New Addington 1940 To 1948

A Memory of Calmore.

I lived at No 8 Wolsey Crescent in the very early development of the estate up to the age of eight before my parents moved to Morden. Even at that age I can remember on many occasions hearing the drone of bombers overhead and watching a flying bomb (doodle bug) fly over our house where it landed a few streets away. I found out years later from my father that luckily it did not explode. The school I attended was in Addington Village at the bottom of Spout Hill in what I can only assume was a local community hall. It was divided into three class rooms by huge folding doors and had a washroom with long stone horse trough type sinks where every child had their names and a hook to hang their enamel drinking mugs. The toilets were corrugated iron structures with stable type doors at one side of the playground and a huge bell in the end wall of the school building.
I can remember the prefabs being built by prisoners of war, so I was told, and after their working day me and others would play on the site. From our front bedroom window at night you could see the search lights over London and the air raid warning system telling us to rush to the shelters. We had an outside shelter and also an indoor one painted green. To us children it was all an adventure and cannot imagine what our parents were going through as everyone expected to be invaded by the Germans.
Just north of Wolsey Crescent in the open countryside as it was then, were two huge inverted cones about twenty feet across where two bombs had landed and can also remember the gypsy camp just off the Addington Road
One of our neighbours, a Mrs Reynolds I believe, had a son Bobby of my age who had three huge double decker toy busses that I loved to play with. Across the road there was a pretty girl named Tina Burk again about my age. Further down the road was a Michael Miles, the same name as a very popular radio presenter and the reason how I always remembered his name. Another neighbour kept a goat tethered to a post in the front garden, no doubt for the milk it produced. Once a week a lorry with a drop down back panel sold horse meat to folk queueing in the street and also a horse drawn cart with milk churns selling to folk with huge jugs. ( not their ears or boobs)
To this day I still insist that kids born in that era were healthier than kids of today who seem to live on junk food.
We always had an egg a day, cod liver oil, condensed orange juice, Varal a malt extract liquid toffee that all kids loved and whatever our mums could cook up from vegetables and their meat rations. All this was supplied by the state for every child even during wartime and I never knew a fat child. And here am I at 78 still in A1 condition awaiting both knee replacement operations and the surgeon commenting that I would reach a hundred mainly because I have never smoked.
I was very disappointed when returning about twenty years ago to find a built up area that was once a lovely community of a few streets set in woods and meadows. I may be wrong but the windmill near Addington Village was half way up Lodge Lane on the right. It was a single lane road in those days and farmland as far as you could see with a narrow winding lane beside it surrounded by tall hedges which probably went back hundreds of years.
I would love to hear from anyone who recognizes my memories or indeed may remember me.

Ray Vail

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