Lydney 1953 1967

A Memory of Lydney.

The shop on the extreme left is Harris's Newsagency. Then J. Clifford Hughes the chemist, then The Wool Shop. The long shop (three shops really) is Williams & Cotton: bread & cakes with a very tempting shop window with cream buns, jammy doughnuts, petits fours etc. I forget what was in the second shop, but the third was a drapery. Then a laneway, behind which was a bakery (presumably belonging to W & C), then Watts Ironmongers. Then Mr Brian Williams the solicitor (children Ruth and Rhodri; Ruth was in my year at school and Rhodri was one or two years older), and Mr Mullen the dentist. Then a row of terraced houses: Mrs Golding; Mr & Mrs Price (lots of children including Cynthia, Jill and Roger); Mr & Mrs English (children John and Zandra); and then us in the white house towards the end. Mr English kept racing pigeons and each morning and evening they would be cooing softly as he scraped out their loft. John kept quite a lot of guinea pigs, including a tufty one called Rastus.

Our house was No. 33 High Street and our shop (Lydney Motorcycles, later Lydney Motorcycles and set back off the road) used to be an old blacksmith's forge. (It is now Yer Tiz, a secondhand furniture shop.) We moved there from Blakeney in 1953 when I was three, and I remember my father burning two enormous sets of bellows in the back garden. Next to our shop and just in the picture is Mr Stinchcombe's shop (later owned by Mr Baber, who married LGS's Domestic Science teacher Miss Croton). On one side of the shop was fruit and vegies, which also sold threepenny posies of violets and primroses for Mothers' Day; the other side was a sweet shop, which also sold ice-creams, bread, fireworks for Bonfire Night and lead farm animals and figures. The shop assistants were called Millie and Mary.

On the right-hand side of the road,where the Belisha beacons are, was Lloyds Bank.

My family left Lydney for Western Australia in 1967, when I was 16. I now live in Tasmania.