Rood End School

A Memory of Oldbury.

I was born in July 1939 in a street with the unbelievable name of `Dog Kennel Lane` in Oldbury, now in West Midlands, can you believe that? Actually I think it was in the Langley area of Oldbury.
As I was so young at the time I don`t actually remember much about it and little did I know that my wife was born within howling distance just two years earlier, so she must have heard me howling sometime or other.
Somehow my mother moved, with my brother and I, to the Queens Head area of Oldbury to a cul de sac called Douglas Avenue where my brother and I spent our formative years during WW2, where we lived with our gran.
I went to Rood End school in Langley Green; the school is still there as a matter of fact. We had to walk quite a long way really to go to school, as I remember, with our mother taking us; and in the winters with heavy snowfalls not at all very comfortable. That was when winters were really winters, during the summer months it wasn`t so bad.
I remember the shop just above the school, on the opposite side of the road. On the corner was an ice cream makers shop, round the back yard, where I think an Italian gentleman made the delicious ice cream that was a treat to eat, but we couldn`t afford an ice cream too often because of the war and our little bit of pocket money didn`t go very far.
My memories of Rood End school, like most kids of that age, were not all pleasant. There were some bad ones too. According to my mother, after my first day she asked me how I had liked my school and my reply was 'I'ts okay but I`m not going again Mom`. Little did I know.
I remember when my dad came home from the war, he was one of the lucky ones, but then we did not know what he had gone through and seen. He used to take us, my brother and I, to West Smethwick Park. Sometimes he would take us on the boats on the pool in the park on Sundays or play football on the pitches or catch sticklebacks round the edge of the pool. For him, my dad, that must have seemed like heaven on earth after what he had gone through during the war, for us too it was a memory never to forget and I haven`t forgotten.
Oldbury over the years obviously has changed but some memories never alter, no matter how long ago they happened.

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