Growing Up In Cranmer Road

A Memory of Edgware.

I was born in 1944 and lived in Cranmer Road until 1958. Our neighbours on one side were Mr & Mrs Norwood, who always sent round a portion of home-made spotted dick for me on a Friday evening when rationing was still in force, and I devoured it with great relish! (Mr Norwood was a butcher so maybe he had some suet left over at the end of the week!) The other side was Mr & Mrs Jecks-Wright. Our house looked out on an open green area, which was developed on the site of the communal air raid shelters, which I remember watching being destroyed by a crane swinging a heavy ball. There was also an undeveloped site opposite the house behind a chain link fence, between Cranmer Road and Wyre Grove, with a brook running between culverts at each end,
I started school in St Andrew's Church, just round the corner in Lynford Gardens, but soon moved up to Broadfields Primary School. The infants were in the older buildings above the playing field, and when I moved into the juniors I moved into a more modern building on the corner of Broadfields Avenue and Hartland Drive. The school air raid shelters were still in the Hartland Drive entrance to the old school. I also remember St Andrew's Church being the location for the baby clinic when my younder brother arrived on the scene in 1950, and later still I was a choir boy at the church.
Greengroceries were delivered to us from the shop in Glengall Road in a fleet of 3 ancient green vans (they had their batteries on the running boards). Milk came from United Dairy at the junction of Station Road and Hale Lane, with Tom the milkman driving his horse-drawn milk float. (Dad used to follow the milk cart with a bucket and spade to feed his rhubarb!) Later Tom graduated to a pedestrian operated electric vehicle. Spurriers had a similar vehicle to deliver bread, but my mother still took me on the 113 bus shopping in the town and I remember so many of the shops mentioned in other posts, including the library upstairs in Boots the Chemist. There were also shops for all the necessaries round the corner in Glengall Road, even Nunn's Electrical Shop, with a "Two Ronnies Four Candles" hardware shop next door.
Dad was a professional pianist, and there were several other musicians living in the town. I remember visiting the cellist Reginald Kilby in Lake View and dad accompanying him playing "The Swan", before I was taken out in a boat on the lake behind his house. Somehow I acquired an old cat's whisker crystal set, which I wired up in my bedroom with one wire to earth on the gas pipe, and the other through the window to a tree at the bottom of the garden to act as an aerial. I had a pair of discarded BBC earphones and used to tune in to listen to Dad's weekly broadcast on the Light Programme at 11.15 at night, snuggled up under the blankets when I was supposed to be fast asleep.
I have so many memories of living in that house, including a stray rocket on Guy Fawkes Night leaving its milk bottle launching pad and crashing straight through my bedroom window, knocking my front teeth out on a see-saw in Edgwarebury Park, and going to see the pigs in Edgwarebury Farm. Eventually we all moved to the other side of the town in Canons Park, with a new set of memories, and now I live 150 miles away in Norfolk.