A Little More About My Life In St Pauls Cray.

A Memory of St Paul's Cray.

I used to live at Orchard Place, small terrace cottages on Main Road, St Pauls Cray.
Previous to this as readers may recall I lived at the top of Chalk Pit Avenue in a semi-detached bungalow with my parents.
The move to the lower part of the town was owing to family health issues and the time I spent at Orchard Place with mum and dad is something I remember quite well.
In the first cottage a family used to have a little ice cream buiness run from the back garden and in one of the others a Mr harris and his wife lived, Mr Harris used to drive the green 477 buses that ran to Dartford and Swanley.
Along the road from the cottages was a large house owned by someone I recall being named Mr Reece or Reeves.
The house was set back off the road and I recall some large what looked like concrete blocks in the front garden area, this was almost opposite a development of flats built on what was earlier part of the school field and later named Bannister Gardens.
The blocks in the big house garden always facinated me as I wondered what they were for, the nearest I have seen elsewhere were to stop military tanks in the second World war but tabout these I have no idea, especially in a place like St Pauls Cray.
Just at the end of the Orchard Place cottages was a small very old house I believe owned by a family named Grout.
The Orchard Place cottages were named after the orchard I think, that when I first lived there was almost opposite the Blue Anchor public house and down a little that had a lovely old farmhouse looking building opposite, the owner of which used to wear an upright shirt collar with a tie in the old fashioned way and he used to ring the bells in the church in the High Street if my memory is correct and was a Mr Gorringe possibly.
The orchard had a quite large "Monkey Puzzle" tree in among the other trees and these trees have always fascinated me but attempts to grow one more than about a foot high have failed!
At the bottom of Hearns Rise was a large barn type building and my mother used take me there to see what things Mr Corke had for sale on his table, just bric a brac but to a child some real treasures.
I love looking all the photos on the internet of the old St Pauls and St Mary Cray and never cease to wonder what the town would have been like to live in a hundred or so years ago.
Derek Stocker

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