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In a post for the Barnet website, A Trip Down Memory Lane, Ray Peak, now living in New Zealand, recalled his schooldays in Sebright Road in the 1950s, with an eyewitness account of life on the nearby allotments:
By 6pm the cloth-capped menfolk had returned from their manual labour and been fed and watered, then to uncover the high-sided wooden barrow, often with a cycle wheel on either side, and extended pushing handles.
Garden tool barrows all seemed to emerge simultaneously from those old Victorian terrace houses, as grim returned servicemen, fag in mouth descended Sebright Road to disappear down the Calvert Road alleyway to their allotted bit of freedom – a veggie/flower/fruit treed patch, so well turned, deeply dug and manured with buckets full of locally collected horse droppings.
Benched up rows of potatoes, snail retardant hay around strawberries, and neatly spaced carrots/radishes, ran at right angles to the clipped and mowed dividing allotment pathways. Each had a watchman type small shed. Here the contented wannabe yeoman could retire, sip from his Thermos flask, light up a Woodbine, and inwardly digest the last weekend copy of the News of the World’s saucy bits.
Huge metal drums with leftover food scraps from schools, were delivered to the various pigsties that existed around or beside these allotments. The noise, squeals, smells and filth of numerous piglets forever harassing their mother, quite something to remember.
The twilight return of these yokels, sporting huge marrows, pumpkins, potatoes, swedes and onions, all rumbling about in the square barrow, would score Brownie points and admiration from wives, neighbours and children.
When visiting in 2014, I stood and wistfully surveyed the overgrown paddocks, that we as kids believed to be our very own patch.