Fish Shop In Hornsey High Street

A Memory of Hornsey.

I was born in 1950 at Alexandra Park Nursing Home in Muswell Hill. My Mum and Dad (Ivy and Joe Abrahams) owned and ran the fish shop in Hornsey High Street and my Dad was not very pleased when Mum went into labour just before the lunchtime rush! I came home to live in the flat above the fish shop. It was a wet, dry and fried shop. My Dad used to have live crab on the slab in the front window and we had a tank on one side of the shop with live eels - sometimes school boys would let the eels out and my dad would have to chase them down the high street. When dad was frying, I used to sit on counter. One side of us was the butcher's shop run by a lovely couple called George and Lil, and on the other side was the greengrocers run by George Alders and his wife. In 1952 my Dad had a massive stroke when he was at Wembley for the cup final. It left him paralysed down one side. We had to sell the shop and go to live with my grandparents in Hillfield Park, Muswell Hill. I went to Muswell Hill Junior and my brother went on to Tollington. Later, my Auntie Jean and Uncle Sid moved to Westfield Road, just round the corner from the fish shop. Sid went on to work for Greens fishmongers in Crouch End, having previously worked for my Dad (which is where he met Jean). In 1958, we were evicted from our house in Hillfield Park because the landlord wanted to convert it into flats. Tenants didn't have many rights in those days. Like many other Londoners we moved out to one of the new towns, in what was then the countryside - Hemel Hempstead in fact.