This article was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on June 24th 1999.

I was most interested in your article in the WSG on 2nd April 1998 about Tarring, said Mrs Beatrice Longhurst (nee Gordon) aged 69, who wrote in:-

I can remember visiting all the shops mentioned in your article in Tarring Road, and getting blocks of ice from Mac Fisheries to make lemonade for tennis parties or croquet - we played both.

I have lived in or around Tarring all my life, and have many rather sketchy memories of Tarring in the 1930s when I was a child. Dr. Nickolds had moved to 59 St Lawrence Avenue. His carriage was kept in a shed in the garden and the horse was kept in a field at the bottom of the garden on ground occupied now by two bungalows with tapering gardens on the right angled bend in Haynes Road.

I lived at No. 61 St Lawrence Avenue and looked longingly over the big brick wall (part of the original farm grounds) at the horse, but was never allowed in.

When I was young I had a governess till I was about five, and then I went to a little school run by somebody who just had about half a dozen children in a big house in Grand Avenue on the corner of Lansdowne Road.

One of my memories was leaving Monty, my toy dog, on a bus as it went through Tarring and having to chase it all the way up High Street; that was before Rectory Road (Tarring bypass) was constructed. I remember the bus stopping by the recreation ground and suddenly realising that the toy dog was actually left on the bus.

Oh I can remember the silver jubilee of George V (1935) and remember watching the parade but nothing else. I was rather protected. I went to Khongs in South Street, Worthing, usually on a Saturday morning. I was terrified there because all that hot air came out onto the pavement and blew through my legs as I went past and thought something awful was going to happen to me.

South Street, Worthing looking north towards the Old Town Hall, both festooned with colourful decorations to celebrate the Jubilee of King George V, 1935.

At the age of about seven I was sent to Hurst Grange in Parkfield Road which was a preparatory school for young ladies, now a Nursing Home. When I was eight years old I remember being spotted by the headmistress at the weekend while walking with my parents up South Street, Tarring and not in uniform.

My crime was eating an ice cream in the street, and my punishment was to stand on a table throughout break for a week, so that the other pupils could see how wicked I had been.

I stayed at the prep school until war broke out and at that stage my parents decided that it was a bit silly to send me to a school that would probably be evacuated. It would be much better to send me to a school that was somewhere in the country already, so I went down to Somerset to Sunnyhill School at Bruton, and I stayed there until the end of the war, coming home for holidays which was when most of the bombs seemed to fall including the land-mine in Haynes Road which occurred when I was home for half term holiday!

I was a perfectly brought up young lady. Anyone who played in the street or in fields or that sort of thing would be not well thought of. In fact my mother was introduced to my father by Mr. Warren the dentist who in fact was not part of Worthing's polite society because he was a dentist. Doctors were all right but dentists were not. My father was of independent means.

My grandfather, Alfred Morris Butler, was the model for Dr Watson in the original illustrations of Sherlock Holmes, and my grandmother also 'played' several minor characters. Professionally, he was an architect who did some of the designs for Worthing Hospital and also part of the Rectory at Broadwater Road (now the Manna coffee house).

He designed our bungalow in 1920 but was very ashamed of it because it was built just after the end of the first war and you were allowed only a very small area, and later enlarged at regular intervals as regulations permitted. Now of course it is two semi detached bungalows. We had a lovely garden with a tennis court, and would either play tennis or croquet and enjoyed tennis parties.

There was an acre of garden and at the bottom a field and a horse. There was a stone wall that went all along the bottom and there were houses in Haynes Road in my childhood but not at that corner till later. Father built the first dwelling in St Lawrence Avenue at no. 61 (our home) and he had the land up to the corner of St. Thomas's Road, and everybody said to him 'You are mad moving so far out of the town. How are you going to live life out there?' Then he gradually sold off the land, about seven acres I think.

I went to the Plaza Cinema (now a bingo club) in Rowlands Road. Didn't go very often because I suppose there were not many films that were suitable. I can remember seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but think I had to be carried out during the film because I couldn't take the witch! They had tea dances and I can remember going to one or two of those.

To be continued.

This article was first published in the West Sussex Gazette on June 24th 1999.

Old coffee shop: Khongs Eastern Cafe, South Street, Worthing where hot air blew between young Beatrice Gordon's legs.