarkets in the city centre. Even sixty years later, I enjoy the evocative image of a lone Leyland Atlantean surrounded by fields. Like many families, we had no car, so the bus became a totem of the times, those fields among our destinations.
We took walking excursions, invariably “over the hill” until a Foot and Mouth outbreak of 1967, when the countryside was temporarily shut. During that time organised walks were diverted along the coast, the highest elevation being the colloquially named “Pneumonia Bridge” (Haslar Bridge, Gosport). But over the Hill (as it was known), awaited a wild and alien hinterland with road names such as Scratchface Lane and Crookhorn Lane. Those lanes are still there, but now mostly subsumed by modern development. The area became the domain of senior Naval officers and their families, for whom it was deemed unseemly to be able to see one's place of work (the Dockyard) from home. 
The closest villages on the northern slopes were Purbrook and Widley, the latter always reminding me of a Charles Hawtrey comedy-film character. Day trips further afield required the use of trains, those with slam door carriages and separate compartments, and no facilities. No Widley. Places became even more ancient and mysterious, with names such as Stoke Clump, Boarhunt, Funtington and Hooksway. At Hooksway I can still recall going into the remote Royal Oak at the age of about seven. It’s still there: the pub, not me, except in my head. “Mine host”, concerned about juveniles on the premises, urged my brother and me to hide beneath a table lest the Police happened to visit. He is remembered still; his name was Alfie Angier. A website devoted to the pub's long history embellishes memories of its days as a "run-down alehouse". I can hear him expounding on his family history in a rustic Sussex accent: “Now, my father and my aunt was brother and sister yer know”. Twas ever thus. If a seven year old me were still under that table today in what has become a smart "gastro-pub", I would soon be told to stop messing about. Times have changed.
Far beyond the hill, I imagined a refracted image from over the South Downs and the North Downs, of yet more arcane destinations such as London. I believed at the time it was the source of the sauce, the brown sauce. On a rare visit to that exotic north(!), passing Vauxhall, my father had pointed out the HP Sauce factory across the Thames through the train window. To this day, an image of what was actually the Houses of Parliament * appears on every bottle, now an apt metaphor for saucy dodgy dealings taking place in that building. Two centuries ago many on the south coast of England worried about a threat from those "cheeky French" crossing the channel; today some worry about others doing so, but the real threat is from that "sauce factory" 75 miles inland.
I moved away from Portsmouth 50 years ago, but still have friends there going back more than 60 years. We all feel over the hill these days. 

[Footnote: *Okay, it’s correctly called the Palace of Westminster. In my new home it's known as San Steffan: I don't like the idea of PoW sauce or SS sauce.]

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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.

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