Mrs Margaret Harris

I came to the village of Southborough when I was six weeks old, I lived in the white cottage, there were two cottages then but now it has been made into one. My father changed his job so we moved into Farm House Cottages, we lived in the first brick one, there were two brick and two thatched cottages. I made friends, went to school and spent hours and hours playing in Southborough. We went on a footpath called Humpty Brigg to get into Hingham to get the fruit and vegetables from a farmhouse. When the war started my mum used to take me and I would walk round by myself. One day I scolded my hands, as I ran into my mother with a boiling hot pan of fat. We could not call the doctor as we would have to pay for it. They took me in a jeep up to the American hospital, just up the road. They treated me for weeks up there, they were very good to me. We never once went into an air raid shelter. The Americans had a picture house and we used to go and at Christmas they would bring a lorry for all the children and take them to Shipdham air field and we would have a Christmas party.

With all the aeroplanes coming over our house it made our chimney come down and we had to move to the empty thatched house at the end of the row. We stayed in the thatched cottage during the day and then moved back to our house in the night.

We moved up to the common when I was 10yrs old. I had a lovely childhood there; we had a river at the bottom of the fields and I had a friend who lived next door. We would watch them harvesting the corn and watch the Binder. We would stand with a stick in our hands hoping to catch a rabbit but we never did. We would climb trees, wander for miles and our parents would never worry where we were. We spent hours in the river. In 1947 just before my sister was born, we were snowed in. We could not get through to the school on the roads, there was snow drifts higher than we were. The next day we went over the fields to Cranworth. We had a reading room at the bottom of Southborough Road, near the phone box and we used to go and pick up pies for the family. We had no phones, no electricity. I enjoyed my school days; I had a lovely time with my teacher.

When I was 19, I moved into my dad’s cottage next door and then my children had the same type of childhood as I did. We still did not have electricity or water but they enjoyed their childhood.

The village changed when they shut the school, shut the pub and then the post office. There used to be a shop In Cranworth. Mr and Mrs Dobson ran it, they didn’t sell much but we went in there when we came out of school. They would sell us their summer apples for a few pence. We went to Sunday School and would go on outings. Harvest festivals and anniversaries were celebrated and the Chapel would be full. I got married in the Chapel and they closed it just before our Ruby wedding anniversary. We celebrated our Silver anniversary in there but it was sold by the time our Ruby anniversary date came.

We knew everyone and we felt safe.

I remember some history about the common; the Bake House at the top of the lane, they used to call him Baker Brown. Also, there was a big new house, we had it offered to us as we hired the land but it did not have any deeds and we were advised not to buy it. I can also remember some old village story of a nurse who had her throat slit by her husband. We used to play near there and the house wasn’t there by then but me and my friend would shout to each other as we were scared in the dark going passed. Old villagers had the old newspaper clippings about the story. Apparently, his image was in Madame Tussauds with the other murderers of the time.