War Years Changed Everthing

A Memory of Barnet.

I was one year old when WW2 began - in 1938. Most of my visual memories stem from that time. I remember, without any facts to support them, the large white house that stood in the grounds of Waitrose Car Park and was in ruins one morning on my way to Byng Road School - the tiny cottages beside HADLEY INFANT'S SCHOOL where my family lived but that have now been demolished - the huge craters left across Hadley Green and in the fields to the meadway, the bombs having hit an old people's home, killling most residents - the green tarpaulin water reserves in the Old Courthouse Park and Ravenscroft Park that were continued as paddling pools for a while - Ration Books - open shop windows - the Common - free roaming cattle - Church beacons - Carless streets and clear streams and fish loaded ponds - lilac gathering and po hats - and make-do-and-mend - orchards and apples - and the Landed Gentry out for their Sunday ride in their pony and trap. Is it possible to recapture that world in letters, pictures, words? Or must it stay forever locked in one's own mind?

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