Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

FRIENDLY INVASIONS 196 “The little candy shop” that little candy shop (Alec emigrated to Canada) still there on the south side of Church Street? 1 I was a constant customer for the little old lady who lived in the back and never seemed to have any other customers. 2 ‘Was it Miss Cherry in the Post Office who was Mr Plum 's girlfriend or was it the other way around? I remember now. Plum was the man I bought rabbits from.’ 3 Alan Cockburn: ‘In the Buckden of the war years, unlike in a London suburb where one knew only a few neighbours to speak to, everyone seemed to know everyone else, so it was quite usual for Kate to stop to exchange a few words with anyone we met: Major Duberly, his wife Lady Eileen, and Mrs Duberly, his mother, who had come to stay; Mrs North, who played the church organ on Sundays and kept innumerable pets; Captain Amers, retired and always immaculately turned out, formerly a well-known leader of a north-country band, who lived in Silver Street, but soon to move to Ottery St Mary [in Devon], even further from the scene of his successes ... 4 ‘Among the local shops I particularly remember Milner’s grocery store in Church Street. Mr Milner and his friendly son, Walter, always courteous and helpful, even to uncouth schoolboys, were generally behind the counter. More rarely, I visited Hinsby’s and the bakery on the corner of Church Street and Silver Street. Bowtell’s was a much bigger grocery in the High Street, next door to the Post Office. ‘A coterie of local bigwigs—Linton, Thornhill and others—used to shoot at the rooks in the grounds of the school. Despicable, I thought and hardly sporting, not much of a challenge. There was a fairly large rookery in the walnut trees adjacent to our football pitch. Can one eat rooks?’ 5 Shooting perched birds was clearly a preoccupation of the Buckden gentry. Alec Owen had been billeted in Stirtloe House, and returning there many years later, was instantly reminded of the behaviour of one of his wartime hosts: ‘Captain Henry Linton used to like to hang out of the window in the servants’ hall and shoot sparrows in the Wellingtonia on the lawn.’ He was glad to see the great tree had survived. Captain Linton, however, had not. Alec refrained from asking if he had fallen out of the window. ‘Stop that, you horrid little boy!’ Alan Cockburn was impressed (and amused) by the hauteur of another Linton on the end of a gun—in her case, the wrong end. Louise Linton Maude-Roxby was the Captain’s sister and the widow of a distinguished First World War soldier. One day a light field gun and its crew arrived on the Hunts End green: ‘They seemed to be on a goodwill mission for they positively welcomed close inspection of their equipment. Mrs Maude-Roxby, tall, well-dressed and dignified, was standing no more than a few inches from the end of the gun barrel talking quietly to the young officer in charge, when she was visibly startled by a loud hoot in her ear, issuing from the muzzle of the gun, but emanating from an urchin peering up the open breech. Her next action made the tableau complete. Laying an elegant grey-gloved hand on the muzzle, she called angrily down the barrel to the source of her fright and annoyance, “Stop that, you horrid little boy. You should be ashamed of yourself.” It would have been so much easier to admonish him with an imperious word and glare over the gun shield. But then the delightful piquancy of the scene would have been lost ...’ 1 Sadly, no. 2 Miss Florence Wallis, a wheelwright’s daughter. She began her working life as a schoolteacher. Her niece Elsie married Austin Mason, one of the Tollington masters, in 1942. 3 He raised them on the palace battlements. Alan Cockburn also kept rabbits (more conventionally housed). They were not, of course, pets. A boy has to eat. 4 For more about Captain Amers, see his A to Z entry. 5 Yes! Rook pie is an old English stand-by, traditionally served with gooseberry jelly and seemingly always made from six rooks. Wartime shortages rekindled interest in it, the rooks being used to eke out the occasional ration of steak. More recently, it has appeared on the menu of a fashionable London restaurant.