Shops and mud
Moving to South Oxhey (oral history)
Moving out of London
London was nearly bombed out y’know, so we thought oh we’d move out to, Dad said “let’s move out to a new estate”, so we came out here, but right half of London where we were, half of it was all flattened y’know.
Shopping
[So I suppose it was a nice relief to get to this beautiful new estate?] Yeah, well it wasn’t a beautiful estate then, it was all mud and muck, there was hardly anything on here, there was no shops [oh right], we used to have coaches come round and you used to buy stuff off the coach, or a horse and cart used to come with the milk, y’know, so we used to have that. There was no shops until they started rebuilding the shops here. [So how long was that going on?] Oh I can’t remember that far away, it was a while back [a few years then], yeah a few years, yeah a few years, as I say we used to have the coach come round and buy it off the coach. You used to get on one end of the coach, walk right through, get what you want and pay at the other end. [If you wanted any other shopping would you go anywhere else?] Yeah we’d go to Watford, Watford’s OK, we used to go to Watford. There used to be 6 cinemas in Watford.
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Penfolds I remember them. We lived in Benton Road .
We had like a green space in the middle where all the kids used to play somebody put a old bike out there and we took it in turns and learnt to ride. And then we moved up to Muirfield Road. We are the
Rowe Family.I missed four years of schooling as the schools weren’t built. There were no places left in the Watford schools. I still have family living there. They are the Gilberts. Cousins. I also remember All the mud. And getting the coke in prams. The farm shop. And when they put the asphalt paths down we dug it up and sieved it for the small lumps to use on the fire. My Dad decided to lawn the garden so we all went with spades and barrows and dug up turf from the fields then everybody started doing it. Of course we got in trouble because it was the farmers for his cows.
We also had a street party for the coronation.
When I talked about it to my husband he used to say here come the coke sandwich stories again
Hard times but we had a lot of fun
Hi Pamela, you have just bought back so many memories to me, I moved to South Oxhey 1949, before that my family also lived in London…Ladbrooke Grove, We moved to Benton Rd for a while then my mum died when I was 7yrs old, after we moved to Muirfield Rd 59, opposite Clarendon School which I went to. I remember getting on a bus to the coal depot at Bushey Arches then walking all the way home with the coke on the pushchair, I remember Toni Bell ice cream van coming round and the rag and bone man who gave us a gold fish for old rags, i could go on forever about my childhood in Sth Oxhey.
I moved to South Oxhey estate in 1949 and remember the mud and more mud! We moved to Muirfield Road and my back garden had a pond in it which my dad filled in with tin cans, etc. Each year the garden would flood with rain washed down from the top of the hill into our flat garden. We had toads in the garden when I first arrived and bats flew around at night! I had to go to school at 5 years old by coach from Prestwick Road to Beecham Grove until Oxhey Wood school was built. We, too had to buy food from a travelling shop called “Barkers” which came around on a Friday or Saturday early evening. I also remember the coalman delivered coal by horse and as kids we had to run after him a with a bucket and collect the horse manure for our garden. My mum used to walk all the way to Bushey Arches to collect a sack of coke from the gas works, pushing a pram, as it was cheaper. How she managed to push the pram with coke balanced on it, baby inside it and me being dragged along too! Don’t think they were exactly “happy days” but it certainly made us all stronger and appreciate what we have today.