I lived in Essex England for a year and half in my teen years. I can still remember the name of the street we lived on. which was School Street. The houses over there don’t have numbers on them. Each house has a name. The house I lived in was called Wilmington. Me and my two sisters had newspaper routes. The Daily Sun and The Mirror were the two newspapers that we delivered. We were paid 2 pounds each route which breaks down to $2.70 each day.
Now I know $2.70 isn’t much, but to a 14 year old girl this was freedom in a sense. Freedom to buy what ever we wanted at the shop after our deliveries were finished. My sisters and I would walk the 1/2 mile to the little shop at the end of School Street. The name of the shop sadly escapes me. It has been 25 years since I lived in England. So the details may be a little fuzzy. Now back to the newspaper route. It took my sisters and I, about 3 hrs the first time we did our paper route. We delivered them like we saw in the movies. We knew nothing of how to deliver newspapers. We were about half way done with our route ( or so we thought) the papers were folded and put in the bag we had to carry . We didn’t know but there were names of each house on the papers. So we had to go and collect them all back and re-issue them. It was cold and wet but we finished it. Within one week, we got better and got it done in 20 minutes. We were known as the American girls. Because The shop owner couldn’t remember our names.
With the money we got we spent it on things from the shop that reminded us of America. I drank so much coke that I can’t drink coke today. There is a meal that not many people are familiar with. It was called macaroni and tomato juice. It is a version from an old recipe my mom grew up called macaroni and tomatoes with salt. We spent our $2.70 on pasta which costs 69 pence and tomato juice which was like 85 pence. So for under 2 pounds we purchased ingredients so we could have food that we used to eat in the States. Something so simple like a meal brought such happiness to our lives.
In the morning my sisters and I would deliver papers and in the afternoon we would walk the 2 miles to a local horse farm to help a lady and her daughter tend to the horses and in return they would let us ride them. We would muck out the stables and feed the horses. We would groom them and take them to different fields to let them run and get exercise. I remember making a deal with our mother that we could go work on the farm as long as we were home before my father got home around 4:00 pm. So we would walk there and spend most of the day there then loose track of time and have to run the 2 miles home. There were many days I thought I was going to die from the painful stitches we would get in our side from running so hard. We loved working on the farm though. There are other stories I could share, but I don’t want to go over board in this post. So if you enjoyed this post comment “England” down below in the comments. Until next time have a blessed day. The pictures are not pictures that I took, I found these online that was similar to what I saw when I was over there.