Barbara Metcalf about feeling isolated in Stevenage and the importance of friends

Transcript:

Barbara: But it was a lot different from living in Wimbledon, because in Wimbledon we had shops on our doorstep- and we had a telephone in Wimbledon, which we didn’t have in Stevenage, and couldn’t get until we’d lived here for about two or three years, could we?

Peter: Couple of years, yes, certainly.

Barbara: Um, which meant you felt slightly cut off because the nearest shops were about a mile away and to get there you walked on a road that went through an estate which was being built and it was, it was quite hard work pushing a – cos’ you had big prams back in those days a, a pram with a baby in it and a toddler sitting on the front of it and you walked a mile sort of down a hill to get to the shops and there were only about six shops when you got there and then you walked up the hill to get back again. But in the beginning, I felt really cut off in the beginning but the road we were in had twenty nine houses in it and they got filled up very quickly and everybody, made friends with everybody else, you- we knew everybody in the road partly because we all had the same problems, we’d all got small children, and you need help when you’ve got small children you know if you have to go to the dentist you need somebody to leave your two children with and the same applies to the people you were talking to so everybody made friends and it it was a very companionable street [Peter interjects].