The community group Friends of Abbey Fields launched their calendar in August this year and for the first time calendars were available on-line.

The calendar was selected in June of this year, after local artists and photographers were invited to submit images of the local area in a competition. Each month features a different image from a different photographer.

Remarkably the first sale was to ex-Kenilworth resident Julie Brisby who now lives with her partner Howard in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. The package was despatched from one of FOAF's distributors, Suthar Rajkumar who runs Fieldgate Post-Office, Bridge street, with her husband.

Given the special nature of the first sale and the location, Julie was asked to share some of her life story, in particular, her memories of Kenilworth.

Julie's Story

I have many happy childhood memories of Abbey Fields, swimming in the pool, fishing for minnows in the brook, tobogganing and, as I got older, walking the dog with my Mum and on a couple of occasions skiing.

My maiden name is Wood, Mum and Dad - Alma and Frank, brothers Ian and Gary and sister Diane.

As a child our family lived in Dudley Road and later moved to Rouncil Lane and my Grandparents, Violet and Bill Povey, lived on Warwick Road. We all attended St John's School then Castle High School. My brother Ian and his family still live in Warwickshire and my niece is still living on Clinton Lane Kenilworth. 

A large portion of my life in Kenilworth, from the mid 1980's to mid 1990's, I worked at Kenilworth Police station in Abbey End and lived in Whitemoor Road.

We moved to New Zealand 19 years ago, originally to Hawke's Bay which is a wine region of New Zealand, and after 18 months we moved to Bay of Plenty and eventually purchased a Kiwifruit orchard. The Kiwifruit industry is very well organised here, my husband works on the orchard full time and the company that pack our fruit provide extra labour when required for the bigger tasks.

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We love the space that we have in New Zealand and the weather is also a great draw card for us, no hard winters!

The photograph I have provided is from our deck overlooking our neighbours Kiwifruit orchard with views down to the coast and Mount Maunganui.

Since moving to New Zealand we have been back to visit Kenilworth four times. We had planned to visit in May this year but that has obviously had to be postponed due to Covid.

We are very lucky here to have very low numbers of Covid and our government is very strict with border control and anyone entering the country must to go into quarantine for two weeks.

Thank you for the happy memories in your calendar.

Julie Brisby

If you haven't purchased your calendar yet, the full list of stockists can be found here.