Life In Southall From 1930 To 1964

A Memory of Southall.

My family moved to Kingsley Avenue from Acton when I was four, and when I started at North Road Infants School, my mother hid me behind the blackboard and easel because I cried! But I progressed from there to the Juniors, and my friends were Harry Parker, Harry Stubbs, Pat Bailey and Billy Burke, whose small, terraced houses were behind Doctor Olive's grand house. We used to play on the green in front of The Plough even after it was dark, until our mothers called us in. Air-raid shelters were built there when the Second World War broke out, in 1939, by which time I went to Southall County Grammar School, losing my friends, who went to Dormers Wells Secondary Modern School, and wouldn't talk to me anymore! When I was a senior pupil there, I did fire-watching, in case of incendiary bombs, so I was paid a half-crown a night, and slept on a table in the library. My father was a guard on the railway, and my mother worked in a fish and chip shop on one side of the green, and my aunt and uncle, Doll and Ed Buck, ran The Plough on the other side. I left home to join the Army when I was seventeen, and later courted Peggy Clarke, from Salisbury Road, who became my wife out in Australia, in 1949, but my parents, Mona and Jack, remained in Shackleton Road, Southall until 1964, by which time my wife and I had begun our family in Hanson Gardens, so we shall always remember Southall fondly.