The Old Post Office

A Memory of Waddington.

My grandparents, Harold and Phyllis Fenton, ran the village post office in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s from their home in the stone house opposite the Horse and Jockey Inn. My three sisters and I, daughters of Margaret Fenton and Joseph Gerard Nevin, visited with our grandparents many times during the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s. I remember the village of Waddington as a quiet rural village with winding country lanes surrounded by green pastures, and remember especially the cows being driven up the hill past my bedroom window to go to the farm for milking. I was a very young child then and my memories of Waddington and my grandparents are very fond ones. I have not visited the village of Waddington since the mid-1970s as I feared that the inevitable urban growth and modernisation would disappoint me and distort my memories of this quiet English village I loved to visit. I am now 62 years old and reside in Kitchener-Waterloo, 80 kilometres south east of Toronto, in Canada. My sisters live in Britain and Spain and we are in the process of doing a genealogical search of our families. I still possess the letter from Queen Elizabeth II to my grandmother on her retirement from the post office in the 60s, thanking her for 45 years of dedicated service to Her Majesty's Royal Mail. My family was very proud of her. We have many photos of our childhood visits to Waddington and like to recall the many happy vacations we spent there as children. And this is how I would like to remember it.