NextBackIn South Street was a large house known as Oldcrest it has now been pulled down. For many years after the war it was used as a teacher's centre. This was where the important government documents from London were stored during the war. I know this because we lived next door for two years. There were three large empty detached houses next to each other and Oldcrest was one of them. They had very big gardens and my dad heard that the Council were letting these gardens out as allotment. He decided he would like to grow his own vegetables so he went to the Council and put his name down for an allotment. They said to him, 'Do you want a house's.”
“The house next door to Oldcrest was empty and they wanted to put a caretaker in there to look after the three detached houses. All a caretaker had to do was to be there when anybody came down from London. As he had his own business in motor spares he could get away at any time, so we moved in the November of 1940. We got an allotment a potting shed and the run of the gardens as well. We had to take lodgers while we were living there. One was a BSA worker, then we had a factory nurse who came to live with us, also from the BSA. She married Paddy Neason the farmer.”
