It’s Coming Back

IT’S COMING BACK

All just down from Royston Cross with the town’s only traffic lights, Logsdon’s garage, the General Post Office and telephone exchange. Close by, the town’s lone roundabout a hub for the town’s only park and the Green Plunge swimming pool, set behind the Priory Cinema, for bathing in the cool green chlorinated water and canoodling for the less shy on a hot summer’s day prior to fascinating at the shifting shadows of the black and light newsreels, matinees and cartoons. Across the way stands the Town Hall where my dad booked a jazz band and later I booked Paul Kossoff’s Black Cat Bones for a young conservatives’ ball.

Up on surrounding hills: the fire station awaiting a fire and Mr Green; the Hospital delivering its newborn (including me); Therfield Heath with its golf and other clubs; the Darlings farming their sweeps of land; Willie Stephenson’s winners riding on the ridings preparing for the sweepstakes and Newmarket. Further still up another hill, Flint Hall Farm -the place I called home for more than a young while.

Such is life and death in and of a second generation changling post-war town called Royston. Astride county boundary, earthly meridian and a little cave.

‘Roasia Town’ - or ‘Royal Stone’ thinking itself named after a large stone at the cross and King James’s Hunting Lodge on Kneesworth Street - dwindling energetically into the future as it fades indifferently into the past. You can still enjoy the novelty of a cappuccino in Dino’s caff as generations fall like seeds from a tree to take their place between the other crosses and memorial stones of the local cemetery..