1958 To 1990

A Memory of Smallfield.

My parents moved from Hackney East London to Orchard Road in 1958, I was two years old.

Orchard Road connected to New Road by way of a pedestrian break in a hedge between the two roads, New Road was unmade in those early days. A gentleman in the first house on the left (as you passed into New Road) grew vegetables, I recall he sold them from the pill box adjacent to the sweet shop in the Parade on a Saturday morning. Eventually the hedge was removed when New Road was tarmaced.

There were two brothers who ran the garage at the end of New Road by the chapel, always dressed in brown coats and flat caps. It was an Aladdin's Cave in there.

I believe it was a Mr Sheppard who took over Sayer's Stores. During his stewardship the shop front was updated and the old glazed wooden door with a bell that wrung when it was opened was replaced along with the shopfront. Blackjacks and fruit salads were a farthing each.

I can remember Freda running the post office from the corner shop on Wheelers Lane, it was then a Co-op, my mother's dividend number still in my memory 14419.. The parade had an impressive flower bed at one time, later dug up for additional parking and the shops changed numerous times.

The blacksmiths was there in my early years together with the old cottage on the junction of Chapel and Smallfield Roads, later demolished when the first block of new houses were built there. I think this was after the floods of 1968, when me and a friend made some money helping to push cars out of the floods. If I'm correct there was a stomach complaint mini epidemic as a result of the floods and we had sometime off school.

In 1969, I cycled to Fernhill the morning after the fatal plane crash and even collected a piece of the wreckage. I often wonder what happened to Beverley Jones, a baby that survived in her cot despite the plane destroying the house of her parents who tragically lost their lives.

I left the village in 1978 when I married living in Kingswood and Horley, before returning in around 1982. We bought a house on the corner of Bridgeham Way and Redehall Road and remained there until divorced in 1991. My children remained in the village for a further number of years.

Lots of memories that seem like only yesterday.

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