Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

FRIENDLY INVASIONS 197 A saintly man Harold Randall had particular cause to remember one Buckden resident above all the rest: John White, parish organist and choirmaster. A musical lad, Harold joined the St Mary’s choir and also received Mr White’s permission to try playing the church organ. His first attempt was so dire that the vicar sent post- haste to the church to find out if vandals had broken in. Despite this inauspicious start, Mr White volunteered to teach Harold, who for the rest of his time in Buckden had a lesson every Wednesday afternoon and practised every Saturday morning before a not always appreciative audience of ladies who came to dust, polish and arrange flowers. At the final evensong before the school returned to London, Harold accompanied the last hymn and played the closing voluntary. Kindly John White had seen and nurtured his potential, and enabled him to give a lifetime’s service as a church organist. ‘I suppose,’ he wrote, ‘Mr White must have died in Buckden years ago. I hope one day to find his resting place and pay my homage to a real Christian gentleman […] He was a saintly man.’ A time of change Ken Odell was billeted briefly with Mr and Mrs Osborne in the High Street, opposite the Vine public house: ‘The house opened directly on to a narrow pavement on what was then still the Great North Road. War-time traffic thundered through the village at all hours of the day and night. I could have reached out of my bedroom window and touched those lorries as they ground their way towards London.’ For Alan Cockburn, living half-a-mile from the High Street, Buckden was a quieter place: ‘The streets carried little motor traffic. John Smith’s new Bedford lorry was requisitioned soon after war broke out. Jim Park, farmer, always drove his maroon Triumph saloon at a sedate five or six mph to conserve petrol. Allen Cope continued to transport livestock in his large purpose-built van. ‘Horse-drawn traffic continued as usual. A sewage cart, essential as the village lacked sewers, would occasionally come by. A milk float from Mann’s Farm called daily on its round. Farm carts were always moving about on some business or other. But in the autumn a long convoy, perhaps fifteen or twenty of them, each one loaded with sugar beet or some other root crop, and each accompanied by a carter, was seen passing the village school and stocking factory in the direction of Offord. 1 One of the carters was Violet Brace, our near neighbour from the row of three or four cottages called Hunts End. Violet lived there with Mrs Brace, active and sociable despite having lost the lower part of one leg, and their neighbours, Mrs Newman and her pretty blonde daughter. Violet dressed sensibly for her calling, always in a jacket, knee breeches, woollen stockings and boots, much in the style, if not the colours, of the Land Army girls—young women I did not meet until the summer of 1942, when tractor driving for the War Agricultural Committee. ‘The larger farms, like Park’s and Mailer’s, may have had twenty or more shire horses for the various tasks on the farm, but I supposed that convoys of so many carts probably belonged to more than one farmer, and the loads were perhaps destined for onward transport from Offord Station. These carts, all of the same well-tried design, were ideally suited for the many jobs on the farm, particularly in muddy fields, where the much larger wagons would be difficult to pull. Quite unaware at the time, we were witnessing the decline of the old ways of farming, and with them the imminent disappearances of the crafts of wheelwright and blacksmith, and the last of one of the proudest sights of the year, the walking of Chivers’ great dappled grey shire stallion, by its groom, round the roads, visiting the farms to serve the mares.’ Au revoir to Buckden By 1942, school numbers had declined. The yearly exodus of fifth and sixth formers had never been matched by an intake of juniors. So, despite the war entering its darkest period, it was decided the school should return to London in the summer. Just as the original evacuation had been voluntary, so equally was repatriation. London was still being bombed, and at their parents’ request forty-three of the boys stayed on in Buckden in the care of Austin and Elsie Mason. David Rhodes, writing in the 1942 school magazine, felt that: ‘With everything taken into consideration, I think we have benefited greatly by the evacuation. Country has come to understand town, and town has come to understand country. We have broadened our minds, considerably, and from a physical point of view the country has done us a tremendous amount of good.’ Alan Cockburn recalled little of the evacuation from Buckden, other than catching the London train at Offord and Buckden Station—a change from cycling the sixty-odd miles home, as he had sometimes done at the beginning and end of the school holidays. But he, too, was in no doubt that the boys had profited immeasurably from their experience of country life, not least because so many of Buckden’s householders 1 For more about the stocking factory, see its A to Z entry.