Dog Shit Lane

 Bollingbroke Close & Coopers Lane, Great Leighs, Essex

Great Leighs is one of those villages that are so ancient you can look them up in the doomsday books. A Norman church, a pub that claims to be the oldest inn in England, a village green with an odd number of goal's- three, and a village shop where one can fondly recall rifling my dads pockets for penny’s then asking him to get as many cola cubes as he can for them. 

Several of the streets were named in someway after Henry VIII ill fated 1^st wife Catherine of Aragon- Catherine Close and Aragon road. She had reputedly stayed at 'England’s oldest inn' St Anne's Castle. The village now sprawls across the main road and has morphed into a Beazer Homes haven - kids shacked up indoors on consoles, talking to their friends via video and parents shoving them off so they can watch Come Dine with Me for hours on end, long gone are the days when you would run to your mates house and knock on the door not knowing if they were in or not.

“Is Tom coming out to play?” “No”, “is ben coming out to play?no?, Is katie coming out to play?” “no, why aren't you at school with them?”

St Annes castle (England oldest inn) is rumoured to be haunted by an old witch (who isn't the land lady) who was burned just outside during the witch hunts. In WW2 some silly American soldiers who were based down the road in White Courts, moved the stone in which her ashes were buried under and out came the ghost - simple. 

My parents house was off of Coopers Lane or Dog Shit Lane as we fondly called it in my infancy. A simple two up two down, my dad designed and built the humble porch which later fell down to my school mates delight and to mine, my dads, and poor old Jimmy Whiting (who at that time lived in the house and slept above) its dismay. The garden didn't stretch back far, but long enough for me to race my next door neighbour Alan Idller up and down in one of those cars with smiley faces on the front, our feet furiously acting as their engines like futuristic Flintstones. Alan's dad was incomprehensibly Scottish, tall dark- a poor mans Sean Connery but with the vocabulary choices of Rab C Nesbitt. He would fondly shout - spitting and spluttering over the wire fence urging his son on, offering sincere advice to both lads in the art of kettle car racing.

At the age of 5 I was still sporting a nice head of blond hair, I was more beat than I have ever or ever will be, a pair of rough round the edges blue jeans, and a washed out navy sweatshirt walking hand in hand with mother kicking stones and dodging shits down Coopers Lane.