St George's News

LOOKING BACK ON EIGHTY YEARS

RUBY'S MEMOIRS, PART 11: THE HOME COMING

PART 1 - THE EARLY YEARS
PART 2 - THE GREAT WAR
PART 3 - THE TWENTIES
PART 4 - FROM GENERAL STRIKE TO WORLD WAR 2
PART 5 -MARRIED LIFE AND THE CLOUDS OF WAR
PART 6 - OUTBREAK OF WAR
PART 7 - THE HEIGHT OF WAR
PART 8 - 1942-44:AMERICA DECLARES WAR
PART 9: POST-WAR 1945-1950: RUNNING THE PUB
PART 10: THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
PART 12: THE SIXTIES
PART 13: FROM HILDENBOROUGH TO DENMEAD
PART 14: TRAVELLING THROUGH LIFE AND DEATH
PART 15: THE LAST 25 YEARS

Part 11: The Home Coming

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE JUNE 1997 ISSUE OF ST GEORGE'S NEWS

It was strange after so long now being able to live an ordinary life in this lovely old Market Town, as it was in 1952. I had no knowledge of Kent and found it a very colourful part of the country with its fruit farms, a river flowing through the middle of the town, a ruined Castle with its keep looking down on all it surveyed, and the great school, dating back to Queen Elizabeth Ist days, with its playing fields spreading far into the country on the northern side of the town bounded by the London road.

Here we bought a house of our own, it was built in what was a terrace in the early Victorian times, three stories high with a semi-basement and a walled garden which ran down to the school grounds. It needed a lot of work to be done on it, in the first place the roof leaked and had to be re-slated. This proved to be little trouble as there were many building firms getting back to life with all the rebuilding that was in progress at that time. Without much ado a couple of men soon arrived with ladders and were up on the roof throwing the old slates down in to a truck by the side of the house. I was amazed how they walked about the roof as though they were crossing a road, there was no such thing as scaffolding then. When I asked the builder if this wasn't a little dangerous, he said, "don't worry about them, they feel safer up there than on the ground."

The next job was on the kitchen where a new Rayburn had to be installed instead of the old kitchen range. This was a treasure as it heated the water and kept the flagstoned kitchen warm and was fed by solid fuel. It was a great start and so we were able to move in.

By now it was hop-picking time so we took a break from house repairing and joined the hop pickers. These families came from East London yearly and stayed on the same farm year in and year out about the beginning of September until the job was finished about three to four weeks. It was their annual holiday and whole families came and lived in huts on the farm specially built for them. One had to apply to the farmer if you were local and he supplied you with a "bin", a long canvas sack, open at the side and fixed to trestles at each end; into which the picked hops were put after being stripped off the vine. My sister-in-law had one to raise money for the church and the first year we helped her, but after that we had one of our own and got many friends to help over the weeks. It wasn't easy at first to be quick, but after a while one got quite used to the work but it did nothing for your hands which became stained green. It was also terribly badly paid but when some of the pickers remonstrated with the farmer he just said - well, it's your holiday isn't it, who else would pay you for that! End of complaints. We all liked it and treated it as part of our summer holiday. I think we must have had some wet days but I can only remember having to get up at 6 o'clock to get to the hop-gardens by seven when a whistle blew for you to start. You took a picnic lunch and a vacuum of coffee as it was jolly cold at first but when the sun filtered through the vines it was wonderful, and there was a great deal of fun doing it day after day. Most of the regulars from London were Cockneys and their humour was hilarious and their back slang, and rhyming sounded like a foreign language. Quite a few pubs wouldn't serve them in the evening and the ones that did only had them in the public bar. They were a bit high at times but really not much worse than the farm labourers were after muck spreading on the fields. I don't think people knew much about hygiene then, but they certainly knew how to enjoy themselves, and I am sure no-one ever suffered from stress.

I now had a new family, my Mother-in-law was charmingly "Victorian", she never did any work but was waited on hand and foot by her two daughters, both widows. One of them spent a lot of time at the Parish Church, an old Norman building which seated about 500 people, though it was never fully occupied excepting on special occasions, when it could be very impressive. I usually attended evensong with her, and often for the ½ hour before the service the curates of whom there were always two, sometimes three, would have a practice of hymn singing for the congregation. It attracted a lot of people and made evensong quite well attended. She also had adopted my husband's daughter by his first wife when she was a baby but of course now was grown up and worked in London at the Bank of England, she was a lively spirit just like her father and I have always enjoyed her company and still do.

We gradually got the house under control with a lot of hard work and ran it as a Guest House and as it was the only one in Tonbridge we were always pretty busy with "B and B and Evening Meal" but I eventually made a separate flat of the top floor. This was a great help as it saved me running up and down three flights of stairs too many times a day.

Ted now had a job selling mechanical implements to farmers who were falling over themselves to get mechanised and as he had known most of them all his life it was not very arduous and he enjoyed meeting many old friends again, so our social life took off. Also there were many happy visits to Hertfordshire as Tony was boarding at his prep school. I enjoyed these a lot but could see our old village now being swallowed up by industry and housing so the visits became a little less nostalgic and I looked forward to the time when he would become a pupil at Tonbridge.

So the 1950's went by very quickly. The world was still troubled by wars, The Korean War was felt in England as our services were engaged in it, Governments changed but I'm afraid I was too busy to worry about politics. Television had arrived and it was easy to be able to watch it on television, if you had one, gone were the days of listening to John Snagge broadcasting during the war. The great excitement in the mid-fifties was the Coronation of PrincessElizabeth which was the first great effort to present this to everyone on television. As many others, we did not have a set of our own but spent the whole day with a local farmer, his family and many friends and most of the time when we were not eating or drinking, "watching the box". I think people who were old enough at the time, will remember the excitement of the day, seeing the whole wonderful tapestry of Royalty as they were in those days, world famous people, the beautiful and the wealthy all together with the streets of London packed with people who had waited all night to cheer the cavalcade from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey and waited more hours for the return after the long ceremony, it was the greatest show and I don't think there were many who missed watching it. This was the beginning of television being a "must", and there were many other occasions which now are taken for granted but in those days we were not quite so sophisticated and enjoyed this media as there was not too much of it, and what there was, was very good.

I rejoined the Red Cross and found things very changed after the time before the war when I had first joined, and learned to drive an old 1914 Ambulance which was a noisy monster. The training was just the same again, one meeting a week when we learned the art of nursing, the intricate art of bandaging, First Aid with its many ways of treating the sick or injured which to my mind always finished up with the same, "do little or nothing". However one learnt quite a lot about useful everyday things such as "don't prick a blister after a burn", don't give anything to anybody before an operation; the three quarter prone position for vomiting when lying down, this was very useful as one of our many duties in hospital was to sit with a patient after an operation until they "came round". I got over the training very quickly as I had done it once before, and then I took an instructors course to become a Cadet Officer. I found this most interesting teaching children who were Cadets a certain amount of biology which helped them to understand the human body and it was amazing how many took up nursing as a career. Once when I was visiting my husband in Guy's hospital in London a nurse came up and said "you don't remember me do you?" and I must admit I didn't. She, of course had grown up and was now a staff nurse, another one I met while out in Kenya in a hospital where I went to have a jab for yellow fever. They both said after joining the cadets they had decided to become nurses. These encounters I found very satisfying.

So what with one thing and another, tennis, golf, swimming, visits to London for the theatre or meeting old friends and walking the dog which we had now acquired, and supporting the cricket team life passed so quickly I found the fifties very happy years, we managed quite a few winter holidays in Switzerland, and some lovely summer holidays spent on the beach in Sussex, in something not much more than a beach hut with a converted tram, where we went every summer for a couple of weeks. Here it was back to nature, for there was no water or electricity laid on, but calor gas was there and the sea to wash in. Many times we were left there without a car so that meant long walks to collect the shopping from the nearest stores, and I forgot to mention the loo was down the garden!

Believe it or not I have just heard that the old friend of mine way back in the thirties who owned it has just died and the whole lot has to be disposed of, I hope to a museum, as the farmer requires his land back, and I should think so too after 60 odd years! Sadly yours, Ruby.

this series of Ruby's "Memoirs" to be continued.

written by Ruby Bullock

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