Springfield

A week or so ago to Tooting to investigate kabanosi capability at the shop just north of Tooting Bec tube station.

A cool but bright morning. No trolleys visible on Station Approach at Epsom. Some mask wearing at the station and on the train - which was still pretty quiet when we got to Sutton. From there, I headed south towards Tooting Bec, a road I used to know well in the days when my route to Tooting ran through Balham rather than through Earlsfield. Lots of interesting goings on and the White Eagle club still appeared to be going strong, although, sadly, it was a bit early for lunch.

Delight turned out to have a substantial cured meat department, but without the sort of kabanosi that I was looking for. The lady behind the counter understood about my not wanting them to involve either cheese or chicken (in the way of the Austrian kabanosi from Waitrose), but she only had thin and dry, not my favourite. Supplemented with a couple of decent looking white rolls.

A long time since London had a good scattering of delicatessens run by Central Europeans who had washed up over here at the time of the Second World War and could usually be relied on to sell fat and moist kabanosi. About as fat as my middle finger, mid brown rather than dark brown and soft rather than brittle. There used, for example, to be one such in Streatham High Street, next to the Odeon cinema. I haven't been to Streatham for quite a while now, but I imagine that both are long gone.

Before the off, I had noticed a Springfield Hospital on the other side of the High Street, a large sprawling place on the map, also to be found at references 1 and 2. Now I have a memory of my elder brother, who had TB as a boy, being sent to a place called Springfield Hospital for a few months, and that we visited for a sports day or some such one summer's afternoon, having driven there from Cambridge. The visiting families sat around the perimeter of a roughly circular sports field with their picnics and the patients did their sports in the middle. A correspondent has since told me that visits would indeed have been non-contact in those days, as isolation was part of the treatment for this infectious and once often fatal disease. So I thought I would take a look.

Promising start in the form of a skip containing a lot of just the right sort of clean, second hand bricks for my collection back at Epsom. Sadly too far away to be carrying even one or two bricks.

On into a mixture of housing estate, building sites and hospital. With this house having what appeared to be an Isle of Wight Echium pininana, a plant which is native to the Canary Islands, but which seems to do well in Ventnor. And, since we first came across it there, it does seem to have spread into the home counties, to places, for example, like Hampton Court Palace. Maybe another case of global warming.

A mixture of old and new. What looks like a porter's lodge left, an administration block right and new flats between. I wondered how many of the staff of what is still a large mental hospital could afford to live in the new flats. From where I associated to the hospital houses once clustered around the similar hospital in Exminster, where BH spent a good chunk of her childhood. Houses which were let out cheap to staff, at what I suppose then was the sort of rent you might otherwise have paid for a council house. From where I associated to my father getting cross about an older lady moaning about having to pay so much rent for her council house, of which she was the sole occupant, rent which I now remember as having been 5/6, otherwise 25p or so, an especially low rent for widows. Pretty low even for then, perhaps sixty years ago. But maybe I have got the 5/6 bit wrong.

More of the same.

Maybe once the laundry chimney, in the days when these places were vertically integrated, if that is the right bit of management jargon. Laundries, kitchens, farms, building departments, workshops, the works.

A place which was built to a good standard, by the standards of its day. Quite a lot of this crenellation to be seen.

Possibly once the central block, now mainly an exclusive collection of 1, 2 & 3 bedroom conversion apartments from City & Country. Quite a few mature conifers of one sort or another, but no Wellingtonia. Perhaps that was a Surrey thing.

The conversion apartments are the grey bit in the middle, but the rest of it looks to be up and running, even if the green bottom left is now a building site. Just at the moment, I cannot think of another such place which is still up and running on such a large scale: the ones I know are pretty much all housing.

What appeared to be a combination of occupational therapy and garden centre, perhaps the same sort of arrangement as our own Old Moat Garden Centre, also in the margins of a (former) mental hospital.

A rather stressed turret in the curtain wall, to go along with the crenellations above.

And so into Burntwood Lane, which would lead me to Garratt Lane and Earlsfield.

I had intended to go to the restaurant we tried last November and noticed at reference 4, but that was shut (although not, I think, dead), so I settled for the place opposite, a place which had probably once been a public house. If you approach it on Street View from Earlsfield, the 'Hallowed Belly', as snapped above, From the other way the 'Open Page'; presumably a wrinkle in the clever database which patches up all the regular images into what you see on the screen. And I think it has been through various other names over the years.

A foodie's take on a bacon sandwich. They remembered to omit the avocado which was good, but they made up for it with the mayo. Then it was posh bacon rather than café streaky and sour dough bread rather than factory thick white. It tasted better than it looks, but if I ever have occasion to take another, I will ask for the mayo on the side, like gravy at Wetherspoon's.

Water was provided on the table, without having to ask for it, just like in North America. Topped up with a spot of a decent Vinho Verde, with just a touch of fizz about it, giving both a pleasing appearance and a pleasing taste. It came in a bottle with an orange label which included a couple of fish symbols. According to Bing, possibly a '2020 Trajarinho Vinho Verde, Adega de Moncao: A bright lemon colour with notes of peach and apricot on the nose. There's a lovely pettience on the palate with lifted notes of lemon zest on the finish'. Neither Webster's, Bing nor Google recognise the word 'pettience', so perhaps it is a wine buff's cod French, taken from 'pétiller' which does, indeed, mean to sparkle or fizz.

And so onto Raynes Park, where it was cold, overcast and windy. No record of any aeroplanes at either Earlsfield or Raynes Park.

The day's haul. Kabanosi dry and over spiced, as I had suspected. Rolls fine. And BH was pleased with her two books from the Raynes Park Platform Library, both good complements to things she still reads - that is to say books about childhoods in the wilds of Scotland and bumming around the Pacific. 'Spawn' involved at least two serious actors - Martin Sheen and Nicol Williamson (a gentleman I once saw do a one man show somewhere near Piccadilly Circus, the night after he had walked off-stage, something of a no-no for a luvvie, be he ever so talented) - but was, on the evidence of the first ten minutes, complete tripe. A collage of tripe from the 1960's and 1970's, perhaps of more interest to a film buff than to ourselves. Put in the box in the garage for the upcoming book fair run by the local Methodists.

While all this had been going on, BH had been busy in the kitchen, with the cakes that were left by 15:00 or so snapped above. A recipe which was new to both of us, cakes with a layered mix of textures which was new to me. Plums on top, not apples. Rather good, but also substantial and one was enough at a time. Or perhaps one and a half.

At this point I set about checking the Springfield business. Item 1, there are plenty of places about called Springfield. Item 2, this Springfield is clearly a mental hospital and it says nothing at reference 2 about diseases of the chest or TB. Item 3, my elder brother was a gifted but unusual child and is it not impossible that a stay at this Springfield was thought to be the way forward. Item 4, a correspondent, a relative, has no memory of this place or of any picnic, but does have a memory about a place at Margate, which did indeed once sport the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital of reference 5, which had eased off on the sea bathing by the time in question and did do TB. But a long way for a day out from Cambridge, at a time when motorways were only just being thought of. I think it most likely that my memory has just got hopelessly confused.

PS 1: Peleton and Brindisa seem to be holding onto the (advertising) top spot in my gmail account. Despite my not having mentioned them or visited their websites for some weeks now.

PS 2: The secret police: Cops built a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd’s murder: An investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals a sprawling, technologically sophisticated system in Minnesota designed for closely monitoring protesters -Tate Ryan-Mosley, Sam Richards, MIT Technology Review - 2022. This came up in the margins of this post. And while one can understand how something like 'Operation Safety Net' came to be, it does seem rather heavy handed and does not encourage belief that the police are there to help. At least not if you are black and live in Minnesota.

References

Reference 1: https://www.swlstg.nhs.uk/. Not particularly helpful to me, although I dare say it does well enough as an entry point if you are a customer rather than a tourist.

Reference 2: https://www.swlstg.nhs.uk/about-the-trust/striving-for-better-quality-mental-health/new-hospitals/springfield-redevelopment/springfield-hospital-history. Better, if not particularly detailed. Not the work of a local history enthusiast.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/07/echium-pininana.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/cross-dressed-hamlet.html.

Reference 5: https://historic-hospitals.com/2017/12/27/margates-sea-bathing-hospital/.