War Years

A Memory of Palmers Green.

I was born in at 72 Bowes Rd on 7th Jan 1940, after being bombed out we moved to 72 Bowes Rd and then to 62l Ulleswater Rd and then to 14 Eaton Park Road. My earliest memories start from when I was on the pot - not the smoking kind, that came later - and when I could not reach the door handles. My brother, who could, had great fun annoying me and then running out the door and shutting it knowing I couldn't follow. In the war years I would go with my mum into Palmers Green. We would go up Ullswater Rd into Conway Rd and then turn into Fox Lane and walk down over the railway bridge and come out opposite the Post Office.  At the side of the Fox Inn there was a gents public toilet which I liked to go in, while mum waited outside, there used to be empty spirit bottles left in there and I used to like smelling the scent from them. It was only when I grew up that I discovered that the taste of the real thing was very unpleasant.  When I was five I went to Hazlewood Lane School.  I made friends with a boy named Robert Perrin whose granddad had a cobblers shop at the top of Hazlewood Lane, does anybody remember it?  I seem to remember a bomb shelter in the area near Fox Lane where we went if the sirens sounded.  Some of the shops I remember are Evans & Davis dept store, Grouts the haberdashers, Janes & Adams, toys and bikes and models, the Art Shop,  Macfisheries, Finlays the tobacconists.