The Memories of Bill Morton
BILL Morton was born in Hethersett in 1920 and brought up in the village in the years between the two World Wars. Bill now lives in Canada. He kindly sent us a copy of his manuscript "A Thursday's Child" which outlines what it was like growing up in the village. This document has never previously been published and we are very grateful to Bill for allowing us to use extracts for this web site. The full manuscript will be placed in the Hethersett Archives as it also covers various trips and other facts about the county of Norfolk.
LOOKING back from the age of ninety; a distance of memory of about eighty-six years, I can still remember my first day in school. I started school at the age of four years and all sorts of memories come to mind. Sitting on my desk as I write this is a piece of wood about five inches long by two and one half wide and about one and one half inches deep. In the top of this piece of wood is an oval indentation which turns it into a stud tray. I remember the year I acquired this article, it would be nineteen thirties of the last century. The church bells of St Remigius Church had to be re-hung. The massive oak beams on which the original peel of bells had been hung had been eaten away by the deathwatch beetle. When the beams were removed quite a bit of wood was salvaged by a local carpenter and various articles were manufactured and sold to parishioners. I acquired my stud tray in the sale. This was in the time when we all wore tunic shirts and had to have back and front studs to attach the collar. We also wore cuff links so it was convenient to have a stud tray.
Since leaving Hethersett I have traveled a long road. My service years took me around the United Kingdom and Africa. On immigrating to Canada my business activities took me to some eighty countries on six continents. It has been a long and much traveled life ,
The following is a poem we used to recite as children:
Mondays child is fair of face
Tuesdays child is full of grace
Wednesdays child is full of woe
Thursdays child has far to go
Fridays child is loving and giving
Saturdays child works hard for a living
And a child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay
Strange at it may seem I was born on a Thursday.
The period between the two world Wars from 1918 to 1939 was a period of twenty one years, I was born in 1920. The Country had not yet got over the impact of the First World War. Rationing was still in effect and all sorts of restrictions on what one could do or not do still existed. It has also been referred to as an interval in a large conflict between the same set of belligerents.
The Government had told the people that the 1914 to 1918 was a war to end all wars, and those who had fought in the war would be properly rewarded. Like most wars, this war was expected to be a short one. In fact, it was expected the first troops who had gone to the war in September 1914 would be home for Christmas. The casualties were dreadful; the trench warfare was unremitting and ghastly. The impact on a village such as Hethersett was disastrous. The young men who were 19 years of age when the war broke out paid a high price, as did those who followed them.
The British Empire was built on the back of the Industrial Revolution. It had peaked industrially in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it had failed to modernise and as a consequence its techniques and processes were no longer competitive. Britain entered the 1914 war non-competitive with the rest of the world and as a consequence in the immediate post war period was unable to return to the prewar days of empire. In 1920 there was a slump and basic industries such as textiles, ship construction, coal and mining plus many other industries never recovered.
The ten years from 1920 to 1930 could be called the decade of strikes and strife. During this decade there were two police strikes, a national rail strike, a long lasting shipbuilders strike, two national coal strikes, a two month long engineering strikes all of which culminated in the General Strike of 1926. By 1930, there were over two million people out of work and this situation remained so until 1936. Even when the Second World War broke out in 1939 there were 1.25 million people out of work.
I have clear memories of the General Strike and the coal strikes. While not fully understanding all the issues involved at the time I knew from overhearing what my parents were saying that it was not good and that we were going to feel the impact. It seemed to me there were great differences of opinion among people. There were those who condemned the strikers, generally those who considered themselves upper class and those who sympathized with the strikers, generally were the workers or poorer people. Society was divided and would not become cohesive until the Second World War. There was considerable anger and bitterness, particularly among the people who had fought in the war. The promises made had not been kept. Even some of the leaders of the labour party were considered traitors which made the working class and particularly the unemployed even more bitter.
1931 saw the onset of the great depression which made industrial improvement difficult and while its effect was worse in the industrial areas it nevertheless had its deleterious effect on rural Britain. It seemed that as conditions became worse and opportunities became even less with resulting lowering of wages. Many technical firms hired apprentices and when they qualified as journeymen they were let go and new apprentices were hired. This was a way of obtaining cheap labour and it appeared there was little anyone could do about it.
As the clouds heralding the coming conflict gathered over Europe, and despite the appeasement efforts by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain we knew we were headed for war and this happened in September 1939.
It was a difficult time for those of us born into the bottom layers of the social strata as nothing came easily. There was always some fear involved in what one said or did. There were social divisions but not always clearly defined. It was not until one had crossed the line did one become aware of having committed a social indiscretion of stepping out of place. In a following chapter I describe the habits of the Panama Ape. Similar habits were practiced by members of society in Hethersett. Even those of us who showed some ambition to improve our lot were accused of “getting above oneself” a form of social sin, and became targets of vituperation and calumny. It was not until it was pointed out to me that I became aware of the social levitation I had committed although to this day I am not sure how I did it.
The Rural Poor
I was born in Hethersett a Norfolk village the son of a farm labourer in the year 1920.
There was a tendency among the great novelists to romanticise the rural poor as the salt of the earth. The honest countryman happy in his role and lot is the picture transmitted by many writers. The ploughman homeward plodding his weary way was all very romantic, including the setting sun.
This view of the rural poor has been reinforced by novelists such as Thomas Hardy and the romantic poets. I have not found a writer who dealt with the reality of the rural poor, the poor housing the rural wage, the inadequate education. There is no doubt the rural farm worker was the sub soil which nourished the whole rural economy of England. It was a long established system reaching back several hundred years. The lot of the farm worker was a hard one. Long hours starting in the early morning, for poor pay {thirty shillings per week minus a deduction for rent if his cottage was tied to the farm on which he worked} He worked 5 1/2 or six days per week and at certain seasons of the year he worked sun up to sun down. To romanticise this was wonderful for individuals who had not lived it. For peoples who had not shovelled manure, who had not worked the laborious tasks that are required to produce the crops on which they had fed.
With the limited education available in the rural communities the only alternative to farm work for the countryman was the army and it was from the rural poor that the county regiments were recruited.
In writing about the first nineteen years of my life I feel I am trying to cover a period which has not been adequately addressed by other writers. It was a period of social unrest and industrial turmoil. Those of us who grew up in that period grew up with some resentment and anger. There was enormous pressure for social reform a great deal of it coming from the men who had served in the military in the First World War and who felt they had been short-changed
It was an in between period, not only in between two World Wars but also a period between attitudes and outlooks. It was a period that still clung to the robes of empire but could not afford the breech clout of reality.
Farm work was still labour intensive, although there were indications of change such as the use of farm tractors and other mechanisation on the farms. One could see the changes coming and with the change, hopefully would come improvement in the lot of the rural worker.
In the following chapters I will try to convey to the reader what it was like to grow up in that rural society. The difficulties we encountered and how we tried to solve our problems with the economic and social mores of that time. The oppressive class distinctions embedded in the lower layers of the bottom strata of society reached over us and influenced everything we did and every thought we had. We were prisoners of a system that was being forced to change but was resisting change. The soil of England had been worked watered and manured by the sweat and energy of the rural worker but his participation in the rewards had always been minor in relation to the effort he had expended.
The rural poor lived with a fear, a fear of being unable to support one self. There was also a fear that hovered always with the rural poor and that was the fear of the workhouse. The workhouse was the bitter end, the ultimate disgrace. I know my parents lived with that fear, the fear that they would be unable to support themselves and that they would finish up in the Workhouse. The workhouse was viewed as not much better than a sentence to prison. Poverty was viewed as a form of disgrace. To be dependant was treated as a social evil and those who had committed this social evil had not measured up to the high standards set by their betters.
The puritan movement among the Protestants brought to their adherents a great regard for this worlds goods and it seems they felt that in accumulating wealth it was because God had blessed them and they were therefore among those who were favoured by the Almighty. The obverse of that coin and argument was that if you were poor it was because God had not seen fit to favour you and you were in some way unfitting to be blessed with the goods of this world. There was also a form of puritanism in the Catholic Church called Jansenism which revealed itself as a denial of any of the comforts which could be obtained in this world which made Catholic orphanages harsh and bleak. Religious orders and male dominated organisations often became hiding places for sexual perverts and deviants.
Looking back from my present age of ninety two there is a misty rosiness which shrouds the past and conceals some of the unpleasantness which pervaded those days. The reality in which we lived was overshadowed by class and the mean narrowness of the “have not’s” struggling to achieve the status of “haves”. It was like a procession of people climbing a ladder and having no regard for the hands and fingers on which they trod, in fact some seemed to get a measure of satisfaction from crushing fingers and hands. Blowing away the mist that clouds the vision of memory, the reality of those days is revealed as stark and cold.
The most persistent memory I have of my early life is being wet and cold. Being cold was part of how we dressed as boys. We wore short pants and during winter in Norfolk the winds would often come from the North-East for periods of a week or so at a time. It would seem we would never get warm. It appeared to be always wet and cold and we would pray for a change in the wind. When I started work I had to cycle about seven miles in the early morning and in rain so that I seemed to get wet very often with no way of getting dry.
There was only one fireplace in the house and we all crowded around in an attempt to get warm. Clothing was expensive and we always seemed to be short of something. Winter clothing was always a great concern, and in particular winter coats. There were rummage sales held in the village [jumble sales they were called] by church or other groups and my mother was a regular attendee looking for suitable winter clothing. I cannot remember my Father having a new suit of clothing. He always had a second hand suit which my Mother had found at a jumble sale.
Being properly dressed to attend church on Sunday was of great concern and it seemed that unless you were cleanly and properly dressed for church you had little hope of getting into heaven when you died. I always had a mental picture of arriving at the gates of heaven and having St Peter looking at me and shaking his head because my boots were dirty or my clothing soiled.
Getting a weekly bath was also a great exercise. Water had to be drawn up from a well by a windlass and carried to the wash house in a pail, heated and we took turns in the bath. Again it was instilled into us that “cleanliness was next to godliness”. I do not know where this saying came from but I am sure whoever said it originally was not raised in a clay lump Norfolk farm labourer’s cottage.
The village of Hethersett covers some 2,695 acres and lies along the old Highway 11 (now 1172) approximately 6 miles from the city of Norwich in the county of Norfolk. The village has a long history dating back to before the Doomsday Book where it is mentioned. It is bounded by Wymondham, Great Melton, Little Melton, Colney, Cringleford, Keswick and Ketteringham Although the name is Saxon, there is evidence of older settlements such as New Stone Age and Roman.
The present parish church was built starting in 1320 and completed in the 15th century.
The most notable event in the history of the village appears to be the Ketts rebellion in 1549.
Hethersett lies very close to Norwich so close that people think it is part of Norwich. Even though many of the residents of Hethersett found employment in Norwich it is nevertheless a separate community.
When I was growing up, the village had three churches. The parish church of St Remigius which was Church of England and Methodist and Baptist places of worship called Chapels. The village had two schools The first was a church school called the National School the other was called the British School which seemed to have had some relationship with the Methodists.
The village contained four public houses. The Kings Head, the Queens Head, the Prince of Wales and the Greyhound. The number of public houses out-numbered the churches which accounted for the fact that pubs opened after the Sunday morning services in the churches in which parishioners were often told to “thirst after righteousness” which was something many did. There was one baker, one post office, three butchers; two Sweet shops a bicycle shop, three grocery shops, one automobile garage, a blacksmith and carpenters shop.
The village had a good bus service. Some buses went through to Wymondham along the main London Road. Most turned off the London Road at the Queens Head and proceeded through the village turning south at Mill Road and then rejoined the London Road at the New Road where it went on to Wymondham. Some buses continued to Attleborough. It was a good service as a lot of people who lived in Hethersett worked in Norwich and some worked in Wymondham which also had some industry, including two brush factories.
There was a railway that went through Hethersett. It was part of the London and North Eastern Scottish system. There was a railway station but not many trains stopped or used the station.
The best thing about the railway tracks were the big banks on which grew wild strawberries. These wild strawberries were the tastiest I have ever sampled and going there to gather them was a yearly undertaking.
Hethersett was quite flat with only a couple of small hills. The area was drained by two stream systems. One started near the church from a group of springs and another which crossed the Great Melton Road and flowed in the direction of Wymondham where it eventually joined a small river called the Tiffey which then joined the river Yare at Barford. To us village boys the streams were a source of great interest as they hosted moor- hens and water rats.
OWNERSHIP OF LAND
In the years after the First World War ownership of land in England was still very much in the hands of a few large land owners. These landowners lived on the rents they obtained from leasing out farms to the farmers who cultivated the land. This system had existed for several hundred years. As a consequence of this very few people living in the village were able to own the houses they lived in. Figures available for the year 1938 indicate that less than thirty per cent of houses in the United Kingdom were owner occupied. In the rural areas the cottages were often tied to the job and were part of the rented property. This made it difficult for a man to leave his employment as he had to give up his house which went with his job. Alternative housing did exist for rent which was built by the local Council but the waiting period to get one was generally fairly long.
Hethersett had its own race course and when I was a boy there were half day races held every summer. The course was off Station Lane. There was a small lane which led to the course which was to the north of Station Lane. The course had jumps of various types and people referred to it as a steeplechase.
The course had no buildings and when races were held tents of various sizes were erected. It was a gathering place for the breeches and bowler hatted brigade. Men turned up with shooting sticks and women strutted around in Jodhpurs. The first time I saw a man perched on a shooting stick I was puzzled and wondered where the top of the stick ended, it was not until the man stood up and walked away that I saw that the stick had a folding sort of saddle on which he sat.
I have clear memories of races, the horses and their riders in their silks. I also have memories of the smells which pervaded the course. The smell of the horses which included their droppings and urine, but also there was a lot of beer drunk and the toilet arrangements were somewhat primitive, which all added to the atmosphere. To us village boys it was all very interesting, particularly watching the bookies and their tic tac men signalling the odds.
There was a stream which ran through the course which provided a water jump, this was where riders would often fall and finish up in the water. I heard one woman say to another that Bunnie had come an arser which I understood to mean he had landed on his rear end. I do not know when the Hethersett races ended but I suspect the onset of the Depression had something to do with it.
The village had a population of about a thousand souls who mostly adhered to the Church of England. There were a few hundred Methodists and a few Baptists. There was a small group of Roman Catholics who attended mass at the nearby town of Wymondham. It was also rumoured that there were a couple of members of the British Flat Earth Society.
The local Church was dedicated to Saint Remigius which reflected local history. After the battle of Crecy which was fought in 1346 Edward III insisted that instead of exporting the raw wool
England should do its own weaving and imported French and Flemish weavers to convert the wool into cloth. A number of these imports settled in East Anglia where a lot of the wool was raised. As a result of these newcomers to the area, they not only built churches they also dedicated churches to their own Saints hence Hethersett got a church dedicated to a French Saint.
One of the strange and ironic twists of history is that Remigius was originally a Christian Romanised Celt from England who was sent to France to Christianize the Franks who were pagan and were invading eastern France. The City of Rheims is named after him.
While the Church of England was the largest religious group in the village it was probably the smallest in Church attendance. The church was a convenient place in which to get married, baptized and buried. A further irony was that there was only one graveyard in the village and that was next to the church. As a consequence no matter what your religion was while you were alive, you were likely to find your final resting place beside or next to members of another Christian sect.
I remember the first time I heard a radio. It was a cat’s whisker crystal set. Eventually radio became popular in the village as was evidenced by the number of wireless poles erected at almost every house, but we still made our own entertainment through the village council and church groups. We had social evenings and general knowledge competitions. Our spelling bees were popular particularly the knock out type. We brought in interesting speakers on all sorts of subjects. One interesting speaker we brought in was Sir Eric Teichman who had been permanent British Consul to the Chinese Government and brought along a marvellous collection of Chinese artefacts. This sparked my interest in that Country and culture which I have never lost. Teichman was unfortunately murdered by two United States soldiers during the Second World War. They were poaching on his property Anyone wishing to know more about Teichman and China should read Simon Winchesters “The man who loved China”
I also remember clinging to my Mothers skirt and hearing this strange noise overhead and looking up to see this cigar shaped thing in the sky and being told it was an airship. I found out later that it was the R.34 and was stationed at Pulham St Mary. Later in the second world war I was going through some personnel records of men on the unit for which I was adjutant and noticed one sergeant had been stationed at Pulham and had been a helmsman on the R.34.
One of our knockout spelling bees became quite contentious. There were two good spellers in the village. One was the village Church of England Rector and the other was a Methodist farmer. It was the rectors turn to challenge the Farmer to spell and he asked the farmer to spell “auspice” This was an unfortunate choice and caused some bad feelings between the two religious groups To ask a farmer to spell auspice at a time when most farm work was done by horses was considered by the Methodist population as just “not cricket”. As a matter of fact, it was considered fortunate that competition between the two religious groups was limited to spelling bees.
Very early on I became extremely interested in history and in particular local history. Almost every village or locality had ghost stories which had connections to some notable event in the past Because of these ghost stories my friends and I decided to investigate these ghost stories and to send these findings to the local newspaper. One was the story of the Baconsthorpe ghost. The Baconsthorpe Manor stands just inland from the town of Cromer on the North Sea. The story of the Baconsthorpe ghost concerned two brothers who quarrelled over the inheritance of the manor and one brother had thrown his brother off the manor wall and was disembowelled on a defensive spike. The Baconsthorpe ghost is reputed to walk the ruins of the Manor holding the ripped out intestines of his brother. Needless to say we did not see any ghost. Hethersett had its own ghost, so rumour said, a headless dog called Old Chuck who was supposed to haunt the local village at certain places. I never found anyone who admitted that they had seen him.
I remember visiting another place of interest called Grimes Graves. How this place got its name I do not know. It was a group of tunnels dug out by Neolithic peoples searching for the flints they used to make their tools. As the Neolithic people were small and the only illumination allowed in the tunnels were candles crawling through the small apertures without burning the backside of the fellow in front required considerable dexterity and care.
We also became involved in remarking of the Pedders Way. The Pedder’s Way was the old Pilgrim Road which led to the shrine of Our Lady Of Walsingham, and then went on to the coast near Hunstanton. This shrine was the second most popular shrine for pilgrimages in England second only to the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Only part of the Way exists a good deal of it has been covered with development or new road surfaces. One of the fascinating aspects of Norfolk is that it has seen every invasion of the island and the different peoples who have occupied the County have left traces of their being there. Even before the Roman period one can find traces of the Celtic people. After the Roman period one can find evidence of Anglo Saxon, Danish and Norman occupation.
CHURCH HISTORY
Going back to history of the Church of Saint Remigius brings to mind the fact that the church had no toilets. It was claimed that the longest sermon preached in that church was in the early seventeenth century and was of considerable duration. For all that I can find out preachers in those days were long and windy and sermons could last several hours. Now if the preacher stayed in the pulpit for any length of time did he have a “peers bladder or did he have a bucket?’ What about the congregation? Did they slip out to find a convenient clump of bushes or did they suffer in silence. Even in my day as an altar boy we had to be careful to relieve ourselves before the service started. There was one convenient grave stone big enough for a small boy to hide behind and to obtain relief, and it would seem it had provided a place for that purpose for several generations.
Something else which always intrigued me about the church was that there was a room over the porch to which there was no access. How that came about nobody seemed to know but never appears to have been used.
The people who were grownups during my childhood were born in the later part of the Victorian or in the early part of the Edwardian reign. From all that I have read of those particular periods they were times of very great class distinction. A great number of the mothers of my contemporaries had been in domestic service. They started work right after school generally as kitchen or scullery maids. Even domestic service had its own class distinction. Butler for men, or in the case of females, house- keeper was at the top of the heap and then there was a descending order to the bottom, where the scullery or kitchen maid or the stable boy had their places.
The men these women married were often local men who worked on the farms in the area or similar work which was available locally. They carried into the village social structure and the distinctions they had encountered and learned in domestic service.
I remember overhearing one conversation between a group of women where a woman, who had been in domestic service as a ladies maid, emphasizing that fact in order to establish her superiority over the other women.
My mother had started as a scullery maid. I believe she was a cook when she met my father who had just returned home from the First World War
There is an old saying “that Jack is as good as his master” That old saying may have applied in other parts but it did not apply in Hethersett when I was growing up. Jack was not perceived as being as good as his master and there were lots of people who made certain that he did not get that idea. When Jack went to his master’s house he went to the back door. He addressed his master as Sir and the master addressed Jack by his surname such as Smith. He never sat down in the presence of his master and was expected to pull his forelock and remove his hat before he spoke.
As I have mentioned class was a well-established and functioning force in the village. Although the village had a population of about one thousand souls, the social atmosphere which pervaded was of a smaller entity or a much smaller hamlet. It seemed everyone knew everyone else’s business genealogy and history.
To those of us who were viewed as belonging to the bottom of the heap there was no way to change this. Hethersett was not only divided vertically it was also divided horizontally. The vertical divisions came about from the church or religious group you were perceived to be a part of i.e. Church of England, Methodist or Baptist. The horizontal divisions were caused mainly by money. Certain occupations could command better incomes which brought emphasis to the horizontal divides. The depression caused some disruption to the historical divisions, for instance young men on leaving school would enter an apprenticeship contract with a firm and when they were qualified as journeymen they would be released from their employment. Apprentices would be doing journeymen work and the journeyman would be on the dole. This meant that the horizontal divisions became narrower and that society devolved into an ever growing layer of poor and a layer of people on top with money.
The major problem was the occupants of the social layer directly above the layer you were viewed to be in. I noticed the same phenomena in South Africa; the most rabid racists were the poor whites the black South Africans were seen as competition. As the black South Africans rose economically and socially the poor whites saw themselves as sinking. The same thing, but on a much smaller scale pervaded the village as I grew up.
There was an expression used frequently in the parlance of the day “knowing your place”. One had to know your place, where you sat in church, the school you went to, who you made friends with and even what you wore. Certainly what you did for a living or what your father did determined your place.
There was in one of the collects which we had to learn in Sunday school a statement which said in effect that we should be content in the place to which God had seen fit to call us. I had not noticed that God had called me to any place and I was certain that when my place was pointed out to me by a very self-important person who I was sure was convinced that he or she had received directions from God and was carrying out Gods will in putting me in my place. In other word the very people who were deciding where all belonged were the ones who made the decisions and were blaming it on God.
A lot of the class distinction disappeared in the Second World War. Most of us started at the bottom and promotion came mainly on ability.
There was an attitude among some of the Christians in the village that poverty was a form of sin. There was reasoning which said that Christians were the favoured of God and the more goods and money you had meant that you were being blessed by God. This was undoubtedly a way of persuading them that they were in fact the upstanding people they believed they were. There was an obverse side to this coin which said if you were poor you had in some way offended God and therefore being poor was your responsibility and you had only yourselves to blame.
The poor and in particular orphans became a charge on the parish. In the case of orphans they were put in the workhouse or an orphanage and many were swept up in a scheme to transport and settle these children in countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. All these countries had a shortage of farm labour and this scheme gave the local authorities in Britain a way to relieve themselves of a financial burden on the ratepayers.
While the orphan scheme may have had good intentions at the start there is no doubt it did not take long for it to deteriorate into an operation beneficial to the operators of the immigration scheme and to recipients of the child labour. There is evidence that some of the operators of the scheme were paid as much as ten pounds sterling by local authorities in Britain to take the children off their hands.
Many of the children shipped were not orphans but children of the poor who were left in care homes. Many were shipped out of Britain and were deceived into believing their parents were dead and that they would be welcomed into kind and loving homes. This may have been true of a minority but the reality for many was the opposite. They were exploited as cheap agricultural labour and any I have talked to in Canada have bitter memories.
I have long believed the transportation of convicts was a way to get rid of the poor. Many of the convicts who were transported had broken the law for poaching and other paltry property crimes. Their offences for which they were convicted were often a last resort before starvation their problem was they had offended against the wealthy land owners.
Functioning in the village was a number of organisations. For the men there were the Foresters which had a relationship with the Anglican Church and The Odd fellows both provided inexpensive services to their members such as insurance, The Foresters had a sports day which was something to look forward to and was well attended. For the ladies there were The Women’s Institute and the Mothers Union. The Women’s Institute was dedicated to teaching women new or improved skills. The Mothers Union was associated with the church and was aimed at encouraging women to bring up their children in the church and to providing stable family life.
MY FAMILY TREE
My Morton grandfather was a Scot from Ayrshire. He served in the Royal Navy and died at sea. My father’s mother came from the Isle of Wight. There were two sons of that marriage and William for whom I am named was left in Scotland when his father’s ship was relocated to Portsmouth, he eventually migrated to the United States. My Grandfather died before my father was born. Grandmother Emma Morton re-married, her second marriage was to an army man named John Plummer who obtained work in Cringleford and that is where my father was brought up living in what was always known as the Round House.
My mother’s family name was Ringer. A Charles Ringer married Frances Lewarne in Hethersett and had eleven children seven boys and four girls. As far as I can ascertain the Ringers were a North Norfolk family. I believe there are gravestones in the churchyard of the Villages of Trunch and Swafield, Norfolk carrying the name of Ringer. The name Ringer is thought to have two possible origins. One that it originates as the name Reinger or Rainger or it could have come from the old English hringanas meaning a ring, which could make it an occupational name. The oldest mention I have been able to find of this name is in Northamptonshire where a family of Ringers held a manor.
To understand these people and how they got to Hethersett and the conditions under which they lived and worked it is necessary to go back to the Napoleonic and pre-Napoleonic periods. When reading about Wellington's Peninsular campaign the regiments that served in his army and doing the same type of study of Nelsons ships and the individuals who manned them it is possible to see where the people came from and why.
When I learned that my grandfather had died at an early age while serving in the Royal Navy at the middle of nineteenth century I researched conditions these men served under. One medical historian called the ships” floating hell holes”. They were rife with disease of all types and anyone serving on them had a better chance of surviving cannonball, shot or shell than surviving the diseases carried on board.
The regiments which made up Wellington’s army had a high proportion of Scots and Irish. There were two good reasons for this - there was still loyalty to the Stewart's in Scotland and to a potentially Catholic monarch in Ireland. The Hanoverian monarchs never felt very secure on the English throne and to keep potentially rebel groups out of the British Isles it was expedient to enlist them in the army and have them serve on the continent and elsewhere. There were two major attempts to replace the house of Hanover, one in 1715 and another in 1745. For many Scots or Irish of the Catholic faith there was no future to be found in the British Isles. Many like Patrick Gordon a Catholic Scot, found service with the King of Sweden in the Great Northern War against Poland. He was captured by the Poles and offered service with the Polish Army. He was captured again and took service with Sweden. Gordon was such a good soldier he was offered service with the Swedes altogether three times. Peter of Russia heard about Patrick Gordon and offered him service. Peter’s first two great regiments were set up and trained by Gordon.
There is another similar case involving an Irishman by the name of Vincent O'Higgins who had family teaching at the University of Salamanca and went there to complete his education. He took trade goods and went to Lima, Peru and fathered a son on a Spanish Lady. Vincent O'Higgins went on to become the Spanish Vice Regent for about half of South America while the son Bernard grew up to become the great liberator of Chile.
I describe the two instances above as examples of people from the fringes of the British Isles taking service with foreign governments because they were unable to find opportunities in their own land for racial or religious reasons. There were thousands like them such as whole regiments of Irish and Scots serving in the French Army. The Regiment Dillon was made up entirely of Irishmen serving France. The second in command to Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham was a Scot. It is also ironic that the first troops to climb the heights of Abraham at Quebec were Scots who could speak French and answer the challenge in that tongue because they had previously served in the French army.
Another interesting case was James Cook the father of the great navigator. His original name was not Cook as he was a Jacobite Scot who rose with James Stewart in the 1715 rebellion and had to escape out of Scotland. If he had been caught he would have been hung. He travelled far enough south to Whitby in Yorkshire where his accent would not be that pronounced and married a local girl. He became a farm bailiff. His son went to sea as a master of a Whitby collier and then joining the Navy and rising to warrant rank. When the admiralty wanted to explore the South Pole, the only navigator they deemed capable of carrying out the undertaking was Cook who had to be commissioned to command a naval ship. It was Cook who surveyed the St Lawrence and Newfoundland, which permitted Woolf to bring his army up to Quebec. Cooks original surveys are now in the archives of Canada. I was very pleased to be on the Board of the Canadian Institute of Surveying when the transfer to Canada was arranged. Cooks surveys in our waters are part of our history and are part of our unique foundation as a country.
Many of the names in Hethersett are Anglo-Saxon, and many are of Danish or French origin One name it seems was only found in the Orkney Islands. In terms of family names I think Hethersett reflected what had happened to the whole of East Anglia in terms of the different occupations and in place names. Historically all have left evidence of the different occupations as they have left traces of their language influencing the Norfolk dialect and accent..
I have always been fascinated by the names found in East Anglia which owe their origin to the wool industry. Many such names were to be found in Hethersett or in nearby parishes. Names such as Webb, Webber, Webster, Fuller, and Weaver all come to mind. There is a village in Norfolk called Worsted which gave its name to Worsted cloth which was first woven in that village. When I visited Worsted it was a small village with a very large church. It was obvious the village had been a thriving place when the church was built. The industry had moved but the church had been built to accommodate a much larger population had stayed.
The wool industry had left ample evidence of its lengthy presence in East Anglia particularly in the type of houses occupied by the weavers. They lived in houses with the second story extending into the street. This type of house allowed the loom to be accommodated on the second floor, as it needed more space than the family who lived on the ground floor. Norwich also had evidence of the wool trade in that one of its major streets called London Street was crooked. I understood that its crookedness came from the fact that it was built over a stream which was originally used by fullers to clean the wool. The stream became a sewer in a later century.
With the invention of the mechanical loom and the spinning jenny, these machines could be powered and the power obtained from fast flowing rivers and streams. Hence there was a move of the industry to the northern counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire where waterpower was available from rivers and streams flowing from the central hilly backbone of England.
MY HETHERSETT HOME
The house I was born in was a typical farm labourer’s cottage. It was of clay lump construction, a method of construction used in East Anglia. Clay lump meant it was built from large rectilinear lumps of clay reinforced with straw and piled one on top of each other. It was very old with low ceilings and an Inglenook fireplace. The roof was of reed thatch very common to the area. Because the walls were very thick the window sills were also very wide which meant that a small boy like me could sit on the window sill and read. Lighting in the house was provided by an oil lamp which burned paraffin oil and when we went to bed we used candles to light our way.
The inglenook fireplace also provided a convenient place to sit and read. The height of the ceilings indicated the age of the cottage it was built when people were much shorter than they are now.
The cottage had a wall oven and had a wash house attached. It had a large garden in which my father grew our vegetables. Water was drawn from a well with bucket and windlass.
Cottages of this type with its thatch roof are often featured on picture post cards in promotional features of England and people who are not familiar with these buildings are often impressed. The truth is unless they have been modernised they were often draughty and uncomfortable. They were warm only close to the fire, which accounts for the reason in the winter we all huddled around the fire to keep warm and why we needed warm clothes instead of heating the house.
One of the enduring memories I have of that cottage was sitting on a little stool next to my Father‘s chair and asking him questions about his war experiences. Dad was in the army at the attack on the Dardanelles’ and at Salonika. He had several bullet wounds, lost fingers and toes to frost bite and was deaf in one ear. That he survived at all was quite remarkable, and some of the incidents he recounted were as music to the ears of a small boy. At some time the remnants of his regiment were combined into the Dublin Fusiliers and it was with that regiment that he went to Salonika and the Balkans.
In the house was a wooden chest which I was told was my Grandfathers sea chest. It was used to store such things as extra blankets etc but below the blankets was all sorts of treasures such as an Afghan dagger, my Fathers medals and regimental insignia, and various bits and pieces brought back from wherever members of the family had served. There were tales attached to each item and I liked to listen to Dad tell these stories. My imagination would be fired up about incidents in India, Africa, Afghanistan and China. Members of the family had served in all these places, and there were tales attached to each article. That chest was the container of the detritus left from family members who had passed through on their way to other places. We had family in The United States of America, New Zealand, South Africa as well as England and Scotland.
The daily routine of the house was governed by the fireplace which was allowed to go out overnight and was lit the next day by my father who was first up in the morning. Cooking was done on the side of the fireplace or hobs as they were called. The kettle sat on one hob while a large saucepan sat on the other hob. Most of the meals we had were one course meals cooked on the fire hobs and consisted of a stew with a base of split peas, vegetables flavoured with a little meat.
Looking back from my present age of 92, there is a misty rosiness which shrouds the past and conceals some of the unpleasantness which pervaded those days. The reality in which we lived was overshadowed by class and the mean narrowness of the "have nots" struggling ro achieve the status of the "haves." It was like a procession of people climbing a ladder and having no regard for the hands nd fingers on which they trod, in fact some seemed to get a measure of satisfaction from crushing fingers and hands. When one blows away the mist that clouds the vision of memory, the reality of those days is revealed as stark and cold.
The most persistent memory I have of my early life is being wet and cold. Being cold was part of how we dressed as boys. We wors short pants and during winter in Norfolk the winds would often come from the North-East for a period of a week or so. It would seem we could never get warm. It appeared to be always wet and cold and we prayed for a change in the wind. When I started work I had to cycle about seven miles often in the early morning and in the rain. I seemed to get wet very often with no way of getting dry.
There was only one fireplace in the house and we all crowded around it in an attempt to get warm. Clothing was expensive and we always seemed to be short of something. Winter clothing was always a great concern and in particular winter coats. There were rummage sales in the village by church or other groups and my mother was a regular attendee, looking for suitable winter clothing.
Being properly dressed to attend church on Sunday was of great concern and it seemed that unless you were cleanly and properly dressed for church you had little hope of getting into heavan when you died. I always had a mental picture of arriving at the gates of heaven and having St Peter looking at me and shaking his head because my boots were dirty or my clothing soiled.
Getting a weekly bath was also a great exercise. Water had to be drawn up from the well by a windlass and then carried to the wash house in a pail, heated and then we took turns in the bath. Again it was instilled into us that "cleanliness was next to Godliness."
These cottages were hard on the women of the house. Keeping them clean was a constant battle. There was a heavy floor tile on the ground floor which had to be constantly washed. On top of the floor tile I do not remember any other floor covering except cocoanut matting which had to be taken out, hung on a clothes line and beaten. The upstairs floors were of heavy oak wood. The upstairs two bedrooms were small and could barely accommodate double beds. Lighting was supplied by paraffin oil lamps and the wicks needed to be trimmed every day. When we went upstairs we carried candles to light our way.
The only wall decoration which stayed in my memory was a pen and ink drawing on wood of a sailor clothed in the dress of the Napoleonic war period. This type of handiwork was common among sailors and was called Scrimshaw. According to my father the wood was from The Bellerophen, a seventy four gun, three deck ship of the line. The Bellerophen was built on the Medway in 1786 and was named by the Earl of Sandwich who was First Lord of the Admiralty. She saw action at Ushant, the Nile and at Trafalgar. She was decommissioned in 1815, was reactivated and renamed Captivity. She was used as a prison hulk and eventually broken up in 1836. How this piece of Scrimshaw came in to our possession I do not know but the age of my father and his parents would make it possible, particularly my paternal grandmother’s people came from the Isle of Wight and some of them had served in the Navy.
Once a week on Monday the copper pot in the wash house had to be filled with water and then fired up to do the family wash. Filling the copper pot was a hard task as the water had to be drawn from the well a bucket full at a time. The laundry was hung outside to dry and ironing was done in front of the fire with the flat irons heated next to the coals.
Saturday was baking day and the wall oven had to be fired up. Friday night Mother would make the bread dough which would rise over night and sufficient bread would be baked to last the family for the coming week.. Beside the bread, current cakes and fruit pies were baked. As a special treat Mother would often make cocoanut haystacks which were made from egg white and sugar and desiccated cocoanut.
Normally there was only one fire going in the house and cooking during the week was done in saucepans standing on the hob beside the fire. A kettle was always standing on the hob so there was always hot water, although somewhat limited in quantity. Most meals were one pot meals containing very little meat. Mostly they were made up of vegetables from our garden with some dried split peas added. The fireplace heated the house, it was the medium used for cooking and it was the centre in the house for everyone to gather around.
The cottage had no bathroom facilities. Our daily washing was done in the wash house where water was kept and a washbasin was provided. Once a week we took a bath in the wash house where water was heated in the copper and we took our bath in a metal bath. This was usually on Saturday night. My memories of my early life seemed to contain a lot of time hauling water from the well to the washhouse. Monday I hauled water for the family wash, Saturday I hauled water for the weekly baths. During the week there was water to be fetched for house cleaning. It was a constant labour.
Getting the chimney swept was a big event and I remember having to stand outside to watch for the sweeps brush coming out the top of the chimney.
In the years after the First World War ownership of land in England was very much in the hands of a few large landholders. These landowners lived on the rents they obtained for leasing out land to farmers who cultivated the land. This system had existed for several hundred years. As a consequence of this, very few people living in villages were able to own the houses they lived in. Figures available for the year 1938 indicate that less than thirty per cent of houses in the United Kingdom were owner occupied. In the rural areas the cottages were often “tied” to the job and were part of the rented property. This made it difficult for a man to leave his employment as he had to give up his house which went with his job. Alternative housing did exist for rent which was built by the local Council.
It is hard to get exact figures regarding “tied’ houses versus Council houses, particularly for as small an area as Hethersett, but National figures give some idea of what the situation was like.
Growing up in Hethersett meant, in a number of ways, you were neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. First we were six and a half to seven miles from the city of Norwich where most of the facilities existed such as higher education, theatre, music or any other educational or cultural facilities. On top of that the great depression hit and while it may have had a bigger and more unfortunate impact on the industrial areas of the country it did impact Hethersett enormously
Many of the people who lived in Hethersett commuted either by public transport or by bicycle to work in the shoe, insurance, food or other industries in Norwich or Wymondham. Those who stayed to work in the village worked in the groceries, bakeries or butcher shops and the rest worked on farms. The great depression had an impact on everyone. There was just no money. I remember one man who walked to Norwich and back every working day.
TOYS OF THE DAY
Most of the toys we played with were made at home either by ourselves or by our fathers. There was a season or time of year for each toy. For instance, as soon as spring appeared out would come spinning tops, these were small usually wood spinning tops with a metal toe. These tops had to be whipped to make them spin and we would go down the road busily whipping our tops. Some fellows had special “whizzers” which had been handed down from an elder brother and these tops were highly prized.
Another homemade toy was the peashooter. They were made from a stick of elderberry wood, which has a soft interior pith and could be burned out with a bit of round metal Also required were the metal supports from a ladies corset which could be bent to make the spring which fired the pea. Ammunition for our peashooters would be dried peas or pigeon peas - garbanzos in Spanish, or in the absence of those two items dried rabbit droppings could also be fired.
Whenever we heard that a lady in the village was buying new corsets we would be on the lookout so we could get the metal supports to manufacture peashooters. Many and lurid are the tales told about our escapades with peashooters. We had a Sunday school teacher who was an absolute dandy. He wore spats and a bowler hat and winged collars. While hiding in some bushes one of our boys managed to knock the bowler hat sideways. This was considered akin to sacrilege and long and careful were the enquiries made to ascertain the name of the culprit but without success.
Another seasonal game was marbles which seemed to have its own time of the year to be played. Every boy had his own collection of marbles and the ones called “glass alleys” were the most prized. There were two games we played with our marbles, One was called “span ums” which required that you threw you marble against a wall and your opponent did the same and if he could span with his hand and touch the two marbles he kept your marble if he could not you got his marble. The other game was called “dribble hole” and required making a small hole in the ground and dribbling marbles into it.
Another of our seasonal activities was what we called the popgun. This was another hollowed out tube of wood and was designed to fire acorns when in season. The popgun had a greater range than the peashooter but was much noisier and it was much more difficult to conceal on oneself. We also manufactured our own catapults or slingshots. These we would make from old bicycle inner tubes and could do considerable damage depending on what the target was. The local police would keep an eye on anyone who had a catapult because damage to insulation devices on telegraph or telephone poles was frequent.
One of the worst thrashings I got was from my mother was for taking a shot at one of my aunts with my catapult and hitting my target. My aunt’s disapproval of me was as big as her posterior which was a broad expanse, so I suppose in the final analysis it was a breakeven deal. As I hit my target but paid a price.
Another part of the bicycle we used was the rim of the bicycle wheel which we used as a hoop.
.A very popular game we played was called conkers. There were many flowering horse chestnut trees in the village. The Horse Chestnut tree threw an inedible seed, which was extremely hard and could be made even harder if the seed was baked. We would make a hole in the seed, put string through and then play a game of conkers. The idea was to smash your opponent’s conker by hitting it with your conker. There was a sort of conker season and generally one conker would reign supreme.
In the village there were gravel pits, which also acted as a dump. Usually there were pieces of metal from cars or other objects. In the summer if we had any free time we would walk to the gravel pit. It was a good place to play particularly as there were lots of sand and also slopes down which we would slide on whatever pieces of metal we could salvage from the dump.
At the time I was in Standard 6 there was a revival of things English such as music, dancing and other cultural activities. Our school had a good choir which, as a Church school supplied voices for the Church Choir. We also started folk dancing as well as Morris dancing. Our school entered various regional competitions particularly in the Folk and Morris dancing and did quite well. I particularly liked the Morris dancing with the bells and ribbons. I remember a young lady who was a bit of an expert at the dancing and came to the school to teach us.
We also had a maypole and we would dance around the maypole with the ribbons. The music was supplied by a portable gramophone, which somehow the school had acquired.
Folk Dancing in England dates back a long way in the history of the country. We know folk dancing was popular in medieval times and in the Tudor period. Folk dancing was often accompanied by folk singing and attempts to organize the art and to preserve it as part of the English cultural history was made about one hundred years ago.
Morris Dancing is believed to be of Moorish origin and was brought to England by soldiers serving overseas. This form of dancing is usually accompanied by the use of sticks, bells, ribbons, swords and handkerchiefs. This traditional form of dancing seems to have become very popular in the Tudor period and we know that Will Kemple a Shakespearean actor danced from London to Norwich taking nine days to do so.
It has been said that England cut itself from a very musically cultural middle ages by the puritan period. I do not know if this is true, what I do know is that in my early years there was a great effort made to revive folk singing, folk dancing, Morris dancing and Choir, singing.
That the puritans had an influence there is no doubt, certainly in the music that was heard in church, and this would have spread over into the daily lives of people. We were encouraged to sing in school, particularly folk songs and also to dance folk dances as well as Morris dancing. It seemed to me that in the period that I was growing up there was a great increase in all activities related to singing and dancing in all forms.
The Church of St Remigius had a good choir and attended various Choir festivals. Folk and Morris dancing was confined to school activities although I remember attending an affair in a neighbouring town in which we contended in folk and Morris dancing.
There were various plays put on by groups in the village, but there did not appear to have been a village wide attempt to produce any form of major theatre. The nearest professional theatre was in Norwich which had The Theatre Royal, several Movie theatres and a Shakespearean round theatre with an apron stage called The Maddermarket which put on some great theatre. As soon as I could afford it I went to the Maddermarket as often as I could.
INTERESTING PEOPLE
Living in the village were several interesting people. One was an ordained clergyman who did not have a parish. He was a great traveller and visited all sorts of different countries and strange places. He was also a great collector and was willing to show some of his collection to villagers such as myself. To me he was an exciting person to talk to and it was also complimentary that he would talk to us as if we were adults and that our opinions were worthwhile. He was a member of the Back family and was related to the Backs living at the Hall. At the outbreak of the Second World War he went to France in some capacity providing services to the British army and survived the evacuation of France. I was stationed in Cornwall and bumped into him there. The next I heard of him was that he was in North Africa and that he was quite sick and had been sent to a hospital at a place called Baragwanath near Johannesburg. I had occasion to visit Johannesburg so called to see him. About a year later I was back in the area and called to see him but he had passed away. To me he was one of nature’s gentlemen and a man I never forgot. Incidentally the Baragwanath hospital was the one in which Winnie Mandela was working when she married Nelson Mandela before he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Baragwanath Hospital was built by the British for service men invalided from the Middle East. When the war was over the British Government turned the hospital over to the South African Government on condition it was to be used for Africans and it continued in this capacity even during the apartheid years.
Living next door to Hethersett at Ketteringham Hall was Ethel Boileau the novelist. She was a prolific writer and some of her work was about the local area. She was famous for writing a number of popular novels such as “Clansman” “When Yellow Leaves “, ”Turnip Tops” and “the Arches of the Years” There was also a female writer of children books living at a place called Homestalls.
Near where I lived was a grass field on which a group of gypsies would appear every year. They would arrive at the same time of the year and always with a small herd of Exmore ponies. They would depart as quietly as they would arrive. Where they went to or came from no-one seemed to know. They would go from house to house in the village selling pegs used for attaching washing to linen lines, doing tinkering and of course telling fortunes.
There was one extremely unusual man who every Sunday would walk down to the junction of the road into the village and the London Road and directed the traffic. He had no authority to do so but everyone would do as he directed. No matter who was in the vehicle he would make certain that who ever was trying to pass through the intersection they did so safely. He was a sort of weekend fixture on the corner. I do not believe he could read or write but he was remarkably intelligent and had a sharp wit about him. One day someone had left a newspaper on the corner and our volunteer traffic director leaned against the pub wall holding up the paper as if he was reading it. But he had the paper upside down when this was pointed out to him he responded by saying that any damn fool could read the paper the right way up.
The villagers of Hethersett had a habit of giving residents nicknames generally related to some happening or experience in their lives. One man it took me years to find out what his proper name was called “Lucknow “because he had been stationed in the army in Lucknow, India and was always talking about it.
Another man was called “Halt that is my Light”. It seems in the first world war when Zeppelin Raids were frequent he would help patrol the village to see home owners were not showing lights. He was leading a patrol across a field to where he reported seeing a light and when he got close called “halt that is my light” and was tabbed with that name afterword’s. Another man was always called “Bum”. He had a very deep bass voice and when a group from the choir sang the Anvil Chorus as bass he always had to sing bum and that name stuck with him.
There was an interesting man who was the proprietor of the King's Head public house and who was an extraordinary gardener. The vegetables he grew were all of a prise winning size and quality. I always liked to talk to him to find out what his secrets were and I learned quite a bit from those conversations.
Living in the village was an old lady who I was told was ninety five years of age. I believe I was about ten years of age when I was told about her which would have made her date of birth around 1840. What was remarkable was that she had never seen the sea which was less than twenty five miles away. Another remarkable thing about her was she had witnessed a public execution at Norwich Castle. I was told it was of James Rush who was hung in 1849. This would have made her nine years old at the time. This would be quite possible as public hangings were big events.
It is recorded that one public hanging at Norwich Castle attracted a crowd of about thirty thousand people and there was a major crowd control problem. In any event she could have also witnessed the last public hanging at Norwich Castle which was held in 1867.
Norfolk people had a reputation for being stubborn and in some cases that I was familiar with it was a reputation well earned. There was one case in the village of a man who had quarrelled with his wife and refused to speak to her. This situation had gone on for some ten years and he would not speak to her. One day he came home and she had a lot of the furniture outside the house. He is reputed to have said “what are you doing?’ To which she is said to have replied “I have found it” He is said to have asked “What have you found? And she replied “Your tongue”
As I was growing up farming was very active in the village. Most farms were mixed. Some kept small herds of cows for milking, some kept pigs for butchering. They mostly planted sugar beet, wheat Swedish turnips and barley. The barley was raised for the malt used in the brewing industry. There were one or two farms which grew fruit such as black currants and other bush fruit. The Swedish turnip, which was called beet in Hethersett was grown as winter animal food. One or two farms raised sheep and one farm grew rose bushes. As young boys we got casual employment on farms particularly harvesting crops or in the thrashing of barley wheat and oats.
One of the worst jobs I experienced was being chaff man on a barley thrash. The barley grain is protected by long prickles called beards which are discharged as part of the chaff during the thrashing process. These small barbs could and did get into any opening in ones clothing and which made the job of chaff man highly undesirable. A chaff man made himself a hood by turning a sack inside out on the long side and wrapping rags around his neck. Even with this, the prickles would find a way too get inside clothing.
Growing up in the depression was a difficult affair. There was just no money and we always seemed to be living on the edge. To supplement father’s wages as a farm labourer my mother worked as a scrubwoman in a laundry and also did day work cleaning houses. While in school, I worked at various part time jobs such as, working on Saturdays selling from a barrow going from door to door, working on farms picking fruit and in the autumn spreading manure from either animal or fish.
What was called fish manure was partly rotted fish guts which farmers would obtain to use as fertiliser for their fields. Shovelling this material off the back of a cart going up and down a field is not the most pleasant occupation. It is probably the worst smell in the world and when this was going on the whole village smelled.
As soon as we were able to work even when still in school we had to work to produce money. Every penny counted. I had a savings bank, a steel affair which you took to the bank and the money deposited in an account. It was from this money my clothes were bought.
Some of the work we did on the farms in the area was tough for a boy who tended to be on the small side for his age. One job I remember doing was topping sugar beet. The beets were turned out of the ground by a plough like device so that they lay on the ground in rows. To top the beets one used a topping knife, which was a long handled device with a curved knife set at ninety degrees to the shaft and a cross handle at the other end. Using this meant one walked along the rows lifting the knife up and down cutting off the tops of the sugar beets. The beets were then sent to the sugar factory, the tops were used as animal feed.
On the farms at this time barley as well as hay was not cut with a binder. In other words it was left loose. The reaper used was called a ”sailor” because it had four sails, which swept the cut crops off the reaper. To efficiently collect the crop a rake device call a” toppler” was used. I think it got its name because it slid across the field as it gathered up the crop and when loaded the handles were flipped and the rake toppled over and started up a new load. The whole idea was to topple in rows so that a farm wagon could be brought along the row and be loaded. Using the toppler was a job a young boy could handle as it was pulled by one horse and did not require a great deal of strength to operate.
The fruit we picked was mostly bush fruit, grown on farms in Hethersett and in the Meltons. These included red and black currants as well as loganberries. These fruits were sold to jam and preserve factories. Fruit picking was easier than sugar beet topping mainly because it did not require a great deal of physical strength. It was done in the summer so one had to guard against over exposure to the sun. It tended to be backbreaking as one was bent over most of the time. One was paid by the amount you picked measured in bushels.
Another task which I undertook and which paid some money was wiping bowls. Lawn bowling was a popular sport in the village. There were two places where people could play the game. One was the Kings Head public house on the London Road and the other was the green at the Village Hall.. The Kings Head green was very old and very well maintained. There are always worm casts which get stuck on the bowls and if the grass is a little bit wet they are apt to slip out of the bowlers hand and because of this wiping the bowl becomes necessary. We boys wiped the bowls for the players for which we received a small payment at the end of each game.,
We as a family were part of the majority religious group in the village; in other words, we were Church of England. The Church of England was divided into three groups Low, Middle, and High. The Church of Saint Remigius in Hethersett was considered High Church. Whether or not a church was Low, Middle or High depended on the Vicar Rector or resident parson.
The God we worshiped was a stern and uncompromising God. He did not approve of laughter, joy or happiness. To put it another way, the authorities in the church who instructed us did not approve of those attributes. To laugh in the church was a deadly sin. We were very perplexed, if we were made in the image of God, any human characteristics we may have got from God seemed to be highly disapproved of by the very God who gave them to us. It did not take long to realize that while we were being taught that “we were made in the image of God”, most people actually believed that “their God was made in their image.” Of course nobody has seen God, so the only way people can visualize God is to portray him in their own likeness - Europeans as a European and Africans as an African.
Because our clergy used vestments, much as the Roman Catholics, had a crucifix and candles on the altar walked with the choir in procession behind a crucifix our church was considered High
There were parishioners in the choir who considered the Rector was too “High' and when asked to bow the head to the altar after procession down the church at the start of a service refused to do so. What was ironic and difficult to understand was that one of the hymns we sang in procession as we went down the church was “At the name of Jesus every head shall bow” but there were individuals even in our choir who refused to bow the head. A compromise was reached in that these individuals would not walk in procession but walk to their seats before the procession started so that their voices would not be lost to the choir.
As children, we were sent on Sundays to early service at 8 AM and then again at 11 AM. We attended Sunday School at 2 PM and then went to church again at seven o'clock in the evenings. As soon as I was considered old enough, I was put in the Church choir as well as made an altar boy.
At least once per year, the Church would have a visit from a missionary usually from Africa who would appeal to the congregation for funds to support the mission. Quite often the missionary had been in some dark corner of Africa and had been left there much too long. One old fellow forgot where he was and gave a long sermon in some African language which nobody in the church understood.
I have often wondered why the Church always appealed to the poor in its parishes and in particular to the children generally of the poor for assistance of the poor in places like Africa. Perhaps, subconsciously they recognized that the poor would be more sympathetic to other poor people as they knew what it was like to be poor?
As members of the Church of England we were baptized soon after birth and, when we reached an age of discretion, we were confirmed by the local bishop. As Hethersett National School was a church school, we also received religious instruction in school. Instruction would be given by the local rector, who would then ask us questions to ascertain how much we had learned from his instruction.
There were many things and attitudes which we found hard to understand. The Church was riddled with class. As children of the poor, we were not expected to question what was taught to us. If we asked difficult questions, we were considered to be getting above ourselves. I never could understand how one achieved that form of levitation and achieved getting above one self. We should keep in our place at the back of any meeting and should just listen to our elders and betters -- and there were many who considered themselves our betters.
Although the Church of St Remigius did not have reserved pews, where people sat in church indicated their view of how they saw themselves in the social order. How they saw themselves was often conveyed to them by other people, particularly by those who considered themselves to be the adjudicators of the village and church social positioning.
One of the things that puzzled me was that we were expected to pray for those in authority who were placed over us. I never did hear of anybody who was placed over us praying for those who were placed under them. Furthermore there was no discussion about who did the placing except it was inferred that somehow God in his wisdom had seen fit to place those that were there now in those positions of authority.
As I look back down the murky and shadowed halls of history I realize that what we were taught as religious truth was the standard lines from the power centres of authority, which were greatly coloured by their position to which they had arrived by the wash and dash of history. History when you boiled it down to its essential elements was a great big game of “I'm the king of the castle” and many of the 'houses' such as the Tudors, Stuarts and Hanoverians were very insecure and the semi-legal judicial murders in which they indulged were often prompted by fear. It also led to some rewriting of history to suit the victors in the struggle for the Crown.
Making the Monarch Head of the Established Church has led to some farcical situations such as a Methodist or Presbyterian prime minister selecting candidates for Anglican bishoprics. The Earl Marshall of England, who was also the Senior Duke in the House of Lords, was charged with the protection of the Monarch who was head of the Anglican Church He himself was a Roman Catholic who was restricted by his religion from holding certain offices under the Crown.
Another thing we found most difficult to understand was the King James Bible and the Anglican Prayer Book preached that in the marriage ceremony ordained by the church that a married couple would hold to each other until death parted them, Yet as Monarch of England and Head of the Church of England Edward Seven was a notorious philanderer and was known as’ Edward the Caresser” and a Knight of the Chaise- Lounge. The rules which we were told we should keep did not seem to apply to certain members of royalty and to many of the upper classes.
As I have already mentioned the Church was riddled with class. There was one village not far from Hethersett which contained a mansion occupied by a Lord. The local villagers were not allowed to proceed into the Church building on Sunday morning until his Lordship arrived and made his entrance. I wondered if he expected the same thing to happen when he reached the gates of Heaven. Did he expect a line up waiting for him to arrive and would he tell St Peter “Now that I am here you can let the common people in”
James 1st of England [6th of Scotland] was not a very pleasant man. He burned witches, and had people he did not like murdered. He was a pederast and believed he was king by divine right; or in other words, God had chosen him to rule. It was in his reign that the Witchcraft Act was passed and such people as Matthew Hopkins flourished. Despite the foregoing, it was also in his reign and under his auspices that the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were written -- both jewels in English language.
I was brought up, as a young Anglican to admire Henry V111. I was taught he was the king who reformed the Church and gave us a better church devoid of corruption and foreign influence. That he was seeking to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon was treated as something hardly worth mentioning and Henry’s motives were almost entirely selfless. What was important was for us to keep in mind was that Henry disapproved of corruption in the monasteries and if some discomfort was caused to the monks and nuns that was part of the price which had to be paid to obtain a better church. If it was pointed out that those who disagreed with Henry were killed then the Spanish Inquisition and Torquemada were quoted as if there was a game of tit for tat going on.
As I delved into the reign of the Tudors and in particular into the years that Henry V111 sat on the throne a much different picture emerged. One had only to examine the amounts of money obtained from the disposal of the monastic lands and the emergence of a new land owning gentry to realise what was happening and who would write the propaganda on behalf of Henry when he died.
The years of Henry’s occupancy of the throne are strewn with the ashes of burned clerics, murdered members of the nobility and of common men and women. They stink with the rot of decomposing flesh of those who were hung drawn and quartered or decapitated. Henry’s victims included two wives as well as dukes and other members of the nobility [particularly if they had any trace of royal blood inherited from previous royalty]. He had his most tireless and loyal servants such as Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell killed as well as well as bishops’ abbots and monks and numberless ordinary citizens of England. It is doubtful if a full count can ever be made of those who were put to death by Henry and his agents and this was mostly without trial, but the number must be many thousands. One has only to look at the portrait painted of Henry by Hans Holbein to see the arrogant selfishness captured so well, from the pursed and petulant mouth to the protruding and prominent cod piece to realise just what sort of man was Henry.
Henry believed by virtue of his birth that he was inerrant and infallible, and that all the people of England should believe as he did and to disagree with him was treason. His belief in his infallibility predated the papal pronouncement of infallibility which was made in 1870 and was confined to faith and morals and could only be made when the pontiff was speaking ex cathedra [from the Chair of St Peter]. The remarkable thing is that the Roman Pontificate has made only one pronouncement ex-cathedra since 1870. Henry on the other hand made regular use of his belief in his infallibility and his pronouncements covered not only religion but also the political aspects of his kingdom
Being appointed to the Royal Council was an invitation to occupy one of the most dangerous seats in the Kingdom, many did not survive it. It was tantamount to being invited to pitch your tent in the forecourt of your own sepulchre. Yet people jockeyed to get close to the Monarch especially during the confiscation of the church lands, the rewards were immense, but one false step and that was the end
The Pilgrimage of Grace and other uprisings in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland and Cumberland, Henry’s broken promises together with the spate of executions speak volumes of Henry’s untrustworthy behaviour, viciousness and arrogance.
To all intents and circumstances there were two reformations in England. There was the Reformation instituted by Henry who separated England from Rome, but kept all the sacraments etc as in the Roman church. On Henry’s death England went through another form of reformation. The son of Henry by Jane Seymour brought the Seymour family into prominence and they were adherents of thinking which was coming into England from the European continent and Evangelistic and anti-Catholic which could account for the amount of rebellions which took place including Kett’s in Norfolk. That the Anglican Church survived is remarkable although it survived with many scars and some divisive thinking.
The Tudor monarchs believed they ruled by divine right. This belief in England started in the reign of Henry V111 and continued during the reigns of subsequent Tudors. This belief was carried over to the Stuarts who succeeded the Tudors. This all ended with execution of Charles 1 in 1649.
One of the great ironies of English history is that the descendants of the new gentry, who had benefitted from the suppression and distribution of the monastic lands and were sitting in the House of Commons, would condemn to death a king descended from a Tudor king who had made their land owning wealth possible. They would then go on to trim the power of future kings of England. There is a further irony in that the Tudors were descended from a Welshman Owen Tudor. The man who was primarily responsible for the death of Charles was also descended from a Welshman by the name of Williams. Oliver Cromwell was descended from the sister of Thomas Cromwell who was married to a man named Williams. Williams must have found it beneficial to use the name of Cromwell particularly when his brother-in-law became Chancellor and was so close to the King when the confiscated lands were being given out. Oliver Cromwell’s mother was a Norfolk Steward, and I believe her family were brewers.
The habit of country people using saint’s days and other religious holidays as their calendar was still in use when I was growing up. Rents which paid quarterly were related to a Saints day or some other church event. To people who were mostly illiterate at the time of the reformation the church calendar was of great importance and how it was ingrained in the minds of country folk is indicated in that it was part of the countryside parlance of my childhood.
As I was growing up there was great concern in parts of the Kingdom over tithing. Tithes were the way the established church supported itself and as the tithes went to the Established church landowners who supported the so-called free churches resented having to pay tithes to the established church. There was an active anti-tithe movement and considerable publicity was given to the problem.
The sound of pealing church bells is one of my fondest memories of the Church of St Remigius in Hethersett. The Church had a peal of eight bells, a large number for a village. I believe some of these bells were quite old but they were all recast when they were rehung in 1938. There is an exuberance and vibrancy to the robust pealing of bells in the English fashion. It is a sound which can never be matched by carillons or the monotonous tintinnabulation one encounters in other countries. The sound of church bells being peeled gave the English countryside a unique sound, this was particularly so on Sunday evenings when the bells were pealed and one could hear in the distance the bells from other churches. The surrounding villages of Great and Little Melton as well as Ketteringham all had peals of three bells and on a summer evening one could hear the three bell peals and the eight bell peal from Hethersett.
It seems the pealing of church bells was used as a means of calling the faithful to church. It appears that the art of pealing of bells developed into a form of competition between parishes and churches. Having a full peal of eight bells was a point of pride in Hethersett. Also bell ringing was a skill and I remember the bell ringers put aside one night per week to practice their art.
In pealing bells the bells are rung not chimed, therefore the intent was not to produce a conventional melody. This art started in England in the 17th century in church towers. Bells are rigged to swing freely, the usual peal consisting of eight bells which are numbered according to their pitch the highest pitch being known as the treble bell and the lowest in pitch being the tenor bell. The bell ringers usually stand in a circle in the ringing chamber directly under the bell chamber. When the rope is pulled the bell swings either up or down making one strike. As the term implies ringing changes means the order in which the bells are rung is changed so there is usually a conductor or leader who calls the changes.
At some time in the thirties, 1938 I believe, it was decided by the Church Council that the oak beams holding the church bells had become so eaten away by wood borers that the beams were unsafe
The wood beams were removed and iron beams were substituted, the bells were re-tuned and re-hung.
There was quite a bit of wood left from the old beams and a local carpenter salvaged as much wood as possible and made items for sale to the congregation. I was able to buy a small stud tray. In those days in England men wore tunic shirts [the sort you had to climb into from the bottom] with detachable collars, so we needed stud trays. I still have my stud tray. I keep it on my desk it makes a convenient place to keep paper clips etc.
There was another aspect to church bells in the village when someone in the village passed away the church bell would solemnly toll, one stroke for a man and two strokes for a woman.
There was another sort of bell ringing in the village. There was a group who at Christmas time went around the village with a set of hand bells. They were a very skilled group and would play Christmas Carols and hymns stopping to do so at strategic places in the village. This was a sort of supplement to the carol singers, or mumpers as they were called in Hethersett, and was much appreciated by the local people. This hand bell ringing was in addition to carol singing which several groups would proceed around the village performing during the Christmas period.
THE CHURCH ORGAN AT ST REMIGIUS CHURCH
The Organ at the Church in Hethersett was a large instrument. It was an old fashioned wind organ with massive main bellows which had to be kept full of air by a small bellows that was hand pumped. Being “bellows man” on the organ was quite a task for a small boy. Keeping the large bellows full required a lot of pumping particularly if the organist was playing a fast and loud piece. The organist communicated with the pumper by means of a bob on a string. There was another bob which told the pumper how much air was in the bellows
On one occasion, I think it was a special Sunday evening service in which the Choir was singing a loud and fast anthem. I was on the organ pumping. It became very hard for me to keep the main bellows full. The bob from the organist started to jiggle which meant she was getting concerned and the indicator bob from the main bellows was showing it was getting empty. No matter how hard I tried I could not keep the main bellows up and the organ eventually gave a sort of long gasp and went silent. I was relieved of my organ pumping duties by a man and everyone started up again: choir and organ. I was treated as a sort of delinquent and was not allowed to pump the organ again.
THE CHURCH CHOIR
When old enough most boys of the Church of England community in the village were tried out for the church choir. It was a fairly large group around thirty or so voices. Not only did it sing at the two major services on Sunday, eleven o’clock in the morning and seven o’clock in the evening. It also practised one Tuesday evening each week. Every year the Choir would be taken on an outing to places such as Hunstanton, Felixstowe or Clacton on Sea. These trips which we looked forward with much pleasurable anticipation were greatly enjoyed. The trips were planned in such a way that we would stop at interesting places such as Castle Rising or Framlingham Castle. There were other events which came with membership in the Choir. There were Choir festivals which were held in large churches such as Wymonham Abbey and would include a dozen or so choirs. The combined Choirs singing together was a fine experience.
ATTENDING SUNDAY SCHOOL
Attending Sunday school exposed us to instruction not only the various views found in The Church of England but also the opinions of the teachers on the way to lead one’s life. It was amazing the different views one encountered in the same school. Thinking back to the views of God passed on to me by different Sunday School teachers I still can bring to the front of my mind pictures I formed of God from listening to these different teachers.
One teacher was the epitome of the English gentleman. He used a lot of cricket terminology in describing how we should live and behave. He told us to always “play fair”, to “play a straight bat” and to “knock the devil for a six”. However he never told us where we would find the Devil to “knock him for a six”. As he described the qualities God demanded of us on could not help but picture God as an English gentleman cricketer in whites, blazer and with his handkerchief tucked in his sleeve.
Another teacher in describing what God required of us went back to the Old Testament. His God was a solemn humourless God, a God who never laughed. He emphasized that if we misbehaved there was punishment awaiting us this would be in some hot corner of hell. This gentleman had a strong streak of the puritan in him.
One teacher was the sports team coach type. Full of platitudinous advice on how our lives should be led. I remember him telling us to “plant your feet carefully” “achieve balance”, “get a good grip of yourself”, “do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing”. This was great advice and came in handy the first time I had to use an Asian toilet.
The pews we sat in as a Sunday school class in church were as hard as nails and in winter very cold. We boys wore short pants and as we sat on those hard and chilly seats part of our thighs rested on the cold wood. This impressed itself on our Anglican backsides as a form of penance in anticipation for any sins we could commit in the coming week.
One day three nuns belonging to an Anglican religious order arrived in the village and of course became active in the church. The leader of this little party, or senior nun, if you can use that term, was a formidable lady. A sort of female “Torquamada” who was determined to correct any faults she could find in us. And find them she did. The other two nuns were a lot milder but moulded their actions and attitudes on their leader.
One of the nuns took over the teaching of the smaller boys Sunday school class which I attended and which was also attended by my cousin Harold. Harold was a sort of independent boy and when he did not want to do something he just was not going to do it. With the Christmas season about six weeks away the nun wanted to imbue in us the spirit of giving. At the time there was no such thing as coloured or fancy wrapping paper. Parcels always arrived wrapped in brown paper which was carefully kept and re-used as was the string. The nun asked one of the boys what they got at Christmas wrapped in brown paper and he just said“ don't know” so she went all the way round the class getting the same response until she came to Harold who did not answer. She repeated her question rather impatiently and glared at Harold who then said “shit”. Now Harold had committed a serious offense. He had said “shit” to a nun but he had also said “shit” in church so he was doubly condemned. The Rector threw Harold out of the Sunday school. Not long after Harold appeared with his Father and a rather heated argument took place. The Rector saying he did not want Harold in the Sunday school as he would have everyone in the Sunday school saying “shit”. My uncle argued that he sent Harold to the Sunday school so he would not say “shit”. Harold came back to the Sunday school and at the age of eighteen joined the Navy. He was on the Ajax at the Battle of the River Plate. The Ajax had only six-inch guns whereas the Graf Spee had twelve-inch guns. I expect Harold said “shit” a few times during that battle.
When we reached what was considered the age of discretion we were instructed by the Rector in preparation for confirmation. This involved weekly visits to the Rectory for the instructions. We met in the Rector’s study, to this day I have no idea what he talked about. The words he used were beyond my comprehension but I was impressed by the rows and rows of books on the shelves. One book title which stayed in my memory was “Fox’s Book of Martyrs’’ I wondered what that was all about. That library was the first I was in and I was very impressed.
After seeing that library I started to collect books. After I started working, one of my great pleasures was to visit the second hand bookstores in Norwich. When I left Hethersett to go to the Second World War I left behind a good sized library, at least it was a good size for someone of my limited means. I have always loved books; reading has always been my number one hobby.
Even today, although I have desk top and laptop computers plus Amazon/Kindle I still love the feel and smell of printed books and can never pass a book shop without going in and finding something of interest.
EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES IN THE VILLAGE
There were two annual events to which we looked forward, the annual Horticultural and Garden Show and the Annual Church Fete.
The Horticultural and Garden Show was held at the Village Hall and as Hethersett was still an agricultural community having several farms within its bounds it gave the farmers an opportunity to show horses and other farm animals as well as providing a vehicle for the local gardeners to display the vegetables and flowers they grew. In this event, prizes were awarded for different categories of pets.
There was also a prize for the best display of vegetables grown by a schoolboy and one year I won this prize which was a great thrill for me.
The Horticultural and Garden show had races for the young people as well as various tests of skill for the older people such as catching a greased pig and climbing a greasy pole to get the ham which was attached to the top of the pole. There was one event which made its appearance every year and which I think was a hangover from the medieval jousting of knights. A bucket was suspended between two uprights and was then filled with water. There was a flat piece attached to the bottom of the bucket which had a hole in it. The idea was that two men comprised a team one would sit in a wheelbarrow and one would push. The one in the barrow had a pole like a lance and would try to get the pole through the hole without spilling the water Very few of the contestants were able to get the pole through without spilling the water which usually fell on them, much to the delight of those who stood and watched.
The Church Fete was held in the garden of one of the larger houses in the village and was intended to raise money for the support of the Church. Members of the Congregation would have tables at which items which had been donated and were sold the proceeds going towards the support of the church. All sorts of games of chance were held such as guessing the number of marbles in a jar, throwing rings over items on a table, dipping into a tub of bran to get a prize. Dipping into the Bran Tub was a great event for children. Prizes were wrapped and hidden in a tub of bran and for a small sum of money one put ones hand into the bran and felt around for a prize, trying to get a good prize was always the ambition of everyone who dipped. The prizes were of little value and were often donated. There were races for the children, and usually there was a show of dogs, cats and other pet animals. The local brass band played and tea was available. It was a bit of a social event and generally was well attended.
An interesting aspect of the gambling which took place at these Parish or other village events was that while gambling was generally frowned on, gambling to aid the Church or other types of religious groups was considered acceptable, and was used extensively by those organizations. It seemed the end to which the proceeds of gambling was used determined whether it was proper or not.
The events we celebrated during the year were mostly of a religious nature, or at least were coincidental to the old feasts of the Church. The Church in England had gone through many variations from the Church of Rome to extreme puritanism, but the Christian celebrations of Christmas, Easter, Whitson and All Hallows remained.
Christmas was probably the great celebration of the year. Even the period leading to Christmas was something to look forward to. Mother would start preparing for Christmas well ahead of the event. Although my parents were very poor they somehow managed to obtain enough money to buy each child a Christmas present. The discussion about what Father Christmas was going to bring was very exciting.
Every year my Mother would save money in a savings scheme run by an uncle and called a Didlum. Saving would start in January with the payout at the end of November. This provided some money for Christmas. Making the Christmas pudding was an event of great anticipation. Mother had a large bowl in which the Christmas pudding was mixed and everyone in the family had to give it a stir. Three penny pieces the small English coin were wrapped in silver foil which Dad had saved from his cigarettes for this purpose and were mixed into the pudding. When the pudding was served on Christmas Day somehow Mother always managed to make sure each child got a three penny bit with their serving.
A Christmas cake was baked ahead of time as were mincemeat pies. Another feature of Christmas was sugar mice.
Waking up on Christmas morning to find presents at the bottom of the bed was a wonderful experience
The custom of bringing a tree into the house and decorating it can be traced back to Livonia and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. With the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert the habit became very popular in England. My father always managed to find a Christmas tree which was brought into the house on Christmas Eve and we all took a hand in decorating it. The tree was taken down on twelfth night and the decorations put away until next year.
Easter was another church feast we celebrated with pleasant anticipation. There were Good Friday services to attend and then Easter Sunday with chocolate eggs. The symbol of Easter was small baby chicks which often came in a small basket with the Eater egg.
After Easter came Whitsunday when it was traditional to wear something new to go to church and if we could afford the bus fare we went to Norwich which had a fair on the following Monday.
After Whitsunday was a celebration we called Harvest Home. It celebrated the gathering of the crops. The altar of the church was decorated with sheaves of wheat and barley as well as garden crops. It was a village thanksgiving. The ceremony at the church would include members of the parish walking in procession to carry offerings of the harvest and singing hymns of thanksgiving.
After Harvest Home we celebrated All Hallows which gave young people a chance to play tricks. We hollowed pumpkins or Swedish turnips to make Jack Lanterns by carving out faces lit from behind by stubs of candles.
Another event we celebrated was Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November. We did this by making bon-fires and letting of fireworks. Two of the small shops in village sold fireworks. One sold fireworks made by a firm called Standard and a popular product of this firm was called “half penny demon” standard also made a firework called a “jumping jack”. The other shop sold a brand call “Brocks” which made fireworks which were pretty and good to watch. One I remember was called “Chrysanthemum Fountain”. Both firms sold a variety of fireworks, both sold rockets which we had to be careful when we let them off because there were many reed thatch roofs in the village.
THE PARISH ANNUAL OUTING
Every year there would be an outing of the parish which would take the children and parents for a day at the seaside at Great Yarmouth. This was an event to which we all looked forward. We saved what little money we could get our hands on and saving for the outing was about as much fun as the outing itself. When the great day arrived we trooped down to the National School gate and the buses or charabancs as they were called would arrive. It was not until much later that I realized what a study group this would have made for Konrad Lorenz As the buses pulled up, there were usually about six, the best and most modern at the front, everyone sorted themselves out and occupancy depended on some unspoken but perceived social order. The first bus was for the rector and other ”big wigs” of the parish and then in descending social order the other buses would be filled. The last bus was the oldest and most decrepit and this was where my mother and the rest of us would finish. Not a word was spoken nor instruction given by anybody. There was an unspoken but known pecking order. I always wanted to ride in one of the first buses but never did.
For a small boy a day spent at Great Yarmouth was exciting. We packed picnics of sandwich meals. The morning was spent on the beach and the afternoon was spent at the amusement park which contained a large number of “rides”. Deciding which ride to spend our limited funds on was all part of the excitement. When the day was over we all gathered at a prearranged spot. The buses arrived and we all got back into the same seats we occupied on the trip down.
The village was a stratified society. It was living in the aftermath of Victorian and Edwardian times. At the top of the heap were gentry with whom we very rarely came in contact. Some of them were exceptionally nice people but we were only in contact with them on rare occasions. The next layer consisted of shop keepers and small business people who sold goods groceries etc but who had to deal with the lower orders. The further down the social ladder one went the more the distinctions became apparent. Being at the bottom of the heap there was only one way for us to go and that was up, but we had to be careful that we were not accused of trying to be something we were not and there was always someone to bring this to our attention.
There was a great deal of snobbery in the parish and sad to say it was among those who had no apparent reason to consider themselves better or worse than anyone else. This snobbery was founded in what one did for a living or what ones father did. There are no greater snobs then the English lower classes. No-one wanted to be perceived as being at the bottom of the heap and people practiced a subtle form of “one-upmanship” to emphasize that they were not in the lowest social strata.
Although St Remigius Church did not have reserved pews, where people sat indicated their view of how they saw themselves in the social order. How they saw themselves was often made plain to them by other people, particularly those who considered they were the adjudicators of the parish social positioning. Although we were living in the reign of George V the social habits and unwritten rules were Edwardian and Victorian to say the least.
I remember attending a meeting at the Village Hall on some matter and several men spoke about the subject and one rather pompous individual held forth and was not only windy but somewhat stupid. Unfortunately I got up to say something to which he did not agree and I was accused of getting above myself. How I had performed this act of levitation I do not know and did not find out, but I was obviously out of my place and was not supposed to have an opinion and certainly should not have expressed it. As Orwell would have put it we were all equal but some were more equal than others.
MORE THINGS I REMEMBER
My childhood was spent in the early twenties of the twentieth century and the Victorian and Edwardian rules for brining up children still remained: "Children should be seen and not heard" and "spare the rod and spoil the child" were the accepted wisdom of the era. Schoolmasters had desks with special containers for canes which were wielded across hands and backsides. Parents were equally diligent in the physical punbishment of their offspring. Today I am sure half the population of the village of my early youth would be in jail for cruelty. My mother had a Malacca cane which she wielded with extreme vigour, generally at my grandmother's prompting. It seems to me that we all lived in fear. My mother lived in fear of her mother, we children lived in fear of mother. Dad lived in fear of not being able to put sufficient food on the table. The only one who didn't seem to be afraid of anyone was my grandmother who I think had scared the devil himself. I remember my mother thrashing me one day all over a misunderstanding. I was innocent of the charge brought against me but as it was her mother who made the accusation, Mother gave me a thrashing of all thrashings. In those days boys wore short pants and stockings which came up to the knee. In wielding the cane she marked the backs of my legs so badly I had to lower my pants and pull my stockings up to hide the marks on the back of my legs.
We were given a very healthy diet which came out of necessity. We had a large garden and Dad grew just about every vegetable that would grow in the Norfolk soil. The vegetables were supplemented with small portions of meat, usually brisket, chicken or rabbit. Split peas turned up at just about every meal. One of my childhood memories is our Christmas dinner. The meat was usually a chicken but the highlight was new potatoes. Dad would grow a variety of potatoes but the "earlies" were the important ones for our Christmas dinner. As soon as some early potatoes were dug he would seal a quantity in metal boxes which were buried in the garden and then dug up the day before Christmas. There have never been potatoes that tasted like those.
Mother baked her own bread and baking day was Saturday. Friday evening the bread dough would be made and left to rise near the fire. Saturday morning I would have to get up very early and fire the oven which was built into the wall of the cottage. Monday was laundry day and again I had to get up and fire up the "copper" in the wash house.
Memory tells me that some of the local foods produced in Norfolk were memorable being of high quality. Norfolk produced lots of bush fruits as well as strawberries and of course dairy products. There was a lady, a farmer's wife from Wymondham Common who made a soft cheese and rode a bicycle with a basket attached to the front and sold this cheese from door to door. I have eaten cheeses in many countries and have yet to find a better one. The tastes and svours of one's early life live on in memory. I had an uncle who was a fishmonger and we got lots of fish in our diet - Wells cockles, Stewkey Blues and Yarmouth Herring and Bloaters as well as Cromer Crabs.
Looking back I am amazed at the number of vendors of different types who came to the door. I have mentioned my uncle who was a fishmonger and called weekly and another relative who was a greengrocer and from whom we obtained oranges and other fruits that Dad could not grow. The milkman came about twice a week - he was a local farmer. There was a man who sold clothing and called about once a month. There was a bag man who brought a great big case containing needles, buttons and other small articles of household use. In the Autumn there would be Spanish onion sellers and every couple of months a rag and bone man would come to see if we had anything to sell. He would purchase our rabbit skins.
Every Friday my Mother would take the bus to Norwich where she would buy her groceries. She would also buy a piece of beef which would be cooked for Sunday dinner. She would slo buy some hard sweets which were carefully rationed each day to us children.
One of my allotted tasks as a small boy was to feed and maintain the rabbits which we bred. The skin would fetch money and the flesh we ate. Most of the rabbit food was grown in the garden. The rabbits ate the large outer leaves of the cabbage, Brussel sprouts, lettuce etc and this was supplemented by my having to gather a sackful of hog weed. Hog weed grew plentifully in the hedgerows around Hethersett and my task was to keep a supply on hand to make certain the rabbits were well fed and kept clean.
NORFOLK WORDS WE USED IN OUR SPEECH
The various invasions and the settlements of Norfolk by people from other lands which have have had a considerable effect on the speech as well as other aspects of the life of the County. I remember a visit I made to Stockholm on business later on in life and being impressed by the similarity of words on street signs and place names. They are so close to the words I knew in Broad Norfolk.
There were other similarities, one of which was the food. Not surprising was the plenitude of fish particularly herring. One dish of which was called Sillgratin or Herring Casserole was very similar to a dish my Mother made particularly as herring were plentiful and cheap.
The Danes and other Scandinavians left much other evidence of their time in Norfolk, for instance the Norfolk “wherry” which was an ideal craft for the Norfolk Broads. Many of Norfolk's place names particularly those ending in Thorpe are of Scandinavian origin, Thorpe being the word for village.
The following words were used in everyday parlance in the village.
Beck: stream
Buskins: leggings
Puttees: Leg bindings
Cop: short throw
Dwile: cloth for cleaning the floor
Foosey: rotten vegetable or fruit
Higler: dealer who went from door to door
Hold-ye: Hang on
Huckabuck: playing leap frog
Loke: narrow alley or lane
Mob: scolding
Dannocks: type of glove
Sillybold: cheeky
Shug: shake
Stingy: unkind
Pightle: a small field
Dickie: donkey
Mumpers: carol singers
Hurl: to throw
Mawther: a young girl
Pug: to launder
ELECTRICITY COMES TO THE VILLAGE
I was very small when electricity came to the village. The village already had gas lighting and many houses and businesses were using this source of heating and illumination Electricity caused quite a change. Some of the older folks looked upon it with suspicion not quite sure what it would do.
I remember holding my elder sister’s hand and watching the poles being installed through the village which would carry the power lines. This was quite an operation with men digging the holes pulling the ropes and setting the poles in the holes. Then along came the men who rigged the wires on the poles this was all very exciting for a small boy.
Once electricity was installed in the village and businesses were able to use it, one of the local grocers installed an electric bacon slicer. This was quite an event. None of us kids had seen anything like it. The bacon slicer had a circular knife and the speed with which the bacon was sliced was something to behold. In its time this was high tech and we were all greatly impressed.
With electricity came an increase in the use of radios, up until the arrival of electricity radios were all battery type. With the increase in radios came an increase in the erection of wireless poles. Radios brought us closer to the rest of the world and there was an increase in discussion about national and international events.
Another impressive event was the first time I saw a farm tractor. There were many farms in the village but all used horses. One day a farm tractor came to the village and we watched it plow a field. Gradually the use of tractors became fairly common and the horses were used less and less.
The roads in the village were recipients of a fair amount of horse droppings and many of the village boys had boxes on wheels for gathering these deposits to use as fertilizer for gardens. I had a box on wheels and gathered up a fair amount of this free manure for our vegetable garden. It was believed that an application of horse manure was good for the rhubarb patch and I always had to make certain that I applied a good layer in the spring of the year. There was a story which went the rounds; a boy was gathering horse droppings and a girl asked him what he was going to do with it, to which he replied we are going to put it on our rhubarb. The girl responded by saying we always put custard on ours.
VILLAGE DANCES
When I was about fourteen years of age, working in Norwich and attending night school, Saturday night dances were instituted in the Village Hall in Hethersett on a monthly basis. These were very inexpensive affairs, with a small admittance fee and a local orchestra. Similar dances were held on different Saturday nights in adjacent villages, so it was easy to attend a dance on any week end.
Ballroom dancing was a good way for young people to meet each other. A good standard of dress was maintained, such as a jacket and tie for males. Lots of the popular music was written with ballroom dancing in mind, and a great effort to learn the various dance steps was made. These events were well attended and greatly enjoyed by the young people of the Village. There was a dance orchestra led by a man called Victor Silvestra who played with dancing rhythms, and his recordings were greatly prized.
THE POST OFFICE AND THE POSTAL SERVICE.
Although Hethersett was a large village and had its own post office it only required one post man. The post man rode a bicycle and wore a hat peculiar to post men of that day. It was a sort of helmet squared at the front and at the back.
Most people purchased their requirements by cash and the mail service did not carry much advertising. Credit cards were not used very much so the mail traffic was very light compared to what it is today. Because of this it was possible for one post man to service a village as large as Hethersett.
There was no Bank in the village but the Post Office had a savings bank service. If one had a cheque to cash which would have been very rarely it would have been done at the Post Office.
One could transmit money by mail by purchasing postal orders.
THE FOODS WE ATE
As we lived n the country we grew most of our food. We always had a large garden and Dad was good at growing vegetables. As in the case of most working people “dinner” was at mid-day and was the biggest meal of the day. We did not eat much meat. Often our mid day meal was a vegetable stew with a little meat. Meat was supplemented by the occasional chicken we killed or a rabbit which we had bred for the meat and skin. On Fridays, we had fish, quite often herring. Yarmouth bloaters were a popular meal and very inexpensive.
The vegetable stews we ate contained split peas and dumplings were generally a supplement to the stew. Norfolk is famous for its light dumplings. Norfolk swimmers as they were called were a wholesome way of extending stews and other pot meals. A Norfolk dumpling was made from flour shredded suet baking powder and water to mix. Dumplings were often flavoured with parsley, sage or horseradish depending on what the dumplings were to be eaten with A good recipe for Norfolk dumplings contained about four ounces of flour, two ounces of shredded suet, baking powder, salt and pepper, herbs or other flavourings would be added at this stage, The dumplings were fashioned into balls about the size of a walnut and added to the top of the stew.
Friday night my Mother made the bread dough for bread baking on Saturday. A week’s supply of bread would be made. Fruit pies would be baked, short breads and current cakes would also be made. We children looked forward with great anticipation to these special treats as we did to the daily ration of one piece of hard sweet which we were given before we left for school.
For breakfast we had a bowl of cereal and toast except on Sunday when we had a boiled egg eaten from an egg cup. The evening meal was a form of high tea which could consist of almost anything which could be eaten cold. Sunday high tea was a bit of a special meal in that we often had a can of salmon or quite often we had some form of sandwiches and cake. I remember one butcher in the village made the best pork head cheese I have ever tasted and even today I enjoy occasionally a sandwich made of pork headcheese though I have never found headcheese that could compare with what I had from that butcher.
Dad was a very good gardener and we always had a good supply of vegetables. Not only did we have a garden at the house but Dad always took an allotment from the village. The allotment permitted him to grow the main crop potatoes at the allotment as well as a good crop of onions. At the house he grew all types of cabbages, beans, turnips, carrots, Brussels sprouts, celery, parsnips, pumpkins as well as the early potatoes. We always had an asparagus bed and always had various types of herbs growing in the garden. The main crop of potatoes was stored in a pit dug in the garden and which was lined with straw. The pit had to be below the frost line and we would dig out about a weeks supply at a time. The main crop of potatoes generally lasted us through the winter and until the new early crop became available usually at the next June. As soon as the new potatoes came in in June Dad would get an airtight Hovis tin and fill it with new potatoes. The filled tin would be buried in the garden well below the frost line and dug up on Christmas Eve, the “new” potatoes would be eaten with our Christmas dinner. One of the things which has puzzled me over the year is that when I was growing up in Hethersett no-one ate the Swedish turnip or Rutabaker as it is called although it was grown as cattle feed by most farmers. When I got to Canada I was surprised to find it quite often on the table and there were many recipes available on how cook it. It is a staple on the menus both in Canada and the United States at Thanksgiving but somehow the people of Norfolk never got around to eating it themselves. Recipes for cooking this vegetable are to be found in most North American cook books but I have not found one in the British cookbooks I possess. This is strange in that it was a Norfolk man who introduced to the British Isles, Turnip Townsend. A good and simple way to cook the Swedish turnip is to take a medium sized turnip, peel it and chop it into one inch cubes, boil it with 2 saccharin tablets {or two tablespoons of artificial sweetener] plus salt to taste then mash it with lots of butter or margarine, and a liberal amount of white pepper
The chickens we kept supplied us with eggs as well as one to be killed for special occasions such as Christmas. We kept rabbits which supplied us with occasional meat but also the skins could be sold to the Rag and Bone man who visited the village about twice per year.
Mother made most of the jam we ate using local fruit such as strawberries, raspberries black and red currants, she also made wine from the rhubarb we grew and dandelions and elderberries
we gathered. I remember her making wine from sugar beet which from comments of those who tasted it was a formidable brew and would have “knocked the wig off a judge” if he had been fortunate enough to have been given a glass.
We children were sent out to gather whatever grew “wild” in the hedgerows or woods and fields to which we had access. We gathered blackberries, rose hips, hazel nuts, wild strawberries, mushrooms, water cress, and dandelions - anything to supplement the pot or the jam or wine making. There were several fields and meadows in which wild mushrooms grew. One had to know which were poisonous and which were edible. No cultivated mushroom can compare with those which had been gathered in the early morning with the dew still on them. Mother would also make mushroom ketchup from those we gathered wild. There were several places in Hethersett where hazel nuts grew in the hedgerows and knowing when they could be gathered was important and also getting there before anyone else could gather them required careful timing..
Because of working with my Father in the garden and the gathering of wild fruits and vegetables I have always loved gardening and liked gathering what grew in the wild.
In the summer after the field crops had been cut we would glean the fields, what we gleaned we kept and Mother would find some way of using.
One of the things I remember there were two butchers in the village who made sausages. Each had his own special recipe and both were very good.. I remember also there were various sausages available in Norfolk one being the Cambridge another was the Lincolnshire It was not until I got to Canada that I found out there was a Norfolk sausage which I believe contains some Parmesan cheese. There are so many different types of sausage available in the British Isles. I hope mass production and mass marketing will not destroy these local good, interesting and very different types of food.
I look back on these early years and I am impressed with how little we wasted. Food was eaten by the family anything surplus {which was rarely} was fed to chickens or rabbits which lived off the garden or the hog weed I gathered. I also had to gather small boughs which had been blown off trees and which were chopped up to provide kindling for the fires Clothing was worn and patched and darned. Afterwards it was cut up to make hooked rugs or cleaning cloths. Buttons were cut off and kept in a button bag as was string from parcels together with the brown wrapping paper. Dad’s weekly newspaper was kept to use as fire starter and part was rolled into spills to light lamps after the fire was going. If there was any waste which would rot it was put in a shallow pit at the bottom of the garden. This pit was dug out about once per year and distributed over the garden to be dug in as manure.
Dad was an advocate of what he called double digging. He would dig a row turning it over and then we would put manure in the place where the earth was removed and then I would take a garden fork and dig the manure into the bottom of the trench. The next row he dug would be turned onto the first trench. His method of digging gave us good results in the quality and quantity of the vegetables he grew.
Looking back at that period it was amazing the amount of food that was consumed in the England of those days which was brought in from other countries. Most of the butter and cheeses had their origin in either Denmark or Holland, although New Zealand had become a supplier of butter as well as lamb. Canterbury lamb came from the South Island of that country. Spain supplied tomatoes and onions. I remember the Basque onion sellers walking around with a pole over their shoulders from which dangled strings of onions which had been braided by the tops and were sold by the braid. Australia sold England mutton while Israel supplied oranges. Argentina was famous for its beef both fresh and canned. Canada supplied wheat, beef and apples. Bananas came from the Caribbean with some citrus fruits. With the outbreak of the Spanish civil war the onion sellers stopped coming.
THE CLOTHES WE WORE
When starting school I wore an English cap with a peak a sort of small edition of an “Andy Cap“. Later we were able to get the standard type of school cap which we bought through the school and which were in the school colours. It was a black cap with “amber” stripes. Everyone was expected to cover one’s head. Later this seemed to change as more and more boys and young men went without hats.
We dressed in short pants, usually gray flannel with socks reaching to the knee. Having a pair of black socks with amber in the fold overs at the top was a source of great pride. We wore gray flannel shirts or a garment called a jersey which was a sort of knitted shirt. Going to church on Sundays we were expected to wear a jacket and of course on Sundays one wore a tie. Most of the boys in the village wore black low boots which were polished for Sundays. It seemed we could not worship God unless we wore Sunday clothes or He did not listen to people wearing work clothes.
An article of clothing which I hated as a boy was called combs short for combinations. It was an undershirt attached to undershorts with sort of half-length legs. This garment had a slit in the back which you had to pull open to evacuate you bowels. It was a most difficult form of under attire ever invented. Up to a certain age we boys were expected to wear these combs and I think we all looked forward to the day when we could discard them.
Something which has stayed with me throughout my life is the expression “allow for growing”. Clothes were expensive item during the depression and when clothes were bought for a child one had to allow for growing. This meant that a boy in short pants would have new pants that reached below his knees when purchased and if he had the pants for a few years they would come halfway up his thigh. It was difficult to allow for growing when it came to footwear. I know I wore boots for too long that I finished up with hammer toes on both feet caused by wearing the boots which were too small for my feet.
At the age of fourteen years boys donned long pants and this was quite an occasion and marked a passage from childhood to adult status. There was another point in one’s life when clothing was an indicator of passage and that was when you got your first pair of pants with a fly; up on till then you had to pull your pants sideways so you could urinate through the leg opening.
When thinking of my childhood I have no memory of my Mother when her hands were not busy. When she was not cooking cleaning or all the things a housekeeper does and she was sitting down her hands were busy. She was knitting, hooking rugs, tatting or some other activity which was of benefit for her family. My mother could read and knit at the same time, she would read a magazine and knit socks for us children. The mothers’ lot in those days was hard and extremely demanding.
THE FEARS WE HAD
The continued fear we suffered in Hethersett, just after the First World War was
instilled into the us by the Government which had demonised the German army, during its march through Belgium. Much of these fears were later proved to be unfounded but to persuade people otherwise was difficult to accomplish particularly with the men who had been in the trenches of Flanders and other areas where the war was fought. We were very conscious of the execution of Edith Cavell who came from a neighbouring village and of course every use had been made by the British Government of these horror stories to bring the Americans into the war on the side of the Allies. While a lot of these horror stories were manufactured, they were still being used in the Press and so we young people were to some extent conditioned by them. To demonstrate how invidious and pervasive these fears were we played a game called war. Everyone wanted to be British and it was difficult to get boys to be German.
After 1920 the year that I was born there were several coal miners’ strikes culminating in the general strike of 1926. The period from the end of the first Great War to the onset of the great depression was an unsettled time and became even worse as the impact of the depression took hold.
We grew up at the end of Empire. The maps on our classroom walls displayed the Red of Empire on every continent. We were taught that Britain was an empire on which the sun never set and being British automatically made us superior. Our skin colour and background gave us advantages that those foreigners did not have, so we were told. Being white was applied to all sorts of situations, such as speaking white meant speaking English.
We recognized at the bottom of our hearts that for our generation, if there were another war some of our names would go on the war memorial. We lived with the fear and I think we all debated in our own minds how we would behave if the conflagration broke out again.
As we grew up we were well aware of the horrors of the trenches and we could see the men in the village minus legs arms and eyesight. We knew only too well that this was a big possibility in our future.
As Hitler and the Nazi Party grew in power, we could see little hope for us to avoid a clash. There were also prominent British citizens particularly in the aristocracy who seemed to favour Hitler and his cohorts. The Prince of Wales who was heir to the throne was not well viewed in Britain by the working people and was regarded as a bit of a poser. The depression was still with us and hard times were still being experienced in the industrial areas. Spending money to keep an individual who was regarded as useless and not particularly ornamental was not a pleasing prospect.
One of the things, which concerned us deeply, was the number of people in important positions in Government and among the aristocracy who appeared to be sympathetic to the Nazi and fascist movements in Germany, Italy and Spain. We listened to Oswald Mosely and other British fascist leaders. We also watched with dismay, the abandonment of the Emperor of Ethiopia to Musselini and his fascists.
We watched, sometimes with amusement, the aristocracy and the gentry as they climbed on each other’s shoulders trying to look good in the eyes of the world, but we rural poor and underprivileged had nothing to climb on except our own or a neighbours midden and even then there was often a pecking order in which we did not have much rank.
From the conversations I overheard, one of the great fears my parents had was getting old and not being able to support themselves. People who grew old and were indigent and had no relatives to look after them were put in a workhouse. This was a great fear and a dreaded end from the conversations I overheard. The workhouse was viewed as not much more than a prison but it was used all too often. The threat of the workhouse hovered over us like a shadowed ghost it was always there. Later there was some improvement in the treatment of the very poor as the workhouse did not get mentioned as often.
One of the most disorganised events I remember was the celebration of the silver jubilee of George the Fifth. He was much admired mainly because he did not interfere in the affairs of the nation. George was married to Princess Mary of Teck who had been selected for marriage to his older brother Rupert who had died. The village put on a dinner and we all sat at long tables set up in the village hall. The food was put on plates which were then passed down the tables. By the time the plate got to a person at the end of the table the food had been removed by the people who passed the plate. There was nearly a riot as many of the people who attended the event got nothing to eat. For us it was not much of a celebration and to be frank not many of us had confidence in the party in power. We viewed them as elitist and as village boys we did not have very much confidence in the way they were acting. The Government of the day was trying to tell us that we as the next generation we could carry on the best of British traditions and that we had to play fair in the way of Britons. I for one did not believe we had always played fair and thought the Government propaganda was nonsense as I had relatives who had been with the British Army in South Africa and had some knowledge of the true story of the concentration camps in which thousands of Boor women and children had died.
Another big event in Hethersett was Armistice Day. The Sunday nearest to the 11th November was called Armistice Sunday and the British Legion paraded to the Church. We had a retired colonel from the Indian Army living in the village, who commanded the parade. A very high percentage of the men residing in the village had served in the First World War. Many had been wounded and some had lost limbs. The parade started in the middle of the village and paraded to the church. Also following behind the Legion were the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides as well as the Brownies and Cubs. Behind them came the Odd-fellows and the Foresters, two fraternal society groups who had members living in the village. The service was very military with hymns such as Fight the Good Fight and Onward Christian Solders. The names of the men from the village who had died in the services during the war were read. It was a long list and the reading was very sad particularly as relatives usually attended. After this, a military trumpeter sounded the Last Post followed by two minutes of silence and the Reveille was sounded to complete the ceremony.
ILLNESS AND SICKNESS IN THE VILLAGE
One of the most unpleasant memories I have of Hethersett was the prevalence of disease and illness and our apparent inability to deal with it.
A great killer in the period was tuberculosis and it was brought home to me as it occurred quite often in my mother’s family. An uncle of mine, his wife and son and eventually my mother succumbed to this frightful disease and there did not seem to be any way to deal with it. The only thing the authorities could do was to erect a hut for the patient to sleep in, in the garden of their house. Tuberculosis is now almost a thing of the past but for quite a while it was a notorious killer and everyone was afraid of it. I know I was afraid of going home and finding a hut put in our garden for my mother. However my mother was put into an isolation hospital in North Norfolk and eventually succumbed to the disease.
There were equally dangerous illnesses such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever and various afflictions which quite often resulted in the death of children. I remember a number of children who succumbed to the diseases and the tragic simplicity of the funerals. It was the custom that if a boy died he would be carried to the graveyard by four girls and if a girl died she would be carried by four boys. I remember seeing these tragic little processions going through the village, the small coffin on a hand bier which would be closely followed by the mourners.
Measles and whooping cough afflicted most children and seemed to come every year and it seemed that almost all students in school would get those complaints at some time or other in their lives.
SUPERSTITIONS PREVALENT IN THE VILLAGE
There were many superstitions among the country folk living in Hethersett when I was a child. Some of them had their origin in religion, some may have pre-dated Christianity. Regardless of their origin, they played a part in our lives.
One superstition was associated with black cats. Black catse were considered unlucky and for a black cat to cross one's path was thought to bring bad luck. Black cats had always been associated with witchcraft and this may have been the birthplace of this superstition.
Salt had its accompanying superstitions. Salt had its religious connotations as an item of savour and to spill it was considered unlucky. If one did have the misfortune to spill salt one could remove the bad luck by throwing a small portion over one's left shoulder with the right hand.
Placing shoes or boots even when new on a table was perceived as bringing bad luck.
Cutting one's nails on a Friday was also thought to bring misfortune and was drilled into us by my Grandmother. As Friday was the day of the crucifixion I think this had religious origins.
Left handed people had a bit of a rough time. The right hand was said to be God's hand whereas the left belonged to the Devil. I remember efforts were made to change left handed children to right handed, causing a fair amount of unhappiness and misery.
Walking under a ladder was said to bring bad luck, as was sewing or knitting on a Sunday. Sunday was said to belong to the Lord and any form of work was discouraged.
Giving a knife as a gift to another person always had to be a sort of exchange. In other words the recipient had to give another piece of metal back.
HETHERSETT NATIONAL SCHOOL
There were two schools in the village. The Hethersett National School often called the Church School because it had a relationship with the Church of England. The other school was called the British School and I believe had some relationship with the Methodists or other non-establishment religions. The National School had an infant’s school and the main school started at six years of age. Classes called standards went up to Standard seven then there was a seven X for those who had completed all standards but was not old enough to leave school. I started school at the age of four years in the infant’s school. There was an older school building opposite the gate to the National School which was no longer used as a school, but was used as a meeting hall for the Church and parish activities. There was a troop of Boy Scouts attached to the Church to which I belonged and we would meet in this building.
Starting at the age of four years we were taught to write on slates with chalk. Everything was provided including text and exercise books. We had to take great care with what was issued to us. I suppose the School budget was tight and there was a great deal of re-use of books pencils etc.
In the school yard we played a sort of baseball we called rounders’ and a type of cricket we called stool ball. The school had a turret holding a bell which was rung for us to file into class. There was a lobby, or porch, with hooks for us to hang our coats in the winter. We all walked to school, there was no such thing as a school bus in those days.
School for me was a love hate relationship. I loved the learning and reading for me was a passion. What I did not like was the bullying and there was lots of that. Somewhere along the way through school I was promoted so that I was in a class with people who were a year older than I was. There did not seem to be any attempt on the part of the teachers to stop the bullying and life at school became a misery until one day I determined to fight back .Unfortunately my size precluded a stand up fight and I knew The Marques of Queensbury rules would not apply so I decided to use tactics which would not be acceptable in many quarters but which might help in stopping the tormenting. One rather large boy with an outsize mouth and an undersized brain came up to me and started pushing me around and taunting me. Village boys usually wore hobnailed boots which were very heavy and these were what I had on, so I aimed a kick at his crotch area which proved to be quite accurate and which doubled him over, after which he performed a sort of tap dance and emitted a noise like a Swiss yodel. His coterie which normally accompanied him looked on with amazement and one suggested I should stand up and fight like a gentleman which considering my size and family origins was stupid. It did not stop the bullying but it did reduce it and school became a bit more liveable.
There was a further problem as I was small for my age and I did not really start to grow until I was about fourteen. I certainly did not shine in sports. The main sport played at the school was Football {soccer} and “charging” was allowed. Whenever I got the ball I would be charged off it by some bigger boy. It was not until I got into the Service and played squash rackets that I found I could become really good at a sport.
One day a male teacher turned up at the school with a very strong Lancashire accent. People did not travel as much in those days and his accent was almost incomprehensible to us. During certain periods in the school we to study our lessons and while doing this we were not supposed to look around, One boy engaged in some day dreaming was told to “Luke at your Buke and not Luke around” this was the source of much amusement and we all “Luked at our Bukes and did not Luke around’.
One aspect of attendance at the Hethersett National School I enjoyed was the period we had each week for singing in the School Choir. The songs we sang were mostly songs from various parts of the British Isles they were traditional airs and I think all the students enjoyed the singing. I can still remember the words to some of the songs such as “The Ash Grove”, “The Nut Brown Maiden”, and “The Mountains Of Mourne” to name but a few.
There was one incident in the school which I shall always remember. There was an assistant teacher sent to the school who was I believe under training. He was, we were told, a County class cricketer but he was not very good at dealing with children. He would walk around the class look over our shoulders and if he found something wrong with our work lift us up by the hair in the back of our neck and then stab us under the arm with a two foot ebony round ruler. We grew our hair a bit longer than boys do today and being lifted up by the hair in the back of the neck was painful and to be stabbed under the arm with a two foot round ruler was also very disagreeable. This man used to ride a bicycle to school and a group of older boys brought pails of small potatoes to school and lined up at the school gates as he was leaving and pelted him with the potatoes.. There was an enquiry to find out who was responsible for this incident but nobody would tell and within a few days this man left the school and we all settled down to our normal routine.
The school had a small piece of land nearby where the boys were taught gardening. I suppose somewhere in an office someone came up with the idea that as we lived in the country it would be a good idea for us to learn gardening. Unfortunately the teacher who was to teach us how to garden was a city bred man from the north of England who did not have any idea on how to grow anything. I think it would be safe to say that every boy in the class knew more about the subject than he did, We were all country bred our fathers all had gardens and we all worked with our fathers in the gardens of the village. It was a well intentioned but in the end ineffective.
The desks of the teachers had a tube built into them to hold canes which the teachers would use at the slightest excuse. I remember one man had about half dozen of these canes of differing thickness and suppleness which when he decided to use he would take out a number, one after the other, and slash the air close to the victim as if trying out to be sure he had the right one for the job. It was a form of sadism. He also had a glass water tank in his classroom which contained some newts, but one day a boy dropped a piece of calcium carbide into the tank. When water is mixed with calcium carbide it produces acetylene gas which smells very badly and the teacher's first reaction was to demand that whoever had made the bad smell should stand up, of course he got no takers and then he noticed that the newts were dead and realized the cause of the bad smell.
This same master also had on his desk a hyacinth in a glass dish designed for growing bulbs using plant food in water. He was very proud of his hyacinth. To cane a boy one day he made the boy hold his hand out, the caning was to be two strokes of the cane across the hand which would be held out palm up. Every time he attempted to hit the held out hand the boy would jerk his hand back making the master miss. The master became most frustrated and kept on thrashing at the retreating hand until the hand was held over the hyacinth. The master took a swing at the hand which the boy jerked back with the result the master missed the hand and hit the flower smashing it and the glass dish.
Of course the teacher was furious. The boy ran home and came back with his father. There were various threats made by the father but it was difficult to tell who was more afraid the boy or the teacher but eventually it calmed down. It did change the stance of the teacher he made certain any boy he caned from then on was standing well away from his desk.
At the back of the school were the toilet and ablution area divided by a wall, the boys on one side the girls on the other. I can only describe what was on the boys’ side which was a trough arrangement at the base of the wall, a stand with two wash basins, two sitters and just one tap. There were no flush toilets and I would doubt that anyone on the village Council or School Board had ever heard of Thomas Crapper and the water waste preventer. The school had pupils ranging from about four years of age to fourteen and in all shapes and sizes.
Going for a pee for a young lad was a hazardous affair because you would just get going when a larger lad would come beside you and let fly and if you were not careful you would get in his back splash.
There was also considerable competition among the bigger lads as to who could pee the highest up the wall. Some of the bigger lads had good distance and could arc quite well almost getting to the top of the wall. There was one chap named Ernie who became the undoubted star turn. One day he managed to get a small quirt over the top of the wall and there was an outcry of indignation from the other side, the girls’ side of the wall.
There was some hasty buttoning up -- this was in the days before zip fasteners -- and all the boys marched out with looks of complete innocence when a lady teacher came storming around. We all tried to look indignant that a female teacher had invaded the territory of the male pupils. There was considerable inquiry as to who had peed over the wall but the culprit was never identified. Ernie always had a place of honour on our unofficial achievement roster.
The attitude of adults to children was based on an old saying which was common at that time and which said “children should be seen but not heard”. If one was spoken to by an elder one was not supposed to answer back. I remember getting into very hot water with my Grandmother because I answered back. Children were not supposed to have opinions or to think.
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON BULLYING
The Oxford Dictionary defines bullying as a method or way to coerce another person to do something by fear
Bullying was rife in the playground at school and it seemed the teachers had no way or no desire to stop it? One could attribute it to a number of causes not the least was jealousy. I did not think that was the only answer, there had to be other reasons. When working later on in life in Africa particularly in Tanzania and in Kenya I was able to observe how animals behaved. I noticed that the first born seemed to occupy the first place in the order of precedence mainly because he or she was fed first. The first born being stronger always seemed to be right behind the parents and the weakest was always last’ In the event of an attack by a predator the weakest would be the victim. Was this a survival of the fittest practice? Had this been acquired over millions of years?
Later when I was able to read Konrad Lorenz and also when I thought back to the chickens and ducks we kept when I was a boy it seemed to me that there was always an order of precedence and no matter how the flock was disturbed it would always reform in the same order. The question of course is
why ,and what instinctive force was at work to cause this to happen . Later I was able to relate this to the grownup behaviour in the village.
There was undoubtedly an order of precedence in the village and anyone who disturbed that order was reminded, in all sorts of ways as to, where he or she belonged in the social order of the village. There were many self-appointed guardians of that position who would willingly convey and make known to the offending individual information about their place and social indiscretions.
There was very subtle bullying going on in the village among grownups. If one had accused them of this practice the protests and denials would have been loud with outrage and their Christian Garments would have been flourished for all to see. But they did it all the same.
Children learn from their parents and it was interesting to notice the boys who bullied me and how their parents regarded themselves in the social structure in the village
There is another aspect to bullying which intrigues me. I believe children often reflect the opinions and attitudes of their parents. If parents make statements denigrating groups or individuals In the presence of their children it is quite likely that the same opinions will be expressed unthinkingly and impulsively in the playgrounds and other places where children gather. The point I am making is that bad or good habits like most things start in the home and are learned from parents.
There is another aspect to bullying which I believe has its roots in a form of racial superiority. If an individual believes he is superior to another racial or social group by virtue of skin colour education employment or any other reason his sense of superiority can lead to a need to dominate, and in turn can lead to coercion by fear.
One boy who was about three years older than me would rush out of his house and beat up on me on every occasion that I went near where he lived. There appeared to be no reason for his picking on me except that I was younger and smaller. He had a reputation as a bully and as I found out later he was ill treated at home by his mother who seemed to live on the edge of a nervous crisis. Looking back I have often wondered what happened to him. Did he marry and did he have children and how did he treat them. Unfortunately the bad habits of parents often get passed on.
COLOUR BLINDNESS
I was born red green colour blind; this is viewed by some people as not much of a handicap which to some extent is probably true it is nevertheless a handicap. There are many occupations and professions which are difficult for a colour blind person to fill And even in day to day activities it is often embarrassing and difficult.
Trying to explain to a normal sighted person about colour blindness is onerous in that no-one has ever looked at the world through another person’s eyes, Nine percent of the worlds males are in some way colour blind. Mostly these males are red green colour blind and according to the experts there is a reason for this. My colour blindness is called Deuteranomaly and is the most common form. It means persons having this problem have a reduction in sensitivity to the green area in the spectrum. This problem is generally sex linked, in other words it occurs more often in males than in females.
For a colour blind person colour coding presents problems some of which it is difficult to overcome. Colour blind people develop avoidance techniques and all sorts of little dodges so that they do not have to make decisions based on colour.
As a small child I developed a complex about my colour blindness. I did not understand it and could not comprehend why I made the mistakes I did. After making a mistake involving colour I overheard someone refer to me as being stupid and for a while I believed it. Perhaps the biggest impact on me was in art class. In school we used coloured crayons. This presented me with a major problem because the red, green and brown colours were all of the same shade and I could not differentiate. One of my worst experiences as a boy was having drawn a green cow in art class I was up ended over my desk and a half dozen strokes of a cane was applied to my rear end and at the same time I was upbraided as stupid. I suppose it did not occur to the teacher that there was no purpose in deliberately drawing an animal the wrong colour. It seems colour blindness was impossible for him to comprehend, and that I may have had a physical problem.
I found a solution to the situation at school, The desks in the school were doubles and the boy sharing a double with me had some troubles with academic subjects so we worked out an exchange he helped me with colours and I helped him with his math and English. An unpleasant memory I have of my desk mate was that in two years after his leaving school he was dead of tuberculosis, and about a year after that his sister had also died of the same disease and a couple of years after that both parents had also followed him to the grave. The whole family had become victims of the dreaded disease.
I have often found myself in embarrassing situations because of my colour blindness. Mostly it was caused by a mistake I made and usually it was with some very self-important individual. Self-importance and intolerance seem to be coupled and to thrive on a midden of ignorance.. I have often been asked if you do not see some colours what do you see? This is a question I cannot answer as I have not been able to see through another person’s eyes. The world I see is the world I have always seen. My vision of the world is the only one I have ever had or ever seen. It is virtually impossible for another person to describe colours to an individual who does not see colour or who only sees certain colours I did not become colour blind by any act I may have committed or through any fault of my parents. This was dealt to me at birth through the genes I inherited.
I am not completely sure but I suspect the feeling I got that I was in some way inferior .or did not in some way measure up came from my grandmother [ my mother’s mother ] Somehow I was viewed as not quite what I should have been and the fact that I was colour blind seemed to be confirmation in her mind that I was deficient in every quality she admired. Even though I doubt that she knew what the word meant she had heard an aunt refer to me as precocious, she therefore applied this label at every opportunity. I did not know what the word meant and thought it was some form of physical deformity and remember looking at myself in a mirror to see if I could see what was wrong. I did my best to avoid her particularly I did not like to hear her praising a cousin while denigrating me.
In the long life I have lived I have often thought that the hurt one receives in ones early life stays like a boil in memory. It does not matter how hard one tries to forget it, it is there. It comes to the surface jogged by a word or action. It is part of who one is, it is part of the building blocks of one’s personality
Nature does in some ways compensate for physical disabilities or deficiencies, for instance a blind person develops acute hearing and a deaf person develops acute sight. In my case I had extremely good night vision and a very good memory. I remember doing an evasion night exercise during the Second World War I was able to lead my group whereas the other normal sighted individuals were unable to cope very well in the dark. I was explaining this to a lad from Ireland how nature compensated. He agreed with me and said he had noticed the same thing in Ireland. Particularly he noticed a man who was born with a short leg nature had compensated for it by making the other leg longer.
For people interested in the subject of colour blindness I would recommend reading “The Ancestors Tale” by Richard Dawkins, particularly chapter six “The howler monkeys tale”
LEFT HANDED AND HOMOSEXUAL PEOPLE
I always felt I got a bit of a rough ride in school because of being colour blind but there were two other groups who were also singled out because of being different. There were two boys and one girl in the class which went through school with me who were left handed and at the time I went through school being left handed was considered a curable problem. I remember hearing it said that the right hand was God’s hand and the left hand was the Devils. This was a hangover attitude from the days of witchcraft but I am sure was sincerely believed by many people.
There was a teacher in the School who would rap the knuckles of left handed pupils with a round ruler in an attempt to cure what was perceived to be a problem causing pain and misery to the pupil. I remember hearing the thud of the round ruler applied against flesh and bone and the cries of pain. I felt particularly sorry for the girl who was left handed and who would be hit with the round ruler and we would see her crying in the schoolyard. The teacher who did this was a bully, an arrogant and ignorant bully.
There was a boy in the class ahead of the one I was in who I am sure was homosexual. He acted a bit feminine and was always very particular about the way he was dressed. He was picked on by the some of the other boys mainly because he would not participate in some of the team sports we played. He was very artistic and in fact was extremely talented as a painter which set him apart from the rest of his class. He had a hard time in the school and with one particular teacher. Again there were attempts to change him but of without success.
It was firmly believed by some very religious people, that being homosexual was a sin and that one had a choice and one could be normal if the individual wanted to change. I could not believe that anyone would willingly choose to be homosexual in view of how they were treated by people who considered that they themselves were normal.
BILL Morton was born in Hethersett in 1920 and brought up in the village in the years between the two World Wars. Bill now lives in Canada. He kindly sent us a copy of his manuscript "A Thursday's Child" which outlines what it was like growing up in the village. This document has never previously been published and we are very grateful to Bill for allowing us to use extracts for this web site. The full manuscript will be placed in the Hethersett Archives as it also covers various trips and other facts about the county of Norfolk.
LOOKING back from the age of ninety; a distance of memory of about eighty-six years, I can still remember my first day in school. I started school at the age of four years and all sorts of memories come to mind. Sitting on my desk as I write this is a piece of wood about five inches long by two and one half wide and about one and one half inches deep. In the top of this piece of wood is an oval indentation which turns it into a stud tray. I remember the year I acquired this article, it would be nineteen thirties of the last century. The church bells of St Remigius Church had to be re-hung. The massive oak beams on which the original peel of bells had been hung had been eaten away by the deathwatch beetle. When the beams were removed quite a bit of wood was salvaged by a local carpenter and various articles were manufactured and sold to parishioners. I acquired my stud tray in the sale. This was in the time when we all wore tunic shirts and had to have back and front studs to attach the collar. We also wore cuff links so it was convenient to have a stud tray.
Since leaving Hethersett I have traveled a long road. My service years took me around the United Kingdom and Africa. On immigrating to Canada my business activities took me to some eighty countries on six continents. It has been a long and much traveled life ,
The following is a poem we used to recite as children:
Mondays child is fair of face
Tuesdays child is full of grace
Wednesdays child is full of woe
Thursdays child has far to go
Fridays child is loving and giving
Saturdays child works hard for a living
And a child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay
Strange at it may seem I was born on a Thursday.
The period between the two world Wars from 1918 to 1939 was a period of twenty one years, I was born in 1920. The Country had not yet got over the impact of the First World War. Rationing was still in effect and all sorts of restrictions on what one could do or not do still existed. It has also been referred to as an interval in a large conflict between the same set of belligerents.
The Government had told the people that the 1914 to 1918 was a war to end all wars, and those who had fought in the war would be properly rewarded. Like most wars, this war was expected to be a short one. In fact, it was expected the first troops who had gone to the war in September 1914 would be home for Christmas. The casualties were dreadful; the trench warfare was unremitting and ghastly. The impact on a village such as Hethersett was disastrous. The young men who were 19 years of age when the war broke out paid a high price, as did those who followed them.
The British Empire was built on the back of the Industrial Revolution. It had peaked industrially in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it had failed to modernise and as a consequence its techniques and processes were no longer competitive. Britain entered the 1914 war non-competitive with the rest of the world and as a consequence in the immediate post war period was unable to return to the prewar days of empire. In 1920 there was a slump and basic industries such as textiles, ship construction, coal and mining plus many other industries never recovered.
The ten years from 1920 to 1930 could be called the decade of strikes and strife. During this decade there were two police strikes, a national rail strike, a long lasting shipbuilders strike, two national coal strikes, a two month long engineering strikes all of which culminated in the General Strike of 1926. By 1930, there were over two million people out of work and this situation remained so until 1936. Even when the Second World War broke out in 1939 there were 1.25 million people out of work.
I have clear memories of the General Strike and the coal strikes. While not fully understanding all the issues involved at the time I knew from overhearing what my parents were saying that it was not good and that we were going to feel the impact. It seemed to me there were great differences of opinion among people. There were those who condemned the strikers, generally those who considered themselves upper class and those who sympathized with the strikers, generally were the workers or poorer people. Society was divided and would not become cohesive until the Second World War. There was considerable anger and bitterness, particularly among the people who had fought in the war. The promises made had not been kept. Even some of the leaders of the labour party were considered traitors which made the working class and particularly the unemployed even more bitter.
1931 saw the onset of the great depression which made industrial improvement difficult and while its effect was worse in the industrial areas it nevertheless had its deleterious effect on rural Britain. It seemed that as conditions became worse and opportunities became even less with resulting lowering of wages. Many technical firms hired apprentices and when they qualified as journeymen they were let go and new apprentices were hired. This was a way of obtaining cheap labour and it appeared there was little anyone could do about it.
As the clouds heralding the coming conflict gathered over Europe, and despite the appeasement efforts by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain we knew we were headed for war and this happened in September 1939.
It was a difficult time for those of us born into the bottom layers of the social strata as nothing came easily. There was always some fear involved in what one said or did. There were social divisions but not always clearly defined. It was not until one had crossed the line did one become aware of having committed a social indiscretion of stepping out of place. In a following chapter I describe the habits of the Panama Ape. Similar habits were practiced by members of society in Hethersett. Even those of us who showed some ambition to improve our lot were accused of “getting above oneself” a form of social sin, and became targets of vituperation and calumny. It was not until it was pointed out to me that I became aware of the social levitation I had committed although to this day I am not sure how I did it.
The Rural Poor
I was born in Hethersett a Norfolk village the son of a farm labourer in the year 1920.
There was a tendency among the great novelists to romanticise the rural poor as the salt of the earth. The honest countryman happy in his role and lot is the picture transmitted by many writers. The ploughman homeward plodding his weary way was all very romantic, including the setting sun.
This view of the rural poor has been reinforced by novelists such as Thomas Hardy and the romantic poets. I have not found a writer who dealt with the reality of the rural poor, the poor housing the rural wage, the inadequate education. There is no doubt the rural farm worker was the sub soil which nourished the whole rural economy of England. It was a long established system reaching back several hundred years. The lot of the farm worker was a hard one. Long hours starting in the early morning, for poor pay {thirty shillings per week minus a deduction for rent if his cottage was tied to the farm on which he worked} He worked 5 1/2 or six days per week and at certain seasons of the year he worked sun up to sun down. To romanticise this was wonderful for individuals who had not lived it. For peoples who had not shovelled manure, who had not worked the laborious tasks that are required to produce the crops on which they had fed.
With the limited education available in the rural communities the only alternative to farm work for the countryman was the army and it was from the rural poor that the county regiments were recruited.
In writing about the first nineteen years of my life I feel I am trying to cover a period which has not been adequately addressed by other writers. It was a period of social unrest and industrial turmoil. Those of us who grew up in that period grew up with some resentment and anger. There was enormous pressure for social reform a great deal of it coming from the men who had served in the military in the First World War and who felt they had been short-changed
It was an in between period, not only in between two World Wars but also a period between attitudes and outlooks. It was a period that still clung to the robes of empire but could not afford the breech clout of reality.
Farm work was still labour intensive, although there were indications of change such as the use of farm tractors and other mechanisation on the farms. One could see the changes coming and with the change, hopefully would come improvement in the lot of the rural worker.
In the following chapters I will try to convey to the reader what it was like to grow up in that rural society. The difficulties we encountered and how we tried to solve our problems with the economic and social mores of that time. The oppressive class distinctions embedded in the lower layers of the bottom strata of society reached over us and influenced everything we did and every thought we had. We were prisoners of a system that was being forced to change but was resisting change. The soil of England had been worked watered and manured by the sweat and energy of the rural worker but his participation in the rewards had always been minor in relation to the effort he had expended.
The rural poor lived with a fear, a fear of being unable to support one self. There was also a fear that hovered always with the rural poor and that was the fear of the workhouse. The workhouse was the bitter end, the ultimate disgrace. I know my parents lived with that fear, the fear that they would be unable to support themselves and that they would finish up in the Workhouse. The workhouse was viewed as not much better than a sentence to prison. Poverty was viewed as a form of disgrace. To be dependant was treated as a social evil and those who had committed this social evil had not measured up to the high standards set by their betters.
The puritan movement among the Protestants brought to their adherents a great regard for this worlds goods and it seems they felt that in accumulating wealth it was because God had blessed them and they were therefore among those who were favoured by the Almighty. The obverse of that coin and argument was that if you were poor it was because God had not seen fit to favour you and you were in some way unfitting to be blessed with the goods of this world. There was also a form of puritanism in the Catholic Church called Jansenism which revealed itself as a denial of any of the comforts which could be obtained in this world which made Catholic orphanages harsh and bleak. Religious orders and male dominated organisations often became hiding places for sexual perverts and deviants.
Looking back from my present age of ninety two there is a misty rosiness which shrouds the past and conceals some of the unpleasantness which pervaded those days. The reality in which we lived was overshadowed by class and the mean narrowness of the “have not’s” struggling to achieve the status of “haves”. It was like a procession of people climbing a ladder and having no regard for the hands and fingers on which they trod, in fact some seemed to get a measure of satisfaction from crushing fingers and hands. Blowing away the mist that clouds the vision of memory, the reality of those days is revealed as stark and cold.
The most persistent memory I have of my early life is being wet and cold. Being cold was part of how we dressed as boys. We wore short pants and during winter in Norfolk the winds would often come from the North-East for periods of a week or so at a time. It would seem we would never get warm. It appeared to be always wet and cold and we would pray for a change in the wind. When I started work I had to cycle about seven miles in the early morning and in rain so that I seemed to get wet very often with no way of getting dry.
There was only one fireplace in the house and we all crowded around in an attempt to get warm. Clothing was expensive and we always seemed to be short of something. Winter clothing was always a great concern, and in particular winter coats. There were rummage sales held in the village [jumble sales they were called] by church or other groups and my mother was a regular attendee looking for suitable winter clothing. I cannot remember my Father having a new suit of clothing. He always had a second hand suit which my Mother had found at a jumble sale.
Being properly dressed to attend church on Sunday was of great concern and it seemed that unless you were cleanly and properly dressed for church you had little hope of getting into heaven when you died. I always had a mental picture of arriving at the gates of heaven and having St Peter looking at me and shaking his head because my boots were dirty or my clothing soiled.
Getting a weekly bath was also a great exercise. Water had to be drawn up from a well by a windlass and carried to the wash house in a pail, heated and we took turns in the bath. Again it was instilled into us that “cleanliness was next to godliness”. I do not know where this saying came from but I am sure whoever said it originally was not raised in a clay lump Norfolk farm labourer’s cottage.
The village of Hethersett covers some 2,695 acres and lies along the old Highway 11 (now 1172) approximately 6 miles from the city of Norwich in the county of Norfolk. The village has a long history dating back to before the Doomsday Book where it is mentioned. It is bounded by Wymondham, Great Melton, Little Melton, Colney, Cringleford, Keswick and Ketteringham Although the name is Saxon, there is evidence of older settlements such as New Stone Age and Roman.
The present parish church was built starting in 1320 and completed in the 15th century.
The most notable event in the history of the village appears to be the Ketts rebellion in 1549.
Hethersett lies very close to Norwich so close that people think it is part of Norwich. Even though many of the residents of Hethersett found employment in Norwich it is nevertheless a separate community.
When I was growing up, the village had three churches. The parish church of St Remigius which was Church of England and Methodist and Baptist places of worship called Chapels. The village had two schools The first was a church school called the National School the other was called the British School which seemed to have had some relationship with the Methodists.
The village contained four public houses. The Kings Head, the Queens Head, the Prince of Wales and the Greyhound. The number of public houses out-numbered the churches which accounted for the fact that pubs opened after the Sunday morning services in the churches in which parishioners were often told to “thirst after righteousness” which was something many did. There was one baker, one post office, three butchers; two Sweet shops a bicycle shop, three grocery shops, one automobile garage, a blacksmith and carpenters shop.
The village had a good bus service. Some buses went through to Wymondham along the main London Road. Most turned off the London Road at the Queens Head and proceeded through the village turning south at Mill Road and then rejoined the London Road at the New Road where it went on to Wymondham. Some buses continued to Attleborough. It was a good service as a lot of people who lived in Hethersett worked in Norwich and some worked in Wymondham which also had some industry, including two brush factories.
There was a railway that went through Hethersett. It was part of the London and North Eastern Scottish system. There was a railway station but not many trains stopped or used the station.
The best thing about the railway tracks were the big banks on which grew wild strawberries. These wild strawberries were the tastiest I have ever sampled and going there to gather them was a yearly undertaking.
Hethersett was quite flat with only a couple of small hills. The area was drained by two stream systems. One started near the church from a group of springs and another which crossed the Great Melton Road and flowed in the direction of Wymondham where it eventually joined a small river called the Tiffey which then joined the river Yare at Barford. To us village boys the streams were a source of great interest as they hosted moor- hens and water rats.
OWNERSHIP OF LAND
In the years after the First World War ownership of land in England was still very much in the hands of a few large land owners. These landowners lived on the rents they obtained from leasing out farms to the farmers who cultivated the land. This system had existed for several hundred years. As a consequence of this very few people living in the village were able to own the houses they lived in. Figures available for the year 1938 indicate that less than thirty per cent of houses in the United Kingdom were owner occupied. In the rural areas the cottages were often tied to the job and were part of the rented property. This made it difficult for a man to leave his employment as he had to give up his house which went with his job. Alternative housing did exist for rent which was built by the local Council but the waiting period to get one was generally fairly long.
Hethersett had its own race course and when I was a boy there were half day races held every summer. The course was off Station Lane. There was a small lane which led to the course which was to the north of Station Lane. The course had jumps of various types and people referred to it as a steeplechase.
The course had no buildings and when races were held tents of various sizes were erected. It was a gathering place for the breeches and bowler hatted brigade. Men turned up with shooting sticks and women strutted around in Jodhpurs. The first time I saw a man perched on a shooting stick I was puzzled and wondered where the top of the stick ended, it was not until the man stood up and walked away that I saw that the stick had a folding sort of saddle on which he sat.
I have clear memories of races, the horses and their riders in their silks. I also have memories of the smells which pervaded the course. The smell of the horses which included their droppings and urine, but also there was a lot of beer drunk and the toilet arrangements were somewhat primitive, which all added to the atmosphere. To us village boys it was all very interesting, particularly watching the bookies and their tic tac men signalling the odds.
There was a stream which ran through the course which provided a water jump, this was where riders would often fall and finish up in the water. I heard one woman say to another that Bunnie had come an arser which I understood to mean he had landed on his rear end. I do not know when the Hethersett races ended but I suspect the onset of the Depression had something to do with it.
The village had a population of about a thousand souls who mostly adhered to the Church of England. There were a few hundred Methodists and a few Baptists. There was a small group of Roman Catholics who attended mass at the nearby town of Wymondham. It was also rumoured that there were a couple of members of the British Flat Earth Society.
The local Church was dedicated to Saint Remigius which reflected local history. After the battle of Crecy which was fought in 1346 Edward III insisted that instead of exporting the raw wool
England should do its own weaving and imported French and Flemish weavers to convert the wool into cloth. A number of these imports settled in East Anglia where a lot of the wool was raised. As a result of these newcomers to the area, they not only built churches they also dedicated churches to their own Saints hence Hethersett got a church dedicated to a French Saint.
One of the strange and ironic twists of history is that Remigius was originally a Christian Romanised Celt from England who was sent to France to Christianize the Franks who were pagan and were invading eastern France. The City of Rheims is named after him.
While the Church of England was the largest religious group in the village it was probably the smallest in Church attendance. The church was a convenient place in which to get married, baptized and buried. A further irony was that there was only one graveyard in the village and that was next to the church. As a consequence no matter what your religion was while you were alive, you were likely to find your final resting place beside or next to members of another Christian sect.
I remember the first time I heard a radio. It was a cat’s whisker crystal set. Eventually radio became popular in the village as was evidenced by the number of wireless poles erected at almost every house, but we still made our own entertainment through the village council and church groups. We had social evenings and general knowledge competitions. Our spelling bees were popular particularly the knock out type. We brought in interesting speakers on all sorts of subjects. One interesting speaker we brought in was Sir Eric Teichman who had been permanent British Consul to the Chinese Government and brought along a marvellous collection of Chinese artefacts. This sparked my interest in that Country and culture which I have never lost. Teichman was unfortunately murdered by two United States soldiers during the Second World War. They were poaching on his property Anyone wishing to know more about Teichman and China should read Simon Winchesters “The man who loved China”
I also remember clinging to my Mothers skirt and hearing this strange noise overhead and looking up to see this cigar shaped thing in the sky and being told it was an airship. I found out later that it was the R.34 and was stationed at Pulham St Mary. Later in the second world war I was going through some personnel records of men on the unit for which I was adjutant and noticed one sergeant had been stationed at Pulham and had been a helmsman on the R.34.
One of our knockout spelling bees became quite contentious. There were two good spellers in the village. One was the village Church of England Rector and the other was a Methodist farmer. It was the rectors turn to challenge the Farmer to spell and he asked the farmer to spell “auspice” This was an unfortunate choice and caused some bad feelings between the two religious groups To ask a farmer to spell auspice at a time when most farm work was done by horses was considered by the Methodist population as just “not cricket”. As a matter of fact, it was considered fortunate that competition between the two religious groups was limited to spelling bees.
Very early on I became extremely interested in history and in particular local history. Almost every village or locality had ghost stories which had connections to some notable event in the past Because of these ghost stories my friends and I decided to investigate these ghost stories and to send these findings to the local newspaper. One was the story of the Baconsthorpe ghost. The Baconsthorpe Manor stands just inland from the town of Cromer on the North Sea. The story of the Baconsthorpe ghost concerned two brothers who quarrelled over the inheritance of the manor and one brother had thrown his brother off the manor wall and was disembowelled on a defensive spike. The Baconsthorpe ghost is reputed to walk the ruins of the Manor holding the ripped out intestines of his brother. Needless to say we did not see any ghost. Hethersett had its own ghost, so rumour said, a headless dog called Old Chuck who was supposed to haunt the local village at certain places. I never found anyone who admitted that they had seen him.
I remember visiting another place of interest called Grimes Graves. How this place got its name I do not know. It was a group of tunnels dug out by Neolithic peoples searching for the flints they used to make their tools. As the Neolithic people were small and the only illumination allowed in the tunnels were candles crawling through the small apertures without burning the backside of the fellow in front required considerable dexterity and care.
We also became involved in remarking of the Pedders Way. The Pedder’s Way was the old Pilgrim Road which led to the shrine of Our Lady Of Walsingham, and then went on to the coast near Hunstanton. This shrine was the second most popular shrine for pilgrimages in England second only to the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. Only part of the Way exists a good deal of it has been covered with development or new road surfaces. One of the fascinating aspects of Norfolk is that it has seen every invasion of the island and the different peoples who have occupied the County have left traces of their being there. Even before the Roman period one can find traces of the Celtic people. After the Roman period one can find evidence of Anglo Saxon, Danish and Norman occupation.
CHURCH HISTORY
Going back to history of the Church of Saint Remigius brings to mind the fact that the church had no toilets. It was claimed that the longest sermon preached in that church was in the early seventeenth century and was of considerable duration. For all that I can find out preachers in those days were long and windy and sermons could last several hours. Now if the preacher stayed in the pulpit for any length of time did he have a “peers bladder or did he have a bucket?’ What about the congregation? Did they slip out to find a convenient clump of bushes or did they suffer in silence. Even in my day as an altar boy we had to be careful to relieve ourselves before the service started. There was one convenient grave stone big enough for a small boy to hide behind and to obtain relief, and it would seem it had provided a place for that purpose for several generations.
Something else which always intrigued me about the church was that there was a room over the porch to which there was no access. How that came about nobody seemed to know but never appears to have been used.
The people who were grownups during my childhood were born in the later part of the Victorian or in the early part of the Edwardian reign. From all that I have read of those particular periods they were times of very great class distinction. A great number of the mothers of my contemporaries had been in domestic service. They started work right after school generally as kitchen or scullery maids. Even domestic service had its own class distinction. Butler for men, or in the case of females, house- keeper was at the top of the heap and then there was a descending order to the bottom, where the scullery or kitchen maid or the stable boy had their places.
The men these women married were often local men who worked on the farms in the area or similar work which was available locally. They carried into the village social structure and the distinctions they had encountered and learned in domestic service.
I remember overhearing one conversation between a group of women where a woman, who had been in domestic service as a ladies maid, emphasizing that fact in order to establish her superiority over the other women.
My mother had started as a scullery maid. I believe she was a cook when she met my father who had just returned home from the First World War
There is an old saying “that Jack is as good as his master” That old saying may have applied in other parts but it did not apply in Hethersett when I was growing up. Jack was not perceived as being as good as his master and there were lots of people who made certain that he did not get that idea. When Jack went to his master’s house he went to the back door. He addressed his master as Sir and the master addressed Jack by his surname such as Smith. He never sat down in the presence of his master and was expected to pull his forelock and remove his hat before he spoke.
As I have mentioned class was a well-established and functioning force in the village. Although the village had a population of about one thousand souls, the social atmosphere which pervaded was of a smaller entity or a much smaller hamlet. It seemed everyone knew everyone else’s business genealogy and history.
To those of us who were viewed as belonging to the bottom of the heap there was no way to change this. Hethersett was not only divided vertically it was also divided horizontally. The vertical divisions came about from the church or religious group you were perceived to be a part of i.e. Church of England, Methodist or Baptist. The horizontal divisions were caused mainly by money. Certain occupations could command better incomes which brought emphasis to the horizontal divides. The depression caused some disruption to the historical divisions, for instance young men on leaving school would enter an apprenticeship contract with a firm and when they were qualified as journeymen they would be released from their employment. Apprentices would be doing journeymen work and the journeyman would be on the dole. This meant that the horizontal divisions became narrower and that society devolved into an ever growing layer of poor and a layer of people on top with money.
The major problem was the occupants of the social layer directly above the layer you were viewed to be in. I noticed the same phenomena in South Africa; the most rabid racists were the poor whites the black South Africans were seen as competition. As the black South Africans rose economically and socially the poor whites saw themselves as sinking. The same thing, but on a much smaller scale pervaded the village as I grew up.
There was an expression used frequently in the parlance of the day “knowing your place”. One had to know your place, where you sat in church, the school you went to, who you made friends with and even what you wore. Certainly what you did for a living or what your father did determined your place.
There was in one of the collects which we had to learn in Sunday school a statement which said in effect that we should be content in the place to which God had seen fit to call us. I had not noticed that God had called me to any place and I was certain that when my place was pointed out to me by a very self-important person who I was sure was convinced that he or she had received directions from God and was carrying out Gods will in putting me in my place. In other word the very people who were deciding where all belonged were the ones who made the decisions and were blaming it on God.
A lot of the class distinction disappeared in the Second World War. Most of us started at the bottom and promotion came mainly on ability.
There was an attitude among some of the Christians in the village that poverty was a form of sin. There was reasoning which said that Christians were the favoured of God and the more goods and money you had meant that you were being blessed by God. This was undoubtedly a way of persuading them that they were in fact the upstanding people they believed they were. There was an obverse side to this coin which said if you were poor you had in some way offended God and therefore being poor was your responsibility and you had only yourselves to blame.
The poor and in particular orphans became a charge on the parish. In the case of orphans they were put in the workhouse or an orphanage and many were swept up in a scheme to transport and settle these children in countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. All these countries had a shortage of farm labour and this scheme gave the local authorities in Britain a way to relieve themselves of a financial burden on the ratepayers.
While the orphan scheme may have had good intentions at the start there is no doubt it did not take long for it to deteriorate into an operation beneficial to the operators of the immigration scheme and to recipients of the child labour. There is evidence that some of the operators of the scheme were paid as much as ten pounds sterling by local authorities in Britain to take the children off their hands.
Many of the children shipped were not orphans but children of the poor who were left in care homes. Many were shipped out of Britain and were deceived into believing their parents were dead and that they would be welcomed into kind and loving homes. This may have been true of a minority but the reality for many was the opposite. They were exploited as cheap agricultural labour and any I have talked to in Canada have bitter memories.
I have long believed the transportation of convicts was a way to get rid of the poor. Many of the convicts who were transported had broken the law for poaching and other paltry property crimes. Their offences for which they were convicted were often a last resort before starvation their problem was they had offended against the wealthy land owners.
Functioning in the village was a number of organisations. For the men there were the Foresters which had a relationship with the Anglican Church and The Odd fellows both provided inexpensive services to their members such as insurance, The Foresters had a sports day which was something to look forward to and was well attended. For the ladies there were The Women’s Institute and the Mothers Union. The Women’s Institute was dedicated to teaching women new or improved skills. The Mothers Union was associated with the church and was aimed at encouraging women to bring up their children in the church and to providing stable family life.
MY FAMILY TREE
My Morton grandfather was a Scot from Ayrshire. He served in the Royal Navy and died at sea. My father’s mother came from the Isle of Wight. There were two sons of that marriage and William for whom I am named was left in Scotland when his father’s ship was relocated to Portsmouth, he eventually migrated to the United States. My Grandfather died before my father was born. Grandmother Emma Morton re-married, her second marriage was to an army man named John Plummer who obtained work in Cringleford and that is where my father was brought up living in what was always known as the Round House.
My mother’s family name was Ringer. A Charles Ringer married Frances Lewarne in Hethersett and had eleven children seven boys and four girls. As far as I can ascertain the Ringers were a North Norfolk family. I believe there are gravestones in the churchyard of the Villages of Trunch and Swafield, Norfolk carrying the name of Ringer. The name Ringer is thought to have two possible origins. One that it originates as the name Reinger or Rainger or it could have come from the old English hringanas meaning a ring, which could make it an occupational name. The oldest mention I have been able to find of this name is in Northamptonshire where a family of Ringers held a manor.
To understand these people and how they got to Hethersett and the conditions under which they lived and worked it is necessary to go back to the Napoleonic and pre-Napoleonic periods. When reading about Wellington's Peninsular campaign the regiments that served in his army and doing the same type of study of Nelsons ships and the individuals who manned them it is possible to see where the people came from and why.
When I learned that my grandfather had died at an early age while serving in the Royal Navy at the middle of nineteenth century I researched conditions these men served under. One medical historian called the ships” floating hell holes”. They were rife with disease of all types and anyone serving on them had a better chance of surviving cannonball, shot or shell than surviving the diseases carried on board.
The regiments which made up Wellington’s army had a high proportion of Scots and Irish. There were two good reasons for this - there was still loyalty to the Stewart's in Scotland and to a potentially Catholic monarch in Ireland. The Hanoverian monarchs never felt very secure on the English throne and to keep potentially rebel groups out of the British Isles it was expedient to enlist them in the army and have them serve on the continent and elsewhere. There were two major attempts to replace the house of Hanover, one in 1715 and another in 1745. For many Scots or Irish of the Catholic faith there was no future to be found in the British Isles. Many like Patrick Gordon a Catholic Scot, found service with the King of Sweden in the Great Northern War against Poland. He was captured by the Poles and offered service with the Polish Army. He was captured again and took service with Sweden. Gordon was such a good soldier he was offered service with the Swedes altogether three times. Peter of Russia heard about Patrick Gordon and offered him service. Peter’s first two great regiments were set up and trained by Gordon.
There is another similar case involving an Irishman by the name of Vincent O'Higgins who had family teaching at the University of Salamanca and went there to complete his education. He took trade goods and went to Lima, Peru and fathered a son on a Spanish Lady. Vincent O'Higgins went on to become the Spanish Vice Regent for about half of South America while the son Bernard grew up to become the great liberator of Chile.
I describe the two instances above as examples of people from the fringes of the British Isles taking service with foreign governments because they were unable to find opportunities in their own land for racial or religious reasons. There were thousands like them such as whole regiments of Irish and Scots serving in the French Army. The Regiment Dillon was made up entirely of Irishmen serving France. The second in command to Montcalm at the Plains of Abraham was a Scot. It is also ironic that the first troops to climb the heights of Abraham at Quebec were Scots who could speak French and answer the challenge in that tongue because they had previously served in the French army.
Another interesting case was James Cook the father of the great navigator. His original name was not Cook as he was a Jacobite Scot who rose with James Stewart in the 1715 rebellion and had to escape out of Scotland. If he had been caught he would have been hung. He travelled far enough south to Whitby in Yorkshire where his accent would not be that pronounced and married a local girl. He became a farm bailiff. His son went to sea as a master of a Whitby collier and then joining the Navy and rising to warrant rank. When the admiralty wanted to explore the South Pole, the only navigator they deemed capable of carrying out the undertaking was Cook who had to be commissioned to command a naval ship. It was Cook who surveyed the St Lawrence and Newfoundland, which permitted Woolf to bring his army up to Quebec. Cooks original surveys are now in the archives of Canada. I was very pleased to be on the Board of the Canadian Institute of Surveying when the transfer to Canada was arranged. Cooks surveys in our waters are part of our history and are part of our unique foundation as a country.
Many of the names in Hethersett are Anglo-Saxon, and many are of Danish or French origin One name it seems was only found in the Orkney Islands. In terms of family names I think Hethersett reflected what had happened to the whole of East Anglia in terms of the different occupations and in place names. Historically all have left evidence of the different occupations as they have left traces of their language influencing the Norfolk dialect and accent..
I have always been fascinated by the names found in East Anglia which owe their origin to the wool industry. Many such names were to be found in Hethersett or in nearby parishes. Names such as Webb, Webber, Webster, Fuller, and Weaver all come to mind. There is a village in Norfolk called Worsted which gave its name to Worsted cloth which was first woven in that village. When I visited Worsted it was a small village with a very large church. It was obvious the village had been a thriving place when the church was built. The industry had moved but the church had been built to accommodate a much larger population had stayed.
The wool industry had left ample evidence of its lengthy presence in East Anglia particularly in the type of houses occupied by the weavers. They lived in houses with the second story extending into the street. This type of house allowed the loom to be accommodated on the second floor, as it needed more space than the family who lived on the ground floor. Norwich also had evidence of the wool trade in that one of its major streets called London Street was crooked. I understood that its crookedness came from the fact that it was built over a stream which was originally used by fullers to clean the wool. The stream became a sewer in a later century.
With the invention of the mechanical loom and the spinning jenny, these machines could be powered and the power obtained from fast flowing rivers and streams. Hence there was a move of the industry to the northern counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire where waterpower was available from rivers and streams flowing from the central hilly backbone of England.
MY HETHERSETT HOME
The house I was born in was a typical farm labourer’s cottage. It was of clay lump construction, a method of construction used in East Anglia. Clay lump meant it was built from large rectilinear lumps of clay reinforced with straw and piled one on top of each other. It was very old with low ceilings and an Inglenook fireplace. The roof was of reed thatch very common to the area. Because the walls were very thick the window sills were also very wide which meant that a small boy like me could sit on the window sill and read. Lighting in the house was provided by an oil lamp which burned paraffin oil and when we went to bed we used candles to light our way.
The inglenook fireplace also provided a convenient place to sit and read. The height of the ceilings indicated the age of the cottage it was built when people were much shorter than they are now.
The cottage had a wall oven and had a wash house attached. It had a large garden in which my father grew our vegetables. Water was drawn from a well with bucket and windlass.
Cottages of this type with its thatch roof are often featured on picture post cards in promotional features of England and people who are not familiar with these buildings are often impressed. The truth is unless they have been modernised they were often draughty and uncomfortable. They were warm only close to the fire, which accounts for the reason in the winter we all huddled around the fire to keep warm and why we needed warm clothes instead of heating the house.
One of the enduring memories I have of that cottage was sitting on a little stool next to my Father‘s chair and asking him questions about his war experiences. Dad was in the army at the attack on the Dardanelles’ and at Salonika. He had several bullet wounds, lost fingers and toes to frost bite and was deaf in one ear. That he survived at all was quite remarkable, and some of the incidents he recounted were as music to the ears of a small boy. At some time the remnants of his regiment were combined into the Dublin Fusiliers and it was with that regiment that he went to Salonika and the Balkans.
In the house was a wooden chest which I was told was my Grandfathers sea chest. It was used to store such things as extra blankets etc but below the blankets was all sorts of treasures such as an Afghan dagger, my Fathers medals and regimental insignia, and various bits and pieces brought back from wherever members of the family had served. There were tales attached to each item and I liked to listen to Dad tell these stories. My imagination would be fired up about incidents in India, Africa, Afghanistan and China. Members of the family had served in all these places, and there were tales attached to each article. That chest was the container of the detritus left from family members who had passed through on their way to other places. We had family in The United States of America, New Zealand, South Africa as well as England and Scotland.
The daily routine of the house was governed by the fireplace which was allowed to go out overnight and was lit the next day by my father who was first up in the morning. Cooking was done on the side of the fireplace or hobs as they were called. The kettle sat on one hob while a large saucepan sat on the other hob. Most of the meals we had were one course meals cooked on the fire hobs and consisted of a stew with a base of split peas, vegetables flavoured with a little meat.
Looking back from my present age of 92, there is a misty rosiness which shrouds the past and conceals some of the unpleasantness which pervaded those days. The reality in which we lived was overshadowed by class and the mean narrowness of the "have nots" struggling ro achieve the status of the "haves." It was like a procession of people climbing a ladder and having no regard for the hands nd fingers on which they trod, in fact some seemed to get a measure of satisfaction from crushing fingers and hands. When one blows away the mist that clouds the vision of memory, the reality of those days is revealed as stark and cold.
The most persistent memory I have of my early life is being wet and cold. Being cold was part of how we dressed as boys. We wors short pants and during winter in Norfolk the winds would often come from the North-East for a period of a week or so. It would seem we could never get warm. It appeared to be always wet and cold and we prayed for a change in the wind. When I started work I had to cycle about seven miles often in the early morning and in the rain. I seemed to get wet very often with no way of getting dry.
There was only one fireplace in the house and we all crowded around it in an attempt to get warm. Clothing was expensive and we always seemed to be short of something. Winter clothing was always a great concern and in particular winter coats. There were rummage sales in the village by church or other groups and my mother was a regular attendee, looking for suitable winter clothing.
Being properly dressed to attend church on Sunday was of great concern and it seemed that unless you were cleanly and properly dressed for church you had little hope of getting into heavan when you died. I always had a mental picture of arriving at the gates of heaven and having St Peter looking at me and shaking his head because my boots were dirty or my clothing soiled.
Getting a weekly bath was also a great exercise. Water had to be drawn up from the well by a windlass and then carried to the wash house in a pail, heated and then we took turns in the bath. Again it was instilled into us that "cleanliness was next to Godliness."
These cottages were hard on the women of the house. Keeping them clean was a constant battle. There was a heavy floor tile on the ground floor which had to be constantly washed. On top of the floor tile I do not remember any other floor covering except cocoanut matting which had to be taken out, hung on a clothes line and beaten. The upstairs floors were of heavy oak wood. The upstairs two bedrooms were small and could barely accommodate double beds. Lighting was supplied by paraffin oil lamps and the wicks needed to be trimmed every day. When we went upstairs we carried candles to light our way.
The only wall decoration which stayed in my memory was a pen and ink drawing on wood of a sailor clothed in the dress of the Napoleonic war period. This type of handiwork was common among sailors and was called Scrimshaw. According to my father the wood was from The Bellerophen, a seventy four gun, three deck ship of the line. The Bellerophen was built on the Medway in 1786 and was named by the Earl of Sandwich who was First Lord of the Admiralty. She saw action at Ushant, the Nile and at Trafalgar. She was decommissioned in 1815, was reactivated and renamed Captivity. She was used as a prison hulk and eventually broken up in 1836. How this piece of Scrimshaw came in to our possession I do not know but the age of my father and his parents would make it possible, particularly my paternal grandmother’s people came from the Isle of Wight and some of them had served in the Navy.
Once a week on Monday the copper pot in the wash house had to be filled with water and then fired up to do the family wash. Filling the copper pot was a hard task as the water had to be drawn from the well a bucket full at a time. The laundry was hung outside to dry and ironing was done in front of the fire with the flat irons heated next to the coals.
Saturday was baking day and the wall oven had to be fired up. Friday night Mother would make the bread dough which would rise over night and sufficient bread would be baked to last the family for the coming week.. Beside the bread, current cakes and fruit pies were baked. As a special treat Mother would often make cocoanut haystacks which were made from egg white and sugar and desiccated cocoanut.
Normally there was only one fire going in the house and cooking during the week was done in saucepans standing on the hob beside the fire. A kettle was always standing on the hob so there was always hot water, although somewhat limited in quantity. Most meals were one pot meals containing very little meat. Mostly they were made up of vegetables from our garden with some dried split peas added. The fireplace heated the house, it was the medium used for cooking and it was the centre in the house for everyone to gather around.
The cottage had no bathroom facilities. Our daily washing was done in the wash house where water was kept and a washbasin was provided. Once a week we took a bath in the wash house where water was heated in the copper and we took our bath in a metal bath. This was usually on Saturday night. My memories of my early life seemed to contain a lot of time hauling water from the well to the washhouse. Monday I hauled water for the family wash, Saturday I hauled water for the weekly baths. During the week there was water to be fetched for house cleaning. It was a constant labour.
Getting the chimney swept was a big event and I remember having to stand outside to watch for the sweeps brush coming out the top of the chimney.
In the years after the First World War ownership of land in England was very much in the hands of a few large landholders. These landowners lived on the rents they obtained for leasing out land to farmers who cultivated the land. This system had existed for several hundred years. As a consequence of this, very few people living in villages were able to own the houses they lived in. Figures available for the year 1938 indicate that less than thirty per cent of houses in the United Kingdom were owner occupied. In the rural areas the cottages were often “tied” to the job and were part of the rented property. This made it difficult for a man to leave his employment as he had to give up his house which went with his job. Alternative housing did exist for rent which was built by the local Council.
It is hard to get exact figures regarding “tied’ houses versus Council houses, particularly for as small an area as Hethersett, but National figures give some idea of what the situation was like.
Growing up in Hethersett meant, in a number of ways, you were neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. First we were six and a half to seven miles from the city of Norwich where most of the facilities existed such as higher education, theatre, music or any other educational or cultural facilities. On top of that the great depression hit and while it may have had a bigger and more unfortunate impact on the industrial areas of the country it did impact Hethersett enormously
Many of the people who lived in Hethersett commuted either by public transport or by bicycle to work in the shoe, insurance, food or other industries in Norwich or Wymondham. Those who stayed to work in the village worked in the groceries, bakeries or butcher shops and the rest worked on farms. The great depression had an impact on everyone. There was just no money. I remember one man who walked to Norwich and back every working day.
TOYS OF THE DAY
Most of the toys we played with were made at home either by ourselves or by our fathers. There was a season or time of year for each toy. For instance, as soon as spring appeared out would come spinning tops, these were small usually wood spinning tops with a metal toe. These tops had to be whipped to make them spin and we would go down the road busily whipping our tops. Some fellows had special “whizzers” which had been handed down from an elder brother and these tops were highly prized.
Another homemade toy was the peashooter. They were made from a stick of elderberry wood, which has a soft interior pith and could be burned out with a bit of round metal Also required were the metal supports from a ladies corset which could be bent to make the spring which fired the pea. Ammunition for our peashooters would be dried peas or pigeon peas - garbanzos in Spanish, or in the absence of those two items dried rabbit droppings could also be fired.
Whenever we heard that a lady in the village was buying new corsets we would be on the lookout so we could get the metal supports to manufacture peashooters. Many and lurid are the tales told about our escapades with peashooters. We had a Sunday school teacher who was an absolute dandy. He wore spats and a bowler hat and winged collars. While hiding in some bushes one of our boys managed to knock the bowler hat sideways. This was considered akin to sacrilege and long and careful were the enquiries made to ascertain the name of the culprit but without success.
Another seasonal game was marbles which seemed to have its own time of the year to be played. Every boy had his own collection of marbles and the ones called “glass alleys” were the most prized. There were two games we played with our marbles, One was called “span ums” which required that you threw you marble against a wall and your opponent did the same and if he could span with his hand and touch the two marbles he kept your marble if he could not you got his marble. The other game was called “dribble hole” and required making a small hole in the ground and dribbling marbles into it.
Another of our seasonal activities was what we called the popgun. This was another hollowed out tube of wood and was designed to fire acorns when in season. The popgun had a greater range than the peashooter but was much noisier and it was much more difficult to conceal on oneself. We also manufactured our own catapults or slingshots. These we would make from old bicycle inner tubes and could do considerable damage depending on what the target was. The local police would keep an eye on anyone who had a catapult because damage to insulation devices on telegraph or telephone poles was frequent.
One of the worst thrashings I got was from my mother was for taking a shot at one of my aunts with my catapult and hitting my target. My aunt’s disapproval of me was as big as her posterior which was a broad expanse, so I suppose in the final analysis it was a breakeven deal. As I hit my target but paid a price.
Another part of the bicycle we used was the rim of the bicycle wheel which we used as a hoop.
.A very popular game we played was called conkers. There were many flowering horse chestnut trees in the village. The Horse Chestnut tree threw an inedible seed, which was extremely hard and could be made even harder if the seed was baked. We would make a hole in the seed, put string through and then play a game of conkers. The idea was to smash your opponent’s conker by hitting it with your conker. There was a sort of conker season and generally one conker would reign supreme.
In the village there were gravel pits, which also acted as a dump. Usually there were pieces of metal from cars or other objects. In the summer if we had any free time we would walk to the gravel pit. It was a good place to play particularly as there were lots of sand and also slopes down which we would slide on whatever pieces of metal we could salvage from the dump.
At the time I was in Standard 6 there was a revival of things English such as music, dancing and other cultural activities. Our school had a good choir which, as a Church school supplied voices for the Church Choir. We also started folk dancing as well as Morris dancing. Our school entered various regional competitions particularly in the Folk and Morris dancing and did quite well. I particularly liked the Morris dancing with the bells and ribbons. I remember a young lady who was a bit of an expert at the dancing and came to the school to teach us.
We also had a maypole and we would dance around the maypole with the ribbons. The music was supplied by a portable gramophone, which somehow the school had acquired.
Folk Dancing in England dates back a long way in the history of the country. We know folk dancing was popular in medieval times and in the Tudor period. Folk dancing was often accompanied by folk singing and attempts to organize the art and to preserve it as part of the English cultural history was made about one hundred years ago.
Morris Dancing is believed to be of Moorish origin and was brought to England by soldiers serving overseas. This form of dancing is usually accompanied by the use of sticks, bells, ribbons, swords and handkerchiefs. This traditional form of dancing seems to have become very popular in the Tudor period and we know that Will Kemple a Shakespearean actor danced from London to Norwich taking nine days to do so.
It has been said that England cut itself from a very musically cultural middle ages by the puritan period. I do not know if this is true, what I do know is that in my early years there was a great effort made to revive folk singing, folk dancing, Morris dancing and Choir, singing.
That the puritans had an influence there is no doubt, certainly in the music that was heard in church, and this would have spread over into the daily lives of people. We were encouraged to sing in school, particularly folk songs and also to dance folk dances as well as Morris dancing. It seemed to me that in the period that I was growing up there was a great increase in all activities related to singing and dancing in all forms.
The Church of St Remigius had a good choir and attended various Choir festivals. Folk and Morris dancing was confined to school activities although I remember attending an affair in a neighbouring town in which we contended in folk and Morris dancing.
There were various plays put on by groups in the village, but there did not appear to have been a village wide attempt to produce any form of major theatre. The nearest professional theatre was in Norwich which had The Theatre Royal, several Movie theatres and a Shakespearean round theatre with an apron stage called The Maddermarket which put on some great theatre. As soon as I could afford it I went to the Maddermarket as often as I could.
INTERESTING PEOPLE
Living in the village were several interesting people. One was an ordained clergyman who did not have a parish. He was a great traveller and visited all sorts of different countries and strange places. He was also a great collector and was willing to show some of his collection to villagers such as myself. To me he was an exciting person to talk to and it was also complimentary that he would talk to us as if we were adults and that our opinions were worthwhile. He was a member of the Back family and was related to the Backs living at the Hall. At the outbreak of the Second World War he went to France in some capacity providing services to the British army and survived the evacuation of France. I was stationed in Cornwall and bumped into him there. The next I heard of him was that he was in North Africa and that he was quite sick and had been sent to a hospital at a place called Baragwanath near Johannesburg. I had occasion to visit Johannesburg so called to see him. About a year later I was back in the area and called to see him but he had passed away. To me he was one of nature’s gentlemen and a man I never forgot. Incidentally the Baragwanath hospital was the one in which Winnie Mandela was working when she married Nelson Mandela before he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Baragwanath Hospital was built by the British for service men invalided from the Middle East. When the war was over the British Government turned the hospital over to the South African Government on condition it was to be used for Africans and it continued in this capacity even during the apartheid years.
Living next door to Hethersett at Ketteringham Hall was Ethel Boileau the novelist. She was a prolific writer and some of her work was about the local area. She was famous for writing a number of popular novels such as “Clansman” “When Yellow Leaves “, ”Turnip Tops” and “the Arches of the Years” There was also a female writer of children books living at a place called Homestalls.
Near where I lived was a grass field on which a group of gypsies would appear every year. They would arrive at the same time of the year and always with a small herd of Exmore ponies. They would depart as quietly as they would arrive. Where they went to or came from no-one seemed to know. They would go from house to house in the village selling pegs used for attaching washing to linen lines, doing tinkering and of course telling fortunes.
There was one extremely unusual man who every Sunday would walk down to the junction of the road into the village and the London Road and directed the traffic. He had no authority to do so but everyone would do as he directed. No matter who was in the vehicle he would make certain that who ever was trying to pass through the intersection they did so safely. He was a sort of weekend fixture on the corner. I do not believe he could read or write but he was remarkably intelligent and had a sharp wit about him. One day someone had left a newspaper on the corner and our volunteer traffic director leaned against the pub wall holding up the paper as if he was reading it. But he had the paper upside down when this was pointed out to him he responded by saying that any damn fool could read the paper the right way up.
The villagers of Hethersett had a habit of giving residents nicknames generally related to some happening or experience in their lives. One man it took me years to find out what his proper name was called “Lucknow “because he had been stationed in the army in Lucknow, India and was always talking about it.
Another man was called “Halt that is my Light”. It seems in the first world war when Zeppelin Raids were frequent he would help patrol the village to see home owners were not showing lights. He was leading a patrol across a field to where he reported seeing a light and when he got close called “halt that is my light” and was tabbed with that name afterword’s. Another man was always called “Bum”. He had a very deep bass voice and when a group from the choir sang the Anvil Chorus as bass he always had to sing bum and that name stuck with him.
There was an interesting man who was the proprietor of the King's Head public house and who was an extraordinary gardener. The vegetables he grew were all of a prise winning size and quality. I always liked to talk to him to find out what his secrets were and I learned quite a bit from those conversations.
Living in the village was an old lady who I was told was ninety five years of age. I believe I was about ten years of age when I was told about her which would have made her date of birth around 1840. What was remarkable was that she had never seen the sea which was less than twenty five miles away. Another remarkable thing about her was she had witnessed a public execution at Norwich Castle. I was told it was of James Rush who was hung in 1849. This would have made her nine years old at the time. This would be quite possible as public hangings were big events.
It is recorded that one public hanging at Norwich Castle attracted a crowd of about thirty thousand people and there was a major crowd control problem. In any event she could have also witnessed the last public hanging at Norwich Castle which was held in 1867.
Norfolk people had a reputation for being stubborn and in some cases that I was familiar with it was a reputation well earned. There was one case in the village of a man who had quarrelled with his wife and refused to speak to her. This situation had gone on for some ten years and he would not speak to her. One day he came home and she had a lot of the furniture outside the house. He is reputed to have said “what are you doing?’ To which she is said to have replied “I have found it” He is said to have asked “What have you found? And she replied “Your tongue”
As I was growing up farming was very active in the village. Most farms were mixed. Some kept small herds of cows for milking, some kept pigs for butchering. They mostly planted sugar beet, wheat Swedish turnips and barley. The barley was raised for the malt used in the brewing industry. There were one or two farms which grew fruit such as black currants and other bush fruit. The Swedish turnip, which was called beet in Hethersett was grown as winter animal food. One or two farms raised sheep and one farm grew rose bushes. As young boys we got casual employment on farms particularly harvesting crops or in the thrashing of barley wheat and oats.
One of the worst jobs I experienced was being chaff man on a barley thrash. The barley grain is protected by long prickles called beards which are discharged as part of the chaff during the thrashing process. These small barbs could and did get into any opening in ones clothing and which made the job of chaff man highly undesirable. A chaff man made himself a hood by turning a sack inside out on the long side and wrapping rags around his neck. Even with this, the prickles would find a way too get inside clothing.
Growing up in the depression was a difficult affair. There was just no money and we always seemed to be living on the edge. To supplement father’s wages as a farm labourer my mother worked as a scrubwoman in a laundry and also did day work cleaning houses. While in school, I worked at various part time jobs such as, working on Saturdays selling from a barrow going from door to door, working on farms picking fruit and in the autumn spreading manure from either animal or fish.
What was called fish manure was partly rotted fish guts which farmers would obtain to use as fertiliser for their fields. Shovelling this material off the back of a cart going up and down a field is not the most pleasant occupation. It is probably the worst smell in the world and when this was going on the whole village smelled.
As soon as we were able to work even when still in school we had to work to produce money. Every penny counted. I had a savings bank, a steel affair which you took to the bank and the money deposited in an account. It was from this money my clothes were bought.
Some of the work we did on the farms in the area was tough for a boy who tended to be on the small side for his age. One job I remember doing was topping sugar beet. The beets were turned out of the ground by a plough like device so that they lay on the ground in rows. To top the beets one used a topping knife, which was a long handled device with a curved knife set at ninety degrees to the shaft and a cross handle at the other end. Using this meant one walked along the rows lifting the knife up and down cutting off the tops of the sugar beets. The beets were then sent to the sugar factory, the tops were used as animal feed.
On the farms at this time barley as well as hay was not cut with a binder. In other words it was left loose. The reaper used was called a ”sailor” because it had four sails, which swept the cut crops off the reaper. To efficiently collect the crop a rake device call a” toppler” was used. I think it got its name because it slid across the field as it gathered up the crop and when loaded the handles were flipped and the rake toppled over and started up a new load. The whole idea was to topple in rows so that a farm wagon could be brought along the row and be loaded. Using the toppler was a job a young boy could handle as it was pulled by one horse and did not require a great deal of strength to operate.
The fruit we picked was mostly bush fruit, grown on farms in Hethersett and in the Meltons. These included red and black currants as well as loganberries. These fruits were sold to jam and preserve factories. Fruit picking was easier than sugar beet topping mainly because it did not require a great deal of physical strength. It was done in the summer so one had to guard against over exposure to the sun. It tended to be backbreaking as one was bent over most of the time. One was paid by the amount you picked measured in bushels.
Another task which I undertook and which paid some money was wiping bowls. Lawn bowling was a popular sport in the village. There were two places where people could play the game. One was the Kings Head public house on the London Road and the other was the green at the Village Hall.. The Kings Head green was very old and very well maintained. There are always worm casts which get stuck on the bowls and if the grass is a little bit wet they are apt to slip out of the bowlers hand and because of this wiping the bowl becomes necessary. We boys wiped the bowls for the players for which we received a small payment at the end of each game.,
We as a family were part of the majority religious group in the village; in other words, we were Church of England. The Church of England was divided into three groups Low, Middle, and High. The Church of Saint Remigius in Hethersett was considered High Church. Whether or not a church was Low, Middle or High depended on the Vicar Rector or resident parson.
The God we worshiped was a stern and uncompromising God. He did not approve of laughter, joy or happiness. To put it another way, the authorities in the church who instructed us did not approve of those attributes. To laugh in the church was a deadly sin. We were very perplexed, if we were made in the image of God, any human characteristics we may have got from God seemed to be highly disapproved of by the very God who gave them to us. It did not take long to realize that while we were being taught that “we were made in the image of God”, most people actually believed that “their God was made in their image.” Of course nobody has seen God, so the only way people can visualize God is to portray him in their own likeness - Europeans as a European and Africans as an African.
Because our clergy used vestments, much as the Roman Catholics, had a crucifix and candles on the altar walked with the choir in procession behind a crucifix our church was considered High
There were parishioners in the choir who considered the Rector was too “High' and when asked to bow the head to the altar after procession down the church at the start of a service refused to do so. What was ironic and difficult to understand was that one of the hymns we sang in procession as we went down the church was “At the name of Jesus every head shall bow” but there were individuals even in our choir who refused to bow the head. A compromise was reached in that these individuals would not walk in procession but walk to their seats before the procession started so that their voices would not be lost to the choir.
As children, we were sent on Sundays to early service at 8 AM and then again at 11 AM. We attended Sunday School at 2 PM and then went to church again at seven o'clock in the evenings. As soon as I was considered old enough, I was put in the Church choir as well as made an altar boy.
At least once per year, the Church would have a visit from a missionary usually from Africa who would appeal to the congregation for funds to support the mission. Quite often the missionary had been in some dark corner of Africa and had been left there much too long. One old fellow forgot where he was and gave a long sermon in some African language which nobody in the church understood.
I have often wondered why the Church always appealed to the poor in its parishes and in particular to the children generally of the poor for assistance of the poor in places like Africa. Perhaps, subconsciously they recognized that the poor would be more sympathetic to other poor people as they knew what it was like to be poor?
As members of the Church of England we were baptized soon after birth and, when we reached an age of discretion, we were confirmed by the local bishop. As Hethersett National School was a church school, we also received religious instruction in school. Instruction would be given by the local rector, who would then ask us questions to ascertain how much we had learned from his instruction.
There were many things and attitudes which we found hard to understand. The Church was riddled with class. As children of the poor, we were not expected to question what was taught to us. If we asked difficult questions, we were considered to be getting above ourselves. I never could understand how one achieved that form of levitation and achieved getting above one self. We should keep in our place at the back of any meeting and should just listen to our elders and betters -- and there were many who considered themselves our betters.
Although the Church of St Remigius did not have reserved pews, where people sat in church indicated their view of how they saw themselves in the social order. How they saw themselves was often conveyed to them by other people, particularly by those who considered themselves to be the adjudicators of the village and church social positioning.
One of the things that puzzled me was that we were expected to pray for those in authority who were placed over us. I never did hear of anybody who was placed over us praying for those who were placed under them. Furthermore there was no discussion about who did the placing except it was inferred that somehow God in his wisdom had seen fit to place those that were there now in those positions of authority.
As I look back down the murky and shadowed halls of history I realize that what we were taught as religious truth was the standard lines from the power centres of authority, which were greatly coloured by their position to which they had arrived by the wash and dash of history. History when you boiled it down to its essential elements was a great big game of “I'm the king of the castle” and many of the 'houses' such as the Tudors, Stuarts and Hanoverians were very insecure and the semi-legal judicial murders in which they indulged were often prompted by fear. It also led to some rewriting of history to suit the victors in the struggle for the Crown.
Making the Monarch Head of the Established Church has led to some farcical situations such as a Methodist or Presbyterian prime minister selecting candidates for Anglican bishoprics. The Earl Marshall of England, who was also the Senior Duke in the House of Lords, was charged with the protection of the Monarch who was head of the Anglican Church He himself was a Roman Catholic who was restricted by his religion from holding certain offices under the Crown.
Another thing we found most difficult to understand was the King James Bible and the Anglican Prayer Book preached that in the marriage ceremony ordained by the church that a married couple would hold to each other until death parted them, Yet as Monarch of England and Head of the Church of England Edward Seven was a notorious philanderer and was known as’ Edward the Caresser” and a Knight of the Chaise- Lounge. The rules which we were told we should keep did not seem to apply to certain members of royalty and to many of the upper classes.
As I have already mentioned the Church was riddled with class. There was one village not far from Hethersett which contained a mansion occupied by a Lord. The local villagers were not allowed to proceed into the Church building on Sunday morning until his Lordship arrived and made his entrance. I wondered if he expected the same thing to happen when he reached the gates of Heaven. Did he expect a line up waiting for him to arrive and would he tell St Peter “Now that I am here you can let the common people in”
James 1st of England [6th of Scotland] was not a very pleasant man. He burned witches, and had people he did not like murdered. He was a pederast and believed he was king by divine right; or in other words, God had chosen him to rule. It was in his reign that the Witchcraft Act was passed and such people as Matthew Hopkins flourished. Despite the foregoing, it was also in his reign and under his auspices that the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were written -- both jewels in English language.
I was brought up, as a young Anglican to admire Henry V111. I was taught he was the king who reformed the Church and gave us a better church devoid of corruption and foreign influence. That he was seeking to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon was treated as something hardly worth mentioning and Henry’s motives were almost entirely selfless. What was important was for us to keep in mind was that Henry disapproved of corruption in the monasteries and if some discomfort was caused to the monks and nuns that was part of the price which had to be paid to obtain a better church. If it was pointed out that those who disagreed with Henry were killed then the Spanish Inquisition and Torquemada were quoted as if there was a game of tit for tat going on.
As I delved into the reign of the Tudors and in particular into the years that Henry V111 sat on the throne a much different picture emerged. One had only to examine the amounts of money obtained from the disposal of the monastic lands and the emergence of a new land owning gentry to realise what was happening and who would write the propaganda on behalf of Henry when he died.
The years of Henry’s occupancy of the throne are strewn with the ashes of burned clerics, murdered members of the nobility and of common men and women. They stink with the rot of decomposing flesh of those who were hung drawn and quartered or decapitated. Henry’s victims included two wives as well as dukes and other members of the nobility [particularly if they had any trace of royal blood inherited from previous royalty]. He had his most tireless and loyal servants such as Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell killed as well as well as bishops’ abbots and monks and numberless ordinary citizens of England. It is doubtful if a full count can ever be made of those who were put to death by Henry and his agents and this was mostly without trial, but the number must be many thousands. One has only to look at the portrait painted of Henry by Hans Holbein to see the arrogant selfishness captured so well, from the pursed and petulant mouth to the protruding and prominent cod piece to realise just what sort of man was Henry.
Henry believed by virtue of his birth that he was inerrant and infallible, and that all the people of England should believe as he did and to disagree with him was treason. His belief in his infallibility predated the papal pronouncement of infallibility which was made in 1870 and was confined to faith and morals and could only be made when the pontiff was speaking ex cathedra [from the Chair of St Peter]. The remarkable thing is that the Roman Pontificate has made only one pronouncement ex-cathedra since 1870. Henry on the other hand made regular use of his belief in his infallibility and his pronouncements covered not only religion but also the political aspects of his kingdom
Being appointed to the Royal Council was an invitation to occupy one of the most dangerous seats in the Kingdom, many did not survive it. It was tantamount to being invited to pitch your tent in the forecourt of your own sepulchre. Yet people jockeyed to get close to the Monarch especially during the confiscation of the church lands, the rewards were immense, but one false step and that was the end
The Pilgrimage of Grace and other uprisings in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Westmoreland and Cumberland, Henry’s broken promises together with the spate of executions speak volumes of Henry’s untrustworthy behaviour, viciousness and arrogance.
To all intents and circumstances there were two reformations in England. There was the Reformation instituted by Henry who separated England from Rome, but kept all the sacraments etc as in the Roman church. On Henry’s death England went through another form of reformation. The son of Henry by Jane Seymour brought the Seymour family into prominence and they were adherents of thinking which was coming into England from the European continent and Evangelistic and anti-Catholic which could account for the amount of rebellions which took place including Kett’s in Norfolk. That the Anglican Church survived is remarkable although it survived with many scars and some divisive thinking.
The Tudor monarchs believed they ruled by divine right. This belief in England started in the reign of Henry V111 and continued during the reigns of subsequent Tudors. This belief was carried over to the Stuarts who succeeded the Tudors. This all ended with execution of Charles 1 in 1649.
One of the great ironies of English history is that the descendants of the new gentry, who had benefitted from the suppression and distribution of the monastic lands and were sitting in the House of Commons, would condemn to death a king descended from a Tudor king who had made their land owning wealth possible. They would then go on to trim the power of future kings of England. There is a further irony in that the Tudors were descended from a Welshman Owen Tudor. The man who was primarily responsible for the death of Charles was also descended from a Welshman by the name of Williams. Oliver Cromwell was descended from the sister of Thomas Cromwell who was married to a man named Williams. Williams must have found it beneficial to use the name of Cromwell particularly when his brother-in-law became Chancellor and was so close to the King when the confiscated lands were being given out. Oliver Cromwell’s mother was a Norfolk Steward, and I believe her family were brewers.
The habit of country people using saint’s days and other religious holidays as their calendar was still in use when I was growing up. Rents which paid quarterly were related to a Saints day or some other church event. To people who were mostly illiterate at the time of the reformation the church calendar was of great importance and how it was ingrained in the minds of country folk is indicated in that it was part of the countryside parlance of my childhood.
As I was growing up there was great concern in parts of the Kingdom over tithing. Tithes were the way the established church supported itself and as the tithes went to the Established church landowners who supported the so-called free churches resented having to pay tithes to the established church. There was an active anti-tithe movement and considerable publicity was given to the problem.
The sound of pealing church bells is one of my fondest memories of the Church of St Remigius in Hethersett. The Church had a peal of eight bells, a large number for a village. I believe some of these bells were quite old but they were all recast when they were rehung in 1938. There is an exuberance and vibrancy to the robust pealing of bells in the English fashion. It is a sound which can never be matched by carillons or the monotonous tintinnabulation one encounters in other countries. The sound of church bells being peeled gave the English countryside a unique sound, this was particularly so on Sunday evenings when the bells were pealed and one could hear in the distance the bells from other churches. The surrounding villages of Great and Little Melton as well as Ketteringham all had peals of three bells and on a summer evening one could hear the three bell peals and the eight bell peal from Hethersett.
It seems the pealing of church bells was used as a means of calling the faithful to church. It appears that the art of pealing of bells developed into a form of competition between parishes and churches. Having a full peal of eight bells was a point of pride in Hethersett. Also bell ringing was a skill and I remember the bell ringers put aside one night per week to practice their art.
In pealing bells the bells are rung not chimed, therefore the intent was not to produce a conventional melody. This art started in England in the 17th century in church towers. Bells are rigged to swing freely, the usual peal consisting of eight bells which are numbered according to their pitch the highest pitch being known as the treble bell and the lowest in pitch being the tenor bell. The bell ringers usually stand in a circle in the ringing chamber directly under the bell chamber. When the rope is pulled the bell swings either up or down making one strike. As the term implies ringing changes means the order in which the bells are rung is changed so there is usually a conductor or leader who calls the changes.
At some time in the thirties, 1938 I believe, it was decided by the Church Council that the oak beams holding the church bells had become so eaten away by wood borers that the beams were unsafe
The wood beams were removed and iron beams were substituted, the bells were re-tuned and re-hung.
There was quite a bit of wood left from the old beams and a local carpenter salvaged as much wood as possible and made items for sale to the congregation. I was able to buy a small stud tray. In those days in England men wore tunic shirts [the sort you had to climb into from the bottom] with detachable collars, so we needed stud trays. I still have my stud tray. I keep it on my desk it makes a convenient place to keep paper clips etc.
There was another aspect to church bells in the village when someone in the village passed away the church bell would solemnly toll, one stroke for a man and two strokes for a woman.
There was another sort of bell ringing in the village. There was a group who at Christmas time went around the village with a set of hand bells. They were a very skilled group and would play Christmas Carols and hymns stopping to do so at strategic places in the village. This was a sort of supplement to the carol singers, or mumpers as they were called in Hethersett, and was much appreciated by the local people. This hand bell ringing was in addition to carol singing which several groups would proceed around the village performing during the Christmas period.
THE CHURCH ORGAN AT ST REMIGIUS CHURCH
The Organ at the Church in Hethersett was a large instrument. It was an old fashioned wind organ with massive main bellows which had to be kept full of air by a small bellows that was hand pumped. Being “bellows man” on the organ was quite a task for a small boy. Keeping the large bellows full required a lot of pumping particularly if the organist was playing a fast and loud piece. The organist communicated with the pumper by means of a bob on a string. There was another bob which told the pumper how much air was in the bellows
On one occasion, I think it was a special Sunday evening service in which the Choir was singing a loud and fast anthem. I was on the organ pumping. It became very hard for me to keep the main bellows full. The bob from the organist started to jiggle which meant she was getting concerned and the indicator bob from the main bellows was showing it was getting empty. No matter how hard I tried I could not keep the main bellows up and the organ eventually gave a sort of long gasp and went silent. I was relieved of my organ pumping duties by a man and everyone started up again: choir and organ. I was treated as a sort of delinquent and was not allowed to pump the organ again.
THE CHURCH CHOIR
When old enough most boys of the Church of England community in the village were tried out for the church choir. It was a fairly large group around thirty or so voices. Not only did it sing at the two major services on Sunday, eleven o’clock in the morning and seven o’clock in the evening. It also practised one Tuesday evening each week. Every year the Choir would be taken on an outing to places such as Hunstanton, Felixstowe or Clacton on Sea. These trips which we looked forward with much pleasurable anticipation were greatly enjoyed. The trips were planned in such a way that we would stop at interesting places such as Castle Rising or Framlingham Castle. There were other events which came with membership in the Choir. There were Choir festivals which were held in large churches such as Wymonham Abbey and would include a dozen or so choirs. The combined Choirs singing together was a fine experience.
ATTENDING SUNDAY SCHOOL
Attending Sunday school exposed us to instruction not only the various views found in The Church of England but also the opinions of the teachers on the way to lead one’s life. It was amazing the different views one encountered in the same school. Thinking back to the views of God passed on to me by different Sunday School teachers I still can bring to the front of my mind pictures I formed of God from listening to these different teachers.
One teacher was the epitome of the English gentleman. He used a lot of cricket terminology in describing how we should live and behave. He told us to always “play fair”, to “play a straight bat” and to “knock the devil for a six”. However he never told us where we would find the Devil to “knock him for a six”. As he described the qualities God demanded of us on could not help but picture God as an English gentleman cricketer in whites, blazer and with his handkerchief tucked in his sleeve.
Another teacher in describing what God required of us went back to the Old Testament. His God was a solemn humourless God, a God who never laughed. He emphasized that if we misbehaved there was punishment awaiting us this would be in some hot corner of hell. This gentleman had a strong streak of the puritan in him.
One teacher was the sports team coach type. Full of platitudinous advice on how our lives should be led. I remember him telling us to “plant your feet carefully” “achieve balance”, “get a good grip of yourself”, “do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing”. This was great advice and came in handy the first time I had to use an Asian toilet.
The pews we sat in as a Sunday school class in church were as hard as nails and in winter very cold. We boys wore short pants and as we sat on those hard and chilly seats part of our thighs rested on the cold wood. This impressed itself on our Anglican backsides as a form of penance in anticipation for any sins we could commit in the coming week.
One day three nuns belonging to an Anglican religious order arrived in the village and of course became active in the church. The leader of this little party, or senior nun, if you can use that term, was a formidable lady. A sort of female “Torquamada” who was determined to correct any faults she could find in us. And find them she did. The other two nuns were a lot milder but moulded their actions and attitudes on their leader.
One of the nuns took over the teaching of the smaller boys Sunday school class which I attended and which was also attended by my cousin Harold. Harold was a sort of independent boy and when he did not want to do something he just was not going to do it. With the Christmas season about six weeks away the nun wanted to imbue in us the spirit of giving. At the time there was no such thing as coloured or fancy wrapping paper. Parcels always arrived wrapped in brown paper which was carefully kept and re-used as was the string. The nun asked one of the boys what they got at Christmas wrapped in brown paper and he just said“ don't know” so she went all the way round the class getting the same response until she came to Harold who did not answer. She repeated her question rather impatiently and glared at Harold who then said “shit”. Now Harold had committed a serious offense. He had said “shit” to a nun but he had also said “shit” in church so he was doubly condemned. The Rector threw Harold out of the Sunday school. Not long after Harold appeared with his Father and a rather heated argument took place. The Rector saying he did not want Harold in the Sunday school as he would have everyone in the Sunday school saying “shit”. My uncle argued that he sent Harold to the Sunday school so he would not say “shit”. Harold came back to the Sunday school and at the age of eighteen joined the Navy. He was on the Ajax at the Battle of the River Plate. The Ajax had only six-inch guns whereas the Graf Spee had twelve-inch guns. I expect Harold said “shit” a few times during that battle.
When we reached what was considered the age of discretion we were instructed by the Rector in preparation for confirmation. This involved weekly visits to the Rectory for the instructions. We met in the Rector’s study, to this day I have no idea what he talked about. The words he used were beyond my comprehension but I was impressed by the rows and rows of books on the shelves. One book title which stayed in my memory was “Fox’s Book of Martyrs’’ I wondered what that was all about. That library was the first I was in and I was very impressed.
After seeing that library I started to collect books. After I started working, one of my great pleasures was to visit the second hand bookstores in Norwich. When I left Hethersett to go to the Second World War I left behind a good sized library, at least it was a good size for someone of my limited means. I have always loved books; reading has always been my number one hobby.
Even today, although I have desk top and laptop computers plus Amazon/Kindle I still love the feel and smell of printed books and can never pass a book shop without going in and finding something of interest.
EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES IN THE VILLAGE
There were two annual events to which we looked forward, the annual Horticultural and Garden Show and the Annual Church Fete.
The Horticultural and Garden Show was held at the Village Hall and as Hethersett was still an agricultural community having several farms within its bounds it gave the farmers an opportunity to show horses and other farm animals as well as providing a vehicle for the local gardeners to display the vegetables and flowers they grew. In this event, prizes were awarded for different categories of pets.
There was also a prize for the best display of vegetables grown by a schoolboy and one year I won this prize which was a great thrill for me.
The Horticultural and Garden show had races for the young people as well as various tests of skill for the older people such as catching a greased pig and climbing a greasy pole to get the ham which was attached to the top of the pole. There was one event which made its appearance every year and which I think was a hangover from the medieval jousting of knights. A bucket was suspended between two uprights and was then filled with water. There was a flat piece attached to the bottom of the bucket which had a hole in it. The idea was that two men comprised a team one would sit in a wheelbarrow and one would push. The one in the barrow had a pole like a lance and would try to get the pole through the hole without spilling the water Very few of the contestants were able to get the pole through without spilling the water which usually fell on them, much to the delight of those who stood and watched.
The Church Fete was held in the garden of one of the larger houses in the village and was intended to raise money for the support of the Church. Members of the Congregation would have tables at which items which had been donated and were sold the proceeds going towards the support of the church. All sorts of games of chance were held such as guessing the number of marbles in a jar, throwing rings over items on a table, dipping into a tub of bran to get a prize. Dipping into the Bran Tub was a great event for children. Prizes were wrapped and hidden in a tub of bran and for a small sum of money one put ones hand into the bran and felt around for a prize, trying to get a good prize was always the ambition of everyone who dipped. The prizes were of little value and were often donated. There were races for the children, and usually there was a show of dogs, cats and other pet animals. The local brass band played and tea was available. It was a bit of a social event and generally was well attended.
An interesting aspect of the gambling which took place at these Parish or other village events was that while gambling was generally frowned on, gambling to aid the Church or other types of religious groups was considered acceptable, and was used extensively by those organizations. It seemed the end to which the proceeds of gambling was used determined whether it was proper or not.
The events we celebrated during the year were mostly of a religious nature, or at least were coincidental to the old feasts of the Church. The Church in England had gone through many variations from the Church of Rome to extreme puritanism, but the Christian celebrations of Christmas, Easter, Whitson and All Hallows remained.
Christmas was probably the great celebration of the year. Even the period leading to Christmas was something to look forward to. Mother would start preparing for Christmas well ahead of the event. Although my parents were very poor they somehow managed to obtain enough money to buy each child a Christmas present. The discussion about what Father Christmas was going to bring was very exciting.
Every year my Mother would save money in a savings scheme run by an uncle and called a Didlum. Saving would start in January with the payout at the end of November. This provided some money for Christmas. Making the Christmas pudding was an event of great anticipation. Mother had a large bowl in which the Christmas pudding was mixed and everyone in the family had to give it a stir. Three penny pieces the small English coin were wrapped in silver foil which Dad had saved from his cigarettes for this purpose and were mixed into the pudding. When the pudding was served on Christmas Day somehow Mother always managed to make sure each child got a three penny bit with their serving.
A Christmas cake was baked ahead of time as were mincemeat pies. Another feature of Christmas was sugar mice.
Waking up on Christmas morning to find presents at the bottom of the bed was a wonderful experience
The custom of bringing a tree into the house and decorating it can be traced back to Livonia and Germany in the Sixteenth Century. With the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert the habit became very popular in England. My father always managed to find a Christmas tree which was brought into the house on Christmas Eve and we all took a hand in decorating it. The tree was taken down on twelfth night and the decorations put away until next year.
Easter was another church feast we celebrated with pleasant anticipation. There were Good Friday services to attend and then Easter Sunday with chocolate eggs. The symbol of Easter was small baby chicks which often came in a small basket with the Eater egg.
After Easter came Whitsunday when it was traditional to wear something new to go to church and if we could afford the bus fare we went to Norwich which had a fair on the following Monday.
After Whitsunday was a celebration we called Harvest Home. It celebrated the gathering of the crops. The altar of the church was decorated with sheaves of wheat and barley as well as garden crops. It was a village thanksgiving. The ceremony at the church would include members of the parish walking in procession to carry offerings of the harvest and singing hymns of thanksgiving.
After Harvest Home we celebrated All Hallows which gave young people a chance to play tricks. We hollowed pumpkins or Swedish turnips to make Jack Lanterns by carving out faces lit from behind by stubs of candles.
Another event we celebrated was Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November. We did this by making bon-fires and letting of fireworks. Two of the small shops in village sold fireworks. One sold fireworks made by a firm called Standard and a popular product of this firm was called “half penny demon” standard also made a firework called a “jumping jack”. The other shop sold a brand call “Brocks” which made fireworks which were pretty and good to watch. One I remember was called “Chrysanthemum Fountain”. Both firms sold a variety of fireworks, both sold rockets which we had to be careful when we let them off because there were many reed thatch roofs in the village.
THE PARISH ANNUAL OUTING
Every year there would be an outing of the parish which would take the children and parents for a day at the seaside at Great Yarmouth. This was an event to which we all looked forward. We saved what little money we could get our hands on and saving for the outing was about as much fun as the outing itself. When the great day arrived we trooped down to the National School gate and the buses or charabancs as they were called would arrive. It was not until much later that I realized what a study group this would have made for Konrad Lorenz As the buses pulled up, there were usually about six, the best and most modern at the front, everyone sorted themselves out and occupancy depended on some unspoken but perceived social order. The first bus was for the rector and other ”big wigs” of the parish and then in descending social order the other buses would be filled. The last bus was the oldest and most decrepit and this was where my mother and the rest of us would finish. Not a word was spoken nor instruction given by anybody. There was an unspoken but known pecking order. I always wanted to ride in one of the first buses but never did.
For a small boy a day spent at Great Yarmouth was exciting. We packed picnics of sandwich meals. The morning was spent on the beach and the afternoon was spent at the amusement park which contained a large number of “rides”. Deciding which ride to spend our limited funds on was all part of the excitement. When the day was over we all gathered at a prearranged spot. The buses arrived and we all got back into the same seats we occupied on the trip down.
The village was a stratified society. It was living in the aftermath of Victorian and Edwardian times. At the top of the heap were gentry with whom we very rarely came in contact. Some of them were exceptionally nice people but we were only in contact with them on rare occasions. The next layer consisted of shop keepers and small business people who sold goods groceries etc but who had to deal with the lower orders. The further down the social ladder one went the more the distinctions became apparent. Being at the bottom of the heap there was only one way for us to go and that was up, but we had to be careful that we were not accused of trying to be something we were not and there was always someone to bring this to our attention.
There was a great deal of snobbery in the parish and sad to say it was among those who had no apparent reason to consider themselves better or worse than anyone else. This snobbery was founded in what one did for a living or what ones father did. There are no greater snobs then the English lower classes. No-one wanted to be perceived as being at the bottom of the heap and people practiced a subtle form of “one-upmanship” to emphasize that they were not in the lowest social strata.
Although St Remigius Church did not have reserved pews, where people sat indicated their view of how they saw themselves in the social order. How they saw themselves was often made plain to them by other people, particularly those who considered they were the adjudicators of the parish social positioning. Although we were living in the reign of George V the social habits and unwritten rules were Edwardian and Victorian to say the least.
I remember attending a meeting at the Village Hall on some matter and several men spoke about the subject and one rather pompous individual held forth and was not only windy but somewhat stupid. Unfortunately I got up to say something to which he did not agree and I was accused of getting above myself. How I had performed this act of levitation I do not know and did not find out, but I was obviously out of my place and was not supposed to have an opinion and certainly should not have expressed it. As Orwell would have put it we were all equal but some were more equal than others.
MORE THINGS I REMEMBER
My childhood was spent in the early twenties of the twentieth century and the Victorian and Edwardian rules for brining up children still remained: "Children should be seen and not heard" and "spare the rod and spoil the child" were the accepted wisdom of the era. Schoolmasters had desks with special containers for canes which were wielded across hands and backsides. Parents were equally diligent in the physical punbishment of their offspring. Today I am sure half the population of the village of my early youth would be in jail for cruelty. My mother had a Malacca cane which she wielded with extreme vigour, generally at my grandmother's prompting. It seems to me that we all lived in fear. My mother lived in fear of her mother, we children lived in fear of mother. Dad lived in fear of not being able to put sufficient food on the table. The only one who didn't seem to be afraid of anyone was my grandmother who I think had scared the devil himself. I remember my mother thrashing me one day all over a misunderstanding. I was innocent of the charge brought against me but as it was her mother who made the accusation, Mother gave me a thrashing of all thrashings. In those days boys wore short pants and stockings which came up to the knee. In wielding the cane she marked the backs of my legs so badly I had to lower my pants and pull my stockings up to hide the marks on the back of my legs.
We were given a very healthy diet which came out of necessity. We had a large garden and Dad grew just about every vegetable that would grow in the Norfolk soil. The vegetables were supplemented with small portions of meat, usually brisket, chicken or rabbit. Split peas turned up at just about every meal. One of my childhood memories is our Christmas dinner. The meat was usually a chicken but the highlight was new potatoes. Dad would grow a variety of potatoes but the "earlies" were the important ones for our Christmas dinner. As soon as some early potatoes were dug he would seal a quantity in metal boxes which were buried in the garden and then dug up the day before Christmas. There have never been potatoes that tasted like those.
Mother baked her own bread and baking day was Saturday. Friday evening the bread dough would be made and left to rise near the fire. Saturday morning I would have to get up very early and fire the oven which was built into the wall of the cottage. Monday was laundry day and again I had to get up and fire up the "copper" in the wash house.
Memory tells me that some of the local foods produced in Norfolk were memorable being of high quality. Norfolk produced lots of bush fruits as well as strawberries and of course dairy products. There was a lady, a farmer's wife from Wymondham Common who made a soft cheese and rode a bicycle with a basket attached to the front and sold this cheese from door to door. I have eaten cheeses in many countries and have yet to find a better one. The tastes and svours of one's early life live on in memory. I had an uncle who was a fishmonger and we got lots of fish in our diet - Wells cockles, Stewkey Blues and Yarmouth Herring and Bloaters as well as Cromer Crabs.
Looking back I am amazed at the number of vendors of different types who came to the door. I have mentioned my uncle who was a fishmonger and called weekly and another relative who was a greengrocer and from whom we obtained oranges and other fruits that Dad could not grow. The milkman came about twice a week - he was a local farmer. There was a man who sold clothing and called about once a month. There was a bag man who brought a great big case containing needles, buttons and other small articles of household use. In the Autumn there would be Spanish onion sellers and every couple of months a rag and bone man would come to see if we had anything to sell. He would purchase our rabbit skins.
Every Friday my Mother would take the bus to Norwich where she would buy her groceries. She would also buy a piece of beef which would be cooked for Sunday dinner. She would slo buy some hard sweets which were carefully rationed each day to us children.
One of my allotted tasks as a small boy was to feed and maintain the rabbits which we bred. The skin would fetch money and the flesh we ate. Most of the rabbit food was grown in the garden. The rabbits ate the large outer leaves of the cabbage, Brussel sprouts, lettuce etc and this was supplemented by my having to gather a sackful of hog weed. Hog weed grew plentifully in the hedgerows around Hethersett and my task was to keep a supply on hand to make certain the rabbits were well fed and kept clean.
NORFOLK WORDS WE USED IN OUR SPEECH
The various invasions and the settlements of Norfolk by people from other lands which have have had a considerable effect on the speech as well as other aspects of the life of the County. I remember a visit I made to Stockholm on business later on in life and being impressed by the similarity of words on street signs and place names. They are so close to the words I knew in Broad Norfolk.
There were other similarities, one of which was the food. Not surprising was the plenitude of fish particularly herring. One dish of which was called Sillgratin or Herring Casserole was very similar to a dish my Mother made particularly as herring were plentiful and cheap.
The Danes and other Scandinavians left much other evidence of their time in Norfolk, for instance the Norfolk “wherry” which was an ideal craft for the Norfolk Broads. Many of Norfolk's place names particularly those ending in Thorpe are of Scandinavian origin, Thorpe being the word for village.
The following words were used in everyday parlance in the village.
Beck: stream
Buskins: leggings
Puttees: Leg bindings
Cop: short throw
Dwile: cloth for cleaning the floor
Foosey: rotten vegetable or fruit
Higler: dealer who went from door to door
Hold-ye: Hang on
Huckabuck: playing leap frog
Loke: narrow alley or lane
Mob: scolding
Dannocks: type of glove
Sillybold: cheeky
Shug: shake
Stingy: unkind
Pightle: a small field
Dickie: donkey
Mumpers: carol singers
Hurl: to throw
Mawther: a young girl
Pug: to launder
ELECTRICITY COMES TO THE VILLAGE
I was very small when electricity came to the village. The village already had gas lighting and many houses and businesses were using this source of heating and illumination Electricity caused quite a change. Some of the older folks looked upon it with suspicion not quite sure what it would do.
I remember holding my elder sister’s hand and watching the poles being installed through the village which would carry the power lines. This was quite an operation with men digging the holes pulling the ropes and setting the poles in the holes. Then along came the men who rigged the wires on the poles this was all very exciting for a small boy.
Once electricity was installed in the village and businesses were able to use it, one of the local grocers installed an electric bacon slicer. This was quite an event. None of us kids had seen anything like it. The bacon slicer had a circular knife and the speed with which the bacon was sliced was something to behold. In its time this was high tech and we were all greatly impressed.
With electricity came an increase in the use of radios, up until the arrival of electricity radios were all battery type. With the increase in radios came an increase in the erection of wireless poles. Radios brought us closer to the rest of the world and there was an increase in discussion about national and international events.
Another impressive event was the first time I saw a farm tractor. There were many farms in the village but all used horses. One day a farm tractor came to the village and we watched it plow a field. Gradually the use of tractors became fairly common and the horses were used less and less.
The roads in the village were recipients of a fair amount of horse droppings and many of the village boys had boxes on wheels for gathering these deposits to use as fertilizer for gardens. I had a box on wheels and gathered up a fair amount of this free manure for our vegetable garden. It was believed that an application of horse manure was good for the rhubarb patch and I always had to make certain that I applied a good layer in the spring of the year. There was a story which went the rounds; a boy was gathering horse droppings and a girl asked him what he was going to do with it, to which he replied we are going to put it on our rhubarb. The girl responded by saying we always put custard on ours.
VILLAGE DANCES
When I was about fourteen years of age, working in Norwich and attending night school, Saturday night dances were instituted in the Village Hall in Hethersett on a monthly basis. These were very inexpensive affairs, with a small admittance fee and a local orchestra. Similar dances were held on different Saturday nights in adjacent villages, so it was easy to attend a dance on any week end.
Ballroom dancing was a good way for young people to meet each other. A good standard of dress was maintained, such as a jacket and tie for males. Lots of the popular music was written with ballroom dancing in mind, and a great effort to learn the various dance steps was made. These events were well attended and greatly enjoyed by the young people of the Village. There was a dance orchestra led by a man called Victor Silvestra who played with dancing rhythms, and his recordings were greatly prized.
THE POST OFFICE AND THE POSTAL SERVICE.
Although Hethersett was a large village and had its own post office it only required one post man. The post man rode a bicycle and wore a hat peculiar to post men of that day. It was a sort of helmet squared at the front and at the back.
Most people purchased their requirements by cash and the mail service did not carry much advertising. Credit cards were not used very much so the mail traffic was very light compared to what it is today. Because of this it was possible for one post man to service a village as large as Hethersett.
There was no Bank in the village but the Post Office had a savings bank service. If one had a cheque to cash which would have been very rarely it would have been done at the Post Office.
One could transmit money by mail by purchasing postal orders.
THE FOODS WE ATE
As we lived n the country we grew most of our food. We always had a large garden and Dad was good at growing vegetables. As in the case of most working people “dinner” was at mid-day and was the biggest meal of the day. We did not eat much meat. Often our mid day meal was a vegetable stew with a little meat. Meat was supplemented by the occasional chicken we killed or a rabbit which we had bred for the meat and skin. On Fridays, we had fish, quite often herring. Yarmouth bloaters were a popular meal and very inexpensive.
The vegetable stews we ate contained split peas and dumplings were generally a supplement to the stew. Norfolk is famous for its light dumplings. Norfolk swimmers as they were called were a wholesome way of extending stews and other pot meals. A Norfolk dumpling was made from flour shredded suet baking powder and water to mix. Dumplings were often flavoured with parsley, sage or horseradish depending on what the dumplings were to be eaten with A good recipe for Norfolk dumplings contained about four ounces of flour, two ounces of shredded suet, baking powder, salt and pepper, herbs or other flavourings would be added at this stage, The dumplings were fashioned into balls about the size of a walnut and added to the top of the stew.
Friday night my Mother made the bread dough for bread baking on Saturday. A week’s supply of bread would be made. Fruit pies would be baked, short breads and current cakes would also be made. We children looked forward with great anticipation to these special treats as we did to the daily ration of one piece of hard sweet which we were given before we left for school.
For breakfast we had a bowl of cereal and toast except on Sunday when we had a boiled egg eaten from an egg cup. The evening meal was a form of high tea which could consist of almost anything which could be eaten cold. Sunday high tea was a bit of a special meal in that we often had a can of salmon or quite often we had some form of sandwiches and cake. I remember one butcher in the village made the best pork head cheese I have ever tasted and even today I enjoy occasionally a sandwich made of pork headcheese though I have never found headcheese that could compare with what I had from that butcher.
Dad was a very good gardener and we always had a good supply of vegetables. Not only did we have a garden at the house but Dad always took an allotment from the village. The allotment permitted him to grow the main crop potatoes at the allotment as well as a good crop of onions. At the house he grew all types of cabbages, beans, turnips, carrots, Brussels sprouts, celery, parsnips, pumpkins as well as the early potatoes. We always had an asparagus bed and always had various types of herbs growing in the garden. The main crop of potatoes was stored in a pit dug in the garden and which was lined with straw. The pit had to be below the frost line and we would dig out about a weeks supply at a time. The main crop of potatoes generally lasted us through the winter and until the new early crop became available usually at the next June. As soon as the new potatoes came in in June Dad would get an airtight Hovis tin and fill it with new potatoes. The filled tin would be buried in the garden well below the frost line and dug up on Christmas Eve, the “new” potatoes would be eaten with our Christmas dinner. One of the things which has puzzled me over the year is that when I was growing up in Hethersett no-one ate the Swedish turnip or Rutabaker as it is called although it was grown as cattle feed by most farmers. When I got to Canada I was surprised to find it quite often on the table and there were many recipes available on how cook it. It is a staple on the menus both in Canada and the United States at Thanksgiving but somehow the people of Norfolk never got around to eating it themselves. Recipes for cooking this vegetable are to be found in most North American cook books but I have not found one in the British cookbooks I possess. This is strange in that it was a Norfolk man who introduced to the British Isles, Turnip Townsend. A good and simple way to cook the Swedish turnip is to take a medium sized turnip, peel it and chop it into one inch cubes, boil it with 2 saccharin tablets {or two tablespoons of artificial sweetener] plus salt to taste then mash it with lots of butter or margarine, and a liberal amount of white pepper
The chickens we kept supplied us with eggs as well as one to be killed for special occasions such as Christmas. We kept rabbits which supplied us with occasional meat but also the skins could be sold to the Rag and Bone man who visited the village about twice per year.
Mother made most of the jam we ate using local fruit such as strawberries, raspberries black and red currants, she also made wine from the rhubarb we grew and dandelions and elderberries
we gathered. I remember her making wine from sugar beet which from comments of those who tasted it was a formidable brew and would have “knocked the wig off a judge” if he had been fortunate enough to have been given a glass.
We children were sent out to gather whatever grew “wild” in the hedgerows or woods and fields to which we had access. We gathered blackberries, rose hips, hazel nuts, wild strawberries, mushrooms, water cress, and dandelions - anything to supplement the pot or the jam or wine making. There were several fields and meadows in which wild mushrooms grew. One had to know which were poisonous and which were edible. No cultivated mushroom can compare with those which had been gathered in the early morning with the dew still on them. Mother would also make mushroom ketchup from those we gathered wild. There were several places in Hethersett where hazel nuts grew in the hedgerows and knowing when they could be gathered was important and also getting there before anyone else could gather them required careful timing..
Because of working with my Father in the garden and the gathering of wild fruits and vegetables I have always loved gardening and liked gathering what grew in the wild.
In the summer after the field crops had been cut we would glean the fields, what we gleaned we kept and Mother would find some way of using.
One of the things I remember there were two butchers in the village who made sausages. Each had his own special recipe and both were very good.. I remember also there were various sausages available in Norfolk one being the Cambridge another was the Lincolnshire It was not until I got to Canada that I found out there was a Norfolk sausage which I believe contains some Parmesan cheese. There are so many different types of sausage available in the British Isles. I hope mass production and mass marketing will not destroy these local good, interesting and very different types of food.
I look back on these early years and I am impressed with how little we wasted. Food was eaten by the family anything surplus {which was rarely} was fed to chickens or rabbits which lived off the garden or the hog weed I gathered. I also had to gather small boughs which had been blown off trees and which were chopped up to provide kindling for the fires Clothing was worn and patched and darned. Afterwards it was cut up to make hooked rugs or cleaning cloths. Buttons were cut off and kept in a button bag as was string from parcels together with the brown wrapping paper. Dad’s weekly newspaper was kept to use as fire starter and part was rolled into spills to light lamps after the fire was going. If there was any waste which would rot it was put in a shallow pit at the bottom of the garden. This pit was dug out about once per year and distributed over the garden to be dug in as manure.
Dad was an advocate of what he called double digging. He would dig a row turning it over and then we would put manure in the place where the earth was removed and then I would take a garden fork and dig the manure into the bottom of the trench. The next row he dug would be turned onto the first trench. His method of digging gave us good results in the quality and quantity of the vegetables he grew.
Looking back at that period it was amazing the amount of food that was consumed in the England of those days which was brought in from other countries. Most of the butter and cheeses had their origin in either Denmark or Holland, although New Zealand had become a supplier of butter as well as lamb. Canterbury lamb came from the South Island of that country. Spain supplied tomatoes and onions. I remember the Basque onion sellers walking around with a pole over their shoulders from which dangled strings of onions which had been braided by the tops and were sold by the braid. Australia sold England mutton while Israel supplied oranges. Argentina was famous for its beef both fresh and canned. Canada supplied wheat, beef and apples. Bananas came from the Caribbean with some citrus fruits. With the outbreak of the Spanish civil war the onion sellers stopped coming.
THE CLOTHES WE WORE
When starting school I wore an English cap with a peak a sort of small edition of an “Andy Cap“. Later we were able to get the standard type of school cap which we bought through the school and which were in the school colours. It was a black cap with “amber” stripes. Everyone was expected to cover one’s head. Later this seemed to change as more and more boys and young men went without hats.
We dressed in short pants, usually gray flannel with socks reaching to the knee. Having a pair of black socks with amber in the fold overs at the top was a source of great pride. We wore gray flannel shirts or a garment called a jersey which was a sort of knitted shirt. Going to church on Sundays we were expected to wear a jacket and of course on Sundays one wore a tie. Most of the boys in the village wore black low boots which were polished for Sundays. It seemed we could not worship God unless we wore Sunday clothes or He did not listen to people wearing work clothes.
An article of clothing which I hated as a boy was called combs short for combinations. It was an undershirt attached to undershorts with sort of half-length legs. This garment had a slit in the back which you had to pull open to evacuate you bowels. It was a most difficult form of under attire ever invented. Up to a certain age we boys were expected to wear these combs and I think we all looked forward to the day when we could discard them.
Something which has stayed with me throughout my life is the expression “allow for growing”. Clothes were expensive item during the depression and when clothes were bought for a child one had to allow for growing. This meant that a boy in short pants would have new pants that reached below his knees when purchased and if he had the pants for a few years they would come halfway up his thigh. It was difficult to allow for growing when it came to footwear. I know I wore boots for too long that I finished up with hammer toes on both feet caused by wearing the boots which were too small for my feet.
At the age of fourteen years boys donned long pants and this was quite an occasion and marked a passage from childhood to adult status. There was another point in one’s life when clothing was an indicator of passage and that was when you got your first pair of pants with a fly; up on till then you had to pull your pants sideways so you could urinate through the leg opening.
When thinking of my childhood I have no memory of my Mother when her hands were not busy. When she was not cooking cleaning or all the things a housekeeper does and she was sitting down her hands were busy. She was knitting, hooking rugs, tatting or some other activity which was of benefit for her family. My mother could read and knit at the same time, she would read a magazine and knit socks for us children. The mothers’ lot in those days was hard and extremely demanding.
THE FEARS WE HAD
The continued fear we suffered in Hethersett, just after the First World War was
instilled into the us by the Government which had demonised the German army, during its march through Belgium. Much of these fears were later proved to be unfounded but to persuade people otherwise was difficult to accomplish particularly with the men who had been in the trenches of Flanders and other areas where the war was fought. We were very conscious of the execution of Edith Cavell who came from a neighbouring village and of course every use had been made by the British Government of these horror stories to bring the Americans into the war on the side of the Allies. While a lot of these horror stories were manufactured, they were still being used in the Press and so we young people were to some extent conditioned by them. To demonstrate how invidious and pervasive these fears were we played a game called war. Everyone wanted to be British and it was difficult to get boys to be German.
After 1920 the year that I was born there were several coal miners’ strikes culminating in the general strike of 1926. The period from the end of the first Great War to the onset of the great depression was an unsettled time and became even worse as the impact of the depression took hold.
We grew up at the end of Empire. The maps on our classroom walls displayed the Red of Empire on every continent. We were taught that Britain was an empire on which the sun never set and being British automatically made us superior. Our skin colour and background gave us advantages that those foreigners did not have, so we were told. Being white was applied to all sorts of situations, such as speaking white meant speaking English.
We recognized at the bottom of our hearts that for our generation, if there were another war some of our names would go on the war memorial. We lived with the fear and I think we all debated in our own minds how we would behave if the conflagration broke out again.
As we grew up we were well aware of the horrors of the trenches and we could see the men in the village minus legs arms and eyesight. We knew only too well that this was a big possibility in our future.
As Hitler and the Nazi Party grew in power, we could see little hope for us to avoid a clash. There were also prominent British citizens particularly in the aristocracy who seemed to favour Hitler and his cohorts. The Prince of Wales who was heir to the throne was not well viewed in Britain by the working people and was regarded as a bit of a poser. The depression was still with us and hard times were still being experienced in the industrial areas. Spending money to keep an individual who was regarded as useless and not particularly ornamental was not a pleasing prospect.
One of the things, which concerned us deeply, was the number of people in important positions in Government and among the aristocracy who appeared to be sympathetic to the Nazi and fascist movements in Germany, Italy and Spain. We listened to Oswald Mosely and other British fascist leaders. We also watched with dismay, the abandonment of the Emperor of Ethiopia to Musselini and his fascists.
We watched, sometimes with amusement, the aristocracy and the gentry as they climbed on each other’s shoulders trying to look good in the eyes of the world, but we rural poor and underprivileged had nothing to climb on except our own or a neighbours midden and even then there was often a pecking order in which we did not have much rank.
From the conversations I overheard, one of the great fears my parents had was getting old and not being able to support themselves. People who grew old and were indigent and had no relatives to look after them were put in a workhouse. This was a great fear and a dreaded end from the conversations I overheard. The workhouse was viewed as not much more than a prison but it was used all too often. The threat of the workhouse hovered over us like a shadowed ghost it was always there. Later there was some improvement in the treatment of the very poor as the workhouse did not get mentioned as often.
One of the most disorganised events I remember was the celebration of the silver jubilee of George the Fifth. He was much admired mainly because he did not interfere in the affairs of the nation. George was married to Princess Mary of Teck who had been selected for marriage to his older brother Rupert who had died. The village put on a dinner and we all sat at long tables set up in the village hall. The food was put on plates which were then passed down the tables. By the time the plate got to a person at the end of the table the food had been removed by the people who passed the plate. There was nearly a riot as many of the people who attended the event got nothing to eat. For us it was not much of a celebration and to be frank not many of us had confidence in the party in power. We viewed them as elitist and as village boys we did not have very much confidence in the way they were acting. The Government of the day was trying to tell us that we as the next generation we could carry on the best of British traditions and that we had to play fair in the way of Britons. I for one did not believe we had always played fair and thought the Government propaganda was nonsense as I had relatives who had been with the British Army in South Africa and had some knowledge of the true story of the concentration camps in which thousands of Boor women and children had died.
Another big event in Hethersett was Armistice Day. The Sunday nearest to the 11th November was called Armistice Sunday and the British Legion paraded to the Church. We had a retired colonel from the Indian Army living in the village, who commanded the parade. A very high percentage of the men residing in the village had served in the First World War. Many had been wounded and some had lost limbs. The parade started in the middle of the village and paraded to the church. Also following behind the Legion were the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides as well as the Brownies and Cubs. Behind them came the Odd-fellows and the Foresters, two fraternal society groups who had members living in the village. The service was very military with hymns such as Fight the Good Fight and Onward Christian Solders. The names of the men from the village who had died in the services during the war were read. It was a long list and the reading was very sad particularly as relatives usually attended. After this, a military trumpeter sounded the Last Post followed by two minutes of silence and the Reveille was sounded to complete the ceremony.
ILLNESS AND SICKNESS IN THE VILLAGE
One of the most unpleasant memories I have of Hethersett was the prevalence of disease and illness and our apparent inability to deal with it.
A great killer in the period was tuberculosis and it was brought home to me as it occurred quite often in my mother’s family. An uncle of mine, his wife and son and eventually my mother succumbed to this frightful disease and there did not seem to be any way to deal with it. The only thing the authorities could do was to erect a hut for the patient to sleep in, in the garden of their house. Tuberculosis is now almost a thing of the past but for quite a while it was a notorious killer and everyone was afraid of it. I know I was afraid of going home and finding a hut put in our garden for my mother. However my mother was put into an isolation hospital in North Norfolk and eventually succumbed to the disease.
There were equally dangerous illnesses such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid fever and various afflictions which quite often resulted in the death of children. I remember a number of children who succumbed to the diseases and the tragic simplicity of the funerals. It was the custom that if a boy died he would be carried to the graveyard by four girls and if a girl died she would be carried by four boys. I remember seeing these tragic little processions going through the village, the small coffin on a hand bier which would be closely followed by the mourners.
Measles and whooping cough afflicted most children and seemed to come every year and it seemed that almost all students in school would get those complaints at some time or other in their lives.
SUPERSTITIONS PREVALENT IN THE VILLAGE
There were many superstitions among the country folk living in Hethersett when I was a child. Some of them had their origin in religion, some may have pre-dated Christianity. Regardless of their origin, they played a part in our lives.
One superstition was associated with black cats. Black catse were considered unlucky and for a black cat to cross one's path was thought to bring bad luck. Black cats had always been associated with witchcraft and this may have been the birthplace of this superstition.
Salt had its accompanying superstitions. Salt had its religious connotations as an item of savour and to spill it was considered unlucky. If one did have the misfortune to spill salt one could remove the bad luck by throwing a small portion over one's left shoulder with the right hand.
Placing shoes or boots even when new on a table was perceived as bringing bad luck.
Cutting one's nails on a Friday was also thought to bring misfortune and was drilled into us by my Grandmother. As Friday was the day of the crucifixion I think this had religious origins.
Left handed people had a bit of a rough time. The right hand was said to be God's hand whereas the left belonged to the Devil. I remember efforts were made to change left handed children to right handed, causing a fair amount of unhappiness and misery.
Walking under a ladder was said to bring bad luck, as was sewing or knitting on a Sunday. Sunday was said to belong to the Lord and any form of work was discouraged.
Giving a knife as a gift to another person always had to be a sort of exchange. In other words the recipient had to give another piece of metal back.
HETHERSETT NATIONAL SCHOOL
There were two schools in the village. The Hethersett National School often called the Church School because it had a relationship with the Church of England. The other school was called the British School and I believe had some relationship with the Methodists or other non-establishment religions. The National School had an infant’s school and the main school started at six years of age. Classes called standards went up to Standard seven then there was a seven X for those who had completed all standards but was not old enough to leave school. I started school at the age of four years in the infant’s school. There was an older school building opposite the gate to the National School which was no longer used as a school, but was used as a meeting hall for the Church and parish activities. There was a troop of Boy Scouts attached to the Church to which I belonged and we would meet in this building.
Starting at the age of four years we were taught to write on slates with chalk. Everything was provided including text and exercise books. We had to take great care with what was issued to us. I suppose the School budget was tight and there was a great deal of re-use of books pencils etc.
In the school yard we played a sort of baseball we called rounders’ and a type of cricket we called stool ball. The school had a turret holding a bell which was rung for us to file into class. There was a lobby, or porch, with hooks for us to hang our coats in the winter. We all walked to school, there was no such thing as a school bus in those days.
School for me was a love hate relationship. I loved the learning and reading for me was a passion. What I did not like was the bullying and there was lots of that. Somewhere along the way through school I was promoted so that I was in a class with people who were a year older than I was. There did not seem to be any attempt on the part of the teachers to stop the bullying and life at school became a misery until one day I determined to fight back .Unfortunately my size precluded a stand up fight and I knew The Marques of Queensbury rules would not apply so I decided to use tactics which would not be acceptable in many quarters but which might help in stopping the tormenting. One rather large boy with an outsize mouth and an undersized brain came up to me and started pushing me around and taunting me. Village boys usually wore hobnailed boots which were very heavy and these were what I had on, so I aimed a kick at his crotch area which proved to be quite accurate and which doubled him over, after which he performed a sort of tap dance and emitted a noise like a Swiss yodel. His coterie which normally accompanied him looked on with amazement and one suggested I should stand up and fight like a gentleman which considering my size and family origins was stupid. It did not stop the bullying but it did reduce it and school became a bit more liveable.
There was a further problem as I was small for my age and I did not really start to grow until I was about fourteen. I certainly did not shine in sports. The main sport played at the school was Football {soccer} and “charging” was allowed. Whenever I got the ball I would be charged off it by some bigger boy. It was not until I got into the Service and played squash rackets that I found I could become really good at a sport.
One day a male teacher turned up at the school with a very strong Lancashire accent. People did not travel as much in those days and his accent was almost incomprehensible to us. During certain periods in the school we to study our lessons and while doing this we were not supposed to look around, One boy engaged in some day dreaming was told to “Luke at your Buke and not Luke around” this was the source of much amusement and we all “Luked at our Bukes and did not Luke around’.
One aspect of attendance at the Hethersett National School I enjoyed was the period we had each week for singing in the School Choir. The songs we sang were mostly songs from various parts of the British Isles they were traditional airs and I think all the students enjoyed the singing. I can still remember the words to some of the songs such as “The Ash Grove”, “The Nut Brown Maiden”, and “The Mountains Of Mourne” to name but a few.
There was one incident in the school which I shall always remember. There was an assistant teacher sent to the school who was I believe under training. He was, we were told, a County class cricketer but he was not very good at dealing with children. He would walk around the class look over our shoulders and if he found something wrong with our work lift us up by the hair in the back of our neck and then stab us under the arm with a two foot ebony round ruler. We grew our hair a bit longer than boys do today and being lifted up by the hair in the back of the neck was painful and to be stabbed under the arm with a two foot round ruler was also very disagreeable. This man used to ride a bicycle to school and a group of older boys brought pails of small potatoes to school and lined up at the school gates as he was leaving and pelted him with the potatoes.. There was an enquiry to find out who was responsible for this incident but nobody would tell and within a few days this man left the school and we all settled down to our normal routine.
The school had a small piece of land nearby where the boys were taught gardening. I suppose somewhere in an office someone came up with the idea that as we lived in the country it would be a good idea for us to learn gardening. Unfortunately the teacher who was to teach us how to garden was a city bred man from the north of England who did not have any idea on how to grow anything. I think it would be safe to say that every boy in the class knew more about the subject than he did, We were all country bred our fathers all had gardens and we all worked with our fathers in the gardens of the village. It was a well intentioned but in the end ineffective.
The desks of the teachers had a tube built into them to hold canes which the teachers would use at the slightest excuse. I remember one man had about half dozen of these canes of differing thickness and suppleness which when he decided to use he would take out a number, one after the other, and slash the air close to the victim as if trying out to be sure he had the right one for the job. It was a form of sadism. He also had a glass water tank in his classroom which contained some newts, but one day a boy dropped a piece of calcium carbide into the tank. When water is mixed with calcium carbide it produces acetylene gas which smells very badly and the teacher's first reaction was to demand that whoever had made the bad smell should stand up, of course he got no takers and then he noticed that the newts were dead and realized the cause of the bad smell.
This same master also had on his desk a hyacinth in a glass dish designed for growing bulbs using plant food in water. He was very proud of his hyacinth. To cane a boy one day he made the boy hold his hand out, the caning was to be two strokes of the cane across the hand which would be held out palm up. Every time he attempted to hit the held out hand the boy would jerk his hand back making the master miss. The master became most frustrated and kept on thrashing at the retreating hand until the hand was held over the hyacinth. The master took a swing at the hand which the boy jerked back with the result the master missed the hand and hit the flower smashing it and the glass dish.
Of course the teacher was furious. The boy ran home and came back with his father. There were various threats made by the father but it was difficult to tell who was more afraid the boy or the teacher but eventually it calmed down. It did change the stance of the teacher he made certain any boy he caned from then on was standing well away from his desk.
At the back of the school were the toilet and ablution area divided by a wall, the boys on one side the girls on the other. I can only describe what was on the boys’ side which was a trough arrangement at the base of the wall, a stand with two wash basins, two sitters and just one tap. There were no flush toilets and I would doubt that anyone on the village Council or School Board had ever heard of Thomas Crapper and the water waste preventer. The school had pupils ranging from about four years of age to fourteen and in all shapes and sizes.
Going for a pee for a young lad was a hazardous affair because you would just get going when a larger lad would come beside you and let fly and if you were not careful you would get in his back splash.
There was also considerable competition among the bigger lads as to who could pee the highest up the wall. Some of the bigger lads had good distance and could arc quite well almost getting to the top of the wall. There was one chap named Ernie who became the undoubted star turn. One day he managed to get a small quirt over the top of the wall and there was an outcry of indignation from the other side, the girls’ side of the wall.
There was some hasty buttoning up -- this was in the days before zip fasteners -- and all the boys marched out with looks of complete innocence when a lady teacher came storming around. We all tried to look indignant that a female teacher had invaded the territory of the male pupils. There was considerable inquiry as to who had peed over the wall but the culprit was never identified. Ernie always had a place of honour on our unofficial achievement roster.
The attitude of adults to children was based on an old saying which was common at that time and which said “children should be seen but not heard”. If one was spoken to by an elder one was not supposed to answer back. I remember getting into very hot water with my Grandmother because I answered back. Children were not supposed to have opinions or to think.
FURTHER THOUGHTS ON BULLYING
The Oxford Dictionary defines bullying as a method or way to coerce another person to do something by fear
Bullying was rife in the playground at school and it seemed the teachers had no way or no desire to stop it? One could attribute it to a number of causes not the least was jealousy. I did not think that was the only answer, there had to be other reasons. When working later on in life in Africa particularly in Tanzania and in Kenya I was able to observe how animals behaved. I noticed that the first born seemed to occupy the first place in the order of precedence mainly because he or she was fed first. The first born being stronger always seemed to be right behind the parents and the weakest was always last’ In the event of an attack by a predator the weakest would be the victim. Was this a survival of the fittest practice? Had this been acquired over millions of years?
Later when I was able to read Konrad Lorenz and also when I thought back to the chickens and ducks we kept when I was a boy it seemed to me that there was always an order of precedence and no matter how the flock was disturbed it would always reform in the same order. The question of course is
why ,and what instinctive force was at work to cause this to happen . Later I was able to relate this to the grownup behaviour in the village.
There was undoubtedly an order of precedence in the village and anyone who disturbed that order was reminded, in all sorts of ways as to, where he or she belonged in the social order of the village. There were many self-appointed guardians of that position who would willingly convey and make known to the offending individual information about their place and social indiscretions.
There was very subtle bullying going on in the village among grownups. If one had accused them of this practice the protests and denials would have been loud with outrage and their Christian Garments would have been flourished for all to see. But they did it all the same.
Children learn from their parents and it was interesting to notice the boys who bullied me and how their parents regarded themselves in the social structure in the village
There is another aspect to bullying which intrigues me. I believe children often reflect the opinions and attitudes of their parents. If parents make statements denigrating groups or individuals In the presence of their children it is quite likely that the same opinions will be expressed unthinkingly and impulsively in the playgrounds and other places where children gather. The point I am making is that bad or good habits like most things start in the home and are learned from parents.
There is another aspect to bullying which I believe has its roots in a form of racial superiority. If an individual believes he is superior to another racial or social group by virtue of skin colour education employment or any other reason his sense of superiority can lead to a need to dominate, and in turn can lead to coercion by fear.
One boy who was about three years older than me would rush out of his house and beat up on me on every occasion that I went near where he lived. There appeared to be no reason for his picking on me except that I was younger and smaller. He had a reputation as a bully and as I found out later he was ill treated at home by his mother who seemed to live on the edge of a nervous crisis. Looking back I have often wondered what happened to him. Did he marry and did he have children and how did he treat them. Unfortunately the bad habits of parents often get passed on.
COLOUR BLINDNESS
I was born red green colour blind; this is viewed by some people as not much of a handicap which to some extent is probably true it is nevertheless a handicap. There are many occupations and professions which are difficult for a colour blind person to fill And even in day to day activities it is often embarrassing and difficult.
Trying to explain to a normal sighted person about colour blindness is onerous in that no-one has ever looked at the world through another person’s eyes, Nine percent of the worlds males are in some way colour blind. Mostly these males are red green colour blind and according to the experts there is a reason for this. My colour blindness is called Deuteranomaly and is the most common form. It means persons having this problem have a reduction in sensitivity to the green area in the spectrum. This problem is generally sex linked, in other words it occurs more often in males than in females.
For a colour blind person colour coding presents problems some of which it is difficult to overcome. Colour blind people develop avoidance techniques and all sorts of little dodges so that they do not have to make decisions based on colour.
As a small child I developed a complex about my colour blindness. I did not understand it and could not comprehend why I made the mistakes I did. After making a mistake involving colour I overheard someone refer to me as being stupid and for a while I believed it. Perhaps the biggest impact on me was in art class. In school we used coloured crayons. This presented me with a major problem because the red, green and brown colours were all of the same shade and I could not differentiate. One of my worst experiences as a boy was having drawn a green cow in art class I was up ended over my desk and a half dozen strokes of a cane was applied to my rear end and at the same time I was upbraided as stupid. I suppose it did not occur to the teacher that there was no purpose in deliberately drawing an animal the wrong colour. It seems colour blindness was impossible for him to comprehend, and that I may have had a physical problem.
I found a solution to the situation at school, The desks in the school were doubles and the boy sharing a double with me had some troubles with academic subjects so we worked out an exchange he helped me with colours and I helped him with his math and English. An unpleasant memory I have of my desk mate was that in two years after his leaving school he was dead of tuberculosis, and about a year after that his sister had also died of the same disease and a couple of years after that both parents had also followed him to the grave. The whole family had become victims of the dreaded disease.
I have often found myself in embarrassing situations because of my colour blindness. Mostly it was caused by a mistake I made and usually it was with some very self-important individual. Self-importance and intolerance seem to be coupled and to thrive on a midden of ignorance.. I have often been asked if you do not see some colours what do you see? This is a question I cannot answer as I have not been able to see through another person’s eyes. The world I see is the world I have always seen. My vision of the world is the only one I have ever had or ever seen. It is virtually impossible for another person to describe colours to an individual who does not see colour or who only sees certain colours I did not become colour blind by any act I may have committed or through any fault of my parents. This was dealt to me at birth through the genes I inherited.
I am not completely sure but I suspect the feeling I got that I was in some way inferior .or did not in some way measure up came from my grandmother [ my mother’s mother ] Somehow I was viewed as not quite what I should have been and the fact that I was colour blind seemed to be confirmation in her mind that I was deficient in every quality she admired. Even though I doubt that she knew what the word meant she had heard an aunt refer to me as precocious, she therefore applied this label at every opportunity. I did not know what the word meant and thought it was some form of physical deformity and remember looking at myself in a mirror to see if I could see what was wrong. I did my best to avoid her particularly I did not like to hear her praising a cousin while denigrating me.
In the long life I have lived I have often thought that the hurt one receives in ones early life stays like a boil in memory. It does not matter how hard one tries to forget it, it is there. It comes to the surface jogged by a word or action. It is part of who one is, it is part of the building blocks of one’s personality
Nature does in some ways compensate for physical disabilities or deficiencies, for instance a blind person develops acute hearing and a deaf person develops acute sight. In my case I had extremely good night vision and a very good memory. I remember doing an evasion night exercise during the Second World War I was able to lead my group whereas the other normal sighted individuals were unable to cope very well in the dark. I was explaining this to a lad from Ireland how nature compensated. He agreed with me and said he had noticed the same thing in Ireland. Particularly he noticed a man who was born with a short leg nature had compensated for it by making the other leg longer.
For people interested in the subject of colour blindness I would recommend reading “The Ancestors Tale” by Richard Dawkins, particularly chapter six “The howler monkeys tale”
LEFT HANDED AND HOMOSEXUAL PEOPLE
I always felt I got a bit of a rough ride in school because of being colour blind but there were two other groups who were also singled out because of being different. There were two boys and one girl in the class which went through school with me who were left handed and at the time I went through school being left handed was considered a curable problem. I remember hearing it said that the right hand was God’s hand and the left hand was the Devils. This was a hangover attitude from the days of witchcraft but I am sure was sincerely believed by many people.
There was a teacher in the School who would rap the knuckles of left handed pupils with a round ruler in an attempt to cure what was perceived to be a problem causing pain and misery to the pupil. I remember hearing the thud of the round ruler applied against flesh and bone and the cries of pain. I felt particularly sorry for the girl who was left handed and who would be hit with the round ruler and we would see her crying in the schoolyard. The teacher who did this was a bully, an arrogant and ignorant bully.
There was a boy in the class ahead of the one I was in who I am sure was homosexual. He acted a bit feminine and was always very particular about the way he was dressed. He was picked on by the some of the other boys mainly because he would not participate in some of the team sports we played. He was very artistic and in fact was extremely talented as a painter which set him apart from the rest of his class. He had a hard time in the school and with one particular teacher. Again there were attempts to change him but of without success.
It was firmly believed by some very religious people, that being homosexual was a sin and that one had a choice and one could be normal if the individual wanted to change. I could not believe that anyone would willingly choose to be homosexual in view of how they were treated by people who considered that they themselves were normal.