Page 31 - Booklet_Design_Bury_Park_Revised_005

My great-grandmother lived in Ivy Road and the shop on the corner used to look after her as she got older the family
always helped her home. When she passed away they closed for the morning and came out to pay their respects to her
absolutely beautiful family.
Lisa Hawes

Bury Park was a big part of my life growing up in the 50s and 60s. I lived in Limbury but my nan lived in North Street,
Luton and most Saturdays I used to go to her house. She would tell me what shopping she needed. We would sit
together at the table in her large kitchen, her in the faded soft cotton wrap-around pinafore she always wore or
sometimes in the blue and white chequered nylon overall she wore when she worked in the cardboard box factory
opposite. She could never find her glasses so I would write down the same things most weeks. A pound of red cheese,
half a pound of tea, a rabbit, ox heart.

Things that aren’t eaten today but were in every
butcher shop then. The last thing was ‘the picture
paper’, the Daily Mirror. I would go into high town
to the Home and Colonial, they sold most of the
things on the list. I may have to fetch grandad’s
shirts from the Chinese laundry or a few stamps
from the small post office where just a few years
later the postmaster was shot dead in the doorway.
Sometimes the list would send me to Bury Park. it
was a very separate part of Luton, Its own quiet little
world.
My auntie Pat worked at the ladies lingerie shop and I would pop in to say hello and spend a short while having a chat.
There was a cafe with a big glass window just beneath the railway bridge near the bus stop. I was waiting for the bus
back to nan’s one day and my gaze fell on a 30 something Indian man sitting at a table in the window. He looked lost
in his own thoughts and unhappy. It was unusual to see anyone other than genteel white ladies in that area so he really
caught my attention. A snapshot in time, as clear today in my 70s as it was back then. I wonder who he was.

I wonder what life did he have. Later on I started working Saturdays in the Woolworths opposite the cinema. I was only
about 15. In those days you got the job and just got on with it, no training of any sort. Those days they had the high
counters with all the goods laid out on top, everything had price stickers but it started to become a thing where people
were taking a sticker off and replacing it with a cheaper one from something else.
Management finally caught onto this and stickers stopped being used. I can also remember it was possible to get up
onto the flat roof and look down to the shoppers below. It was quite a view but so dangerous. I wonder if that’s where
my fear of heights came from. One Saturday morning I rushed to work only to find I was an hour early.
I had no idea, so I decided to pop round to my nan’s sister for a cuppa. She lived in Bury Park Road just behind
woolworths. The house is now long gone but she was a lovely tiny lady who lived as so many of those older ladies did
back then, in a time warp of welcoming cosy front rooms, the teapot always on and a bit of home made cake if you
want some. One of those long houses where each room led straight into the next hallway, front room, kitchen, scullery.

I never made it past the kitchen so never knew if they had a garden. Her husband was a huge man, disabled so was
always sat down in an armchair, he was always smiling, happy and welcoming too. I loved visiting them. I still go to Bury
Park, I love the bustle and the shops. Its a world away from the quiet place of my childhood. I wonder what the people
living there today would think if they were to see it as it was back then.

When I brought the shopping back to nan’s she would open the Daily Mirror, could never find those rogue glasses so
would point to a picture and ask me to read it to her. We went through the whole newspaper that way. I never thought
anything of it. I was 11 or 12 so it is what it is at that age. It never occurred to till years later that she was completely
illiterate and I was told her school was taken over by soldiers billeted there in the first world war so many children lost
out on an education. How sad that she had to spend her whole life ‘losing her glasses’.
Eve Hirst
The waldeck cafe on the corner of Dunstable Road and Waldeck Road, In the 1950’s and possibly 60’s Luton footballers
used to spend afternoons in there. My friend and I used to walk past on our way home from Luton High School
deliberately to see if we recognised anyone sitting in there.
Shirley Hobbs

31