Hornton History Group’s next talk is all about RAF Brize Norton, and given by a former serviceman who spent almost 30 years in the RAF.
It takes place on 9th February at 7.30pm in the pavilion and you don’t have to be a History Group member to go – everyone is invited.
‘A Vanished Past’ by Clare Marchant is a series of volumes describing various aspects of village life in Horley throughout the 20th century. Book 5 is now available – see attached flyer for more details.
‘A Vanished Past’ by Clare Marchant currently comprises 4 volumes describing various aspects of village life in Horley throughout the 20th century. For more information about these books and how to purchase them, see below.
Two new volumes (3 and 4) of ‘A Vanished Past’ Horley Oxfordshire by Clare Marchant are a now available. You will be able to view and purchase them at our fabulous Christmas Market this Saturday (December 3rd).
Volume 3
Work and Our Surroundings : by Clare Marchant
Price £17.50 Shaftesbury House Publishing 2016. ISBN 978-0-9932788-2-2
Volume 4
Horley School and People at Leisure
Price £17.50
Price £17.50 Shaftesbury House Publishing 2016. ISBN 978-0-9932788-3-9
Watch this space to see extracts from these books and enjoy a further dip into Horley’s past after Christmas….
If you are unable to attend the fair and are interested in purchasing the books please contact Mike Patching on 01295 730039 or mike.patching@btinterest.com or
Contact Clare Marchant, 15 Circus Street, Greenwich, London SE10 8SN or marchantclare@hotmail. Cheques payable to Clare Marchant.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
The pattern of their life was indelibly laid down even before they were married, partly through Jim spending all his working life in the same job, and also because lack of money set strict limits on the choices available to them, in common with many other people. War or peace made little real difference.
Their day began very early and by 5.30am Lucy had made the morning’s first pot of tea. Jim collected the buckets of water from the tap before he went off to work, that is unless the weather was so cold that the tap had frozen. Fortunately that only happened in the worst weather, and if a hard frost was predicted the previous evening, then it was provident to fill the buckets then rather than wait for the morning, otherwise there would be no water for the early morning tea, no bottle of cold tea for lunch, and no water in which to wash faces or hands or do the breakfast dishes, let alone the week’s washing if it happened to be a Monday.
Jim went off on his bike down the village and stopped half way up the steep hill that rose up on the far side of the brook, where the Ironstone railway bridge crossed the road. As he and the other Ironstone workers arrived they hauled their bicycles up the steep embankment and onto the railway line to wait for the small tank-engine that pulled the van for them and their cycles the short distance to their work place.
Once Jim was away, Lucy’s day was her own until he returned at 3.30 for his dinner. The first thing she did was to cope with the daily chores. She started with the breakfast dishes and got ready for the Co-op milkman’s call. This sit-down-with-a-cup-of-tea visitation not only brought in the milk, but the news of the condition of the roads and the weather, and most important, details of what had happened locally in other villages overnight. It gave Lucy a head start in the exchange of news and in the circles of those who like her had an insatiable curiosity about local goings-on. Armed with her news she would barter with it later in the day.
Lucy was lucky to have one of the four village taps outside her front garden gate. Others who lived further away had to carry their pails as far as 75 yards – and this alone must have provided motive for not washing clothes more often than necessary.
Since Lucy had no sink she washed up in an enamel bowl. The water had to be boiled in a kettle and then some soda added to make the hard Oxfordshire water a little softer, and to dissolve the fat more easily. She never rinsed the dishes, for that needed extra water, but simply dried them and put them away with an invisible veneer of chemical still on them. The water was kept for a while in case there should be a further use for it.
Next the fire had to be cleared out, the ashes riddled, and the fireplace laid with screwed up newspaper, sticks and finally coal ready for lighting later in the day. This job had to be done before the rest of the house was cleaned because it raised so much dust. Once completed the rest of the cleaning could proceed in earnest.
The floors in Lucy’s house were ancient very uneven flagged stone, but she covered all her floors with shiny linoleum that was easy to clean with a mop. She had rag rugs, made from bits and pieces of hard-wearing fabric (men’s trousers and overcoats) sewn or woven together by women in winter evenings, which were cheerful in front of the fire, and they were simply shaken out now and then in the garden to get rid of the accumulated dust. In the early 1950s Lucy took a great step forward by putting down a fitted carpet in her living room. It was not new, but bought second hand from Mrs Cherry, farmer’s wife in Hornton who was moving house. Jim laid it and it ‘fitted where it touched’, but it was considered very grand by all of us. Lucy had no vacuum cleaner or Ewbank so the carpet was brushed with a hard broom to clean it. The carpet added a feeling of warmth, even if it did go up and down over the lino covering the irregular undulating flagstones.
Lucy did not have a great deal of furniture, so there was not much polishing to do. She had an ornate ebonised glass-fronted sideboard in her sitting room given her by the Davieses at the Firs over the road, a Pembroke table, a pretty set of balloon-back chairs, and a wonderfully painted grandfather clock. These all had to be polished with wax polish, since there were then no spray cleaners. By way of decoration she had a few watercolours, a stuffed squirrel in a glass case, and a large print of the Stag at Bay. A duster flipped across these served well enough, and the only other items in the room were the two armchairs that she and Jim sat in by the fire every evening. She exchanged these from time to time, swapping one for a chair thrown out by one of the people she worked for, or buying one that somebody was selling for half a crown. Lucy re-covered them when they got worn or when she was able to buy a cheap remnant from one of the market stalls in Banbury. Her upholstery skills were rough and ready, and the material was pulled across the most important parts of the chair and sewn in place, leaving some of the chair showing the old material. These parts were covered up by turning that side of the chair to the wall or covering the gap with a cushion, but the chair looked clean and new.
There was little to do upstairs. Before she had a sprung mattress the feather one needed shaking up to get rid of the lumps, but apart from that she had only to empty the chamber pot. Chamber pots, (sometimes called Jerries) along with wasps and a former boyfriend, were things that Lucy could not abide. She was happy enough to have a pot under the bed to use in the depths of night rather than go downstairs and out into the garden to use the earth closet, but she did not like to empty them.
This routine was generally how Lucy coped with her housework, but the pattern varied according to the weather, the time of year, the day of the week or other activities which took over. Like most people, Lucy did her washing on Mondays. That is unless it was pouring with rain. Then it had to wait until the weather turned, but if it was fine the process began by placing a big pan of soapy water and clothes on the paraffin stove to boil. Since it was dark in the kitchen Lucy did her washing in the garden, in a large bowl on a stool. Because of the effort of boiling all the water, one lot was used for many clothes and rinsing was kept to a minimum. A drubbing board was used and the action of rubbing the clothes across its ridges made Lucy’s knuckles red and the clothes clean. When the clothes had been pummelled about for a while, they were rinsed and wrung out, first by hand, twisting them hard to get most of the water out, and then put through the rollers of a mangle to extract the last drops. Finally the sheets and clothes were hung out to dry, held in place by pegs sold by the gypsies – made of split thin branches of wood from which the bark had been cleaned. It was at this stage that disaster could happen as the damp sheets trailed on the earth, or shirts got blown off the line by a gust of wind. The clothes had to be watched for fear of rain. As soon as the skies looked dark there were worried trips to the window or back door and as soon as it started spotting with rain, the washing, only part dried, would be hastily unpegged and bundled indoors with much tut-tutting and wondering ‘When am I going to do it now? Dratted weather’. If she got all her washing done by the end of Monday, she was doing well, and the ironing was generally left until Tuesday.
Washing and ironing for Lucy were not nearly as difficult as it was for women who had children, though Lucy found it trying enough, particularly the ironing which was fiddly. Heating the heavy flat irons on the grate needed judgment: hot enough to vanquish the wrinkles, not so hot that they would burn the clothes. Then speed and skill were needed to do as much of the ironing as possible before the iron lost all its heat and became useless.
By the middle of the week, with a good deal of housework behind her, Lucy took time out. She visited her family once a week cycling miles through country lanes to Hook Norton until she ‘took ill’ in middle age and used the bus instead.
Once a week she also visited her mother-in-law in Hornton – as long as they were ‘talking’. Old Mrs Eadon was sharp-tongued and intolerant of Lucy’s foibles, and did not soften with age.
Market day in Banbury was on Thursdays and Lucy always caught the Stratford Blue bus at 8.45 to go and do her shopping. A trip into Banbury needed some organising for there were few buses, and any activities in Banbury had to be fitted into these times. The buses moved very slowly, but Lucy enjoyed the chat and the news from the other villages when she was on the bus, so it was worth the effort.
Since Lucy’s day started so early she had usually completed a great deal by lunchtime. At about half past one, when she had washed up the lunch dishes and had a cup of tea in whatever house she happened to be, Lucy’s thoughts turned towards Jim’s dinner that he had at half past three after work. Everyday Lucy prepared a generous meal for Jim: tender roasts or tasty casseroles finished off with a pudding, and each day he ate but a miniscule portion. Lucy on the other hand did herself proud whether or not she had already had a midday meal. She did not hold with people ‘going without’ – and neither did anybody else at that time. The shortages of money in the depression, and the rationing of food during the war had raised people’s anxieties about not having enough to eat. No one worried about eating too much and when supplies became available everybody was delighted. Lucy and many of her generation put on large quantities of weight. It became a norm, particularly for women in their forties and fifties, and was called the Middle Aged Spread. Nobody talked of its being unhealthy or unfashionable, it was just how things were and the women affected seemed very comfortable with their size.
The Evenings
Once Lucy had washed up after their main meal about 4pm her activities depended on the time of year. In summer Jim’s evenings were spent in the garden and Lucy might join him and potter about with the flowers. Jim was an excellent gardener and had long, neat rows of perfect vegetables. He grew sweet peas and chrysanthemums for Lucy to cut for the house during the summer and into the autumn. He also grew in addition to the normal green and root vegetables and legumes, shallots, Jerusalem artichokes and just a few black potatoes. If she felt like a stroll Lucy might visit the Astells to look at something Mary wanted to show her, or go and put some flowers on a grave in the churchyard, stopping on the way back to watch an evening cricket match, or even in later years, very daringly, have a drink in the pub if she had a friend with her.
Lucy did not normally go out in the winter evenings, not liking the dark. She enjoyed the cosiness of the winter evenings at home, particularly the long sit-down at the end of the day in the flickering dim light of the paraffin oil lamp. In the great open fireplace Lucy had hung up her collection of brass plates, horse brasses and kettles that caught the light of the fire and shone in bright contrast against the black beams where they were nailed. In front of the fire was a big bold steel fender with fire irons. But however cosy and traditional it looked, the fire gave out heat only immediately around it, so that unless you sat in Lucy’s or Jim’s chair on either side of the fire, you caught the draughts that swept down the chimney and eddied round the house. So, with the curtains drawn, and sitting by the fireside, she would write letters to the innumerable friends that she liked to keep in contact with, or read the women’s magazines which had been passed on to her. Once the BBC began to broadcast The Archers, she and Jim listened to it every day, and to the news that followed it on the wireless. Jim read his thrillers and histories, stuck stamps in his album and looked through the newspapers. If visitors called they stopped, and the caller was presented with a plate of cakes to eat, accompanied by a glass of South African sherry, or some homemade wine. Sometimes Jim enjoyed a game of cribbage or draughts in the winter evenings, but their days ended early and by nine o’clock Lucy was preparing Jim’s supper of pickled walnuts or onions to eat before he went to bed.
By nine thirty Lucy and Jim were in bed for the night. With the advent of electric lighting in about 1955, the process of retiring was made much easier than it had been with the candle which made shadows leap around the old bumpy walls, sloping ceilings and irregular beams.
Once in bed they slept, and there were not many nights when either one of them was still awake to hear the Church clock strike ten.
Lucy’s good works in the village
Although the pattern of her life was governed by housework, it was not Lucy’s first love. However often she repeated, ‘Oi loikes ter see it toidy’ she was relieved when it was done and was not above brushing the odd bit of dust under the carpet saying, ‘No-one wont notice that little bit’. As soon as things in the house were straight she would go out and ‘see to things’ in the village, which was her real passion in life. The lure of conversation and the promise of swapping news hastened her step.
Lucy had a heart that overflowed with kindness. If anyone needed a hand or wanted looking after she would be there offering help and food. She single-handedly looked after the needs of the oldest inhabitants of the village, doing their washing and shopping, undertaking their spring cleaning, collecting their pensions, and even decorating their rooms. Lucy also ordered their bottles of sherry or brandy from the wine merchants, for once they had a choice of the much lauded home-made wine or South African sherry they all opted for the latter whatever they said about the excellence of the former. The older women, Mrs Walden, pronounced Mrs Woaldin and Mrs Chapman were dependent upon Lucy’s unstinting generosity, time, and effort, and both were remarkably ungrateful for her kindness, chiding her for trivialities and calling her a ‘giddy thing’. They instinctively understood the extent of Lucy’s compliant nature. They promised to remember her in their wills but nothing ever came her way.
More rewarding was the work Lucy did with families who were much more appreciative of her willingness to save them from crises. Any slight qualms about her inquisitive questions were more than counterbalanced by her energetic goodwill. Before she worked with our family she had been cook at The Manor for the Stocktons, seen the Astells through their difficult and motherless years, helped the Blythes of The Firs in the 1940s when the four children were small, as well as lending a helping hand with the Rumps and even acting as midwife for an early birth. Lucy always became part of the families she was helping: she bustled around the house cleaning, scrubbing, dusting, hoovering, beating the mats ferociously on the washing line with the handle of the broom, washing and ironing. She did whatever there was to be done with never a second thought. She was unlike any other person in the village. It was a community which placed a very high value on privacy and was also very class bound, yet she was intimately involved in half a dozen homes from quite different classes and whether they were church or chapel made no difference. For some work she received wages, but often she did not. Lucy could never resist the urge to respond to a crisis or a cry for help, and she spent much of her time in this way.
Saturdays and Sundays
Saturdays and Sundays had routines all of their own. Saturdays meant shopping in Banbury in the morning and catching the half past twelve Sumner’s bus home. Afternoons were the time for village activities which anyone could join in such as fetes, jumble sales, decorating the church, doing the teas for cricket matches, and weddings. For Jim it meant the gardening, and doing the odd jobs that had accumulated during the week. Saturdays was the day when the earth closets were emptied. But this was only part of Jim’s Saturday activity, and he was usually found rummaging around his garden, straightening things up, or tying in the sweet peas that grew in profusion in his garden and gave off one of the most fragrant smells of summer. All activity ceased at 4.30. and by a quarter to five Jim was sitting alert in his armchair with a pencil poised to check the pools as the football and racing results were read over the wireless. Jim’s Saturdays were his own, but the same could not be said for Sundays.
On Sunday mornings Jim cycled to Hornton where he saw his parents for an hour or two and helped do the odd jobs that his mother had lined up for him during the week. After cycling back to Horley, he went for a drink in the pub with Harry Walden, who came to call for him, before coming home for his roast Sunday lunch. In the afternoon he read the papers while Lucy had a sleep, and after tea it was time for Lucy to get ready for Church.
There were two places of worship in Horley: the beautiful early English Anglican church at the top of the village on the hill, St Etheldreda’s, and the small, Victorian, Hornton stone Methodist chapel that was attached to the Eadon’s house.
Congregations in both church and chapel dwindled in the fifties, but there remained a core of loyal attenders. At St Etheldreda’s Charley Varney the verger, Lucy and her friend Mrs Tom Allington, the two churchwardens, the school teacher’s family, The Vicarage family and The Manor family. The religious convictions of the believers varied. At one extreme was Miss Gwladys Ball, a bluestocking aesthete, gaunt and gothic in her worship. At the other extreme was Lucy whose knees prevented her kneeling when praying and whose spiritual commitments did not prevent her sucking Mintoes during the sermons, unwrapping them noisily and glancing uneasily over her shoulder to see if anyone was looking.
From time to time Lucy’s thoughts strayed wistfully towards the Methodist chapel next to her house. Her Sunday evenings would have been easier if she worshipped there. They sat down a lot and she would not have to climb the hill up the village. It was cosy in the chapel, unlike in the church which was cold and draughty despite the huge fire roaring in the massive and antique stove at the back of the church. They sang rousing hymns in chapel and as it was a small building it made a cheerful noise.
Going to church also meant having a good look at who was there, and if they were not, the opportunity to speculate where they were and why. All in all the discomforts were worth tolerating; and there was the added bonus of feeling righteous as she walked down the hill with Charley Varney and Mrs Tom Allington, sucking Mintoes together.
Lucy was a very regular attendee at church. Her only absence was one Sunday when Donald Peers, heart-throb of the early fifties was on the wireless. She stayed at home and was thrilled to hear him sing ‘There’s a little white duck swimming on the water’, but she felt the guilt and did not do it again.
After church on Sunday there was only time to sit down for a while to tell a disinterested Jim who was at church and what they were wearing. Then it was time once again to wind up the machinery for the next week.’
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Mrs Lucy Eadon’s role in the life of The Vicarage family was important in the 1960s, particularly to Honor who was young and said: ‘she kept our body and soul together – she had all the essential qualities for those times: she was cheerful, energetic, laughing and she counterbalanced the underlying sadness in our family.’
Frederick Jim Eadon 1903-1972 – Elsie Ethel Eadon 1907 -1975
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
Lucy’s house, by village standards, had much more spacious rooms than most cottages. It was older than many of the buildings and had stone mullions over the windows. At some time a piece of the garden had been sold, and a Methodist chapel built adjacent to the house, so that on Sundays the singing of hymns could be heard through the walls of the house. The remaining garden curled round the chapel, so that much of the garden was more private than it would otherwise have been. The house was thatched and had thick walls and small windows. The entire house consisted of four equal sized rooms, two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. There were no fitments of any kind other than a grate in the living room. The front and back doors both opened directly into the living room as did the stairs, which was not much more than a short wide ladder hidden behind a third door. The fourth door opened into the flagged kitchen which had four distempered but unplastered bumpy stone walls, and two windows, one wide one looking out onto the front garden and the village street, and the other a tiny one-paned window set into the thick wall and overlooking the kitchen garden, shedding a beam of daylight into an otherwise totally dark corner.
There was no running water, so there were no taps, no sink, and no bathroom. Since there was no drainage there was no flushing lavatory either inside or outside the house, and neither was there anywhere in the kitchen to empty away any dirty water. It was all thrown onto the garden. But since the water all had to be carried in buckets from the village tap out in the main village street, people were very economical in their use of water, and there was not much to throw away. There was no electricity either and consequently Lucy had no electric kettle, cooker, vacuum cleaner, or lighting. Refrigerators were in any case uncommon and freezers were unknown to us in Horley at this time in the fifties and sixties.
Nonetheless the kitchen had its own delights for us and was a most comforting place to be. Since people’s basic needs have always been the same, housewives then had their ways of making life comfortable even though they managed it differently. The appliances that Lucy had which were crucial were those used for cooking. She had three means of cooking. In Victorian times her living room had acquired an open, cast-iron grate with brass fittings that had been set into the wide chimney that still rose straight to the sky, so there was always a danger in wet or windy weather that the fire would be put out. Part of the grate was an oven for slow cooking which served nicely for casseroles with thick gravy, and meats that needed gentle roasting to make them succulent. Lucy had clever ways with game and meat, and was not afraid of larding joints liberally. Her greatest skill lay in traditional fare: pies, meat puddings, roasts and stews, and she understood how to use her ovens and make even the humblest food taste delicious.
Her other oven was a paraffin cooker which looked like a tin box with a door, perched precariously on a paraffin burner. This cooked roasts and stews faster than the grate, and was always used for tarts and cakes. Lucy also had a separate burner for the kettle or for cooking vegetables. Cooking a meal meant an intricate series of moves and cooking vegetables in sequence – but Lucy had long learnt this pattern of moves and accomplished it with deftness and speed.
The storage of food was less easy. Like everyone else, instead of a fridge Lucy made do with a meat-safe, which was a small wall-cupboard with perforated doors to allow air to circulate around the food stored in it. It helped keep the food fresh, particularly in summer, and kept out the flies and mice. Even so it meant a twice-weekly visit to the butchers in Banbury if one was to eat meat or fish daily. Many of the vegetables were taken directly from the garden in season, so their storage presented no problem, although Lucy had a small wooden barrel in the corner of her kitchen in which she stored potatoes during the winter months. Onions were hung up from the beams in the shed outside the back door, alongside the garden tools and washday equipment. Other vegetables needed storing inside the house or they would have been eaten by the rats, but even in the kitchen care had to be taken to keep food away from the ever present if hidden armies of mice.
Along one of her bumpy distempered kitchen walls, Lucy had a large waist-high apple-green cupboard with a wide top. In the cupboards below she kept her stores of jam and pickled onions and walnuts. On top she made wines in large wide enamel and china bowls – usually the discarded basins of washing sets when the jugs had broken. Here the fruits fermented below the pungent yeast-laden pieces of toast that floated on their frothy surface, before they were bottled and stored for the winter months.
Against another wall stood a 1930s sideboard that she had been given (Lucy never bought any furniture save the spring mattress for her bed). This stored her cooking utensils, her hair sieves, mincer, wire-whisk as well as numerous pie, cake and meat tins. On the top of this sideboard stood five tins: three cake tins and two biscuit tins, each of which had something inside. At any one time Lucy had two cakes on the go: the remains of one, and a fresh one, which might be a fruit cake or a Victoria sponge flavoured either with coffee, or chocolate, or orange or occasionally one sprinkled with cherry and walnuts. In the third tin were jam tarts or little buns. Sometimes these overflowed into the two biscuit tins, which might contain custard creams and digestive biscuits, but they were not much favoured in view of what else was on offer. Lucy allowed us children to help ourselves to whatever we chose: ‘ʹAve what yer want’, ‘Finish that hoff for me Hhonor’, and ʹAve another one. Goo on’, were her instructions. Since Jim ate so very little, all this baking was solely for Lucy and her visitors to eat, and not surprisingly her generosity and open hospitality meant that she had many callers, who, in exchange for food and her friendship gave Lucy what she prized most of all – the news.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
The first months of the war passed largely unnoticed in Horley. It was not until the high summer of 1940 that the reality of war became apparent. Jim’s work on the opencast iron mining was a reserved occupation, so he did not have to enlist in the army, but the threat of invasion in the summer of 1940 alarmed the nation and affected everyone. A Committee was set up in Horley, as in every other village, to draw up strategies for coping with the imminent danger, and it focused attention on the frightening possibilities of invasion. Jim and Lucy both did First Aid courses, and both passed their tests. Lucy was inordinately proud and even years later told everybody ‘I got me cers-tificate’.
So there were compensations and excitements in the war effort for Lucy but Jim was a nervous jumpy person, and being at war did not suit him at all, but along with all the other men in the village who were in protected occupations, not medically fit, or past the age of recruitment, he joined the Home Guard. This was probably the most demanding and traumatic activity in which he ever participated.
At the beginning of the war when a German invasion seemed imminent, the Home Guard organised night patrols around the village, and men who would have to be at work early next morning forsook their beds to wander in the Oxfordshire fields in search of the invading enemy. Jim did his shift with Charley Varney who was as pragmatic about this intrusion into his sleeping hours as about everything else, and determined to put his duty time to good use. One night he took Jim rabbiting, but Jim cared even less for rabbiting than for patrolling, and as soon as Charley had bagged his game and stowed it safely inside his jacket, Jim was anxious to be back in the village where he thought he would be safe from the night and the Germans. Jim did not feel much happier in the village than in the fields, for the dark and quiet of the early hours gave it a new and unfamiliar feel. Normally he and Lucy were in bed by half past nine.
On their way back Jim’s worst anxieties were confirmed. On Plot Hill a long low sound at regular intervals was carried to them on the night air from the direction of the village. Neither of them could make out what it was. Would they need to raise the alarm? They were still two hundred yards from houses. When they reached The Green and paused to listen, they identified the source was Dooky Jelfs’ cottage: Dooky’s snoring drifted out through the open window. Laughing with relief they could only have a sneaking admiration for anyone who could emit such stentorian cannon-like roars. They enjoyed the moment and started composing the tale they would tell. But the laughter was short lived. Something more immediate diverted Jim’s attention. There was a scream from Charlie. The rabbit, which had been stuffed up his jumper, at that moment involuntarily emptied the contents of its bladder down his front!
Charlie decided to throw in his hand for the night. Apart from his own discomfort, Jim was telling him in a thin, weary voice that he was ‘very near frit [ frightened] to death’. They bewailed their respective misfortunes all the way down the village, neither listening to the other, and parted at Jim’s house. Charlie walked on to his home Marine Cottage about forty yards further down the village, and Jim could hear him talking about the alarms of the night and the evils of rabbits until he reached his front door and closed it behind him, shutting out the traumas of the night.
This taste of the Home Guard was enough to convince Jim that it was not for him, and henceforth he went to enormous lengths to find a means of disentangling himself from it all. It was not an easy matter to get out of the Home Guard during the wartime – you could not just drop out because you did not like it. There was pressure to stay in – everyone resented it to some extent, but of course patriotism won out.
After the problems of the Home Guard all other difficulties relating to the war faded into insignificance. On the scale of things, the return of Mrs Herbert from London to Horley to reclaim the cottage where Lucy and Jim were caretaking, was more of an inconvenience. The Germans in the autumn of 1940 seemed to have abandoned the idea of invasion in favour of bombing the large cities. London was subjected to intense night bombing raids and the days were spent extinguishing the fires and removing the injured and dead from the rubble before the raids began again. An Oxfordshire village must have seemed a haven of safety.
After initial consternation Jim and Lucy found no real difficulty in finding a new home. There was plenty of accommodation in the village and the house that stood next to the Methodist Chapel stood vacant and was ready for letting. The Astells helped the Eadons move their heavy furniture by providing a cart. It was at Chapel House that Lucy and Jim spent the rest of their long and happily married years, and where we as children grew to know them after the war.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
The Square in Horley was really a triangle. It was on a flat piece of land, about halfway up the long hill on which the village had been built. South of The Square a street of cottages and houses sloped down to the Sor Brook, and above, the Big Lane climbed towards Hornton. Both roads left from different corners of the triangle and from the third, the Banbury Lane went off in the direction of Hanwell.
In the 1950s The Square housed a pub, a shop, and the Post Office. The phone box, which was erected after the war, was next to the letterbox, and the bus stop was on the north side of The Square. Where the main street led south was a village tap from which people who lived in The Square collected their water. There was a clattering of pails and shouting at intervals throughout the day as various families came to fill up, exchange the news and vent their feelings on the buckets that tipped and slopped.
It was as caretakers of Mrs Herbert’s thatched house on the Big Lane corner of The Square that Lucy and Jim made their first home. Mrs Herbert was living in London. They had rooms at the front and the parlour window gave Lucy a dress circle view of all that was going on in the village. Any traffic that was passing between Banbury and Hornton had to turn a complete right angle round the house so it gave her an insight as to what was going on in Hornton as well. But there was little traffic then: once a day a bus left for Banbury, and once a day it returned, but if anyone in the village was going anywhere they generally passed through The Square to get there, and Lucy’s keen eye missed nothing of the comings and goings of the Horley community.
Lucy and the Astells
The Astell family had suffered a grim loss. Mrs Astell had been killed by a lorry in a cycling accident on Warmington Hill. She left a husband and four children: Andrew, Peter, Mary and Janet. Janet was only six, so when Lucy stepped into the breach she had to provide a good deal of mothering as well as managing the house and preparing the food. She had much greater autonomy than at The Manor, and she entered into their family life with gusto and great good humour.
The Astells lived as tenant farmers at Bramshill Park Farm. The farm ran over a steep bank and along the fertile valley made by the Sor Brook called Ragnalls Bottom. We believed the village legend had it that the farm, before the reformation, had been a small outpost, or grange farm, of the Abbey at Wroxton, a neighbouring village. The golden walls of the farm and the lichen-covered mossy roof gave it a feeling of antiquity. It stood impressively beyond a small fenced area of grass called The Green Court where the geese were kept. On a bank above it the gardens spread – a gentle mass of flowering shrubs and beds that blended with and softened the outlines of the house.
To reach the Astells was only a short walk from The Square where Lucy lived, up the hilly Little Lane that ran past the farm. Each day Lucy’s journey followed the same pattern. She locked the door and hid the key before shouting a few words of greeting to anyone who happened to be about: ‘I say, it’s cold hain’t it? It’s still a-freezing. Watch them hicicles don’t fall off that thatch and ʹit you on the ʹead.’ she would shout cheerfully, and laugh about the icicles.
A muddy track led to the farmyard where the mullioned windows of the cowsheds looked across it. In a ditch on the left a wooden farm wagon lay abandoned. Hot and laughing she would arrive at the farm’s back door.
by Honor (Morgan) Berry
Lucy’s life began to take on a new shape when she came to Horley and she knew an independence that had never been hers before. As cook at The Manor her role was clear, and when her work was done, her time was her own.
The Stockton’s who owned Horley Manor were a family of local solicitors. They had two children – Miss Marjory and Master John as Lucy always called them. They entertained a good deal in a modest way and Lucy’s job was to cook the three meals a day that they and the household staff required. She also prepared afternoon tea, and made a quantity of soft, easily digestible food for the aged and infirm of the village that she and the maid distributed twice a week. Since in The Manor household master and servants ate the same menu and drank the same wine life was straightforward for Lucy. The fare was rich and tasty with meat three times a day and a good deal of pastry, gravy, butter, eggs and cream. The cakes tended to be substantial and the vegetables well cooked and traditional. Fish was not much in evidence and neither were raw vegetables, skimmed milk, and the muesli that we value so highly today. Pastas, pizzas, burgers and Chinese food were unknown, and the only foreign cuisine that occasionally appeared was what was called a curry. It was in fact no more than a beef stew with a teaspoon of prepared curry powder added. But curry with its strange flavours and hot spices were not entirely unknown. One or two men in Horley had been to India and tasted the food for real when they had done their soldiering as young men. Charlie Varney was one of them, but I do not recall his praising the food.
Lucy’s days as cook may have been some of the happiest in her life. Lucy loved to feed people and there was constant activity, companionship and good humour. She took pride in the Stockton’s successes and took a nosey interest in their goings-on, so her work was always satisfying, and if it was possible, her spare time was even better.
Lucy walked out with a number of young men at this time. One boyfriend, much in favour, fell from grace because some days after he had taken her out to tea, he tapped at The Manor kitchen window and asked her for the money for it. She counted it out from her purse and then hurled it at him. They never exchanged a word again though they both spent the rest of their lives in Horley.
Lucy’s favourite pastimes were whist drives in the winter, and in the summer gentle walks across the fields to a pub, a little tennis, and best of all, dancing in the gloaming on long warm evenings. It was while she was at The Manor that she met Jim Eadon. He and his friend Bob Gilkes played tennis with Lucy and her friend Violet, the maid at The Manor.
Jim came from Hornton. His ‘Dad’, a fine looking man with a waxed moustache and gentle ways had once been a soldier and had fought in the Boer War. He still had his red jacket to prove it. Because of his dad’s soldiering, Jim had been born in Wellington Barracks, Chelsea, but the family had returned to Hornton where his parents kept The Red Lion pub [or The Dunn Cow?] for some time. Jim worked on the North Oxfordshire opencast ironstone mining works. He worked with his father, and they were known as ‘Big Jim’ and ‘Little Jim’ – the latter taking after his tiny sharp-witted mother. That he never completely broke away from her dominance is not surprising, for she was a tiny dragon of a woman that could have dominated an army.
Jim was every bit as quick-witted as his mother, but he had shyer and softer ways and was happier with Lucy. He found comfort in her stock phrases of ‘make yourself comfy’, ‘that little bit don’t matter’, ‘ʹave another’, ‘noice, hain’t it?’, and, as evening drew on ‘we’ll be ʹaving a drop [a drink] hin a minute’.
After a respectable period of courtship and engagement Lucy and Jim got married in December 1933. Jim was 30 and Lucy 26 – rather older than most people on marriage in those days. After the ceremony at South Newington where Lucy’s family lived they returned to Horley to begin their life together. With her new status in life came changes: Jim would not let her cook at The Manor. He liked her to be at home in the evenings. Lucy left The Manor and moved down the lane. She and Jim lived in The Square and she went to work on a daily basis with the Astells who lived at Bramshill Park Farm. Jim and Lucy got on remarkably well. Lucy’s only slight disappointment was Jim did not eat much, but that did not stop her cooking too much for him.
When she had been cook at The Manor, she and Violet the maid had taken food to the poor and ill of the parish, and Lucy had seen the foul conditions that once active people had to live in if they were not able to look after themselves, and had no running water or sanitation. If they were weak they had to use any container as a lavatory, and they had no strength to empty it – harsh unpleasant details that are rarely recorded or spoken about. She and other women in the village were sensitive about the problems which the lack of drains created, and went to great lengths to keep their lavatories clean, using large quantities of strong- smelling disinfectants such as Dettol and Jeyes Fluid to disguise any unwanted smells.
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