Memories of Laindon/Lt Burstead

By Margaret Lowery Nee Marshall

My memories of Laindon are of having to catch a City bus from my village Lt. Burstead early in the morning to Laindon station so that I could travel by the old sooty trains to Fenchurch St to the office where I worked in 1952.  

The trains had separate carriages which were always packed as they started off at Southend and usually we were standing between the two rows of seats, hot, stuffy and smokey and if the windows were down, sooty smuts blown in to stick to your clothes. In winter, the trains were cold, often late, due to ice or fog and when I arrived home from work, there were no buses to go to the village and I had to wait in a little wooden shed at the station that sold cups of tea etc. 

Then I caught the bus which took me home via Noak Hill Rd. and they more or less stopped where you wanted to get off.  My journey then continued by crossing the stile into the first of two fields which in winter I crossed in the dark and wet, over the stile by the stream, over the bridge and then up the footpath through the wood, all up hill and which in my youth I RAN because I was so afraid of the dark trees on either side!! 

The only other memory of Laindon is of occasionally going to the cinema, which we referred to the "flea pit" as we thought the cinema in Billericay was far superior!!