Borehamwood, The Village

A Memory of Borehamwood.

I was born at 4 Glenhaven Avenue in November of 1945 to Matthew Murray and Elizabeth (Beth) Murray, My sister Jill having been born in Radlet in 1944. I remember that the walls were brown in the house so I gave it the name of the 'dirty house'.

After the war, council houses were being built to take care of displaced Londoners. My folks got one of the council houses, 23 Caishowe Road. We must have moved to this house about 1947. My sister Lindsey was born in this new home in 1950.

We all went to Cowley Hill Primary school which was on Winstre Road. We took a short cut on a foot path from Caishowe Road to the back side of the school.

Borehamwood was a wonderful quiet place to grow up. We didn't realize that we lived so close to London. Borehamwood was part of the green belt, so we felt like we lived in the middle of farm country. Even the movie studios had sheep on their lots. We would go gather the wool off of the fences. One time we even learned to card and spin it at school.

We would spend hours walking the lanes, scrumping, playing on the Iron Bridge and watching the steam trains go under the bridge and playing in the smoke from the trains.

Traffic was almost non existent on our street. Very few people owned cars, so we played for hours in the road. Roller skating, hide and seek, kick the can, hop scotch, riding bikes.

After school, my friend Angela Brown and I would walk over to the fish and chip shop on Hertford road for a bag of chips with crackling and a pickled onion.

One of my favorite places to walk to was The Home of Rest for horses.

Sitting outside the Mops and Brooms on a summer evening with a bag of crisps and an orange drink was a big treat for my sisters and I. We would play in the garden while my folks had a drink in the pub and visited with their friends.

I now live in Idaho in the USA in a small town away from big cities, and think fondly of those long summer evenings when we would have to go to bed when it was still light, the windows open, the smell of the soft moist air and the sound of the train going through the town could be heard in the distance.

Borehamwood was a great place to grow up. In the 1940s and 1950s it was safe to walk the streets day or night. We enjoyed our neighbours and we all watched out for one another.