´óÏó´«Ã½

This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Jackie Jude of Chelmsford Library on behalf of Artin Cornish and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

Apart from Lowfield Farm which was owned by a Mr. French, who I believe was a builder in west London, and which was managed by Mr. Roberts, most of the land around was owned by Lord Whyfold who lived in the big house which I mentioned in the first part of my story. This big house also had a little church of its own in which, in fact, I sang as a choirboy when one of his daughters married there. The other boys I played with were billeted with the estate workers. Each day we would all have to walk the mile to mile and a half up to the village of Churchill to school. It was a church school with only two teachers, apart from the two teachers we brought with us from London, so it was rather crowded. There was also another bit of the school and another teacher for the infants. I don’t think for the two years that I was there my education really improved very much from what I had already been taught in London, apart from the fact Mr. Blake, the headmaster, was very keen on aircraft recognition so we often spent time talking about aircraft and how to recognise them. Also, of course, I learnt a lot about country life.

It was from there after about eighteen months at the school that I took a scholarship exam which I passed. I was later to go to join my London grammar school which had been evacuated to Wellingborough in Northamptonshire. Each day Norman and I would set off in the morning with our white haversacks containing our packed lunches in a tin box to be eaten in the classroom at midday before we went out to play in the playground. It was not tarmacked but just hard stones as far as I can recall, and very rough. In the afternoons we would troop back home again, down the hill, over a little humpbacked bridge, then up an unmade lane to the road and down past where the other boys lived to Lowfield Farm. On the way home we could see the ridge of the Cotswold hills, on which Little Risingham sat, and we could see the weather coming. We often could see clouds coming towards us and see the rain falling on the hills and would know that we would have to hurry if we wanted to get home in the dry. On one occasion we got caught in a thunderstorm and took shelter in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Timms. He was the cowman where Roy and Bob Blackburn were billeted, and I recall Mrs. Timms pulled the curtains, covered the mirror over, and put all the knives and forks away because she was scared of the lightning. It struck me as all being very weird.
One winter we had so much snow that we could not go to school for three days. We were completely cut off by the snowdrifts across the road which of course Norman and I thought were great fun and we used to be able to walk on top of the snowdrifts for a couple of days until they collapsed. We built ourselves snowmen and of course this was a treat for two little London boys who had never seen so much snow. Living on the farm we had lots of food and there was always chicken or rabbit or pigeon or even pheasant sometimes and hare, which I had never had before. We had another roast goose at Christmas and on one occasion a pig was killed and we had a side of bacon hanging up.
We had lots of lovely ham, sweetbreads and all sorts of food which I don’t suppose I had ever eaten before. There were eggs, both chicken and duck and plenty of milk. There was lots of fruit, some of which was bottled during the summer months so we could eat it during the winter. We made some of our own butter which we were sworn to secrecy not to tell anybody about because other people of course were on rations during the war. Of course there was honey too.
It was fascinating seeing Mr Roberts gathering that in wearing his hat with a mesh attached which covered his head and shoulders and with a little smoke gun which he puffed when he was taking the honey section out of the hive. These would then be placed in a machine, which looked something like a boiler and then spun around so that the honey ran out and this went into jars. This was carried out in the dairy part of the house.
I don’t think we had such a thing as a daily newspaper but Mr Roberts used to read something called ‘The Farmer and Stock Breeder’. I remember that because that was cut up into squares and used as toilet paper. That was something else that Norman and I had to get used to, having been used to toilet rolls in London.
The first part of the war was very quiet as far as air raids were concerned and our parents were able to come and see us on two or three occasions before Norman’s father was called up into the Royal Navy and my own father was taken ill and had to go into hospital in the early summer of 1940. I was never to see him again because on the 20th October 1940 he died. I remember coming home from school and eating our meal at the kitchen table and then Mrs Roberts saying to Norman to go out and play because she had something she had to tell John about. When Norman had gone she called me round and sat me on her knee and told me that my father had died. Of course I remember being very upset. A year or so ago I found a letter among my late mother’s papers which was from Mrs Roberts telling my mother how she had broken the news to me and my reaction.
Of course it all flooded back. Mrs Roberts was very kind to us and I am sure she helped me a lot to get over the sadness that I felt.
Mrs Roberts was herself a Roman Catholic and would from time to time cycle all the way into Chipping Norton, some five miles away, to attend Mass. Each evening she would stand at the foot of our bed and we would say prayers. After saying Our Father and the Creed we would pray for the safety of our parents and then would always finish up with the same prayer for ourselves which went:
‘In my little bed I lie,
Heavenly Father hear my cry,
God protect me through the night
And keep me safe till morning light’
On Sunday mornings she would send us off to the village church where we soon joined the choir and that was the beginning of my choral singing for 65 years later I am still singing in a church choir. As I believe I have already said, during 1940 Norman’s father was called up into the navy and my own father died so that meant the mothers were living alone in London. It was some time during the blitz that Norman’s home was badly damaged and his mother came down to Sarsden in a very shocked state but was able to rent a cottage about a mile away from Lowfield Farm. However she very kindly consented to let Norman stay on with me at Lowfield Farm and only go up to visit his mother on occasions until I left to go to join my grammar school at the end of August, beginning of September 1941.
Of course that began another chapter in my story of evacuation but I used to return during the long summer holidays to Sarsden and Lowfield Farm and I continued to keep in contact with them until they died in the 1960s.

Thoughts of my stay at Lowfield Farm at Sarsden in Oxfordshire
Sunday was always a rather special day as regards Sunday lunch. We would always have a Yorkshire pudding to start with. This was absolutely delicious. The batter was poured into a baking tray and put in the oven with the joint suspended above it so that as it was cooking the juices of the meat would run into the Yorkshire pudding. When this was ready it was p[laced before Mr Roberts for him to carve out slices for each of us and this was eaten separately with just gravy poured over it. After this the joint would be brought in and Mr Roberts would carve slices from the joint on separate plates piled high with fresh vegetables.
The big day in farm life in those days was when the contractor’s men came with their monster machine. It would be all hands to the pumps on such a day and men would stand on top of the rick and toss sheaves of wheat or oats into the top of the machine, which was steam driven, and out of the other end would pour the grains of wheat into sacks and at the other end would discharge bales of straw tied with string. A far cry from today when a combine harvester comes into a field and does the whole operation more or less in one go, when the wheat is cut and the grain separated from the straw and the straw bales are pushed out the back all bundled up and the grain goes into a separate hopper and is then taken away to be dried in huge barns. In those days when the grain of wheat, barley, oats was deemed too ripe a machine called a binder, which combined the cutting and tying up of the sheaves as it was cut, would be brought in. The grain would fall onto a belt, be taken into a machine and tied and then thrown out the back where it would be somebody else’s job to walk behind the machine picking these sheaves up and putting them into what is called stooks. Usually the heads would be bent together in lines of three with a separate sheaf at each end to be left in the fields to dry. If there was good weather and they dried quickly they would then be gathered up, tossed up with a fork into a cart pulled by one of the horses and then taken away into the rick yard and unloaded and stacked into ricks, waiting for perhaps two or three months until the contract thresher would come to complete the operation to bag up the grain. Of course, before the grain harvest it was haymaking at the end of June, beginning of July when the grass which had been left to grow would be cut and raked into lines to dry in the fields. These rows would have had to be turned two or three times during the few days after the cutting to make sure it was completely dry before it was loaded onto carts, pulled by a horse of course, to be taken to the rick yard to be stacked. It was very important that the hay was quite dry because if it was damp then it could very easily heat up and then spontaneous combustion would take place and a fire would result and destroy perhaps the whole of the rick yard. So care had to be taken to keep this dry. Very often these would be thatched with straw just in the same way that a cottage was thatched to keep rain out. They would have to keep the hay sweet for feeding the animals during the winter months when there was a shortage of grass.
When we needed our hair cut we would have to go into Chipping Norton and as I recall there was only one bus a week and on one occasion we missed the return bus and we had to walk back with Mrs Roberts carrying the shopping she had bought and we boys running between trees pretending they were stations to shorten the journey. I think it was a game devised by Mrs Roberts to take our minds off the four mile walk.
There was a general shop in Churchill but apart from that and the van which came round about once a week, anything of major importance would have to come from Chipping Norton bearing in mind there was no car, everything had to be carried by hand.
Washing of course would have to be done by hand. There were no washing machines and the wash house was a brick built shed, as it were, in the back garden. The lavatory was behind this.
The toilet itself was a large plank of wood with a hole in it directly over a cess pit. Remember there was no running water, so there was no flush toilet. There was no electricity, so there was no light in there. The only light was the daylight that came in over the top of the door so it was not a place to linger, especially in the winter.
To wash your hands you had to go back into the kitchen to get an enamel jug to dip into a pail of water which was kept under the sink, pour it into an enamel bowl in the sink and wash your hands with some carbolic soap and cold water. Coming from a tap over the sink every drop of hot water had to be heated on the kitchen range. Nevertheless it must have been a pretty healthy life because, apart from colds, I can’t remember ever being ill down there.
I recall having a very bad cough on one occasion and Mrs Roberts coming in the middle of the night with her candle, wearing a long white nightdress with her hair, which she usually kept it up in a bun during the day, hanging in a big plait down her back .She gave me some concoction which I think was something like honey, glycerine and vinegar which was quite nice to take and very soothing.
I remember standing out in the back garden one night looking towards the northwest and there was a great red glow in the sky. I think it must have been the night Coventry was badly bombed.
In the last term at the junior school the boys were taken by coach to Chipping Norton where we were taught woodwork. It was a most valuable instruction as I learned how to cut a dovetail joint and also to keep both hands behind the edge of my chisel which is the most valuable information that you can give a young person and something I carried with me into adult life in doing ‘Do-It-Yourself’ around the house in my early married days.
I am pleased to say that after 65 years I am still in contact with Norman Horlock and we ring each other up on our respective birthdays, his being in May and mine in December. We both remain very thankful to Mr and Mrs Roberts for taking us in and for the times we had on Lowfield Farm in Oxfordshire.
That probably concludes the immediate memories that I have of those formative years between 1939 and 1945.

To be continued…..

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.