First Love Thornton Heath 1963 69

A Memory of Thornton Heath.

My memories of Thornton Heath are not as a local resident, but as the girlfriend of someone who lived in the area and with whom I went out for 6 years from the age of 15 to 21, eventually becoming engaged when I was 19. His name was Martin Clarke (Mart), and he lived with his parents and brother Stuart in the top flat of the block next to Woolworths, facing the Clock Tower. As teenagers without a great deal of money, most of our time was spent wandering round the shopping centre at Croydon on a Saturday. We would go and have a tea in the Fairfield Halls with our friends or hang around shops looking at things we couldn't afford to buy. As we grew older, we both got Saturday jobs with Lambeth Libraries and had more money to go out. We would go and see films at the big Cinema near Thornton Heath Ponds (was it called the State?), and occasionally go to see plays at the Ashcroft Theatre - I remember seeing Hywl Bennett in a modern version of Midsummer Night's dream which was really enjoyable.
When Mart finished his time at Pollards school he got a succession of different jobs, but I stayed on until the 6th form of my own school and then went on to Art college. We stayed together for a while, but our lives were going in different directions and we eventually split up. The last I heard of him was that he had married and moved to Cambridgeshire where he was a bus driver. That was in 1981 and his parents were still living in the flat opposite the Clock Tower (it had been convenient for them as his Mother, Geraldine Clarke, had been the manageress of the Woolworths next door). Does anyone keep in touch with Mart or Stuart?

My other memories of Croydon are childhood outings to Kennards where I vaguely remember the ponies, but more especially a kind of puppet show which I used to enjoy being taken to see by Mum. The other memory dates from the summer of 1966, when Mart got me a summer job at the RAC East Croydon where he was working at the time. One morning we were going to work past the newly finished, huge modern office blocks which had just been constructed at East Croydon, when we saw a section of the road cordoned off and crowds of people and the police. We were told that a girl had thrown herself out of the top floor of the empty office block and was lying on the pavement. We couldn't bear to look and hurried away, but I remember reading somewhere later that she had been a young hairdresser who had broken up with her boyfriend.

Does anybody else remember this incident or have any recollections of my boyfriend Mart?

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