Ghost town

Monday 4^th September

Back to work after 2 weeks off, I found an article, “Ghost trains to Watford” by David Mckie from the Guardian, in my drawer. I guessed it was put there by Peter, the elder statesman of our TEFL school and when he arrived in his odd socks just before nine he confirmed it. As well as being a first call of reference about the language, he’s a definite ‘phone a friend’. Beyond that, Peter has a mild case of English eccentricity. Not one of those you see in magazines who are so obsessed by bulldogs that they have posters and inflatables in their sheds but in a drier more understated perhaps old-fashioned way. Even eccentricities modernise.

The article talks about the station usage figures published by the Office of Railway Regulation and talks about Watford West, the stairways to platforms on Tolpits Lane that somehow qualifies as a station (rather than a ‘stop’) that I pass to and from Kerry’s. Apparently figures say 25 passengers used it last year despite the fact that it’s been closed for 10 years and only the platforms can be made out amongst the greenery that reclaimed this unused space. Mckie is funny: what has become of the 51 people who’ve used this station in the last 2 years? Was there a Hertfordshire Circe (look it up, I did) or “Were they perhaps lured by the promised delights of west [he doesn’t capitalise here, humph] Watford on to some phantom train that then carried them off to captivity?”

The delights of West Watford? This is where I come in. I was born and grew up in a terraced house at 239 Harwoods Road, which links the main West Watford A-roads, next to the corner shop I did paper-rounds for and just across the road from the (now-demolished) buildings of my infants and junior schools, named after Chater, the do-gooder son of a town centre chemist at the turn of the twentieth century. I am still good friends with one of my mates from that school, Idris. He lived about a third of the way up the 7 minute walk to the stadium when I was a ten year-old and is now about half way between Watford West station and my sister Kerry’s place.

The Metropolitan line station (Watford) was slightly closer to our Harwoods Road house and was the one I used for day-trips to London (change at Baker Street) when I was trying to broaden my small-town horizons in my teens. I think I only ever used the Watford West station, which is on the border of the council-built Hollywell, for a crafty toke, and that after it was closed but before it was cage-gated: 1999 to be exact. The difference in the residential areas closest to the stations says much about the rich and poor of an old market town. The Met line stops next to Cassiobury Park, next to which the Earl of Essex had one of his homes, which later gave way to the Cassiobury Estate, all detached and semi-detached middle-England homeland. This is where Terri (my eldest sister) lives with her husband Matt and children Jake and Teigan.

Heading west from the uninvited greenery of Watford West is Croxley Green, the end of the line, about half way to my (now demolished) senior school. The other way, what’s left of the tracks snake east then north through Watford Stadium Station and Watford High Street Station and on to the Junction. The stadium station was built during the early to mid-80s when hooliganism was in vogue and in red-tops and the idea of fencing in people who’d paid to be entertained and rat-running them in one direction seemed perfectly reasonable.

Six stations and others without “Watford” in the name but with our dialling code: so much to be proud of. But the real delights of West Watford, where do I start?

Oh, I’ve finished.