Four Wonderful Years

A Memory of South Ockendon.

My family moved to South Ockendon in 1953, into a new house at 164 Daiglen Drive, on the housing estate just outside the village.
We shopped in the village and my father took the train from there every day to his work in London.
I went to Palmers School for Girls in Grays, taking the bus every day, but the rest of my life was spent with friends who lived nearby, either on the estate or, like Anita and Elizabeth, who lived in the village. Anita in a house that her parents had owned for quite some time I believe and Elizabeth in one of the "prefab" homes. Elizabeth's father did ear piercing, and did mine for me.
I remember Sunday afternoons in the garden of one of the two pubs (not the Royal Oak, the other one whose name I cannot now recall) drinking lemonade with my parents enjoyed a beer before dinner.
My favourite place to "play" was in the abandoned sections of the sandpit that lay just across the road from our house. Full of sand hills covered in trees and bushes and of pools of water that ranged from two or three feet deep to being so deep that you could not see the bottom. We paddled and swam, caught tadpoles, watched myriads of birds, had picnics and roasted potatoes in our fires. I had always loved the outdoors, ranging Primrose Hill in northwest London before moving to Ockendon, but I think it was in and around the village that I really learned to appreciate "living in the country".
We left for Canada in 1957, but I went back in 1999 and so have some photos of our house and those sandhills.
Couldn't find anyone I knew though . . . . .