Mr Andrew Durrant, Garvestone, the 15th of April 2021. 

PART 1 

I was born in 1944 in Garvestone; in the house that still stands (although much altered), at the top of the little old foot path, where it joins the Top Road, the b1135. I didn’t then know of course that I was the last of fifteen generations of the Durrants of Garvestone. We have been in the village since the early 1500s. 

Being born in 1944, I don’t remember anything about the Second World War except what must have been the winter of 1947, I remember standing with my father across the road on what was then quite a high bank opposite our house and watching a gang of men shovelling snow off the road, working their way down the road and I was told, years later, that they were German prisoners of war, who were still in this country in 1947 apparently. That house beside the Top Road, we had electricity, I’ve never lived in a house without electricity, although at that time in the 40s there were parts of Garvestone that did not have electricity, but our water supply (there were no water mains in Garvestone then) the water came from a well, which was in the garden of the house next door. We had a vegetable garden behind the house and also at the bottom of the vegetable garden there was a little brick building which was what we called the lavatory. Inside there, were two wooden seats: one, a higher seat, was for adults, and there was a much lower one, which was for children. They had wooden lids, which you removed when you wanted to use the toilets and there was of course a bucket underneath. Perhaps (I’m not sure how often) perhaps once a fortnight, Mitford and Launditch District Council, as it then was, the predecessor of Breckland, sent a tanker round all of the villages and the men with the tanker, had buckets, and they came and emptied our lavatory buckets into the tanker. Our milk deliveries came from (I think his name was Mr Parry) who kept the shop in Whinburgh, and I can remember, as a small child, that Mr Parry’s van would draw up outside the house and my mother would go out with a jug and Mr Parry would ladle milk from a Churn into my mother’s jug, the was how the milk was delivered.  I can remember seeing steam rollers coming along the Top road and Traction engines (steam traction engines) pulling threshing machinery in the Autumn and Winter. There were also poor old men, who we called ‘tramps’ who were on their way from Gressenhall Workhouse to Wicklewood Workhouse and they would walk along that road through Garvestone, and they would sometimes come knocking on people’s doors to ask for food and or water. I don’t think my mother ever answered the door to them, we just kept indoors and kept quiet until they went away. And very occasionally also there were pedlars; men, I think they were probably Sikhs (they wore turbans) they were the only people we ever saw with dark skins and so we would think they were very, very strange indeed, and rather scary, and I don’t think my mother used to answer the door to them either. 

Every working day my father would get on his bike and join with other men on their bikes, going into Dereham to work. My father worked at the Trains Factory, they made trailers, based where Roy’s now is in Dereham at the other side of the road and he did that every day, as so many of the men did, whatever the weather, taking a packed lunch with them. We used to look forward to him coming home at night, my sister and I to see whether he had not eaten all of his sandwiches, cheese sandwiches, because they were something very special to eat. By about 1957 I think he had got thoroughly fed up with this bike ride – he was then well into his forties, and so he bought a car. He got a driving licence because before the second world war he’d had a motorbike, anyway he had this car (I think it was called a Ford Popular) and he used that until he retired in 1975, he used a car, not the same one of course, to go to work in Dereham. By that time, we’d moved from the house on the Top Road down to Cherry Tree Farm near the railway crossing, to live with Grandad, my father’s father. There were two shops in Garvestone at that time: on the junction of the Reymerston Road and the Top road there was what was I think late forties and most of the fifties probably, the Coats family kept that shop, and Mr Coats had petrol pumps installed to cope with the increasing number of cars in the village although by no means every family had a car of course. The other shop was of course Mrs Kiddles. Mrs Kiddle as well as having a general store, also had the village post office, and outside her shop was the telephone box. The telephone box at that time stood in front of the shop, not where it does now. It was inside the telephone box, which most people hardly ever used, but the machinery inside – you put in your three pennies and you dialled the number and waited for the person the other end to answer. Then you pressed the button labelled “A” and you could carry on your conversation. If the person the other end of the line didn’t answer, you pressed the button labelled “B” and the machine gave you your three pennies back. As I say, most people never used the telephone kiosk because they were rather in awe of it. Older people sometimes, rather than try to use the telephone box machinery, would go into the shop, and ask Mrs Kiddle to make their telephone call for them if they wanted the doctor or something like that. It was always a bit of an adventure going to Mrs Kiddle’s shop, you very often had a queue, sometimes the queue stretched out of the door onto the footway outside. Mrs Kiddle came to the shop I think in 1939 and stayed there of course for many decades afterwards, but she was never flustered, she always had time to talk to people and if anybody new to the village went into the shop, they would probably not leave until Mrs Kiddle had found out all about them and their family and what work they did etc. And then if you wanted to know about anybody you would go and ask because Mrs Kiddle would almost always know. It was not a good idea to go to Mrs Kiddle’s shop on a Thursday morning because Thursday morning was when the old age pensioners went to collect their pension money and they of course would stand and gossip with each other and with Mrs Kiddle. My Grandfather, long, long after he had ceased to be able to ride his bicycle, used to sort of use it as a sort of walking frame on wheels and would walk on Town lane to the shop, and that was a big event – Thursday morning collecting your pension. 

We were still living in the house where I was born when I started school, 1949.  The road of course, the Top road, between our house and the road, was not the road as it is now. More or less where the village sign now stands, the was a pit, a deep hole in the ground, which would, by most people nowadays would call a pond, that the Norfolk word is a ‘pit’. It looked very deep to a small boy and the children were not allowed to play in that area because it was so deep with steep sides and the whole road had more bends than it does now, and it was much narrower. There wouldn’t be so much problem with speeding vehicles as there is nowadays if the road had been the same as it was in them days. My mother too me down to school for the first week I think she said, and she told me this of course later, but at the end of the first week I told my mother I didn’t want her to take me to school anymore because the other boys would laugh, and so she paid an older boy who came past our house, she paid him a sixpence a week to see me safely down to school and then home again in the afternoon. Pretty well, as soon as I got to Garvestone school, I started being called ‘Dicky’. My father’s older brother had also been called ‘Dicky’ and my grandfather had been called ‘Dick’, and none of us was named Richard so I’m not sure where that came from – ‘Dicky Durrant’. That continued of course until I left home in my late teens. First of all, when we went to school, we were in what we called ‘the little room’ and the teacher was an elderly lady called Miss Holland, who came by train from Wymondham every day, and then biked from Thuxton Station up to Garvestone school. In the little room, as in the adjacent big room, was of course a fireplace, and Mrs Allen, the caretaker, had the job of lighting those fires every morning when they were necessary. I don’t remember a lot about what we did in the little room, I do remember, there was some rather grubby sheets of cardboard, that we used for making little plasticine models on. I think yes, I liked making little things out of plasticine, but I can’t remember what I made. We also did knitting, by the time of this incident Miss Holland had retired and Mrs Allen was the infant teacher. This knitting was with wooden needles and thick white wool. I didn’t like knitting, one day a man came into the little room and was talking to the children and to Mrs Allen, and I only vaguely recall he asked me what I was knitting, and I said I didn’t know - which was the truth. After he’d gone Mrs Allen told me off because she said I knew very well that I was knitting a dishcloth, but I don’t think I did. Anyway, at, I suppose the age of seven, we moved from the little room into the big room, with those the same age as me and by then, the head teacher who taught the older children ages seven to eleven was Mrs Barnes. We sat at the old-fashioned wooden desks with a metal frame, and the seat was a single plank, two people sat at each desk, but the seat was a single wooden plank, so if one of you had to get up and go out of the desk for some reason, the other person had to stand up as well because the seat lifted up in one piece. The ordinary things that would happen was occasionally we would have a film strip. The school had a film strip projector, I expect they were educational films, but I have no recollection of what they were about, but they made a change from the daily school routine. And then perhaps once a term, Mr Slater came who had a film projector, I think he was probably employed by Norfolk County Council to go round the county from school to school with his film projector. The exciting thing about Mr Slater’s film projector was that it showed moving pictures, not like the film strips. The pictures on Mr Slater’s films moved about and that was really exciting it really was. But to start with, we didn’t have proper curtains to black out the windows when we had film strips or films, and so one Autumn time, Mrs Barnes and Mrs Allen had the idea that us children should collect acorns  and we took bags of acorns to school that we’d picked up off the roadside, we took them to school and Mr Tenwright, the local farmer, used to come to the school and weigh the acorns and take them away, I guess to maybe the mill in Dereham, or a mill anywhere, where the acorns were ground up into some sort of animal feed. Of course, the school was paid for the acorns and the money that was raised was used to buy some blackout curtains for the school windows which made it much easier when we had film strips or films. Just occasionally, we would ride on a coach to Dereham cinema, the whole school would go as far as I can remember. A trip on a coach was quite an adventure and then to see the moving pictures of these what were I suppose colour films. In the early 1950s, we saw ‘The Ascent of Everest’ I think and Walt Disney Nature films, and we also saw, I’m pretty sure, we saw a film of The Coronation which was in 1953. The Coronation itself of course, was literally a washout and we had a day off school, and there was a fancy-dress parade and a tea for children and adults, and what was it called – a crazy football match I think, with adults in fancy-dress, I think? But it was all rather washed out by the fact of the persistent rain that day, which was a pity. One thing I didn’t like about Garvestone School were the school dinners. The dinners were brought in a van by, I think she was Mrs Holliday, she brought them from Dereham, from the kitchens at one of the secondary holds in Dereham, so they were beginning to cool off somewhat I guess by time they got to Garvestone and the other village schools, and I just didn’t like them. I suppose for the adults who’d lived through the war and were used to restrictions on food supplies that… Mondays was mince, I don’t know what it was that they minced up, but it tasted to me, as a small child, it tasted disgusting and the other things, they weren’t very nice. I must’ve made so much fuss at home about the school dinners, that in the end my parents relented, and I went home at dinner time to have my dinner there. As a child I was very much interested in, and fond of my food, I wasn’t hungry, but I was well built and my mother fed me well, she seemed to think that me and my sister needed feeding up and school dinners just weren’t up to the standard or quantity that I thought I needed, nor would I drink a third of a pint of milk, that we had at school even though those were free and I don’t suppose there was anything wrong with it, I just didn’t, even to this day, like raw milk. In the summer time, we would go out into the playground and Mrs Barnes would bring the wind-up grammar phone and we would have country dancing. I disliked country dancing very much. It sometimes meant you had to hold hands with a girl and in those days, primary school aged girls and boys had very little to do with each other. On this they really had to, country dancing was one of those things that we had to do, and we also had a maypole, and we used to dance round this wretched maypole with ribbons to make patterns of intertwining ribbons attached to the top of the maypole. Mrs Allen used to follow us round, slapping our bottoms to encourage us to go the right direction because if you make a mess of maypole dancing it really is quite horrendous, terrible business, it all has to be untangled and start again. The reason for the maypole dancing was that we used to have to do it at the church fete. The church fete was held I suppose was probably held in June/July time, must have been, and it was held in the grounds of what was then the Rectory, in the grounds where the Rector lived, now called the Old Rectory, and much changed. In those days there was an efficient lawn space that we would do our display of country dancing and maypole dancing and the village would sit around and watch and clap politely. And of course, there were all sorts of other things, ‘bowling for the pig’ and ‘bran tub’, where you would put your hand in the tub in amongst all the sawdust stuff and pulled out a little parcel without knowing what was in it, and I suppose you paid a threepence for that, not sure. That was one of the highlights of the village in the summer.

Going back to the coronation, June 1953, that was when television started to come to people’s attention. They had a television set installed in the Mattishall Parish Church, and people who went to Mattishall would come back and talk about this strange metal shape on the top of the church tower, and nobody in Garvestone had a television set before then but fairly soon after the coronation Mr and Mrs Smith had a television had a television installed in The King’s Arms public house at the top of Town Lane, and that meant the people who went to the public house could see the television programmes, black and white of course. Gradually after that more people in the village started to have their own black and white television sets very small by todays standards of course, and it was a real novelty and not many people from many years had their own television and you would be invited to someone’s house to see a particular programme. My sister and I were invited, this would have been late 1950s, to go over to the level crossing Keeper’s Cottage, and because they had a television set, Wednesday teatime, there was a children’s programme called ‘Jackanory’, and we’d watch this Jackanory programme and when it was over, we’d go home again for our tea.

[end-part 1]