colkirkchapter1

My earliest recollection of Colkirk was, I think, the Diamond Jubilee of good Queen Victoria. Anyway, it was an occasion for public rejoicing and a good excuse for real village do. The old rector and his energetic daughters were probably at the bottom of it. They were always the prime movers in any village happening, whether it be to celebrate a birth, a death, a marriage, or merely the end of a distant war. Those were the days of real isolation. Any event that did not take place within a few miles hardly disturbed the placidity of life.

But that year there had been a good and early harvest, the weather was still fine, and the time was ripe for rejoicing. Races and athletic events, both for adults and for children, were held in a big meadow known as Watering Close. This was also, when occasion demanded, the Cricket Meadow. It was owned by my grandfather and used for grazing the cows, who were not disturbed by a mere cricket match. Fielders were expected to shoe them off if they wandered onto the pitch. It seemed most remarkable to me in later years when I visited the Oval that one spectator moving in front of a sight screen was enough to stop a game. We did not mind.

A great pit took a bite out of the meadow. It was full of water and fairly deep on the meadow side. Here, where the bank was conveniently steep, a pole was fixed horizontally Over the water with a box at the end of it. The pole was well greased and the box contained, instead of the traditional live pig, a leg of pork. The lads of the village were urged by excited spectators to walk the greasy pole and claim the prize. One by one they floundered and fell off into the water with a mighty splash. The winner reached the box, made a grab and overbalanced at the last moment. But he did touch it, so he was awarded the prize. There were dark hints by the losers that he had sanded the soles of his feet.

As the day was ending all repaired to the neighbouring barn, which had been swept and garnished for a feast. Odd roast beef and pickles, beer, plum puddings, and more beer. The plum puddings were boiled in the coppers of the farmhouse nearby, the house which years afterwards became my parents' home, the house to which I came home from the First World War, the house to which I eventually brought my bride.

Colkirk did not change much during those early years, though the toll of young men who did not come back was heavy. Many of the boys with whom I played cricket and football "went west", and those who returned were not the same. Jack Ram lost an eye and an arm. He became the village postman and rode into the nearest town on a pony for the letters - a great advance, for before the war the post did not arrive until about six o'clock in the evening.

On a wet cold night the old postman was sure of a glass of whisky when he called at my grandmother's house. So it was that I heard an eye-witness account of the local ghost. Jack Ram told me how he had been riding down Market Lane early one morning for the post, while it was still dark, and his pony had shied at a misty figure in the road. Both Jack and the pony were terrified. It was gone when the pair of them, pony and rider, at last nerved themselves to Pass the spot.

One of my aunts who lived at the bottom of the lane had a similar experience. She had visited the Rectory for a game of cards and on the way back caught a glimpse of a misty and, she said, terrifying figure. She fled back to the Rectory in horror and had to be revived and escorted home by the Rector. That was long before Jack’s adventure, and Aunt Susan's story as far as we knew was known only to the family. A mystery - and so it remained.

Another strange phenomenon was observed more publicly during a service at the little church of Gateley, near Colkirk. A ball of fire was seen to enter the church door, trundle down the aisle and explode against the altar. The Devil, of course. But perhaps there is a more ordinary explanation for this one: we boys had also been scared by a ball of fire which came through the open door of the barn when we were playing inside on a rainy day. It passed quite slowly over our heads and hit a scythe that was hanging on the wall with a great clang. Vagrant lightning? But then Gateley Church rather went in for devils. One of the old pictures painted on the Chancel screen showed a fine horned devil being conjured out of a jackboot: the origin of the painting was probably a squire with a bunyon and a clever cobbler. But even in our young days the Devil was a very real person and well respected. I remember while being prepared for confirmation the old Rector asking me "Is the Devil omnipotent?" Speaking from experience I replied "Yes!" But that was the wrong answer.

I was sent to boarding school at the nearby market town of Fakenham when I was seven years old, which was about 1900. It was a girls' school really, but a number of small boys were taken as well: only one other boarded besides myself, until my younger brother joined me later, and a few day boys. We were weekly boarders, and how we longed for Saturday when my Aunt would arrive in the pony and trap to take us home for the weekend. We spent all our weekends and short holidays at our grandmothers farm: often the long summer holidays too. There we learnt to work hard and play hard and acquired the lore and customs of the country. We learnt to handle and tend animals, collect eggs, and help with all the little jobs that need doing on a farm. In due course I was taught to load a wagon, starting with hedgerow cuttings: awkward stuff to load, slippery and springy. We were carting them off to the stack yard one day to make stack bottoms for haysel or harvest, when I fell off, head first making a nice little round hole with my head in the soft earth. I wasn't hurt much. Nobody bothered. That was the way in the country. Somebody felt you to see if any bones were broken and if not, all right, get on with the work - much more important than a small boy's aches and pains.

The next event was rather more serious. It happened at harvest time and I was helping on the stack. Missing a sheave - a "shove in Norfolk - I stuck the fork into my foot. Luckily I had good thick boots on, but when the fork was pulled out the blood spurted up and I was carried down the ladder and into the house, not feeling too good. It was good being carried around in a bath chair, but I was back at work in the fields by the end of harvest. Old Bartaby carried me down the ladder: in his younger days he had worked on the Hall Farm, which belonged to my great uncle. But by the time I knew him he had "took religious": he would suddenly turn to you and say "Are you saved?" Most disconcerting.
My great Uncle was a man before his time and invented all sorts of farm machinery. Bartaby used to help him: sometimes he worked all night making parts for my Uncle 's inventions. Up to my boyhood, every large farm had its own forge and carpenter's shop. My Uncle had little railway lines laid down from the "turnip house" to the fat bullock boxes and yards, so that one man could push a whole truckload of feed to the stock in one go, instead of carrying it a skep at a time. So automation is not so new. He invented a method of drying out a hay or corn stack by blowing hot air into it, a practice that was hailed as a new idea in the Second World War. He also devised a means of ploughing s field by means of cables worked by a portable engine that was set in the corner of a field. The "portable" was a single piston engine, mounted on ordinary wooden waggon wheels and drawn by a couple of farm horses. It was still working within my recollection.

My grandmother's farm was not a large one and we usually got to know the men who worked on it quite well. The first I remember was Wake, who grew a large black beard and a numerous brood of children: how they all packed into their tiny cottage is a mystery. In fact I think that was why Wake left. By modern standards those cottages were a disgrace, tacked on to the stables and two of them having no back door. Each cottage had one fairly large room downstairs and two small rooms above, one leading into the other: no scullery, no pantry, no drains, but a good large shed attached. The shed was a must in the country.

Burton came next: a great character who had migrated to London in his youth, to work in a dairy. Cows were kept in the middle of the city in those days, hand fed all the time, never seeing a meadow or a stream: they were mere machines for producing milk, and not very good milk at that. It was distributed in open cans and bailed out with a measure on dusty doorsteps. No wonder the infant mortality rate was high. And I'm afraid our inilk in Colkirk was little better, carried in open wooden buckets from the cowshed and poured into open pans. The milk that was unsold remained in the pans for the cream to rise: next day it would be skimmed off and poured into large crocks to ripen for butter. People came to buy their milk at the door, bringing their own jugs and cans, and it was bailed out to them with pint or half pint measures. No one bothered much about washing hands, which were constantly in contact with the milk in bailing it out. I have seen things in cowshed and dairy which would make a modern sanitary inspector's hair curl. Nobody thought a thing of it then.

I remember one day an old lady from the village came to the door for milk and she produced from her jug a gorgeous apple, which she gave me. We were free of all the apples of the garden, but that apple tasted better than any of them, or indeed than any apple I have tasted since: perhaps it was the kindness and love with which it was given. The old lady was the wife of the village carrier, a Crimea veteran with a peg leg, which was due not to the war but to a waggon accident He went into the market town every day shopping for people, and on his pony cart he had room for one passenger. He must have had a small army pension, for the amount he earned this way could not have brought him a living. Later I learnt it was the Rector who set him up in his little business. That was how things were done then. There was no National Insurance, no National Assistance, no old age pension - only the dreaded workhouse. So people helped each other. The better off felt it their duty to help those in distress. And I don't think the recipients felt that they were objects of charity: it was simply the expression of a relationship between the people of a remote parish: a "backward" one, even sixty five years ago. I have read that the same sort of feeling exists even today in certain slum areas of the large cities. But I cannot help feeling that we have lost something in these days of the welfare state. I remember another old man, long past work, who came to the door regularly for his pay. He used to be a mole catcher and although everybody knew he hadn't caught a mole for years, the polite fiction was kept up until the day of his death. Today he would be a Pest Officer, a Government Official, and would be marched off his fields on the appointed day to lose his identity in the ranks of the old age pensioners.

Old Burton was a true countryman, in spite of the London experience. He always wore a faded plaid scarf, a woollen one, knotted about his throat: I never saw him without it. Every autumn he killed a pig and salted it down in a barrel which stood at the corner of the kitchen. He lived on that all through the winter months and towards spring the smell in that kitchen was "enough to knock yer backards". His poor old wife could not eat it and would have fared badly but for the ministrations of my Aunt.

Mrs. Burton claimed to have second sight. She said she often saw people walking about with strange clothes on. And she prophesied that my brother also would see "things" because he was born in "chime hours". Certainly one night he claimed to have seen a man in our bedroom, dressed in strange clothes which from his description I should now recognize to have belonged to the eighteenth century. Mrs. Burton gave out that she was a witch, but a white one. This meant not only that she could see things, but she could cure warts and she understood the use of wild herbs. We were never afraid of her, in fact we were very fond of the old dear. But there was a black witch in the village: of her I shall tell later.

Before the Burtons came to us they acted as caretakers at the Hall, which was empty at the time, the land being farmed by an absent tenant. Burton kept the house aired and Mr. Burton acted as yardsman. My great uncle had departed this life, but he had left part of it behind him, as I will tell. My aunt used to visit Mrs. Burton at the Hall Farm with a basket of comforts, and occasionally she would take me with her. One entered the kitchen, I remember, through a large, stone-floored "back kitchen'. There would be a large wood fire burning in the open hearth and a worn old rug on the stone floor in front of it. Mrs. Burton once told us "While I'm asettin hare a great ol dorg come in and set hisself down by the fire. T doan't take no notice o him an he doen't take no notice o 'me. Presently he get up and go out again." My Aunt said she could remember a dog there in her childhood very like the ghostly one Mrs. Burton described.

Old Burton said another time that he often saw as he went out in the grey dawn the figure of a man dressed in a tail coat with brass buttons at the back, standing in the corner rubbing his hands. He could never understand what he was doing. Then my Aunt remembered that when my great uncle Thomas was alive a basin stood there and he would pull off his jackboots and wash his hands before going into the house. Neither of the Burtons were at all frightened. They seemed to look on these things as quite normal. and they came from a village on the other side of the county, so they knew nothing of our family history.

When a man left a farmer's employ in those days, it was the understood thing that he should be allowed to borrow horses and waggon to cart his family and furniture to his next employer. This is what in due course the Burtons did. Old Burton always said that he would come into some money. Nobody believed him, but we heard after he left that he actually had. But poor old Mrs. Burton had died before then.

About this time, when we were still at school in the local town, the whole school was taken on an outing to see the men come home from from the Boer war. They disentrained at the railway station and marched through the town, a brave sight in their khaki and slouch hats. Little did we think then that we should ourselves ride out of the town only a few years later as members of a troop of Yeomanry. At the end of two World Wars, we were demobilised singly and sneaked home, allmost as if it were a shameful thing to have served. After the last war in fact I was told, or it was inferred, more than once, that I was lucky to have been in the army away from the bombing. Having served at home on the east and south coasts, taken part in a landing, and survived a bombing and torpedoed ship, that did seem a bit thick. But these remarks were not made in our beloved Colkirk, which I left long before the last war, and what a change! I went into the Crown, Colkirk's only pub, which was full of shrieking women, and I found the old chaps I knew huddled in one corner. It used to be a quiet pub where a man could get a drink and a game of dominoes away from his family in the evening. No woman was ever seen there then. The land which I had known and cultivated was sold and largely covered by a rash of ugly little red brick bungalows, inhabited by foreigners who had been brought there by wartime industry and airfields. The old cricket meadow was desecrated by chicken runs. But I have jumped a few decades. This story was meant to describe an old-time village, inhabited by real live people, the salt of the earth. I have given you a glimpse of the corpse.