Childhood In Waltham Cross

A Memory of Waltham Cross.

I was born in Waltham Cross in 1941, right in the middle of an air raid.  My dad was yelling up at the planes saying "Not tonight Adolf, not tonight!"
Waltham Cross back then was a wonderful village to grow up in. Sunday mornings only the sweet shop would be open at the top of Trinity Lane, named Foyles. You could walk up the High St and come across sheep being herded in the middle of the road, and all the traffic, well what there was of it, would come to a halt and await the shepherd and his flock.
The High Street was full of hustle and bustle on a Saturday morning and I would have to go into the Co-op furniture shop and pay on my mum's weekly HP for the furniture she had bought. I would then go across the road to Collins grocers and butchers and give them a shopping list my mum had given me and wait for the merchandise to be packaged. Friday nights my mum and I would wait outside the Embassy pictures for my dad to come off the 310 bus from his job in Hoddesdon and we would all go to the pictures. I would always get a choc ice and on my birthday I could have 2. I always knew I was special with my dad. On the way home he would give me a piggy back ride down Trinity Lane to Northfield Road where we lived as I was always tired.
I went to Holy Trinity School in Trinity Lane where the block of flats now are and as it was a church school Holy Trinity Church was our place of worship.  I was eventually married at the church and had funeral services for both parents there in later years. I am very sad at the blight of Waltham Cross these days.  Now a motorway runs through the town and the old shops and wonderful ways are gone. But I feel I had the best of times back then and wouldn't change a thing of that time.

Madeline (Clay) Rees