A Well Remembered Book Shop

High Road c1955
Enlarge photo |  More about this photo

I moved away from Woodford Green many years ago and have lived in various places since, but I still recognise Woodford Green as my home town. I have 3 vivid memories of my time living with my gran just off the green in Fairlite Avenue.
The first being the trips to the book shop on the corner of Woodford Green, High Road with my gran who at the time was head cook at the Sunset Road Junior School, I would wait for her until she left work then we would both walk to the book shop where there was always a selection of secondhand annuals with pop up pictures and gran, once or twice a week depending on funds, would buy me an annual and I can remember to this day some 60 years on the excitement first of choosing my annual then once I got home of turning the pages and being facinated by the wonderful pop up pictures. It was from these books I learned to read.
My second memory is somewhat more dramatic. I recall walking to school and passing for the umpteenth time the church just off Johnson Road, having got to school being rushed down into some shelters, hearing a huge explosion, being sent home early and passing not the splendid church but now a pile of rubble. It's now the site of The James Hawky Hall.
My third and last vivid memory is even to this day a very sad one. It's of the "Lady in White" who walked every single day, irrespective of the weather condition, in her bridal dress, from Snarebrook to Woodford Green, High Road where she would wait till late in the afternoon then walk all the way back to her flat in Snaresbrook. According to my gran she had been making this trip from a period after the First World War, she was certainly making it into the late fifties. I had cause to work in her flat in, I believe, 1956 and was shocked and saddened  to see the terrible state she was in, her face was covered in white powder and rouge, her wedding dress was filthy and the bottom torn and frayed from years of dragging across the ground. I was always led to believe that her attire and her pilgrimage related to a lost loved one during WW1.