Wendy Davenport
Wendy talks about horse and cart deliveries

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In Woodham the milkman came with a horse and cart – a beautiful horse, we used to follow him all the way round. They were actually more economic than the vans now because the horse knew the round and the horse would keep walking and stop at particular places along the road and all the milkman had to do was get out and run with the pints and just say ‘Gee!’ and he'd move along to the next stop. So the milkman wasn't forever in and out of the van stopping and starting, he was on the trot the whole time going round and the horse just knew exactly what to do.

The vegetables came round with the horse and cart as well. They did a round of the Woodham Estate and they came from Sharman’s in Maybury and he was the local greengrocer and he came round, so you got that to the house as well. You see the mothers couldn't drive, the mothers had no cars. Otherwise we had to go shopping on our bikes when we were a bit bigger and if we hadn’t got it right, we went back. You could bike from Woodham to Woking, park your bike outside the shop, go in and get whatever it was and come out again and the bike was still there.

Woolworths was the first thing you came to in the Chertsey Road - that had most things. Sainsbury’s was up in the High Street opposite the railway. Sainsbury’s was big, but it was tiled all the way up and you went to each counter for the different things, which meant that you had to go in, go to the biscuits and wait for your biscuits; then you went up to the sugar and queued there again and got your bit of that; then you went over to the meat and queued again and got your bit of that. You queued at every counter round Sainsbury’s, it took an awful long time. There was a girl at the way out and the man wrote on the paper or the bag the price and then you got to go out and you paid it all in one go.