Interview with Laura Owen (b.1950) about growing up in Bletchley and education.

Laura Owen moved to Bletchley from London in the early 1950s, aged two or three, to the Saints estate. Family life in the 1950s and 1960s was hard, both her parents worked. Her education was at Castles Infants and Saints school. Playing truant was not unusual. She recalls schoolfriends and playground games. At Wilton School she remembers subjects studied including Domestic Science and Needlework, separate playgrounds for girls and boys, punishment with the slipper.

She recalls the freedom of childhood play with the ‘gang’ from the Saints. They roamed widely, to the brickworks, including playing ‘chicken’ with the brick lorries on Newton Road, to the ‘bottledump’ site on Buckingham Road and round the cattle market. They also played in ‘The old haunted house at the bottom of Majors Hill’, which used to be the Shoulder of Mutton pub. She remembers a dolls’ hospital in Fenny, Bletchley Carnival, Derwent Drive Youth Club and the annual fair and recalls many childhood incidents and local shops. In her teens she used to go to Wilton Hall (including the Rolling Stones concert) and discos at a dance hall in Bletchley, also to coffee bars and record shops. She met her husband at a dance at Wilton Hall; she remembers the local motorbikers who used to turn up also. She recalls the Queen’s visit.

After leaving school, she worked at a pet shop in Woburn for two years, moving to Cramphorns in Bletchley then to a supermarket in Whaddon Way. She married in 1968 and moved to Moulsoe.