Railways are in my blood. My father was a controller with British Railways, and there was a line at the bottom of our garden in the days when the occasional steam train would pass, taking people on day trips to such exotic locations as Clacton and Southend-on-Sea. They would wave — it was a bit like The Railway Children.
We lived at 73 Naylor Road, a semi on a newly built development at Whetstone, an unimpressive north London suburb that had a rural aspect in the 1940s and 1950s. My father carved the numbers in relief on the top of the privet hedge outside the front door. It’s where I was born and lived until I went to university, longer than anywhere since.
I used to cycle to Oakleigh Park station and stand on the iron bridge, taking numbers or watching and listening. Recently, I visited the National Railway Museum, in York, where my son Freddy is at university. It brought back such memories. I love the aesthetics of steam trains.
In my bedroom, my father built a table that covered the whole room — it was an amazing feat of engineering. I wish I had developed his carpentry skills. He carved an oblong hole in the middle so I could stand on my bed underneath and operate the whole of my clockwork Hornby train set.
Our house was pretty small. The front room had a bay window, an oval dining table, a sideboard and a mahogany wireless we listened to mainly on Sundays. Behind that was the living room, overlooking the garden, which housed a black upright piano, above which was an extraordinary painting, a Victorian watercolour of the River Nile.
I learnt the piano beneath that painting, and had to practise for an hour every morning before school. Miss Cross, my teacher, was a very proper lady, and I did mainly Strauss. I wanted to play Scott Joplin, but that was too ... risqué. When I couldn’t take much more, I took a kitchen knife and stabbed it through middle C, after deciding it was the most important note. That was end of the piano lessons. My mother got her own back — she bequeathed me the piano in its demoralised state.
During holidays, my mother allowed me and two friends — we were known as the Three Musketeers — to disappear with a packed lunch to the fields nearby. We had to be back by dusk. We used to follow Dollis Brook through people’s back gardens, mapping its course. It was fast-flowing, in parts subterranean, and eventually ran into the Thames. We would find strange things in it, like underwear and half a shoe.
We were one of the last families to have a television, so we went to friends’ houses to watch. When we finally got one, it had doors, with the set concealed inside. I saw The Defenders, an American legal series in which a father-and-son team took on seemingly hopeless cases, and was hooked — it really showed how they built a case.
Another formative experience was when my mother was wrongly accused of parking too close to a pedestrian crossing. She was acquitted, but was appalled that the police — she called them “bluebottles” — had lied in such a small case. Her subsequent advice, “Never trust a man in uniform”, comes back to me when I am involved in cases where police corruption or malpractice have led to miscarriages of justice.
My father died just before I left to study law at Keele University in 1960. Some time later, my mother sold the house and went back to her home town, Exeter. I have been past occasionally, and cannot believe I ever lived there, but it matters a great deal to me. I had a happy childhood; in a sense, I want to seal it up and preserve it. Going back would undo that.
Memoirs of a Radical Lawyer by Michael Mansfield QC is published by Bloomsbury. He will be speaking at the Helmsley Arts Centre, in North Yorkshire, on Thursday