Malcolm G Hill
Those Were The Days My Friends . .
Memoirs of Lancing Life 1947-1963
Introduction and Early Origins
Like many of the people whose reminiscences of Lancing life appear here, I too came across this fascinating website by pure chance whilst trawling references on the internet to the Lancing/Sompting/Worthing area. So I trust my few recollections of growing up there will prompt further reflections among those of us scattered around the globe, and of course, those of you still resident in the area, and also prompt others to write accounts of our early lives and even perhaps engage in mutual correspondence whilst we still have time before our all too soon inevitable demise.
My name is Malcolm Gerald Hill. I was born in 1940, not in Lancing actually but in Hayes, Middlesex, but within a few weeks of my birth was taken to live with my grandmother, Mrs Gertrude Perkins at her home in First Avenue, Lancing on account of my mother's premature death from that scourge of early 20th century Britain, tuberculosis of the lungs.
Within a year I had been adopted by the Hill family, Mr Malcolm Thomas William Hill and his wife Eva Mary, who at that time lived on Crabtree Lane in a house called White Gates, a lovely detached home now replaced by an apartment block, opposite The Crabtree Inn and on the other side of the road to a row of shops, among which I remember a greengrocer's with the memorably evocative name of Hibdidges. The Hills had a daughter, Barbara Jean, eleven years older than myself, who unfortunately died in 2014 in her eighty-third year and lived with her husband Peter, also deceased this year, 2015, just outside Norwich in Norfolk.
