“Give over boy, you'll send me up the Fairfield's you keep going on" said mum whilst
i was doing one of my best teenage strops {see Harry Enfield's Kevin and Perry}.
Up
the Fairfield's was one of many local terms for the old Arlesey Asylum. What did
you know it by?, the loony bin, the bin,
The nuthouse, the big house, the 'sylum', the Dodd, there were many more i dare say.
As
a boy I grew-
The view of the Asylum from my landing window set the scene for my imagination to run wild.
At night when it was lit up i could see parts of the old building illuminated against the night sky, it appeared very spooky, Sometimes late at night ,or in the early hours of the morning,a siren would pierce the dark night sky and fly straight into my bedroom window causing me to wake with a jolt, one of them must have got out!
As I lay in bed listening tothe siren screaming like a possessed banshee, i would have visions of one of the poor demented souls breaking out of his padded cell and making his way across the fields,
With the cold wind and rain pelting him back he struggles to get out of his straight jacket, his bare bleeding feet clogged with thick mud to slow his progress, his eyes wide and wild like a rabid animal, his mad screams muffled by his frothing mouth, scary stuff! Of course this was all childhood imagination and I've later learned that siren was the fire alarm, or was it?
Patients did find their way out of the hospital at an un-
I know, I found one!
As kids we used to cut through the Asylum to get to the Arlesey
pits for fishing, never alone, never ever after dark
We never looked at anyone. We always made sure we left for home in plenty of time before dusk.
As time went by my friends and I started riding old mopeds and motorcycles over our local fields
Many happy summer days were spent riding over lumps bumps and holes which festooned the dirt tracks
It wasn’t long before we ventured to the Arlesey pits on these old bikes, the only way to get there was through the Asylum,
There were two ways of getting to the pits, one was through the Asylum using its roads, the other was to turn an immediate left once in the grounds, and follow a dirt track which led around the edge of the Asylum fields, far to bumpy,
s
So up the loony bin road {as it was known} we went. As we gained confidence we would venture further
It wasn’t uncommon to ride around the Asylum roads stopping off now and then to chat to some of the patients,
They would always ask for fags and a couple of my friends who smoked would sometimes give them one.
On hot days we would go into the W.R.V.S. canteen for a coke, this was situated near the football and cricket pitches
patients would come in and would sometimes get really wound-
If we had no money and needed to quench our thirst we would park our bikes and scrump some of the lovely ripe juicy apples from the Asylum orchard and sit under the shade of the trees and relax in the sunshine,
No one ever bothered us and we never bothered them.
