It was an accident of history, in a sense, that I went to Selhurst - or even
lived in Croydon  - at all. When my father came out of the RAF in 1946, and
married my mother, he joined ABC Cinemas as a Trainee Manager, and they sent
him to work in Kilburn : after he died, I found some notes he had made about
the difficulty of getting home, late at night, from Kilburn to West Wickham,
where my mother, by then pregnant with me, was living with her parents. I
was actually born in West Wickham, and my parents only moved to Norbury when
dad was assigned to the South London district of the Company, and was based
at a cinema some OC's will remember, the Rex, on London Road, Norbury ( next
to a pub then called the Norbury Hotel ) Our house was on Stanford Road,
right opposite Norbury Manor Boys School.

I have often thought about how different my life would have been if Dad had
remained based at Kilburn - I have always been proud of being a South
Londoner ( NEVER a Croydonian ! ) and the thought of being a North Londoner
has never particularly appealed !

Norbury was an "odd" place  - it is right at the top end of Croydon, and
only a few yards walk from our house you were in the County of Surrey, and
had my parents bought a house further down Stanford Road, I may well have
ended up at Mitcham Grammar rather than Selhurst ( several of my friends
from Norbury Manor Primary went there ) but, just to complicate matters, if
you walked from our house to Norbury Station via Hermitage Lane, you passed
an LCC primary school, so had we lived in that part of Norbury, I might have
ended up at an LCC school. When asked where her grandchildren lived, my
Grandmother always said "Streatham " rather than "Norbury" as she always
thought the former was a "cut above" the latter.

The point is this : my mothers family owned a butchers shop in Streatham -
trading as James Uff  - and until the business was sold in the mid - 1950's
- we had our weekend meat delivered every Saturday morning by a lad on a
bike, despite there being other butchers shops within walking distance of
our house that we could have used.  I remember some occasions when my Dad
took me with him when he went to the shop to pay the staff wages - my Great
Uncle, who ran the business, was terminally ill by this time, and the family
had rallied round to keep the business going pro tem. 

There may be other OC's - probably slightly older than me ! - who lived in
Norbury, close to the "border" with Streatham, who remember the butchers
shop called JAMES UFF, and may have bought their meat there. I am not sure
how long the business was in Streatham - so far as I can discover, we - the
family - disposed of it in about 1956, but it may have been there since
around the time of the First World War - I remember my Grandmother telling
me thst she, with her mother and sister, had had to run the business during
the war as her fther was dead and her brother was in the Army. Reginald Uff
survived the war, and ran the business until illness over took him. What I
don't know is whether the shop was always in Streatham, or re - located
there sometime after WW1. My Grandmother was born - in 1893 - in Wembley,
and one of the mysteries I am trying to solve is how a family from Wembley
came to be running a shop in Streatham. Any OC's who can help me put
together this particular piece of my family history are very welcome to
contact me.

I was always a little uncertain exactly where the border berween Croydon and
Streatham was  I think it was at Hemitage Bridge, but the signs saying "
Borough of Croydon " were close to Norbury Station. Somewhere, I have an old
postcard showing a pre - WW1 Croydon Corporation tram pasing under the
railway bridge at Norbury station heading in the London direction. From what
I have read, until the setting up of what became London Transport in ( I
think ) the 1930's, passengers wanting to go to Streatham or beyond by tram
had to change to an LCC tram at or near Hermitage Bridge - Croydon
Corporation trams could not work through.

Another "quirk" of living in a place like Norbury where three LEA's met was
the fact that an old school friend of my fathers lived close to the large
Westminster Bank sports ground, although his house was in Mitcham, not
Norbury. Their daughter - the same age as me - went to Streatham High
School, which was LCC run, while their younger son went to Alfred Mizen
primary school ( probably twice as far to walk to from their house as was
Norbury Manor PS ), and then Mitcham Grammar. This may all seem terribly
trivial now, when parents have more choice over their childrens school, but
in the 1950's you normally went to the nearest primary school to your home.
Choice of secondary school was determined, however, by the 11 + results -
and even if my parents had wanted me to go to a school like Mitcham Grammar
or Streatham - both nearer to home than was Selhurst - this would not have
been possible : and my sister, who failed the 11 + but was selected at 13 +
for a " grammar - type " education had to leave Norbury Manor and transfer
to John Newnham in Addington - an awful long journey by two buses from
Norbury - and yet she could have walked to Streatham High.

Odd how these things work out, isn't it ?