Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

FRIENDLY INVASIONS 195 Offord, while their second son, Ken, was in the tuberculosis hospital at Papworth Everard, where he had been for some long time. ‘John picked the yellow eating apples when ripe from the tree in the back garden and stored them on racks in the cellar. Each night before bedtime he would bring a few to the table to go with a hot drink. Although the house had electricity, the supply was limited to three wall sockets, so oil lamps provided most of the illumination; and candles lit us to bed soon after the nine o’clock news on the wireless. Sometimes we tuned in to Lord Haw Haw, whose broadcasts, announced with the words “Jarmony calling, Jarmony calling!” in his unique and rather nasal tones, provoked a good deal of derision and total disbelief. ‘Bath night took place at the weekend; the bath, plumbed for drainage, but without taps, stood in one corner of a big, almost empty room upstairs. A hand pump in the kitchen was the source of all our water, which we carried upstairs in buckets to the bathroom, where from a glass case in a far corner a large malevolent pike kept a baleful eye on proceedings, while from another a somewhat startled stuffed otter looked ready to plunge into the artificial waters at its feet. A gloomy oil painting of Stirtloe Park made up the rest of the furnishings. 1 ‘On the night of 14 November 1940, the household, quite unusually, retired to a cupboard below the staircase. For most of the night we could hear German aircraft flying to and from some distant target. The next day we learned that Coventry had been all but destroyed.’ Making friends In 1940, Ken Smith returned to Buckden from Papworth, still in need of nursing attention but well enough to cope with light tasks in the workshop. Two of the evacuees moved to another billet to make a bedroom available for him. Alan Cockburn, staying on, came to enjoy his company and to admire his craftsmanship. They disagreed on one thing, however: Alan, the Londoner, had come to much prefer the ways of the country; Ken, country born and bred, hankered after the city life. Sadly, his chance never came. He died in the late summer of 1943, aged 29. Evacuee Robert Curtis also knew what it was to lose a Buckden friend. Peter Robinson was the son of the owner of Robinson’s Garages and taught him to drive. Both young men held a provisional licence (‘permission to go mad on the King’s highways in all manner of powerful machinery’). This was a precious document because provided the war was still on, one could eventually convert it into a full licence without having to pass the official driving test . Robert achieved this when he was demobbed in 1947, but Peter never got the chance. He had been killed in France in 1944, a year after joining up. Alec Owen did not make close friends with village boys of his own age: ‘The Buckden kids would try to tease us. They implied that we boys thought milk came from bottles and not from cows. I don’t think I ever rose to the bait. I never made friends with any of the local kids for some reason, probably because there were so many Tollington boys my age at school. I remember some of the Offord boys wanted to fight us (me and my little brother) but they were too big so we ran away and hurled insults at them from a safe distance.’ He did, however, have friends among the adults: ‘The former village blacksmith, Mr Middleton, was a close friend of mine as was his pony Tom, who bit my behind one day as I was brushing him. Mr Middleton allowed me to help him when he took his pony and cart on the various excursions. In that way I helped an old gentleman (whose name I regretfully forget) move his apples from his orchards to various places in the village. Some of the apples never reached their destination but were gratefully received by school chums we passed on the journey. Mr Middleton’s daughter Violet who lived on the High Street opposite the forge had been a nurse or nursing assistant at The Towers during the First World War when it was a convalescent home for wounded servicemen. My friendship with Mr Middleton also assisted me in getting a job as a beater when Squire Thornhill of Diddington held a pheasant shoot. I think the Squire gave me 5s. which was a princely sum for a working-class kid. I think it was the first coin I ever really earned. ‘I remember Mr Frost (blind basket maker) and of course all the Stirtloe people, including the gypsies who camped down from the spinney near the house, especially the gypsy boy of my age who patiently tried to teach me to tickle trout. They roamed the country in brightly painted wagons and made clothes pegs out of hazel sticks. ‘I am desperately trying to remember the name of the man who lived in the next house to the Osbornes and whose stinky pond I fell in while hunting newts in his osier bed. I wonder; do they still cut osiers? 2 Is 1 Boys billeted in households without any form of bath were put on a rota for the bathroom (there was only one) at The Towers . 2 No, sadly.