The Lost Dens of Leicester by Sharon Tyers

The Lost Dens of Leicester – a love song for the feral children

I was saddened to read this afternoon, whilst writing this, that the Cambridge Dictionary’s first definition of a den is ‘a room in a home that is used especially for reading and watching television.’ The Oxford Dictionary says the same.  My first definition of a den sixty years ago and still today is a place of wild bramble and briar where you hid from home and all associations with it, human or material. Our dens had no structure, no roofs and were both chaotic and gloriously simple. Only nature provided a doorway or window to the world beyond it.

The key to our den was a broken twig. It served to tease aside the heavy doorway made from a never-ending tangle of bind weed and find within, and all around, utopia – earthen, verdant green, dusky with secrets and barely sun lit. The bind weed’s trumpeted white flowers opened in June, which coincided with school breaking up for the summer and they framed our den’s doorway, inviting to a chosen few, but definitely no one over eight, or boys. When we were in residence, we identified as tomboys in pigtails, feral in crimplene and home-spun cardies but with clock-watching, controlling, tidy minds in pinnies, like our mothers. Up and down the length of the Kingsway dens like these were designed, engineered and crafted by sticky jam-stained fingers, lollipop smiles and furtive minds. Security and privacy were deeply honoured so they were always set far enough apart so that you never saw or felt your neighbour, especially those from other streets. They stretched as far as the Narborough Road, which led all the way into the city of Leicester, and was lined with steel and hosiery factories in the 1960s. This was where the adults were kept busy, safely hidden away from the children who were equally hidden from the adults whilst they made their dens.

Sixty years later, I often find myself deep within our den in my dreams and can still smell its scent: fetid, sweet and warm.

If making dens was about being hidden from reality and if my 60’s childhood was full of feral freedom, I was clearly a fortunate child. It is only much later in life that I have become aware that alongside that utopian world of mine lay a dystopian twin which I glimpsed only in the dim-lit periphery of my child’s eye.  If I blinked it was gone but it did exist, and was full of dark shadows where secrets were only whispered. Here lay the hidden children who were excluded from our Shangri La and who we were taught ‘to give a wide berth to.’ They became the lonely children, the invisible children who were locked not only out of our dens, but out of our fields, our school, our games and our birthday parties because they didn’t have, according to the 1965 hit, we were singing at the time: ‘the rosy red cheeks of the little children.’ These unfortunate children were given crass names and kept hidden, not in our dens but behind glo-white net curtains so they weren’t able to feel the warmth or share with us those hot, halcyon days.

Yet I fondly recall, despite being so little, Leicester introducing the Leicester Factory Shutdown which allowed all families, including mine, to enjoy leaving Leicester in their thousands for the seaside resorts of Skegness, Clacton on Sea and Mablethorpe on the east coast. Special holiday trains left the city on the hour, ensuring the hard-up families who had neither a car, a swimming costume or a bucket and spade to their name didn’t lose out on their first ever holiday. Holidays were inclusive even though so much of life in the 60’s was painfully exclusive. During our holiday we came back under the close supervision of our parents again, new ground for children and adults alike. Those children like us that were taught to be seen but not heard, were suddenly very visible and very loud and our parents shuddered in this new holiday haven. New rules had to be learned by the feral: washing your hands before you ate, keeping your clothes clean and a strict routine which you could set your watch to, if you had learnt to read the time. On arrival back in Leicester, the adults returned to the factories with relief and the fortunate few, like me, tried to recall what it was like to be feral again and attempted to find their den, already well buried by nature during their absence.

Today, I issue an apology to those I was an unknowing party in excluding from our den sixty years ago and take them back there with me:

Let’s burrow deep inside our den, ensure we are well-hidden, close the door with the little twig and begin to work. Those who have achieved a Brownie home-maker badge can wall-paper the walls with daisy chains, buttercups and cow parsley until it simmers and stinks and set about adopting the open plan design that would become so popular but was rarely seen in the 60s. We are nothing if not ahead of our time.  A wooden clothes horse from the kitchen of number 12 is all that divides the living and sleeping spaces but everyone agrees it works well. Seating and dining arrangements are made from a picnic blanket from number 10 and a set of dolly cups and tea plates from number 8; the sleeping space contains an oily blanket from number 14’s garage. We swoon in its airless opulence.

Safety is never neglected in this striving for a fashionable living space and a first aid kit consisting of five dock leaves, a wet flannel and an eye glass is stashed in a seaside bucket in the corner, just in case someone keels over in the sticky heat or stings their arm on the rampant nettles.  To help pass the sun-drenched halcyon hours, games are allowed in the den: marbles, Snap and an Etch-a-Sketch for making notes about tasks yet to be completed. Expressly forbidden are space hoppers, roller skates and recorders. This is a quiet place and the unruly, loud or violent are removed from the den immediately, either feet first or hair first followed by their dolly, head- first. Those expelled have few choices – to build their own den or spend the rest of the long hot holidays at home, bouncing a ball against the outside wall, alone.

The procurement of food is assigned to those who enjoy science at school and have requested a microscope for a birthday present in their seventh year. They are a singular set of people, who have not achieved the home maker badge and are best kept busy. Their stolen stash is shared equally between the residents on a dolly tea plate. On a good day your ration is three love hearts, a fig roll, two candy cigarettes and a dairylea cheese triangle.  On a bad day it could be a stale cream cracker and a murray mint. Parma violets are strictly forbidden.

Outings are to Pea River where the rampant blackberry bushes stain our hands red, or a trip to White Lane where we peer at the newly built M1 taking shape as it snakes through Leicester. The sun there is always venomous under a whitened, cerulean blue sky, baking the new concrete bridge where a service station is being built, and gives off an acrid white dust that gives the lane its name. Wear a hat. Transport is by little red scooters, that can be safely parked outside the den, hidden from view by a vast display of dandelions and Jack by the Hedge.

Today, the steel and hosiery factories my parents worked and sweated in for twenty pounds a week are gone, and so are the wild dens we capered and sulked in on the Kingsway. Leicester is unrecognisable from the city of my birth and now is home to the National Space Centre, Mindera, Octopus and Apple; their employees shop online or at the Fosse Park shopping centre which has swallowed up the rampant hedgerows where we played.

But somehow, while our wilderness is lost, the children today have a deeper respect for the natural world than we ever did. They make bat boxes, bird feeders, go on nature scavenger hunts and enjoy upcycling. They learn to compost, take Earth Day selfies, and are committed to cooling our planet. Personal, social and emotional development is a key part of the curriculum with the aim of building resilience and encouraging them to express their feelings and consider more closely the feelings of others, which we failed to do when excluding children from our den.

But I worry that children are less resilient to the demands of the world because they are no longer allowed outside in the streets and fields on their own, as we did, but are kept in their bedrooms on Gameboys, Nintendo and Play-stations, like the forgotten children of my own childhood.  I keep wondering where the children dream, build, hone and craft their imaginations as we did, which take them to places only children can go. I wonder how they escape the grown-ups as we did so often? How the grown-ups escape the children as they did so often? What freedom looks like, sounds like and tastes like for them?

A friend found one of the little red scooters in her garage recently, rediscovered after sixty years. I found my mum’s green plastic bowl which we used for blackberry picking at Pea River, and now I use it for the same purpose. My memories have always felt like this, they have substance, not saccharine coated lumps of nostalgia for a past that wasn’t really as good as we thought it was. On days when I long to be back in those dens again, writing these words takes me back there. It is a place where I can go, anytime, unseen because we still haunt those hardy hedgerows of long ago. How strange that their tangled spiky growth, full of thorny blackberry briars, bind weed, thistles, stingers and dock leaves, are such a comforting memory, and how strange too, that I feel I can touch them again.

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Sharon Tyers is a retired English teacher, originally from Leicester. She is the author of the novel Linen and Rooks. She has just completed a biography of her mother’s life in Leicester’s garment-making industry and is beginning a project to tease out the story of Susan Henchard, from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Follow her on Instagram: @sharontyerswrites