Chequers Road

A Memory of Noak Hill.

I lived in Chequers Road, called Chequers lane in these photos. The girl in the photo is standing outside her gate in the house that was next door. My house was the other side of the tree. When the photo was taken there were two old wooden cottages which my father helped to pull down when the new brick ones were built. They were farm worker's cottages. The one where the girl stands was for the cow man and the other was for the tractor driver in the 1950s. The new cottages were nearer the road and where the old cottages were became the back gardens. I remember we always found clay pipes there so there must have been farm workers living there for many years. In the late 1950s or early 1960s a car ran into the tree and made it so unstable that it had to be removed for safety reasons. I was very pleased about that because there was an owl which used to sit in that tree and hoot all night - right outside my bedroom window.

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