Life In County Oak

A Memory of Crawley.

I was born in the cottage that was named Morning Dawn in 1937. The house is now a Muslim mosque. I remember the recreation area very well. We played there often. My dad had an allotment nearby. I remember the Covey and Brown farms that were just across London Road from my home. My aunt, Joan Brown, was married to my mother's brother, Major Stewart Collett, and I remember the Brown family. It sticks in my memory that in front of the Brown house was what had at one time been a swimming pool. It certainly had water in it. I remember collecting tadpoles in it on numerous occasions. Next door to Morning Dawn was the house occupied by the Haywards. He looked after the sewage farm, I think. Olive Hayward often took me on the bus to school in the mornings. I remember one morning watching a German bomber dropping bombs on the town and hitting the Post Office; in fact two of my cousins Jean and Esme Cheeseman were in the Post Office at the time the bomb hit it. I believe a bomb hit the CofE school on the same morning. I remember going to the store just to the north of our house, and also going to Webb's store just south of us, too. We got Walls or Lyons ice cream there, probably after the war. My father worked for James Longley in Crawley and was also an ARP warden during the war. I had another cousin, Alan Steer, who lived in Crawley at the time, but I have lost all touch with him or any of his family since we moved to Canada in 1948. My wife and I were in Crawley again in April and visited Morning Dawn. Lots of memories, mostly pleasant, though some disturbing ones too.

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