Graiseley Lane, Wednesfield

“Ladies and gentleman: We apologize for the delay. We’re waiting for delivery of a replacement part. We expect repairs will not hold up the flight too long.”

The announcement explained why we’d been sitting on the tarmac at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport for 30 minutes past the scheduled departure time. It did not increase my trust in the aging aircraft, a Douglas DC-8*, the same kind of plane that carried me and my family to Canada, 23-years earlier.

This flight would be my first return to my country of birth since emigration to Canada, in 1965.

Arriving at London’s Gatwick Airport, I boarded a bus to Wolverhampton and on to Wednesfield, where my family — aunts, uncles, cousins, and surviving grandparents — still lived.

I need not have worried that I wouldn’t be able to find my way to my relatives’ home in Wood End. Hoisting my cumbersome pack and camera bag, I walked to my aunt and uncle’s house. 

What emotions arose in that short walk. It was as though I had stepped into someone else’s dream. 

I walked past the alley leading to the former home of my maternal grandparents. Speaking of walking, that’s where I took my first steps. I roughhoused with the Cosnett kids, bumped over its unpaved surface in my tin pedal-car, strutted around, guarded by Fallah, my granddad’s Alsatian (as the German Shepard, or Deustcher Schaferhund was called in England at the time). 

To my eternal shame, I once pushed a little girl (my first crush) into a patch of stinging nettles there.

A wooden garage accessed from the lane once housed my father’s Ford Model A, awaiting repair after a winter frost had popped the engine core plugs. Helpfully, I knocked out its windows with a toffee hammer. It was probably the adults’ response to this mischief that forever fixed in my memory the musty smell of the interior, the dust-coated dashboard gauges, the sound of breaking glass. 

The garage also contained my grandfather’s collection of bicycle parts, some of which became my first “grownup” two-wheeler — what today’s hipsters would call a “fixie.” A footnote to this anecdote: My cousin took the fixed wheel bike for a spin when I wasn’t home. Forgetting to pedal continually, he was launched off the machine at speed, his head finding the curb. Luckily, though dazed and confused, he suffered no permanent injury.

My homecoming was soon marked by reintroduction, or rather legal introduction to the civilized social warmth of the English pub, to which, as I’ve noted before, I’d been initiated at an early age at my dad’s shows.

The usual after-supper (or tea) ritual, as I was to learn staying at my cousin’s house, was an hour up at “the local” for a couple of pints. What struck me immediately was the eclectic mix of patrons, particularly in terms of age — young and old, generations sitting at the same table, exchanging stories, banter, and humour. Incidentally, the art of the verbal dig, designed to spike airs and graces, reaches the level of blood sport in the Midlands. A matching quick wit is the only defence. The scrum up at the bar, several people deep, seemed to be the place business relationships were negotiated and cemented.

No one would let me buy a pint.

Cutting off the Danes (Wednesfield Seal)

The first written references to Wednesfield are found in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, recording a great battle fought there between the Mercians and Danish Vikings.

In 910, the formidable forces of brother and sister warriors King Edward of Wessex and Lady of the Mercians Æthelflæd (progeny of Alfred the Great and his wife, Ealhswith) combined to attack the Danes, who had been pillaging and plundering around Bridgenorth. According to the Chronicles, the Vikings were slaughtered by the thousand, including Kings Eowils & Healfdan. The decisive Mercian victory marked the end of Danish rule and arguably laid the foundations for the unification of England. The bloody rout is celebrated on Wednesfield’s Urban District Council seal.

We might infer from the village’s name that the fierce Norse god Woden had some influence in the region, just as he helps us over the hump of every week in the Gregorian calendar.

Woden’s Field grew from the enclosure of, you guessed it, several agricultural fields. With the rise of the industrial revolution, the village and its satellites (like Willenhall and Bilston) became a centre of small industry, including chain-making, locksmithing (which my father’s side of the family helped develop), and trap manufacturing, including man traps😲.

I grew up in the post-war housing estate of Ashmore Park, built upon one of the forest estates which Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Lady Wulfruna (d. circa 1005) granted to the monastery of St. Peter’s Church. 

The Industrial Revolution’s thirst for coal turned those woods in to heaps of slag — “pit bonks” in the local lingo — the remnants of which, sometimes smouldering from internal fires, were fitting sites for childhood games of “war.” 

The area has, since my emigration to Canada, been amalgamated into the greater Wolverhampton district. It’s former glory days of smelters and collieries came to an end shortly after my family left.

Though I carried a reference letter from one of my Toronto contacts to a studio in London, I spent only 24-hours in the city. In a lorry-drivers hostel on the banks of the Thames (digs arranged for me by my lorry-driving uncle), I decided that I couldn’t “go home” to England and hitched a ride back to Wolverhampton, where my cousin, a travel agent, arranged a flight back to Toronto.

I treasured the family reunion — it would be the last time I saw my maternal nan and paternal granddad — and visits to childhood haunts, including the seaside town of Blackpool where it is rumoured I was conceived, and Bridgenorth, scene of Viking mayhem and destination for my earliest bicycle tours. But after a month I was homesick for Canada, and not just any part of Canada. I longed for British Columbia, specifically the west coast. I needed a breath of fresh sea air.

*Also known as the McDonnell Douglas DC-8, the American four-engine long-range narrow-body jet airliner was built from 1958 to 1972.