| We lived in Stockwell Green, London SW9 when WW2 broke out. I was fourteen, came from a family of five Mum and Dad, two brothers, myself a girl. Most children were evacuated into the country; my two brothers went to Somerset.
I had left school, I was sent down to a small village in South Merstham, Surrey, to my mother’s brother and his wife, they had two grown up children, one boy and one girl. Tony was called into the RAF and became a navigator. Margaret his sister married a Canadian soldier, went to Canada, still there and now 80.
During my stay at my aunts, I had to find work and because men and women had joined the forces, there were plenty of jobs going.
I found a job in Redhill in the Surrey Fine Art Press. I became a feeder (I worked on a Meilie printing machine) I use to stand up high on a platform and feed into grippers, which gripped and carried the sheets of paper around a large cylinder, which printed the litho type that lay below.
Two people operated this machine. Jack Goodenough the minder and myself the feeder. We printed local newspapers and book bindings etc.
From Endsliegh Rd in Merstham where I lived it was about a two-mile walk to my place of work, The Press and back to my home.
This where my experience of something that happened to me which awakened in me my first experience of nature, and that there was more in life than roof-tops which is all I ever saw in London
One morning on my way to work, an elderly lady came out from her cottage, and stopped me, asked me who I was, and where was I going. I told her I was staying with an aunt in Merstham and that I was on my way to work at the press in Redhill.
She said no need to go to Redhill, if you go a little further down the road on your left you'll see a road sign, Wiggie Lane cut through there and follow it right through, you will see a bungalow, further on a convent and beyond that, the Press, take a mile off your journey, but be careful of the brambles, its terribly overgrown its like a wilderness, the lane itself.
I took her advice and went into the lane.
It was everything she said, wild and unkempt. I carried on but was a little nervous, because it was deep country and not a soul in sight and thought of turning back.
Those were the days
A little further on I came to a clearing on my right then, I saw the bungalow; I stopped, I was enchanted, I had stepped into another world.
The bungalow was white, green tiles on the roof, the front garden was enormous, it had no order what-so-ever, but it was a riotous of colours. Hundreds of Daffodils, Crocus, ferns etc. it looked like a meadow covering the whole of that front of that garden. What made the picture so perfect, the sun was up that morning in a cloudless blue sky, a slight breeze was gently moving the leaves of the overhead trees, the combination of the two together, was throwing millions of golden pellets across the garden below, it was beautiful!!
The silence was deafeningly of it all, only to be broken by a cuckoo calling his mate in the surrounding countryside.
I continued on my way, passed the convent, which was well laid back and surrounded by a very high fence and saw the Press on my left.
When I was in my fifties, I was curious to try and find out just who owned and lived in that bungalow. Because during the time I worked at the Press I never saw anyone.
What I did see was signs of life, a window opened here and there and a saucer on the doorstep.
When I finally got to Merstham and Wiggie Lane , the Lane itself was blocked off, it was completely overgrown. However I got to speak to a passer-by a lady who told me who had owned the bungalow. That it had belonged to a Captain or Soldier who served in the First World War and survived it and died before the second war was ended.
I though if he had been in the Trenches in that first 1914-18 war and survived it. No wonder he turned his home into the paradise and that was how I saw it.
Can anyone if they know of any information elucidate if this is true, as I've no way of knowing and what of the Surrey Fine Art Press and is that still there.
User: sidders
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