Maureen & Roy Toppin - Memories of Croxley Green
Recorded 26th November 2022
also including Lorraine Humphreys
Recorded 26th November 2022
also including Lorraine Humphreys
Maureen: I was born in 1937, December 26th, Boxing Day.
Roy: 1938
Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.
Int: Let’s start with you, Maureen. Were you born in Croxley?
M: Yes, I was born in 258 New Road and my parents had been down to Rickmansworth for Christmas Day, walked all the way from the High Street up Scots Hill and when they got home I started coming and my Dad had to walk up to Nurse Dixon in New Road to fetch her out and she came down on her bicycle and delivered me – she was quite a character, Nurse Dixon. She was a district nurse in Croxley Green for years and years, so that was my entrance into the world. Before the war we moved from 258 to 124 New Road and that’s where we were when my mother knew that war was imminent and so she took me down to Wales to live with my grandmother and her Welsh family and my brother was due to be born in the November. My father was still at home when he was called up, so he joined his unit in 1939. We found this out recently on the 1939 census. When we got home, which was about 1945, I was enrolled in Yorke Road School and Miss Bridge was one of the teachers there. She did eventually become headmistress but at the time she was just a young teacher, quite young, about 26 or something. My memories of going to school are we used to have a horrible milk crate and we had to go and bring the milk crate in and it’s put me off milk for life, because it was thick cream on the top with cardboard tops on it and you pulled it and it just used to make me heave – I’ve never liked milk since! Other memories of school were coming home we used to pass the stables – what do you call them? It’s where they shoe the horses.
Int: Oh, the blacksmith.
M: The blacksmith, thank you. So we used to go past the blacksmith and my mum would let me stop and watch the horses being shod and I can remember the smell of that burning hoof to this day. They were very active because lots of the farms round here had cart horses and horses, you know, and used them on the farms. So it was a very busy blacksmith’s.
Int: In New Road, was it?
M: Yes. It’s where now the Garage is.
(Lorraine Humphreys, Maureen’s sister, is introduced)
Int: So we were talking about your time at Yorke Road.
M: Yes. My brother John Adair followed two years later and then ten years on Lorraine went to Yorke Road as well. We progressed round the corner to Old Boys School, which was next door to where the Duke of York pub was, before it was demolished, and I was just there for one year before going on to Harvey Road School.
Int: So how old were you then? Eleven?
M: I was –
L: Nine, seven.
M: Seven, yes. Well, I was probably eight because I had the year in Old Boys. Did you go to that Old Boys School, or did you …?
L: Old Boys by my time was a kitchen, it was where we went round for dinners, we had all our dinners round there. I don’t remember it as a teaching area, it was mainly a canteen.
Int: That would have been in the forties, then, wouldn’t it?
M: Yes. We only had two classes in there, and one was Miss Watson, a very nice lady, who played the piano for everything that we did, and the other one was Mrs. Fenton, Glynis Fenton, she was – and she used to run the Co-op choir, up above the Co-op as it is now – it’s a storeroom now – but it used to be a hall up there and we used to have the choir practice there.
L: At the back of the Co-op, wasn’t it?
M: Yes, at the back. In the car park.
L: Yes, that was a big part of Croxley, that choir.
M: It was the Co-op choir and when I was in Old Boys, Mrs Fenton used to run the choir then, she started it, she started it then.
Int: Quite young.
M: Quite young, and then we used to have concerts at Dickinson’s Guildhouse. We’d also go round in the winter to old peoples’ homes and things like that, and we would sing carols. She had concerts on as well. This is a picture of Harvey Road School, and this is Miss Eyles the teacher, she was a well-loved teacher at the school, very nice lady.
Int: That would have been late forties?
M: Yes. She used to take us out on Saturday morning, her and Mr. Routledge, another teacher at the school, would take us out on walks. We used to go down Cassiobury Park or up onto the Green.
Int: Yes. On a Saturday?
M: On a Saturday, in their own time, they took the trouble to do that.
Int: What was your favourite subject at Harvey Road?
M: Well, I liked English – at Maths I was absolutely appalling, I never got it. I just loved English and stories, you know, composition. I love history, I loved history all my life, mainly interested in ancient history, and this is what’s recently got us into doing the family history, so we’ve completed all of our Welsh side of the family and also the Irish side of the family as well.
Int: And do you remember much about the composition of the school day at Harvey Road in the late forties? And would that have changed by the time that you went, Lorraine? Was the teaching different?
L: It was, really… (some inaudible talking over)
M: The teaching probably wouldn’t have changed, but we never had a canteen. It was wartime and food was quite grim, so one week we had sandwiches and the next week we got a hot meal, but they couldn’t give us a hot meal every week, so on the day when we had sandwiches, we didn’t have a canteen, we had to eat at our desks, and you’d come back from school and sit down at your desk and find some boy had put a piece of beetroot into the inkwell. (Laughter) And eventually I think some money was released and they built a canteen at the back of the school. But we had very limited facilities there – you know, you’d play rounders, and I can’t remember playing netball, but I suppose they must have done, but we just had a playing field outside, that was all. So I think, Lorraine, it must have improved ten years later.
L: Yes, ten years later there was a canteen, and we definitely had hot meals there.
M: The sandwiches and everything were horrible, but, you know, you were glad to have it, because it’s one meal your mother didn’t have to provide for you during the wartime.
Roy: 1938
Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.
Int: Let’s start with you, Maureen. Were you born in Croxley?
M: Yes, I was born in 258 New Road and my parents had been down to Rickmansworth for Christmas Day, walked all the way from the High Street up Scots Hill and when they got home I started coming and my Dad had to walk up to Nurse Dixon in New Road to fetch her out and she came down on her bicycle and delivered me – she was quite a character, Nurse Dixon. She was a district nurse in Croxley Green for years and years, so that was my entrance into the world. Before the war we moved from 258 to 124 New Road and that’s where we were when my mother knew that war was imminent and so she took me down to Wales to live with my grandmother and her Welsh family and my brother was due to be born in the November. My father was still at home when he was called up, so he joined his unit in 1939. We found this out recently on the 1939 census. When we got home, which was about 1945, I was enrolled in Yorke Road School and Miss Bridge was one of the teachers there. She did eventually become headmistress but at the time she was just a young teacher, quite young, about 26 or something. My memories of going to school are we used to have a horrible milk crate and we had to go and bring the milk crate in and it’s put me off milk for life, because it was thick cream on the top with cardboard tops on it and you pulled it and it just used to make me heave – I’ve never liked milk since! Other memories of school were coming home we used to pass the stables – what do you call them? It’s where they shoe the horses.
Int: Oh, the blacksmith.
M: The blacksmith, thank you. So we used to go past the blacksmith and my mum would let me stop and watch the horses being shod and I can remember the smell of that burning hoof to this day. They were very active because lots of the farms round here had cart horses and horses, you know, and used them on the farms. So it was a very busy blacksmith’s.
Int: In New Road, was it?
M: Yes. It’s where now the Garage is.
(Lorraine Humphreys, Maureen’s sister, is introduced)
Int: So we were talking about your time at Yorke Road.
M: Yes. My brother John Adair followed two years later and then ten years on Lorraine went to Yorke Road as well. We progressed round the corner to Old Boys School, which was next door to where the Duke of York pub was, before it was demolished, and I was just there for one year before going on to Harvey Road School.
Int: So how old were you then? Eleven?
M: I was –
L: Nine, seven.
M: Seven, yes. Well, I was probably eight because I had the year in Old Boys. Did you go to that Old Boys School, or did you …?
L: Old Boys by my time was a kitchen, it was where we went round for dinners, we had all our dinners round there. I don’t remember it as a teaching area, it was mainly a canteen.
Int: That would have been in the forties, then, wouldn’t it?
M: Yes. We only had two classes in there, and one was Miss Watson, a very nice lady, who played the piano for everything that we did, and the other one was Mrs. Fenton, Glynis Fenton, she was – and she used to run the Co-op choir, up above the Co-op as it is now – it’s a storeroom now – but it used to be a hall up there and we used to have the choir practice there.
L: At the back of the Co-op, wasn’t it?
M: Yes, at the back. In the car park.
L: Yes, that was a big part of Croxley, that choir.
M: It was the Co-op choir and when I was in Old Boys, Mrs Fenton used to run the choir then, she started it, she started it then.
Int: Quite young.
M: Quite young, and then we used to have concerts at Dickinson’s Guildhouse. We’d also go round in the winter to old peoples’ homes and things like that, and we would sing carols. She had concerts on as well. This is a picture of Harvey Road School, and this is Miss Eyles the teacher, she was a well-loved teacher at the school, very nice lady.
Int: That would have been late forties?
M: Yes. She used to take us out on Saturday morning, her and Mr. Routledge, another teacher at the school, would take us out on walks. We used to go down Cassiobury Park or up onto the Green.
Int: Yes. On a Saturday?
M: On a Saturday, in their own time, they took the trouble to do that.
Int: What was your favourite subject at Harvey Road?
M: Well, I liked English – at Maths I was absolutely appalling, I never got it. I just loved English and stories, you know, composition. I love history, I loved history all my life, mainly interested in ancient history, and this is what’s recently got us into doing the family history, so we’ve completed all of our Welsh side of the family and also the Irish side of the family as well.
Int: And do you remember much about the composition of the school day at Harvey Road in the late forties? And would that have changed by the time that you went, Lorraine? Was the teaching different?
L: It was, really… (some inaudible talking over)
M: The teaching probably wouldn’t have changed, but we never had a canteen. It was wartime and food was quite grim, so one week we had sandwiches and the next week we got a hot meal, but they couldn’t give us a hot meal every week, so on the day when we had sandwiches, we didn’t have a canteen, we had to eat at our desks, and you’d come back from school and sit down at your desk and find some boy had put a piece of beetroot into the inkwell. (Laughter) And eventually I think some money was released and they built a canteen at the back of the school. But we had very limited facilities there – you know, you’d play rounders, and I can’t remember playing netball, but I suppose they must have done, but we just had a playing field outside, that was all. So I think, Lorraine, it must have improved ten years later.
L: Yes, ten years later there was a canteen, and we definitely had hot meals there.
M: The sandwiches and everything were horrible, but, you know, you were glad to have it, because it’s one meal your mother didn’t have to provide for you during the wartime.
L: I think I’m right in saying that there were five grocery shops in New Road. (M: New Road, yes) Five grocery shops at one time.
M: There was also three butchers shops. - Robinson’s halfway down the road, the Co-op and Gadsden’s, nearer to Barton Way.
Int: Well, apart from when you were at school, how did you use to entertain yourself in your free time?
M: Well, both of us belonged to the Girls Life Brigade. This was another photograph I was going to show you.
L: And the youth club.
M: And the youth club, yes.
L: The youth club I went to was in the Guildhouse but your one was at the Methodist Church.
M: Yes. So that’s the Girls Life Brigade and here I am at the age of five, somewhere, here. So this was a big part of our life.
Int: From the age of five, gosh.
M: Yes, and I finished when I was 21, when I got married. We had a band and they used to play
Int: Was that every week?
M: Yes. We used to march round New Road.
L: Everything revolved round the Girls Brigade, didn’t it?
M: Yes, our whole life really revolved around – for our entertainment – revolved around the Methodist Church in New Road, and though I was christened at the Baptist Church in Rickmansworth, Lorraine was christened in the Methodist and starting with the Girls Life Brigade, which was Captain Louie Hedges, who’s a very well known character in the village – you know the Hedges family, of course, with Algernon and Louie – so it was a very nice family group, there were nice girls, most of the girls you’d been in school with, and they used to have the cadets one night and then there were the older girls on another night, and the older girls, we used to have this band practice, and we had a bandmaster, Mr. Panel, he used to come all the way from …
L: Southall was it?
M: Southall, yes. He used to come every week with his son Alan and they used to give us band practice and then in November we would be marching with the Boys Brigade up New Road to the Cenotaph on the Green there.
Int: What did you play?
M: I was the mace bearer.
L: And I played the bugle.
M: And we actually got to the Albert Hall once. There’s a competition every year for all the bands in the GLB, and it culminated – I think we were second, we weren’t the first band but the second, so in the afternoon we went and played in the Albert Hall. I never realised what a big arena it was until you’re standing there looking across it.
Int: Do you remember what year that was?
M: Ooh – that was about 1958.
L: I must have been older than 10.
M: Were you?
L: Because I played the solo, you know, the solo bit. So I must have been 11.
Int: So you were involved all your teenage years until you were 21, you said.
M: So this came about through being in Sunday school, really. I met my best friend there when we were 5 - Jennifer Weston - we are still friends to this very day, 80 years later, We went to Sunday school and I used to take Lorraine with me and I delivered her into the little class where the small children were..
M: So a lot of life revolved around the Methodist Sunday school, which was an absolutely very vibrant thing at that time. Louie Hedges, she used to play the piano, she also played the organ, and she played the organ for my wedding. Lovely people, very, very nice people and the Superintendent of it was called Frederick Parker, and he lived up in Malvern Way somewhere up that end, and if we wanted to have our badges, like they do with the Girl Guides, you’d get badges for different things, Mrs Parker would take us in and we were allowed to do our housework badge with her, home making badge, so she would get us washing and polishing and do things like that, so they were a great family, and their elder daughter Doreen was also in the Girls Life Brigade. Once a year we had our Sunday School Outing and half of Croxley went to that. There used to be 5 or 6 coaches, the length of the top of New Road, right down to past Yorke Road were the coaches that used to take us. We never went anywhere very exciting -it was usually Burnham Beeches or Clacton, sometimes –
L: Littlehampton.
M: Littlehampton, yes. But it was a great thing.
Int: Exciting?
M: Yes, that was.
L: The buildup. (M: Yes) You know, you’d build up to it, it would be a year waiting for this one
M: And also the Sunday school anniversary, the church would be packed out for that, and you always had a new dress on the Sunday school anniversary.
L: And just going back to the badges that we used to do, I paid back a bit, really, because when I had my first child, they used to come to me to do the bath the baby badge, you know, child care badge and I used to have show them the way to change a baby and then to bath a baby and they would do it then at my house.
M: And we used to do the nature badge – we would go up on the Green in the summer and in the dell up the top, which seemed much deeper to me then than it is now, I don’t know if they filled it in or what’s happened to it – it used to be a big dell that you could run down the sides. And the main thing that I always loved was that they had harebells up there, you could always see harebells, and we used to pick them and press them and things like that. Stone’s Orchard on the Green, we used to go and buy cherries from there, and you’d ring the bell and they’d come out and he had brass weights that he'd weigh the cherries out of.
L: And they’d be standing on the ground, on the mud, on the muddy ground.
M: Yes. And they had big baskets of cherries then. And also the cherry picking was down New Road. There was Mr. King, he lived about 10 doors down from where the blacksmith’s was, and he had an orchard there which stretched down from the row of cottages to where Evans Close is now, so it was quite a large orchard. And you used to go round to his back door and ring the bell and he would come and you’d say ‘can I have some cherries’ and then he’d weigh them out he kept the cherries outside in his garage and then used to sell them. So – New Road was a lovely road, really. We had everything we needed in one road, didn’t we, Lorraine?
L: Well, whether that was because we where we were – all of our needs were in New Road. I mean, Barton Way and all those other roads had been built by then, but everything seemed to – I think because of the Guildhouse, I think had a lot to do with it, the Guildhouse was a very big part of it I think.
M: Yes, John Dickinson did a good job there. We showed that at the 150th anniversary of All Saints Church recently. Our Flower Workshop workshop put on the display, the theme was Organisations in Croxley Green, and we suggested our theme could be John Dickinson’s? As far as I was concerned, John Dickinson’s is Croxley Green, you know. So – and the flowers were beautiful, weren’t they?
L: All that big flower arrangement.
M: Stunning, yes. The two altar rails we did and the outside. Three of our ladies did that, and then they did the photographs which is where Margaret (Pomfrett) came in, because she approached the community centre and the lady there agreed to let us have some old photographs. I went down to the Rickmansworth Museum to try and get some photos but there was nothing down there at all. And then I went on the website and I saw you have pictures, don’t you? So I couldn’t reproduce them well enough to put on display so she ran me off some and then Margaret very kindly laminated them for us, which was marvellous. The Dickinson’s Guildhouse was marvellous. As Lorraine said, the Horticultural Show was on there every year; Ward’s Nurseries from Sarratt had a big dahlia show. And the Boy Scouts had their jamboree – yes, they had jamborees and they put a concert on every year and I used to love the Scout concert, because it was really funny. They used to dress up as ladies and it was really good evening. Then of course as I got older I went to dances in there on a Saturday night. It was a Saturday night dance venue. The main areas downstairs were for the working men at John Dickinson’s. They had billiards, they had a bar there. They had the science rooms and quiet rooms where they could go and read, because the initial concept was it was educational, so it was for people who hadn’t been able to go to university who wanted books to look at. So that all took place in there. And it was a great tragedy when that
[general discussion about the date when there was a fire at the Guildhouse]
M: ’65 was it? When was Kevin born, Lorraine?
L: 1964.
L: Yes, so he was about 9 months and I was looking after him at my Mum’s, you and Mum had gone out, you and Dad and Mum, and our garden, the back of our garden was - well, it goes now into the car park of the Co-op. So that was how near I was to the fire and all you could hear was the huge explosions.
M: And Roy heard it in Rugby Way.
L: And I had been left to look after this baby. I think it was the first time the baby had been left with me, and I was absolutely terrified, because when I went out into the garden the flames looked as if they were at the bottom of our garden – they weren’t but it wasn’t that far away and it looked as if they were actually coming into our garden, because they were huge, and the air of the beer kegs was – they were exploding and I can remember getting Kevin and running out the front, because I really thought it was all going to come and burn me down while they were all out.
M: And you heard the explosion in Rugby Way? It was the asbestos – it was quite sad.
Int: It was the hall at the back, wasn’t it. It wasn’t the actual thing.
M: The hall at the back, yes. It wasn’t the actual building, no, but it was a terrible loss because we really didn’t have another hall. The only halls you had at that time were the halls at the back of churches and things.
L: Well, we had the hall at the top of the Guildhouse, in the front.
M: Yes. That’s where my wedding breakfast was held.
L: And that’s where we used to have our youth club, you know. We used to have jiving and those sort of things up there.
M: And they had a youth club at the Methodist Church as well. Used to do that there sometimes on a Saturday. But that was a terrible loss that hall, wasn’t it, really?
L: It was, yes.
M: It was a real loss.
Int: When you left school, where did you go to work?
M: Well, I went to John Dickinson’s, surprisingly! (laughs) But not here, over at Apsley Mills, so I had to get two buses. I used to go from here to where Clements was and then pick up the bus through Kings Langley to Apsley and I was there for about three years.
Int: Fifteen you must have been?
M: Well, I was 16 when I started– well I stayed on a bit longer at school. I had two years’ shorthand typing from a lady called Mrs. Oliver that used to live in Durrants Drive, and she used to do it in her front bedroom, so her house was given over to – downstairs you used to sit round the dining room table and then upstairs the bedroom had been converted into – like an office with desks all the way round. And that was how you learned your shorthand typing. After starting work I also went to night school classes at the old Tech in Queens Road, Watford, to take my exams. So I started off in a typing pool at John Dickinson’s at the Apsley Mills Branch, but they were very poor payers unfortunately. Very poor. They were very paternalistic inasmuch as they looked after you, you know. If you needed anything medical they had their own nurse there and doctor. but they didn’t pay much money. But anyway I was there for about three years and then I went up to London from there. So I started working in London because I thought, well I’m not going to get anywhere here, you know, doing this. Apsley Mills itself was huge stretched for I think it was nearly three quarters of a mile. So I was in Stationery Department, which was about one third the way along, and because I was a junior, I would be sent to Card Department, which was the total other end. If you know that area now there’s all shops – there’s Sainsbury’s and Dunelm’s and all that – and that was all part of the Mill, and it would take me twenty minutes to walk down there and twenty minutes to get back. It was huge, you can’t imagine it, really.
Int: And where had you gone to high school? Durrants? From Harvey Road on to Durrants?
M: On to Durrants, yes. I did take the eleven plus but unfortunately the year that I took it, I’m not making excuses, but the year that I took it I had an abscess in my throat which was huge and I had to have an operation to take it out. I lost a lot of schooling, first of all with all these sore throats and having treatment before I had it, and then I had it done, and when we got back I’d missed the exam – there were several people had missed it so they took us to Watford Girls Grammar School and about five of us sat in this classroom. I was absolutely petrified. I just froze, I just couldn’t do it, and so we went up to Durrants. It was a very good school. We had Mr. Jefferies and his wife, Dr. Jefferies I think he was, wasn’t he?
L: I don’t know.
Int: You were happy there?
M: Yes, very happy, yes.
L: I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I hated it.
Int: Not for you?
L: No, I didn’t like it. Well, I had a brother and a sister to follow and I’m afraid, you know, I was always compared and
M: That’s awful, really. Oh, I never knew that.
L: It just wasn’t a nice experience. I couldn’t wait to get out.
Int: And you worked in Croxley too – so where did you work?
L: Yes. I worked at the Sun Printers. Our father had worked at the Croxley Mill, John Dickinson’s, for many years and then he moved to Sun Printers and I went in there right from school, I couldn’t wait to get out of school, so I left at 15 and I went to Sun Printers, and stayed there and gradually moved into the offices and stayed there till I had my children.
M: So the shops in New Road, I was just thinking about – did you know the Miss Garlands, has anybody ever talked about the Miss Garlands?
Int: No, I don’t think they have. We’ve heard a lot about the shops in New Road, but not that particular one.
L: That was a butcher’s, actually, before the Garlands took it to the greengrocery, because that was a butcher’s originally.
M: Oh it wasn’t a butcher’s – I’ve only ever known as the two Miss Garlands - that must have been before my time. It was a funny old shop – they did sell some fresh fish as well.
L: They had everything.
M: Yes, they had everything. It was a really rubbish shop. They had a few apples, and then there’d be a wooden trough with potatoes in it, and a few turnips, but they were very eccentric women. They all wore long dresses and they had their hair done up in a turban. They would tie a turban on top of their hair.
Int: When are we talking about? The forties, fifties?
L: It was fifties, certainly in my childhood.
Int: So you remember them?
L: Oh yes, very, very much. They were very much characters.
Int: Where were they in New Road?
M: As you come down, there’s an opening where there’s a house that’s been changed from a shop – it’s half way down, just thinking about Evans Close, come down the road further and that was Robinson’s the butcher’s, and I went to school with Anne Robinson and her sister, so that was the first of the butcher’s shops and then opposite to that was the Garlands, but the shop was divided in half, had a partition down it, and they had a bicycle shop – Mr. Reid was it?
L: I don’t know, can’t remember.
M: It was divided in half, so the two Miss Garlands were here and there was a bicycle shop next door, and then it was Mr. Toms.
L: No, Mrs. Davis was the wool shop.
M: Yes, a wool shop, yes.
L: And then there was Mr. Toms, electrical, televisions and things.
M: Electrical, yes.
Int: On the same side as the Co-op?
M & L: No. On the other side.
L: If you think of where the diving shop used to be and you’re going up towards the Green on that side, that little group of shops which is the dentists now, that dentist was the electrical shop, Toms the electrical shop, and then Mrs. Davis was the wool shop.
M: The wool shop next door. And then it was the bicycle shop, and then the two Miss Garlands., coming back up the road going towards the Green.
L: And the Elements took it over from the Garlands, and they were a big family from Gonville Avenue, the Elements. And it had big meat hooks on the wall, and that. I could never remember it as a butcher’s but I’ve heard since that it was a butcher’s there.
M: Yes, and some of the walls were tiled, that makes sense, because some of the walls were tiled, weren’t they?
L: Yes. And then next to there there was a grocer’s shop, a small grocer’s shop in my time.
M: And that was in somebody’s front room.
L: They were the [Balls] family, yes, very small in their front room. And then it reverted back to a house again
M: Then you came down a bit further down the road from Mr. Toms there was Mr. Wade’s the sweet shop, which I absolutely loved because we only got a quarter of a pound of sweets a month and you used to wait till it got to the first of the month – the coupons had gone, and then you could have some sweets and I used to be begging my Mum for some sweets – ‘you can’t have them, because we’ve used all the coupons this month’ I think things like aniseed balls, penny chews and liquorice were not on rations.
Int: How things have changed!
L: Made up for it since!
M: And then next door to that was Durrant’s he was the jeweller’s and the clockmaker’s. But going back to Mr. Toms the electrical shop. When I was a small child, just – I think we had it by the time Lorraine came along – but we only had gas mantles, we weren’t on electricity. So we had gas mantles, and I used to have to go and get these mantles, and you had to be very careful, you only knocked the box and it shattered. So consequently not having any electricity, we couldn’t have a radio. We did have a radio, but it was accumulator driven. So I used to have to take these glass accumulators, had a carrying handle, my brother and I used to take them over and leave them with Mr. Toms and he would charge them up and then we would bring them back, but of course they were filled with acid, so loads of times I used to drop this acid on my white socks, and it just burnt a hole through the socks. My Mum used to tell me off, because she used to have to sew these holes up in the socks.
Int: Burn your feet!
M: You can’t really believe that there were still houses in New Road that didn’t have any electricity.
L: Well, that was in my time. I can remember electricity coming in.
M: You can remember it coming in?
L: And then we only had it downstairs first of all.
M Oh dear! Going further down the road from there, again after the jeweller’s, there’s a few more houses and then you came to Dimmock’s, which was quite a large grocer’s store, and Mr. and Mrs. Dimmock ran that for years in competition to the Co-op. And then going down a bit further the end house (before the new area with two shops before Gadsden the butchers) was Mrs Tom and her son, she had a sweet shop in her tiny front room.
L: and with an earth floor.
M: You used to have to step down into the shop and her son used to run it, and how did they make a business out of this!?
L: Oh, we had lots of sweet shops. Five or six.
M: Yes, we did, yes. And on the opposite side to that you had the dairies, there was Kinch\s dairy there and they used to bring the cows down New Road and they were milked in there as well, and then just after Mrs. Toms there was the butcher’s again, that was Gadsden’s, sadly gone quite recently.
L: I think there was one shop in between those two. But I can’t remember. Mrs. Toms was on the end and then there was this other shop and then there was Gadsden’s the butcher’s.
M: Yes. And then two doors down from that was Mr. Mead, he was the fishmonger.
L: Oh yes. Do you know about him?
M: Do you know Mr. Mead?
Int: Well, we’ve heard about the fish shop, yes.
M: Yes. And he used to put his table up at the end of his front garden and he had a big metal box like that which was covered with a cloth and then he had white fish, fresh fish, and he used to serve that out of there.
L: It used to smell the whole road, it was dreadful!
M: And health and safety, you know! (laughter)
L: He was there until – yes, the health and safety that came in and I think he had to close then because he had it all out in the open.
Int: Where did he get his fish from, do you know?
M: I don’t know. I don’t know where he would have – possibly a van went round delivering fish.
L: His daughter’s still around Croxley, New Road.
Int: Yes, it’s a Croxley name, isn’t it? (M & L: Yes). One of the many.
L: Yes. Or it’s his granddaughter actually, Karen, I was at school with her.
M: There was also three butchers shops. - Robinson’s halfway down the road, the Co-op and Gadsden’s, nearer to Barton Way.
Int: Well, apart from when you were at school, how did you use to entertain yourself in your free time?
M: Well, both of us belonged to the Girls Life Brigade. This was another photograph I was going to show you.
L: And the youth club.
M: And the youth club, yes.
L: The youth club I went to was in the Guildhouse but your one was at the Methodist Church.
M: Yes. So that’s the Girls Life Brigade and here I am at the age of five, somewhere, here. So this was a big part of our life.
Int: From the age of five, gosh.
M: Yes, and I finished when I was 21, when I got married. We had a band and they used to play
Int: Was that every week?
M: Yes. We used to march round New Road.
L: Everything revolved round the Girls Brigade, didn’t it?
M: Yes, our whole life really revolved around – for our entertainment – revolved around the Methodist Church in New Road, and though I was christened at the Baptist Church in Rickmansworth, Lorraine was christened in the Methodist and starting with the Girls Life Brigade, which was Captain Louie Hedges, who’s a very well known character in the village – you know the Hedges family, of course, with Algernon and Louie – so it was a very nice family group, there were nice girls, most of the girls you’d been in school with, and they used to have the cadets one night and then there were the older girls on another night, and the older girls, we used to have this band practice, and we had a bandmaster, Mr. Panel, he used to come all the way from …
L: Southall was it?
M: Southall, yes. He used to come every week with his son Alan and they used to give us band practice and then in November we would be marching with the Boys Brigade up New Road to the Cenotaph on the Green there.
Int: What did you play?
M: I was the mace bearer.
L: And I played the bugle.
M: And we actually got to the Albert Hall once. There’s a competition every year for all the bands in the GLB, and it culminated – I think we were second, we weren’t the first band but the second, so in the afternoon we went and played in the Albert Hall. I never realised what a big arena it was until you’re standing there looking across it.
Int: Do you remember what year that was?
M: Ooh – that was about 1958.
L: I must have been older than 10.
M: Were you?
L: Because I played the solo, you know, the solo bit. So I must have been 11.
Int: So you were involved all your teenage years until you were 21, you said.
M: So this came about through being in Sunday school, really. I met my best friend there when we were 5 - Jennifer Weston - we are still friends to this very day, 80 years later, We went to Sunday school and I used to take Lorraine with me and I delivered her into the little class where the small children were..
M: So a lot of life revolved around the Methodist Sunday school, which was an absolutely very vibrant thing at that time. Louie Hedges, she used to play the piano, she also played the organ, and she played the organ for my wedding. Lovely people, very, very nice people and the Superintendent of it was called Frederick Parker, and he lived up in Malvern Way somewhere up that end, and if we wanted to have our badges, like they do with the Girl Guides, you’d get badges for different things, Mrs Parker would take us in and we were allowed to do our housework badge with her, home making badge, so she would get us washing and polishing and do things like that, so they were a great family, and their elder daughter Doreen was also in the Girls Life Brigade. Once a year we had our Sunday School Outing and half of Croxley went to that. There used to be 5 or 6 coaches, the length of the top of New Road, right down to past Yorke Road were the coaches that used to take us. We never went anywhere very exciting -it was usually Burnham Beeches or Clacton, sometimes –
L: Littlehampton.
M: Littlehampton, yes. But it was a great thing.
Int: Exciting?
M: Yes, that was.
L: The buildup. (M: Yes) You know, you’d build up to it, it would be a year waiting for this one
M: And also the Sunday school anniversary, the church would be packed out for that, and you always had a new dress on the Sunday school anniversary.
L: And just going back to the badges that we used to do, I paid back a bit, really, because when I had my first child, they used to come to me to do the bath the baby badge, you know, child care badge and I used to have show them the way to change a baby and then to bath a baby and they would do it then at my house.
M: And we used to do the nature badge – we would go up on the Green in the summer and in the dell up the top, which seemed much deeper to me then than it is now, I don’t know if they filled it in or what’s happened to it – it used to be a big dell that you could run down the sides. And the main thing that I always loved was that they had harebells up there, you could always see harebells, and we used to pick them and press them and things like that. Stone’s Orchard on the Green, we used to go and buy cherries from there, and you’d ring the bell and they’d come out and he had brass weights that he'd weigh the cherries out of.
L: And they’d be standing on the ground, on the mud, on the muddy ground.
M: Yes. And they had big baskets of cherries then. And also the cherry picking was down New Road. There was Mr. King, he lived about 10 doors down from where the blacksmith’s was, and he had an orchard there which stretched down from the row of cottages to where Evans Close is now, so it was quite a large orchard. And you used to go round to his back door and ring the bell and he would come and you’d say ‘can I have some cherries’ and then he’d weigh them out he kept the cherries outside in his garage and then used to sell them. So – New Road was a lovely road, really. We had everything we needed in one road, didn’t we, Lorraine?
L: Well, whether that was because we where we were – all of our needs were in New Road. I mean, Barton Way and all those other roads had been built by then, but everything seemed to – I think because of the Guildhouse, I think had a lot to do with it, the Guildhouse was a very big part of it I think.
M: Yes, John Dickinson did a good job there. We showed that at the 150th anniversary of All Saints Church recently. Our Flower Workshop workshop put on the display, the theme was Organisations in Croxley Green, and we suggested our theme could be John Dickinson’s? As far as I was concerned, John Dickinson’s is Croxley Green, you know. So – and the flowers were beautiful, weren’t they?
L: All that big flower arrangement.
M: Stunning, yes. The two altar rails we did and the outside. Three of our ladies did that, and then they did the photographs which is where Margaret (Pomfrett) came in, because she approached the community centre and the lady there agreed to let us have some old photographs. I went down to the Rickmansworth Museum to try and get some photos but there was nothing down there at all. And then I went on the website and I saw you have pictures, don’t you? So I couldn’t reproduce them well enough to put on display so she ran me off some and then Margaret very kindly laminated them for us, which was marvellous. The Dickinson’s Guildhouse was marvellous. As Lorraine said, the Horticultural Show was on there every year; Ward’s Nurseries from Sarratt had a big dahlia show. And the Boy Scouts had their jamboree – yes, they had jamborees and they put a concert on every year and I used to love the Scout concert, because it was really funny. They used to dress up as ladies and it was really good evening. Then of course as I got older I went to dances in there on a Saturday night. It was a Saturday night dance venue. The main areas downstairs were for the working men at John Dickinson’s. They had billiards, they had a bar there. They had the science rooms and quiet rooms where they could go and read, because the initial concept was it was educational, so it was for people who hadn’t been able to go to university who wanted books to look at. So that all took place in there. And it was a great tragedy when that
[general discussion about the date when there was a fire at the Guildhouse]
M: ’65 was it? When was Kevin born, Lorraine?
L: 1964.
L: Yes, so he was about 9 months and I was looking after him at my Mum’s, you and Mum had gone out, you and Dad and Mum, and our garden, the back of our garden was - well, it goes now into the car park of the Co-op. So that was how near I was to the fire and all you could hear was the huge explosions.
M: And Roy heard it in Rugby Way.
L: And I had been left to look after this baby. I think it was the first time the baby had been left with me, and I was absolutely terrified, because when I went out into the garden the flames looked as if they were at the bottom of our garden – they weren’t but it wasn’t that far away and it looked as if they were actually coming into our garden, because they were huge, and the air of the beer kegs was – they were exploding and I can remember getting Kevin and running out the front, because I really thought it was all going to come and burn me down while they were all out.
M: And you heard the explosion in Rugby Way? It was the asbestos – it was quite sad.
Int: It was the hall at the back, wasn’t it. It wasn’t the actual thing.
M: The hall at the back, yes. It wasn’t the actual building, no, but it was a terrible loss because we really didn’t have another hall. The only halls you had at that time were the halls at the back of churches and things.
L: Well, we had the hall at the top of the Guildhouse, in the front.
M: Yes. That’s where my wedding breakfast was held.
L: And that’s where we used to have our youth club, you know. We used to have jiving and those sort of things up there.
M: And they had a youth club at the Methodist Church as well. Used to do that there sometimes on a Saturday. But that was a terrible loss that hall, wasn’t it, really?
L: It was, yes.
M: It was a real loss.
Int: When you left school, where did you go to work?
M: Well, I went to John Dickinson’s, surprisingly! (laughs) But not here, over at Apsley Mills, so I had to get two buses. I used to go from here to where Clements was and then pick up the bus through Kings Langley to Apsley and I was there for about three years.
Int: Fifteen you must have been?
M: Well, I was 16 when I started– well I stayed on a bit longer at school. I had two years’ shorthand typing from a lady called Mrs. Oliver that used to live in Durrants Drive, and she used to do it in her front bedroom, so her house was given over to – downstairs you used to sit round the dining room table and then upstairs the bedroom had been converted into – like an office with desks all the way round. And that was how you learned your shorthand typing. After starting work I also went to night school classes at the old Tech in Queens Road, Watford, to take my exams. So I started off in a typing pool at John Dickinson’s at the Apsley Mills Branch, but they were very poor payers unfortunately. Very poor. They were very paternalistic inasmuch as they looked after you, you know. If you needed anything medical they had their own nurse there and doctor. but they didn’t pay much money. But anyway I was there for about three years and then I went up to London from there. So I started working in London because I thought, well I’m not going to get anywhere here, you know, doing this. Apsley Mills itself was huge stretched for I think it was nearly three quarters of a mile. So I was in Stationery Department, which was about one third the way along, and because I was a junior, I would be sent to Card Department, which was the total other end. If you know that area now there’s all shops – there’s Sainsbury’s and Dunelm’s and all that – and that was all part of the Mill, and it would take me twenty minutes to walk down there and twenty minutes to get back. It was huge, you can’t imagine it, really.
Int: And where had you gone to high school? Durrants? From Harvey Road on to Durrants?
M: On to Durrants, yes. I did take the eleven plus but unfortunately the year that I took it, I’m not making excuses, but the year that I took it I had an abscess in my throat which was huge and I had to have an operation to take it out. I lost a lot of schooling, first of all with all these sore throats and having treatment before I had it, and then I had it done, and when we got back I’d missed the exam – there were several people had missed it so they took us to Watford Girls Grammar School and about five of us sat in this classroom. I was absolutely petrified. I just froze, I just couldn’t do it, and so we went up to Durrants. It was a very good school. We had Mr. Jefferies and his wife, Dr. Jefferies I think he was, wasn’t he?
L: I don’t know.
Int: You were happy there?
M: Yes, very happy, yes.
L: I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I hated it.
Int: Not for you?
L: No, I didn’t like it. Well, I had a brother and a sister to follow and I’m afraid, you know, I was always compared and
M: That’s awful, really. Oh, I never knew that.
L: It just wasn’t a nice experience. I couldn’t wait to get out.
Int: And you worked in Croxley too – so where did you work?
L: Yes. I worked at the Sun Printers. Our father had worked at the Croxley Mill, John Dickinson’s, for many years and then he moved to Sun Printers and I went in there right from school, I couldn’t wait to get out of school, so I left at 15 and I went to Sun Printers, and stayed there and gradually moved into the offices and stayed there till I had my children.
M: So the shops in New Road, I was just thinking about – did you know the Miss Garlands, has anybody ever talked about the Miss Garlands?
Int: No, I don’t think they have. We’ve heard a lot about the shops in New Road, but not that particular one.
L: That was a butcher’s, actually, before the Garlands took it to the greengrocery, because that was a butcher’s originally.
M: Oh it wasn’t a butcher’s – I’ve only ever known as the two Miss Garlands - that must have been before my time. It was a funny old shop – they did sell some fresh fish as well.
L: They had everything.
M: Yes, they had everything. It was a really rubbish shop. They had a few apples, and then there’d be a wooden trough with potatoes in it, and a few turnips, but they were very eccentric women. They all wore long dresses and they had their hair done up in a turban. They would tie a turban on top of their hair.
Int: When are we talking about? The forties, fifties?
L: It was fifties, certainly in my childhood.
Int: So you remember them?
L: Oh yes, very, very much. They were very much characters.
Int: Where were they in New Road?
M: As you come down, there’s an opening where there’s a house that’s been changed from a shop – it’s half way down, just thinking about Evans Close, come down the road further and that was Robinson’s the butcher’s, and I went to school with Anne Robinson and her sister, so that was the first of the butcher’s shops and then opposite to that was the Garlands, but the shop was divided in half, had a partition down it, and they had a bicycle shop – Mr. Reid was it?
L: I don’t know, can’t remember.
M: It was divided in half, so the two Miss Garlands were here and there was a bicycle shop next door, and then it was Mr. Toms.
L: No, Mrs. Davis was the wool shop.
M: Yes, a wool shop, yes.
L: And then there was Mr. Toms, electrical, televisions and things.
M: Electrical, yes.
Int: On the same side as the Co-op?
M & L: No. On the other side.
L: If you think of where the diving shop used to be and you’re going up towards the Green on that side, that little group of shops which is the dentists now, that dentist was the electrical shop, Toms the electrical shop, and then Mrs. Davis was the wool shop.
M: The wool shop next door. And then it was the bicycle shop, and then the two Miss Garlands., coming back up the road going towards the Green.
L: And the Elements took it over from the Garlands, and they were a big family from Gonville Avenue, the Elements. And it had big meat hooks on the wall, and that. I could never remember it as a butcher’s but I’ve heard since that it was a butcher’s there.
M: Yes, and some of the walls were tiled, that makes sense, because some of the walls were tiled, weren’t they?
L: Yes. And then next to there there was a grocer’s shop, a small grocer’s shop in my time.
M: And that was in somebody’s front room.
L: They were the [Balls] family, yes, very small in their front room. And then it reverted back to a house again
M: Then you came down a bit further down the road from Mr. Toms there was Mr. Wade’s the sweet shop, which I absolutely loved because we only got a quarter of a pound of sweets a month and you used to wait till it got to the first of the month – the coupons had gone, and then you could have some sweets and I used to be begging my Mum for some sweets – ‘you can’t have them, because we’ve used all the coupons this month’ I think things like aniseed balls, penny chews and liquorice were not on rations.
Int: How things have changed!
L: Made up for it since!
M: And then next door to that was Durrant’s he was the jeweller’s and the clockmaker’s. But going back to Mr. Toms the electrical shop. When I was a small child, just – I think we had it by the time Lorraine came along – but we only had gas mantles, we weren’t on electricity. So we had gas mantles, and I used to have to go and get these mantles, and you had to be very careful, you only knocked the box and it shattered. So consequently not having any electricity, we couldn’t have a radio. We did have a radio, but it was accumulator driven. So I used to have to take these glass accumulators, had a carrying handle, my brother and I used to take them over and leave them with Mr. Toms and he would charge them up and then we would bring them back, but of course they were filled with acid, so loads of times I used to drop this acid on my white socks, and it just burnt a hole through the socks. My Mum used to tell me off, because she used to have to sew these holes up in the socks.
Int: Burn your feet!
M: You can’t really believe that there were still houses in New Road that didn’t have any electricity.
L: Well, that was in my time. I can remember electricity coming in.
M: You can remember it coming in?
L: And then we only had it downstairs first of all.
M Oh dear! Going further down the road from there, again after the jeweller’s, there’s a few more houses and then you came to Dimmock’s, which was quite a large grocer’s store, and Mr. and Mrs. Dimmock ran that for years in competition to the Co-op. And then going down a bit further the end house (before the new area with two shops before Gadsden the butchers) was Mrs Tom and her son, she had a sweet shop in her tiny front room.
L: and with an earth floor.
M: You used to have to step down into the shop and her son used to run it, and how did they make a business out of this!?
L: Oh, we had lots of sweet shops. Five or six.
M: Yes, we did, yes. And on the opposite side to that you had the dairies, there was Kinch\s dairy there and they used to bring the cows down New Road and they were milked in there as well, and then just after Mrs. Toms there was the butcher’s again, that was Gadsden’s, sadly gone quite recently.
L: I think there was one shop in between those two. But I can’t remember. Mrs. Toms was on the end and then there was this other shop and then there was Gadsden’s the butcher’s.
M: Yes. And then two doors down from that was Mr. Mead, he was the fishmonger.
L: Oh yes. Do you know about him?
M: Do you know Mr. Mead?
Int: Well, we’ve heard about the fish shop, yes.
M: Yes. And he used to put his table up at the end of his front garden and he had a big metal box like that which was covered with a cloth and then he had white fish, fresh fish, and he used to serve that out of there.
L: It used to smell the whole road, it was dreadful!
M: And health and safety, you know! (laughter)
L: He was there until – yes, the health and safety that came in and I think he had to close then because he had it all out in the open.
Int: Where did he get his fish from, do you know?
M: I don’t know. I don’t know where he would have – possibly a van went round delivering fish.
L: His daughter’s still around Croxley, New Road.
Int: Yes, it’s a Croxley name, isn’t it? (M & L: Yes). One of the many.
L: Yes. Or it’s his granddaughter actually, Karen, I was at school with her.
Int: OK, yes. And what do you remember of all the events that took place such as the Coronation and maybe the Revels, and you know the sort of national and local
M: Well, my earliest memory is of VE Day and my brother, my Mum dressed us up, my brother was Old King Cole, and we – there’s a marvellous picture – I don’t know if it’s in the archives up at All Saints, but he looked about 6 feet tall, the Vicar at the time – and he was wearing a little square hat like this on his head, with his long white gown, and my brother’s out in front. She put some cotton wool round a dressing gown, an old red dressing gown, made him a crown and I was – I was a nurse, I think. I think I was dressed up as a nurse. But there’s a picture of that and they paraded the Green all the way up to the top that day.
M: Well, my earliest memory is of VE Day and my brother, my Mum dressed us up, my brother was Old King Cole, and we – there’s a marvellous picture – I don’t know if it’s in the archives up at All Saints, but he looked about 6 feet tall, the Vicar at the time – and he was wearing a little square hat like this on his head, with his long white gown, and my brother’s out in front. She put some cotton wool round a dressing gown, an old red dressing gown, made him a crown and I was – I was a nurse, I think. I think I was dressed up as a nurse. But there’s a picture of that and they paraded the Green all the way up to the top that day.
VE Parade. Among the children in fancy dress in the foreground are John Adair, John Seabrook, Janet Quick and Richard Paddick. The vicar is Reverend Percy Langdon
Int: That was before your father came home as well?
M: Yes, my Dad was late coming out. He was early going in, he went in right at the beginning and he didn’t come out till first of January in 1946. And Lorraine was born a year later. Yes. He did do a long service and my Mum didn’t see him all those years. In fact when he came home, on the day he came home, he came in with a – I’d only ever grown up round women. I had my grandmother, you know, when we were living down in Wales. Then we came back and my aunt lived with my Mum, her unmarried sister lived with us, so there were two ladies there, and then when my Dad came in I just – my brother as well – we just burst into tears. We didn’t know who this man was, never seen him, being about two or three when he went.
Int: Hard for him as well.
M: Yes.
Int: Then he got a job at the Mill straightaway did he?
M: No, he went back to – when did Dad? – no, I think he started back at the Sun, after the war he went back to the Sun. He was in the Sun when you were born.
L: Was he?
M: Yes. Yes. I think he finished with the Mill and went in the army and then when he came back he started at the Sun Printers.
Int: But there was plenty of work, I suppose.
M: Yes, well, he did work in the factory, you know more about this than me, Lorraine, what he did.
L: What, with the Sun?
M: Yes.
L: Yes. He was in the Despatch Department and – no, no, beg your pardon, he wasn’t, that was his later years. In those early years he was in the canteen, he was cooking, that was his trade and in the army he was a cook.
M: And they asked him to take over the Night Canteen, didn’t they?
L: Yes. The Night Canteen, he did the work there.
M: He used to run that.
L: He ran that for many, many years. And then – I don’t know why, I think it stopped, I think it closed down, the Night Canteen, and Dad then moved into the Despatch, into the warehouse part.
M: He used to walk home and he used to walk across Croxley Moor and he used to take a great big handkerchief or a bag with him and he’d pick mushrooms on his way home, huge, huge big black mushrooms he used to bring home and then we used to cook them for breakfast. But when he was in Italy during the war, when they eventually came up to Italy, he had a lot of Italian prisoners of war working in the kitchens doing the preparation of things, and they taught him how to make spaghetti. So when he came home he used to make spaghetti and he used to put sheets of paper on the clotheshorse and spread the spaghetti all out to dry on the clotheshorse and then make the sauce. So we were eating spaghetti from 1946, long before it came over here.
(general talking all together about being first to eat spaghetti).
L: Friends didn’t know really what it was, not to make your own pasta.
M: No, make your own pasta.
L: And Bolognese sauce, they’d never – I can remember that at school, you know, friends saying ‘what do you mean?’ Not knowing what Bolognese was.
M: He was a very good cook and we always had lovely food, you know, we always ate very well really at home.
Int: So you decided to stay in Croxley as an adult, did you?
M: Well, no – when I got married at 21, I moved from here to Garston and we had a flat there. We eventually, three years later, bought a maisonette. This is my late husband (Roy and I have been married 25 years now) but it was my late husband., Michael Spencer. And we bought a maisonette and my son was born in Watford, King Street Maternity Home, and then when he was about eighteen months old we moved out to Bletchley because a lot of people had to move out of Croxley, you know, in those days, I’m talking about 1962, 61, very expensive to buy round here, so we moved away to buy a house.
L: There was a lot of building going on all around then.
M: Yes. All the new housing sites. There was Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable, Aylesbury. In Bletchley down my road were girls from Harrow, Wembley, Croxley Green, Watford, Luton. Bletchley was an up and coming new Town. So we stayed there – my youngest son was born there, at the Royal Bucks Hospital in Aylesbury, and then when he was three years old, that’s when we moved back to Croxley, and I’ve been here 52 years now. I came back in 1971, and – we’ve been here ever since, yes. And Lorraine got married. I have only spent 12 years of my life outside Croxley.
L: I’ve always lived here. I lived in New Road until I got married and then I lived in Girton Way, moved to Girton Way when I got married and that’s been me! I haven’t lived anywhere else
M: And Roy , you got married and – you moved to Rugby Way, didn’t you?
R: That was the first house, yes. And we stayed there till Paul was 12, and then to Windmill Drive and then he went to Ricky School obviously. And going back to the beginning, both my parents were orphaned. My Dad was orphaned at eight and my Mum was orphaned at ten. So I didn’t have any grandparents as such in my lifetime. So in mine and my brother’s life there were only my parents. Dad came from Chester and both his parents died up there. TB. And then my Mum lived in Wharf Lane in Rickmansworth. Her Dad worked at the gas works there and when he died the house was the firm’s, tied to the firm. This was 1907 so my grandmother moved to Croxley with her 5 children. The 1911 census shows them living at 285 New Road and that’s where my Mum, Gladys Howell was born in 1904 , she went to Yorke Road School and Old Boys.
At 14 she join John Dickinsons paper mill in Croxley until she got married to my father Richard Toppin at All Saints Church, in 1927.
L: Where was that, Roy, just out of interest, where was that in New Road that your mother lived?
R: 285. Which is opposite the shop.
M: And I was born at 258.
R: You had a florist.
M &L: Yes. Newtons the florist.
M. Yes I was in school with Joyce Newton, her father ran the florist shop.
M: My parents met – my Dad was working at Moor Park Golf Club, you know, in the kitchens there, and he used to come down into Rickmansworth on his day off on Saturday and Mum was lodging there with a lady, you know, a family friend, and they met at what they called Mrs. Wilbee’s Tanner Hop, so that was in the Ebury Hall and it cost sixpence on a Saturday night to go there dancing, Mrs. Wilbee’s Tanner Hop, I think that’s really funny! (laughter). And that’s where they met! Oh dear
M: Richard, my second boy, went to Yorke Road School for a short time. I think he was only there maybe a year. Only a year and then
L: Went to the new school, Yorke Mead.
M: They went to the new school, Yorke Mead School up in the end of Fuller Way. But Yorke Road School, another memory I have, is Miss Cooper, the headmistress, very, very strict lady, she lived in a house attached to the school,. Old Boys school was where all the lovely new flats are now. The Headmistress’ house on the corner had a large garden, sometimes we were allowed to go in there and see the flowers in the garden. She was a very austere old lady. We were all terrified of her.
R. Did Miss Cooper go to the new Yorke Mead school.
M: No, I think she must have retired – she was an old lady when I was there.
L: She was – I saw one of the teachers, Miss Benson, at Miss Bridge’s funeral.
M: Did you?
L: She actually came
M: Yes, Miss Cooper must have been of retirement age, so when they went to Yorke Mead then Miss Bridge took over as headmistress. By this age she’d gone through all of us children and was now at the headmistress.
R. Maureen’s two sons, Kevin and Richard, met my two sons Paul and Stephen, at school: the younger two sat next to each other at the new Yorke Mead School.
M: Yes. They were in the Chess Club together and we would be going round to somewhere like Bushey or Stanmore, and Stephen would be with Roy and I would be taking Richard, and we’d meet up at these things.
Int: That sounds like a big change for you. You were at school in Croxley and your life was really centred in Croxley, (M: Yes) and by the time you had children you were taking your children all over the place to do things.
M: Yes. Yes, that’s right, that’s it.
L: I have always been involved with the activities in the area, having never moved away. I ran a playgroup for some years and I started one of the first mother and toddler groups in Croxley.
Int: Oh did you?
L: And the first one was in the Methodist Church and I used to go with my son and take Kevin or Richard. Then one day I was asked if I would start another one. It was a new thing coming in then, because there hadn’t been mother and toddler clubs.
Int: When was that?
L: That would have been about 71, 72.
Int: There was nothing in the sixties?
(general no)
L: There was nothing
M: No, there was nothing
L: There were playgroups
M: Sunday school.
L: But there weren’t mother and toddler groups, so you took your children and left them, but you couldn’t be there with them and what we were realising at that time was that it was the mums that wanted something and so I started the first one at the Croxley Community Centre. And then went on from there. I did lots with the Playgroup Movement, and with the regional organisers and so forth. So I was always very involved with that and because of that I was quite involved with the Revels every year. The Revels nearly died out
M: It did.
L: and that was again late 60s.
Int: So it was going in the fifties then?
L: It had been going. When we were kids the Revels was very much there, and when we were in the Girls Brigade we would do the Maypole dancing and, you know, that was our thing. But then it gradually started to dwindle off until one year it was so bad that they had one queen – you know, the May Queen – who was taken round in somebody’s car and that was about it.
Then there was a lady, I don’t know if you’ve come across the name of Kay Moss? She came to the rescue and there were a few, Janet Luck and some of the others came in on that, and said ‘you know, we have to revive it’, and that would have been about – that could have been about 74 by that time, yes, because my second son was just born. And I can remember saying to the mothers at toddler group, you know ‘how about it? Shall we put something in?’ And they wouldn’t – all they would agree to that first year was dressing the children up and pushing the children in the pushchairs, but the mums weren’t going to dress up. And that was our first year. And then once they got there, they realised, you know, they’d walked through the streets in ordinary clothes and it – it wasn’t the same, they were saying, ‘well, next year shall we wear a hat, or something?’ And so the following year they wore a hat and a sash and we did Alice In Wonderland, so they had a sash with red and white roses and they did a hat, and then after that it just got bigger and bigger, you know, it got to that stage of ‘well, we’ve got to have a proper float next year’ and then we got a float with all the mums walking behind, and it got bigger and bigger and as the Revels did, it really took off big style. And then my son, my younger son, was chosen to be the Pageboy, which felt a real privilege at the time, because I’d been there as a child and now my child was going.
M: And I was doing the same over in Bletchley. My friend and I we wanted to join this mothers’ club because we all come from out of the area and it was absolutely full, so there were three girls on my estate and I said ‘why don’t we start our own one?’ So we approached the authorities, the health clinic, and said if we set up a mothers group here would you let us have the hall, because we couldn’t – we didn’t have any funding, so they agreed, provided that once a month we gave a talk that was related to health. So we started the 1968 Bletchley’s Mothers’ Club and that’s still going now, can you believe it, all these years later. It’s still going and it welcomes people that have moved into the area and things. Yes. So it’s funny because we were miles apart but we were doing the same things. And again we had a carnival with big floats and made all the costumes and all the rest of it.
Int: But going back to Croxley, what do you think has really kept you in the area here – what’s the favourite thing about Croxley?
L: Because I think you’ve got a good community, not that I’m as much part of that community now, because there’s a lot of new people in and once you work, and I’ve been involved with other things. The community - but you’ve also got the surrounding areas which the countryside is the thing, you know, we’ve loved walking, so wherever you go from Croxley Green you’ve got a nice walk. Wherever you go – you’ve got the rivers, you’ve got the canals, you’ve got fields, you’ve got the woodlands – you’ve just got a bit of everything here. You’ve got Cassiobury Park on your doorstep. So that really I think has been one of the main things, the locality. You’re nice and near to London and you’ve got Watford, which used to be a very good shopping centre – not so good now, but it used to be a very nice shopping centre, and, yes, I think, you know there’s plenty of good reasons. I worked locally as well. My husband worked at the Sun Printers as well.
Int: And what’s been the biggest change, do you think, in all the time that you’ve been here?
M: I think the expansion – I’m quite disturbed by all this infilling now. Here they’ve just fought off a challenge to remove a house, put in a road and build five town houses in the back garden. Luckily everybody in the road saw sense and nobody agreed to it, but you know we are getting overcrowded and though there’s a reason for people – you can understand everybody wants to come to a nice area, they all need a home, and we have very good schools - but I think Croxley must be just about reaching its limits, really. You know, we’ve got the big new development going on on the top of the Green at Killingdown Farm, and I don’t know how much more – because there aren’t the facilities. There aren’t any more doctors, there aren’t any more shops, there isn’t any more parking space as we know now.
Int: Do you think anything’s improved, though, in the time that you’ve been here?
M: Well – when I was younger people used to come and visit, we had a lot of friends – most of my friends live away, Lorraine has many more local friends than I have. But my friends are quite far flung. My friends when staying would say ‘Don’t you live in a beautiful place?’ And I used to go ‘What? Croxley Green”. They said ‘oh yes, it’s fabulous here.’ And because they’d be going up the lane to Sarratt, they’d be going to Chipperfield, they’d pop down into Rickmansworth, we’ve got this lovely Green with two pubs on it. And it was what they thought was quintessentially a country village or something could look like. But I don’t feel we’re some much of a village any more.
L: Definitely lost the village feel.
M: Oh yes. When I was a child that’s what I did feel - we lived in a village. It wasn’t like Sarratt or Chipperfield, but we definitely had that village feel about it. And what I love now, even – well, not quite now – say four years back or something, I’d be going down the road and I’d think ‘oh look, there’s John so-and-so’s Mum and Dad there’ and I used to know all the people in Barton Way because they were all parents of school friends and things like that. So, yes
L: That’s gone, hasn’t it? That’s definitely gone.
M: Yes.
Int: Well, a lot of people drive now don’t they as well?
L: That’s right.
Int: Rather than walking. What do you think your mother would think if she could see Croxley now? What would she think had changed so massively?
M: Well, her life changed dramatically when she moved to Rickmansworth, my parents moved into a flat.
Int: OK.
M: And they were right on the edge of the Aquadrome, so they had a different life, it wasn’t so insular as it was in Croxley Green. She’d got Rickmansworth to go shopping in and then they built the Tesco’s, which was right on their doorstep. What she had in Croxley which was like - my aunt lived opposite and they used to go round to the Women’s Guild on the Monday night and the pair of them used to run a bingo one evening, and the main prize would be a joint of meat! For the weekend. Which was quite, you know, welcomed. So her life changed quite a bit, but she loved her new home too.
L: So if Mum was here now, I think if she still lived in New Road, I think her life wouldn’t change that much. (M: No.) Because she’d still go to the Co-op for shopping and she would still meet her friends.
Int: So some things haven’t changed
L: Because she never drove neither did my father, so I think it’s cars that have altered things dramatically. It’s stopped us talking in shops –
M: Shops, yes.
L: And I think one of the times that I really noticed that was when the plastic free shop in New Road opened – and all of a sudden you were going in to the shop and talking to the shopkeeper.
Int: The Green Store.
L: Yes, the Green Store, and people were talking while they were putting their things into their – spooning it into a bag. And that really brought it home to me, the first few times I went in there. I thought this was exactly how it used to be. And what a lovely feeling it was when you came out of the shop and thought ‘oh yes, I had a good natter there’ whereas normally driving to the Co-op, you know, out in the car park, into the thing, grab your bits, pay at the cash till, you don’t even speak to the cashier half the time, and you’re off And then I think something now has changed again.
Int: It’s quite nice to think people want to stay rather than move on.
L& M: Yes. L: And I think that is a sign. I think that’s a sign that people, that young people are staying. R: The younger generation. (general murmuring ‘yes’ etc.)
L: The schools are very good.
M: I mean the houses – it shows that the houses are hardly up for sale and they’ve gone. And, you know, we keep getting these letters saying ‘do you want to move because’ you know ‘we’ve got several people waiting to buy a house in your road’ – this type of thing. It is good, it has improved things, but I look back with nostalgia, with great – it’s – I love that part of my life here, growing up, and I mean there were frustrations, no doubt, but when I look back on it, I consider myself fortunate to have been in Croxley Green and grown up here.
Int: Well, that’s a lovely note on which to end. Looking back nostalgically.
M: Well deserved cup of tea!
M: Yes, my Dad was late coming out. He was early going in, he went in right at the beginning and he didn’t come out till first of January in 1946. And Lorraine was born a year later. Yes. He did do a long service and my Mum didn’t see him all those years. In fact when he came home, on the day he came home, he came in with a – I’d only ever grown up round women. I had my grandmother, you know, when we were living down in Wales. Then we came back and my aunt lived with my Mum, her unmarried sister lived with us, so there were two ladies there, and then when my Dad came in I just – my brother as well – we just burst into tears. We didn’t know who this man was, never seen him, being about two or three when he went.
Int: Hard for him as well.
M: Yes.
Int: Then he got a job at the Mill straightaway did he?
M: No, he went back to – when did Dad? – no, I think he started back at the Sun, after the war he went back to the Sun. He was in the Sun when you were born.
L: Was he?
M: Yes. Yes. I think he finished with the Mill and went in the army and then when he came back he started at the Sun Printers.
Int: But there was plenty of work, I suppose.
M: Yes, well, he did work in the factory, you know more about this than me, Lorraine, what he did.
L: What, with the Sun?
M: Yes.
L: Yes. He was in the Despatch Department and – no, no, beg your pardon, he wasn’t, that was his later years. In those early years he was in the canteen, he was cooking, that was his trade and in the army he was a cook.
M: And they asked him to take over the Night Canteen, didn’t they?
L: Yes. The Night Canteen, he did the work there.
M: He used to run that.
L: He ran that for many, many years. And then – I don’t know why, I think it stopped, I think it closed down, the Night Canteen, and Dad then moved into the Despatch, into the warehouse part.
M: He used to walk home and he used to walk across Croxley Moor and he used to take a great big handkerchief or a bag with him and he’d pick mushrooms on his way home, huge, huge big black mushrooms he used to bring home and then we used to cook them for breakfast. But when he was in Italy during the war, when they eventually came up to Italy, he had a lot of Italian prisoners of war working in the kitchens doing the preparation of things, and they taught him how to make spaghetti. So when he came home he used to make spaghetti and he used to put sheets of paper on the clotheshorse and spread the spaghetti all out to dry on the clotheshorse and then make the sauce. So we were eating spaghetti from 1946, long before it came over here.
(general talking all together about being first to eat spaghetti).
L: Friends didn’t know really what it was, not to make your own pasta.
M: No, make your own pasta.
L: And Bolognese sauce, they’d never – I can remember that at school, you know, friends saying ‘what do you mean?’ Not knowing what Bolognese was.
M: He was a very good cook and we always had lovely food, you know, we always ate very well really at home.
Int: So you decided to stay in Croxley as an adult, did you?
M: Well, no – when I got married at 21, I moved from here to Garston and we had a flat there. We eventually, three years later, bought a maisonette. This is my late husband (Roy and I have been married 25 years now) but it was my late husband., Michael Spencer. And we bought a maisonette and my son was born in Watford, King Street Maternity Home, and then when he was about eighteen months old we moved out to Bletchley because a lot of people had to move out of Croxley, you know, in those days, I’m talking about 1962, 61, very expensive to buy round here, so we moved away to buy a house.
L: There was a lot of building going on all around then.
M: Yes. All the new housing sites. There was Leighton Buzzard, Dunstable, Aylesbury. In Bletchley down my road were girls from Harrow, Wembley, Croxley Green, Watford, Luton. Bletchley was an up and coming new Town. So we stayed there – my youngest son was born there, at the Royal Bucks Hospital in Aylesbury, and then when he was three years old, that’s when we moved back to Croxley, and I’ve been here 52 years now. I came back in 1971, and – we’ve been here ever since, yes. And Lorraine got married. I have only spent 12 years of my life outside Croxley.
L: I’ve always lived here. I lived in New Road until I got married and then I lived in Girton Way, moved to Girton Way when I got married and that’s been me! I haven’t lived anywhere else
M: And Roy , you got married and – you moved to Rugby Way, didn’t you?
R: That was the first house, yes. And we stayed there till Paul was 12, and then to Windmill Drive and then he went to Ricky School obviously. And going back to the beginning, both my parents were orphaned. My Dad was orphaned at eight and my Mum was orphaned at ten. So I didn’t have any grandparents as such in my lifetime. So in mine and my brother’s life there were only my parents. Dad came from Chester and both his parents died up there. TB. And then my Mum lived in Wharf Lane in Rickmansworth. Her Dad worked at the gas works there and when he died the house was the firm’s, tied to the firm. This was 1907 so my grandmother moved to Croxley with her 5 children. The 1911 census shows them living at 285 New Road and that’s where my Mum, Gladys Howell was born in 1904 , she went to Yorke Road School and Old Boys.
At 14 she join John Dickinsons paper mill in Croxley until she got married to my father Richard Toppin at All Saints Church, in 1927.
L: Where was that, Roy, just out of interest, where was that in New Road that your mother lived?
R: 285. Which is opposite the shop.
M: And I was born at 258.
R: You had a florist.
M &L: Yes. Newtons the florist.
M. Yes I was in school with Joyce Newton, her father ran the florist shop.
M: My parents met – my Dad was working at Moor Park Golf Club, you know, in the kitchens there, and he used to come down into Rickmansworth on his day off on Saturday and Mum was lodging there with a lady, you know, a family friend, and they met at what they called Mrs. Wilbee’s Tanner Hop, so that was in the Ebury Hall and it cost sixpence on a Saturday night to go there dancing, Mrs. Wilbee’s Tanner Hop, I think that’s really funny! (laughter). And that’s where they met! Oh dear
M: Richard, my second boy, went to Yorke Road School for a short time. I think he was only there maybe a year. Only a year and then
L: Went to the new school, Yorke Mead.
M: They went to the new school, Yorke Mead School up in the end of Fuller Way. But Yorke Road School, another memory I have, is Miss Cooper, the headmistress, very, very strict lady, she lived in a house attached to the school,. Old Boys school was where all the lovely new flats are now. The Headmistress’ house on the corner had a large garden, sometimes we were allowed to go in there and see the flowers in the garden. She was a very austere old lady. We were all terrified of her.
R. Did Miss Cooper go to the new Yorke Mead school.
M: No, I think she must have retired – she was an old lady when I was there.
L: She was – I saw one of the teachers, Miss Benson, at Miss Bridge’s funeral.
M: Did you?
L: She actually came
M: Yes, Miss Cooper must have been of retirement age, so when they went to Yorke Mead then Miss Bridge took over as headmistress. By this age she’d gone through all of us children and was now at the headmistress.
R. Maureen’s two sons, Kevin and Richard, met my two sons Paul and Stephen, at school: the younger two sat next to each other at the new Yorke Mead School.
M: Yes. They were in the Chess Club together and we would be going round to somewhere like Bushey or Stanmore, and Stephen would be with Roy and I would be taking Richard, and we’d meet up at these things.
Int: That sounds like a big change for you. You were at school in Croxley and your life was really centred in Croxley, (M: Yes) and by the time you had children you were taking your children all over the place to do things.
M: Yes. Yes, that’s right, that’s it.
L: I have always been involved with the activities in the area, having never moved away. I ran a playgroup for some years and I started one of the first mother and toddler groups in Croxley.
Int: Oh did you?
L: And the first one was in the Methodist Church and I used to go with my son and take Kevin or Richard. Then one day I was asked if I would start another one. It was a new thing coming in then, because there hadn’t been mother and toddler clubs.
Int: When was that?
L: That would have been about 71, 72.
Int: There was nothing in the sixties?
(general no)
L: There was nothing
M: No, there was nothing
L: There were playgroups
M: Sunday school.
L: But there weren’t mother and toddler groups, so you took your children and left them, but you couldn’t be there with them and what we were realising at that time was that it was the mums that wanted something and so I started the first one at the Croxley Community Centre. And then went on from there. I did lots with the Playgroup Movement, and with the regional organisers and so forth. So I was always very involved with that and because of that I was quite involved with the Revels every year. The Revels nearly died out
M: It did.
L: and that was again late 60s.
Int: So it was going in the fifties then?
L: It had been going. When we were kids the Revels was very much there, and when we were in the Girls Brigade we would do the Maypole dancing and, you know, that was our thing. But then it gradually started to dwindle off until one year it was so bad that they had one queen – you know, the May Queen – who was taken round in somebody’s car and that was about it.
Then there was a lady, I don’t know if you’ve come across the name of Kay Moss? She came to the rescue and there were a few, Janet Luck and some of the others came in on that, and said ‘you know, we have to revive it’, and that would have been about – that could have been about 74 by that time, yes, because my second son was just born. And I can remember saying to the mothers at toddler group, you know ‘how about it? Shall we put something in?’ And they wouldn’t – all they would agree to that first year was dressing the children up and pushing the children in the pushchairs, but the mums weren’t going to dress up. And that was our first year. And then once they got there, they realised, you know, they’d walked through the streets in ordinary clothes and it – it wasn’t the same, they were saying, ‘well, next year shall we wear a hat, or something?’ And so the following year they wore a hat and a sash and we did Alice In Wonderland, so they had a sash with red and white roses and they did a hat, and then after that it just got bigger and bigger, you know, it got to that stage of ‘well, we’ve got to have a proper float next year’ and then we got a float with all the mums walking behind, and it got bigger and bigger and as the Revels did, it really took off big style. And then my son, my younger son, was chosen to be the Pageboy, which felt a real privilege at the time, because I’d been there as a child and now my child was going.
M: And I was doing the same over in Bletchley. My friend and I we wanted to join this mothers’ club because we all come from out of the area and it was absolutely full, so there were three girls on my estate and I said ‘why don’t we start our own one?’ So we approached the authorities, the health clinic, and said if we set up a mothers group here would you let us have the hall, because we couldn’t – we didn’t have any funding, so they agreed, provided that once a month we gave a talk that was related to health. So we started the 1968 Bletchley’s Mothers’ Club and that’s still going now, can you believe it, all these years later. It’s still going and it welcomes people that have moved into the area and things. Yes. So it’s funny because we were miles apart but we were doing the same things. And again we had a carnival with big floats and made all the costumes and all the rest of it.
Int: But going back to Croxley, what do you think has really kept you in the area here – what’s the favourite thing about Croxley?
L: Because I think you’ve got a good community, not that I’m as much part of that community now, because there’s a lot of new people in and once you work, and I’ve been involved with other things. The community - but you’ve also got the surrounding areas which the countryside is the thing, you know, we’ve loved walking, so wherever you go from Croxley Green you’ve got a nice walk. Wherever you go – you’ve got the rivers, you’ve got the canals, you’ve got fields, you’ve got the woodlands – you’ve just got a bit of everything here. You’ve got Cassiobury Park on your doorstep. So that really I think has been one of the main things, the locality. You’re nice and near to London and you’ve got Watford, which used to be a very good shopping centre – not so good now, but it used to be a very nice shopping centre, and, yes, I think, you know there’s plenty of good reasons. I worked locally as well. My husband worked at the Sun Printers as well.
Int: And what’s been the biggest change, do you think, in all the time that you’ve been here?
M: I think the expansion – I’m quite disturbed by all this infilling now. Here they’ve just fought off a challenge to remove a house, put in a road and build five town houses in the back garden. Luckily everybody in the road saw sense and nobody agreed to it, but you know we are getting overcrowded and though there’s a reason for people – you can understand everybody wants to come to a nice area, they all need a home, and we have very good schools - but I think Croxley must be just about reaching its limits, really. You know, we’ve got the big new development going on on the top of the Green at Killingdown Farm, and I don’t know how much more – because there aren’t the facilities. There aren’t any more doctors, there aren’t any more shops, there isn’t any more parking space as we know now.
Int: Do you think anything’s improved, though, in the time that you’ve been here?
M: Well – when I was younger people used to come and visit, we had a lot of friends – most of my friends live away, Lorraine has many more local friends than I have. But my friends are quite far flung. My friends when staying would say ‘Don’t you live in a beautiful place?’ And I used to go ‘What? Croxley Green”. They said ‘oh yes, it’s fabulous here.’ And because they’d be going up the lane to Sarratt, they’d be going to Chipperfield, they’d pop down into Rickmansworth, we’ve got this lovely Green with two pubs on it. And it was what they thought was quintessentially a country village or something could look like. But I don’t feel we’re some much of a village any more.
L: Definitely lost the village feel.
M: Oh yes. When I was a child that’s what I did feel - we lived in a village. It wasn’t like Sarratt or Chipperfield, but we definitely had that village feel about it. And what I love now, even – well, not quite now – say four years back or something, I’d be going down the road and I’d think ‘oh look, there’s John so-and-so’s Mum and Dad there’ and I used to know all the people in Barton Way because they were all parents of school friends and things like that. So, yes
L: That’s gone, hasn’t it? That’s definitely gone.
M: Yes.
Int: Well, a lot of people drive now don’t they as well?
L: That’s right.
Int: Rather than walking. What do you think your mother would think if she could see Croxley now? What would she think had changed so massively?
M: Well, her life changed dramatically when she moved to Rickmansworth, my parents moved into a flat.
Int: OK.
M: And they were right on the edge of the Aquadrome, so they had a different life, it wasn’t so insular as it was in Croxley Green. She’d got Rickmansworth to go shopping in and then they built the Tesco’s, which was right on their doorstep. What she had in Croxley which was like - my aunt lived opposite and they used to go round to the Women’s Guild on the Monday night and the pair of them used to run a bingo one evening, and the main prize would be a joint of meat! For the weekend. Which was quite, you know, welcomed. So her life changed quite a bit, but she loved her new home too.
L: So if Mum was here now, I think if she still lived in New Road, I think her life wouldn’t change that much. (M: No.) Because she’d still go to the Co-op for shopping and she would still meet her friends.
Int: So some things haven’t changed
L: Because she never drove neither did my father, so I think it’s cars that have altered things dramatically. It’s stopped us talking in shops –
M: Shops, yes.
L: And I think one of the times that I really noticed that was when the plastic free shop in New Road opened – and all of a sudden you were going in to the shop and talking to the shopkeeper.
Int: The Green Store.
L: Yes, the Green Store, and people were talking while they were putting their things into their – spooning it into a bag. And that really brought it home to me, the first few times I went in there. I thought this was exactly how it used to be. And what a lovely feeling it was when you came out of the shop and thought ‘oh yes, I had a good natter there’ whereas normally driving to the Co-op, you know, out in the car park, into the thing, grab your bits, pay at the cash till, you don’t even speak to the cashier half the time, and you’re off And then I think something now has changed again.
Int: It’s quite nice to think people want to stay rather than move on.
L& M: Yes. L: And I think that is a sign. I think that’s a sign that people, that young people are staying. R: The younger generation. (general murmuring ‘yes’ etc.)
L: The schools are very good.
M: I mean the houses – it shows that the houses are hardly up for sale and they’ve gone. And, you know, we keep getting these letters saying ‘do you want to move because’ you know ‘we’ve got several people waiting to buy a house in your road’ – this type of thing. It is good, it has improved things, but I look back with nostalgia, with great – it’s – I love that part of my life here, growing up, and I mean there were frustrations, no doubt, but when I look back on it, I consider myself fortunate to have been in Croxley Green and grown up here.
Int: Well, that’s a lovely note on which to end. Looking back nostalgically.
M: Well deserved cup of tea!
