NOTES ON
1954 - Day out in
London and afterwards some time at Pennington Heath
http://comp.uark.edu/~dsears/photos/Eileen54dayout
When
we were young, say before I turned 12, Mum and Dad took us out every other
weekend, the weekends when Dad did not work.
We would go to the north Kent coast, the south coast, and to London. In London we would visit the obvious tourist
places, the Tower of London, the parks, the famous shopping streets and the
ceremonial places, like Trafalgar Square.
And we would visit the museums, the Science Museum, the Geological
Museum, the British Museum and the British Museum (Natural History), the London
Zoo, London Museum (with its diorama of the fire of London which fascinated
me), Madame Tussauds and the London Planetarium. I loved them all, especially the planetarium and the Science
Museum. This day we used the Maidstone
East – Victoria route and we must have returned with excess energy, because Mum
and Dad took us to a park near Maidstone East Station called Pennington
Heath. It was a famous park locally,
where hangings took place in past centuries.
It is close to Maidstone Prison.
The etiquette of British Rail tickets and passes held by railwaymen is interesting. It was virtually forbidden for a railwayman to cancel another railwayman’s ticket, so Dad would buy one set of tickets for the family (at 25% of the normal rate) and then use them for the rest of the year. This way we traveled all over the region at next-to-no cost. Outside the region, he was allowed a free pass for the family anywhere in the UK, which we used for our annual holidays. Again, the passes were never cancelled, so we could use them multiple times if we wished. It was a ticket collector at Maidstone East who once cancelled another railwayman’s ticket. He became hated around the region and soon left the railway.