Page 129 - Through a glass brightly

Saturday morning school. If they then went to watch Barnet FC playing a football match at the Underhill ground, they might be given a detention by a prefect if they were seen without their caps!
From Janet at 17.05
Well I can remember getting home but not how I got to school! Well I must have got there somehow obviously! I think I must have caught the 251 to the tube station at Totteridge for the tube to Barnet and like Jen then puffed up the slope to the top of Meadway.
Coming home on 4 days was easy to remember - trolley bus to Whetstone and then back of the 251 bus to the Totteridge War Memorial and then a short walk home down ?Jackson's Lane (or little lane I think we called it too) and then into Priory Close.
However although I think I took the tube to Barnet in the morning why do I remember taking the bus back to Whetstone in the afternoon? Surely I would have bought return tickets or did we have bus/tube passes? On Wednesdays particularly when the weather was fine and we finished early I would walk down Barnet Lane past the playing fields and Ravenscroft and then up to Oaklands Road turn right and down the hill and into Priory Close. Took me about 30 mins I think. This was only done on Wednesdays as, if I took that way home during the weekdays, I would meet the Ravenscroft pupils and apparently they heckled us Grammar School girls!
I can't think that my father would have dropped me off on his way to Enfield College. But I do seem to remember that during the Suez crisis in our first year I think my grandfather came to pick me up as possibly the buses/trollies weren't running properly and my elders obviously thought I needed a lift home! and could not be left to fend for myself and the vagaries of the transport system!
Oh yes that slope up from Barnet tube station was SO steep! But Barnet Hill on the way down on Wednesdays was great fun. Now I will go back two generations as my grandfather told me that as a boy he had cycled down Barnet Hill to celebrate the relief of Mafeking during the Boer War!
Take care especially as we can now get even closer together at 1m apart and I might even get a haircut in two weeks time!
From Val at 18.08
Wow Janet - what really stood out for me here was the fact that your grandfather was a boy in Barnet! Had the family lived in Barnet for a long time? What other memories did he have? Was this the Petch side? Does anyone else in our group have a long history in Barnet? My family had moved out from London during the war after their street in Hackney was bombed - this was the case for lots of my Barnet friends, that their families were incomers, but do others of us go back further in Barnet and have stories of what life was like?
From Carolyn at 21.53
Hi Val, I think you have forgotten that you did cycle to school for a time. I used to meet you at your house and we cycled the side roads to school. My mother allowed this on the promise that I would never cycle up Barnet hill, but was allowed to ride down it. When I think how busy that road was with, I believe, no pavement for a long way, I shudder at the memory. Helmets were hardly the thing then!
What was that about some buses being reserved for long- distance passengers? Doesn't ring any bells with me.
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