This article written by Jackie Rickenberg was published in the Parish Magazine in October 2022
We will all truly be ensconced in Autumn when you read this, but currently I am reflecting on the long, hot summer we either endured or savoured, depending on your disposition! It made me think about how we managed in years gone by and what tips we could, in fact, glean from those days. So, as we approach what will invariably be a difficult winter for an awful lot of people, from these articles, we are reminded that our sense of community is more important than ever.
From “In Days Gone By” by Lucy Good, she writes:
“After being without electricity and trouble with the water recently, reminds me of days gone by in the village when we had a very hot summer and a drought. I lived in Yew Cottage. My father, Thomas Karn, worked with grandad and Uncle Jack in the Forge (the Karns at the shop were another family). There was no electricity in the village in those days or water on the mains. The rain water butts and tanks were empty and then the wells dried up. I can see my father now, with a wooden yoke with two pails on, struggling up Dye House Hill after getting some water from the stream at the bottom which, in those days, fell into a small waterfall before going under the road. The water had to be for drinking, washing, cooking etc, and also some had to be brought up to use in the Forge. Mr Rapley at Hill Farm had a horse-drawn water cart which he used to get water for the animals and also to water the cricket pitch which was done with the horse’s hooves bound with sacks to save them churning the green up. Everyone had oil lamps and candles for lighting – and of course, coal or log fires and stoves for cooking on.
Apart from all this, what we did have were two shops. Karn’s Stores, where their bread was baked in a brick oven heated by wood faggots and always hot cross buns on Good Friday mornings, delivered on the door step still warm. The oven had to be kept heated and on Sunday mornings one could take their joint or a cake along and get them cooked for a penny for each one”.
Taken from Dye House showing the steep gradient of the hill
In “Disappearances” written by Mary Bennett, she reflects on the changing landscape and how nature is being affected by the climate and ever-changing world.
“One of the changes in the Thursley scene during my lifetime has been the disappearance of ponds. Before the late 1940’s every farm had one. Cows drank from them, ducks swam on them, swallows hawked over them, frogs spawned on them. One of my great failures as a godparent was when I assured a child in need of tadpoles that there were bound to be lots in the pond in Smallbrook Lane and then arrived to discover that it had been cleaned up and turned into an ornamental pool. Later it went altogether. Where do frogs go to breed now? Or have they been eliminated? (I do believe it has been reinstated – Ed).
What else has vanished? Elms and rabbits, of course, though both are doing their best to come back. The big hedge-elms went not many years after the war, victims of the axe rather than the bug. Before that we called the straight stretch of Highfield Lane immediately above Homefields, “The Avenue” because it was bordered with such fine trees. They made it very dark when one walked up from the village on a winter evening, so that it was a comfort to come back into the starlight as one turned the corner; all the more of a comfort since at that point there was a nasty little echo that sounded like footsteps padding along behind one. Alarming in a different way was an occasional sight of the big white barn owl that lived, I think, in a tumble-down, ivy-grown barn behind Hedge (now Rawdon). The brown owl can still be heard from time to time, but I suspect that it is a very long time since a white owl was last in evidence in Thursley.
Bats and butterflies are both much scarcer than they were. What child would now covet a butterfly net? A few years ago, I would have said the same of chaffinches, but they seem to be coming back even more successfully than rabbits or elms. I was delighted to encounter quite a good flock in Highfield Lane last winter, even though it was nothing to compare with the huge flocks that once used to turn up, with supporting parties of greenfinches, every time that one fed the hens during the winter months. I suppose that the grubbing up of many hedges must have made all the everyday hedge birds thinner on the ground, but as long as there were some of them about one doesn’t really notice until they vanish completely.
I don’t remember when the cuckoo started to become so much rarer. In May, cuckoos once really did sing all day, everywhere, and one often saw them flying over the fields, cucking and burbling as they went. House martins, anxiously awaited, still turn up; but in the last few years the swallow has all but vanished. Is all this the result of events in Africa, or is it anything to do with damage to habitat here? Does everyone in every country tidy up too much? It is melancholy to think that a child growing up in Thursley in future might have to go to a special reserve to see a tadpole or an owl, and might never see a swallow at all”.
Interesting that Colin the cuckoo, so admired by a pilgrimage of twitchers every May on the parish field, would have had a lot more feathered friends than he does today.
This was written around the mid 1980’s (although some of it refers to much earlier times, as does the first article), after the last major epidemics of Dutch elm disease and myxomatosis had ravaged the country. And I’m not sure the memories, certainly from my childhood, of the pastime of young children capturing butterflies in jam jars, is to be encouraged these days!