Our Adventure in the Windmill

by Steve Parkes (QM 1961-67)

My friend Roy and I had a little adventure, involving the exploring of private property we had no business venturing into at all!

Just near the end of Follyhouse Lane, where it converges with Sandwell Street, behind Roy’s parents’ house (just by the spot where Roy’s back gate led out onto the lane), there led off, at right- angles, a gulley, or public footpath, called Green Hill Walk. Running more or less due west to east, it was paved with the old-fashioned, traditional, blue paving bricks that used to be so abundant in Walsall back then and it ran up alongside the last of the houses on the opposite side of the lane, and led to Highgate Road at its other end.

Three-quarters of the way along this gulley, beyond its perimeter fence on the left, stood a most unusual building – a sort of ‘folly’ in the form of a round tower, standing detached in the back garden of the house at the end of the gulley, that fronted onto Highgate Road. Though quite small in its ‘plan’ dimensions, it rose to five storeys high, plus the rooftop that had crenulations, like mock ‘battlements,’ around the top of its wall.

It was known locally as ‘The Windmill,’ and had, originally, been a working flour mill, driven by wind power, until the 1860s, when it had fallen into disuse and had been stripped of its grinding machinery and its sails. The old mill is still there to this day, though privately owned and closed to the public, and you can read about its history in Wikipedia, under the heading “Highgate Windmill.”

Back in 1962 – the period I’m writing about here – it was still standing semi- derelict. It was structurally sound, but standing there in someone’s back garden, neglected and seemingly unloved, yet prominently visible both from Highgate Road and from Green Hill Walk.

Of course, it aroused in Roy and me an almost unbearable curiosity! I’d known about it for years, long before I’d met Roy and, of course, Roy had grown up with it on his very doorstep, so to speak, but we were still aching to know more about this strange, iconic tower and wondered desperately what it looked like on the inside!

I don’t know how we came to find ourselves inside that private garden that day. I honestly can’t remember whether we tried the latch of the tall gate that led in from the gulley and found it unlocked, whether we squeezed through a gap in the fence boards, or if we climbed boldly over the top of the six-foot gate or fence..?

Because I have no memory of it, I’m inclined to think we found the gate unlocked and just sneaked in that way – acutely aware all the time that we were trespassing in someone’s private garden, almost within view of the house!

Of course, that knowledge added to our excitement and made our little adventure all the more daring – knowing that, at any moment, we might get caught and find ourselves in a load of trouble!

Keeping, as much as possible, on the far side of the windmill from the house, so that we were screened from view, we hurried up to the wall of the structure, where we had maximum cover from being seen. More recent pictures of the windmill show a single-storey, pitched-roof, brick-built shed extension, attached right onto, and partly wrapping around the side of the tower and positioned on the far side from the house – just at the point where Roy and I were hugging the original wall of the tower, long before that shed extension had been built.

There must have been a door on that side, as there is none visible on old photographs taken on the opposite side but it was, no doubt, securely locked and did not afford us any access that day. So we concentrated our attention on a ground-floor window that was right next to it instead.

The windows on the lower floors had all been rather crudely boarded-up, as there appeared to be no glass in them to keep out the weather. It hadn’t been very securely done, however, and it didn’t take Roy and me long to pull enough of the boards away to allow us both to climb inside. We were IN the windmill!

We found ourselves in a strange, circular room that occupied the entire ground floor of the building. It was eerily and only dimly lit from the mainly boarded-up windows and was, to all intents and purposes, devoid of any furniture. All there was in there were a few old packing cases and some bits and pieces of junk, mainly old lengths of electrical cables and old, dusty, industrialIt was, indeed, about the same size as a large chicken’s egg, so I picked it up and slipped it into my pocket as a souvenir of our visit.

Against the curved wall on one side of the room, a correspondingly curved, open staircase led invitingly up to the first floor above. Now that we were inside the windmill, we were determined to explore the entire building. We were naturally curious and we knew this was going to be our one and only opportunity to explore this place, so we climbed the stairs up to the next floor.

We found another room exactly like the first – dimly-lit, with no furniture and with a floor littered with bits of old junk. Like the ground-floor room, everything was covered in the thick dust of long disuse and neglect.

Another curved, open staircase led further up to the floor above. Nothing daunted, we began our next ascent. We wanted to go right up to the top floor and see if it was possible to get onto the roof, at that point our plans were cruelly thwarted!

I was leading the way and was halfway-up the second staircase, when, suddenly, a large, fluttering, flapping, flying creature of some kind flew up in front of my face, silhouetted against the gloom behind it and scared the living daylights out of both of us – me especially! My first impression was that it must be a large bat (I’d never seen one at that time, so I didn’t know how small they actually were).

With a loud cry of “EUGHHHH....!” (or something of a similar nature), we turned and fled down those stairs as though a bat out of Hell was after us – which, indeed, we thought actually was! We were out of that window and back to the safety of the gulley in record-breaking time!

Stopping to catch our breath, Roy looked back and said he saw a pigeon fly out of one of the upstairs windows and back in again, so we realized it had been that which had given us such a scare, not a giant bat after all. Neither of us, however, had any wish to go back in and try to make it to the top floor any more. That pigeon had taken the wind right out of our sails!

Still – it had given us something to tell our grandchildren about! Or could we? We had been, after all, trespassing on private property – not a thing to be condoned or encouraged in future generations! Perhaps our grandchildren wouldn’t read about our little adventure until they were grown up, responsible adults, and it wouldn’t give them wrong ideas about exploring on private property where they had no rights being!

We can but hope!