Derek Haycroft
Derek talks about his childhood in Woking

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We just went to our adventure playground which was the whole of Horsell Common. You just went off and even at age eight, you’d just go off and by the time we got to ten, we used to be able to cycle to Virginia Water and leave the bike there and spend the day and parents didn’t worry. Over on Horsell Common, which… it’s difficult to think about it now, but you know where the Cricketers is? If you stood with your back to The Cricketers public house, you could see right across to the boundary trees over at the far side by Carthouse Lane. There was just heather because it got burnt off about every other year. But over on it there'd been any amount of excavations, certainly not for building material, because it wasn't that sort of ground, but because of the comparative freshness. Then I should think they were just exercises by the military for the First War and never filled in. They were great for us kids, you could do all sorts of things in this and we used to run all over this area.

You’d make a camp in them and have battles with catapults with each other, climb trees. There’s some good climbing trees there and you could get further and further up and up. Exploring all the time because everyone had bicycles, so that as your parents slowly released the strings on you a bit, you went further and further afield, because the next thing was, if you went through Chobham and you got onto Chobham Common, it was really vast, particularly when you’re a small child. The entertainment came, they built the Ritz in Woking, which was the ABC Cinema eventually, now demolished, and there was a Saturday morning film for children. So we got our tuppence or thrupence and sometimes took the tuppence and thrupence and didn’t go to the cinema, just went off more adventure playing, particularly if you’d just seen a good film, like ‘Treasure Island’ or something, you’d re-enact the whole lot out there forever.

Yes, it was all just a carefree sort of existence. Football we played, didn’t really get onto cricket until we went to the county school and that really sort of took off from there on, because they did football in the autumn, rugby in the spring and then cricket. So you got three sports and everybody really got quite well into that, it was good fun.