 
### A NEW FOREST CHILDHOOD

### 1903 – 1916

by THOMAS GILBERT SCOTT

Copyright 2007 CUDWORTH PRESS

Smashwords Edition

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CONTENTS

Preface

The Scott Family

Bernard and Lydia Scott

Brothers and Sisters

The Bungalow

Kettlethorns

Bessie

Outside

The Garden

Visitors

Boundary Ford

The Forest

The Seasons

The Village

Craftsmen

Holidays

Influences

School

The 1914-18 War

Sway Notes

Subsequent History

Scott Antecedents
PREFACE

TOM SCOTT spent the greater part of his life as a doctor in Newbury, in Berkshire, where he and Buffy brought up five children, but Tom's own childhood had been spent at Sway in the New Forest. He was born in 1903, one of the youngest of ten children whose father was a doctor in Bournemouth.

Tom died on 10 November 1979 and wrote these memoirs shortly before that; I think he meant to go over them again, for there are unfinished notes and the odd gap. They were written and rewritten in two notebooks, with subject headings in the margins. I have occasionally moved chunks in order to avoid hopping about from one subject to another, and have added dates, names and relevant additional snippets from various members of the family in square brackets. Otherwise, they are exactly as Tom wrote them, and give a vivid picture of the life of a comfortably off large family (as well as the ten children there were seventy-two first cousins) living in the country before the 1914-18 War. They are also acutely observant of the Forest, its flora and fauna, and of country practices and crafts.

I have added three appendices. These give additional information about Sway (for which we are hugely indebted to Tony Blakeley); an outline of Tom's later life; and more information about Scott family antecedents.

Photographs come from family albums and also from Tony Blakeley.

My sisters Elizabeth Fortescue and Georgina Burrows and my daughter Annabel Taylor have all been involved in the production of the book, and we thank Andrew Barron very warmly for designing it.

The photograph of Tom on the back cover of the book was taken by Elizabeth Fortescue in 1979 shortly before he died.

Caroline Taylor, September 2003
THE SCOTT FAMILY

MY GREAT, great, great grandfather was John Scott, a grazier [yeoman, d. 1777], who lived at Braytoft near Skegness in Lincolnshire — then on the coast, now miles inland. His mother was Ann Wayte, descended from John Bradshaw who signed Charles I's death warrant and whose sword I have.

John Scott's eldest son was trained as a doctor but died when a young naval surgeon, having insisted against advice on boarding a plague ship which had docked in Portsmouth harbour, where he caught the plague and died. So a younger son, Thomas [1747-1821], the tenth of thirteen, was at the age of ten sent to a boarding school at Scorton in Lancashire where he spent the next six years of his life. He returned home at the age of sixteen, did a years work on the farm, and was then sent to a doctor practising in a town some eight miles distant to be trained. However, after three months he was returned home in disgrace, having committed some immoral act! His father was furious and put him to work on menial tasks with the sheep. For the next ten years he led a dissolute life keeping bad company.

One day he had a row with his father, threw his shepherds smock on the floor, and said he was going into the Church. He saw the Dean of Lincoln, for whom he translated the Greek Testament at sight, first into English and then into Latin. He was then told he must see the Bishop of London. So he Walked to London in boots that he had made himself, and records that he was here able to stay with some better-off relations — a maternal aunt [Bridget Wayte] married to one Lancelot Brown, better known as 'Capability' Brown.

He eventually entered the Church and became a celebrated divine, producing a five-volume copy of the Bible with his commentaries, from which he became known as Scott the Commentator. He wrote several books, as well as many tracts and books of sermons. He was an early follower of Wesley. He died in 1821 but took a long time dying and often asked for his sons to come and see him. On one occasion two of them rode on horseback from a considerable distance and on asking their father what it was he wanted to see them about, he said: 'I think it is time the potatoes were planted.' This was March 24th!

Thomas Scott had a large family, one of whom, another Revd Thomas Scott [1780-1835] married Euphemia Lynch [1785-1853] whose grandfather, Nathaniel Gilbert, had owned the 'Gilbert estate' in Antigua in the West Indies. This Thomas Scott also had a large family, one of whom was Sir George Gilbert Scott, the architect, and another Samuel King Scott, my grandfather, who was a GP in Brighton. My grandfather was clearly a man of immense energy; he had a large practice in the town and was an immense walker, walking extensively in Switzerland and the Lakes as well as in Sussex. He married Georgina Bodley [d. 1901] who was a sister of George Bodley, another eminent architect who worked closely with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Grandfather died suddenly of a coronary thrombosis at the age of forty-six [in 1865], leaving Grandmother with a large house and thirteen living children. She had given birth to fourteen, but one lived only a few days and one, Maitland, my father's nearest and closest brother, died at eleven of heart failure following rheumatic fever. He was a great favourite with the family and his death left a deep sorrow on my father for many years. [Tom's grandmother and her surgeon son Alfred were listed in the Brighton Street Directory as still living at 15 German Place, now Madeira Place, in 1888. Reginald John Ryle MD, who married her daughter Catherine, took over the house and was living there in 1900.]

After Grandfather's death there was little money and a public fund was opened in Brighton to help Granny. Some of the family could remember running to get a copy of the weekly paper with headlines: 'Scott fund reaches £ . . .' My father, Bernard [b. 1858], was sent to Lincoln Grammar School where he was taken in free by the headmaster who was, I think, a brother or a cousin of Grandmother's. He came home twice a year only, and it took all day in an unheated train. School was very Dickensian and he was beaten almost daily; there were two hours' work every morning before breakfast, and that consisted of bread and water, and the food altogether was poor. He used to make a little pocket money from richer boys who threw him pennies for standing on his head on the planks laid across the dykes as bridges. (Both his and my earliest memories were of standing on our head.) Other members of the family were sent off to live with friends or relations.
BERNARD AND LYDIA SCOTT

(DADDY AND MOTHER)

WHEN MY FATHER was sixteen he went to Guys Hospital to train as a doctor. He shared rooms in Putney with his elder brother Tom [who was also studying medicine], and had to walk both ways to and from Guy's daily. He passed his final exams at twenty but had to await his twenty-first birthday before he could qualify. He learnt surgery at Guy's under the Lister spray, which meant that in addition to careful cleanliness all operating was done under a fine spray of carbolic acid in order to control infection; the results were surprisingly good. Later, he and my mother spent their holidays in a small hotel next to St Bride's Church in Fleet Street, and Daddy spent each day at Guy's watching the development of the new aseptic surgery.

After leaving Guy's he went to the Sussex County Hospital at Brighton, where his eldest sister, Georgie, was matron. She had trained at St Thomas's Hospital where Florence Nightingale still came to lecture and used to have batches of young nurses home to tea on Sundays. There was a nice story that one day Daddy was sent for by the Board of Governors. He entered a large room and was confronted by a lot of elderly men seated at a long table. The Chairman waved him to a chair and then asked: 'Dr Scott, we want to know what you would do if fire broke out in one of the wards. What would be the first thing you would do?' My father was aware that there was a fire drill, about which he knew nothing. He thought deeply, and then with an air of great solemnity replied: 'I would go and pack my portmanteau.'

About this time [c. 1884] one of Daddy's younger sisters, Emily, married Albert Wright, a prosperous solicitor in Liverpool, who was a widower with two children. The wedding was held at Brighton, and in the house party were Albert's widowed sister, Mrs Whitworth, who lived in Windermere, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia. There was a grand dinner party the night after the wedding; my father was in charge of the arrangements and had to announce which man should accompany which lady into dinner. Lydia was very attractive but shy. No one came to take her in, and she began to think she was to be left out as being too young. But when everyone else had gone in, my father came and took her arm, saying: 'Lydia, I am to have the honour of taking you in to dinner.' He clearly fell for her, and before she left he asked if he might come to call on her in Windermere when he was free. She heard nothing for two years, during which period she had a fairly gay time. She went with some girl friends to a boarding school at Scarborough, and during the holidays there were parties, dances and in winter skating on the lake, often at night with lanterns.

At the end of two years he wrote saying he had a holiday and was coming up. He called, and they had a very happy time walking in the Lakes. He then left for London where he had to stay for a few days before returning to Brighton, but on the train south he wrote her a long letter professing his love and proposing marriage. He asked her to wire her reply to an address in London. The reply came the next day, 'Writing Brighton'. So he had to wait; but the letter was there for him when he got home, accepting him. They did not meet again for six months — the day before their wedding in Windermere [1886].

I think he must have settled in Bournemouth soon after this, where his brother Tom was now in practice. Bournemouth at this time was little more than a fishing village although it had started to grow. But the whole area west of Branksome, including what is now Canford Cliffs and Sandbanks, down to Poole Harbour was still virtually part of the New Forest.

Daddy soon had a large general practice in Bournemouth and developed a reputation as a surgeon. He started a small nursing home in conjunction with his second house, which he called Shiplake, as he so loved holidays at Shiplake on the Thames. For several years he spent the summer holidays there on a houseboat called Psyche, taking the whole family, including our nurse, Bessie, older members of the family, and a cook. He was a keen punter and used to go in for punting races. I think my sister Elisabeth was probably the youngest member of the family to go on those holidays; certainly George and I never got there. The Psyche must have been quite large as I know that on one occasion Sir William and Lady Hale-White (he was an old friend from Guy's) came down to join the party.

In the early days Daddy carried out his practice in a cab, and he had a coachman called Prowles whom I remember as an old man pensioned off and doing odd jobs at Stagsden. I used to associate him with the Hosts of Midian (who 'prowled and prowled around'). I think Daddy must have started to use a car pretty early, around 1903 or 1904, when he had a German chauffeur called Blűcher who I think was interned in 1914. After that Fawkes was chauffeur until Daddy died in 1937.

Daddy was a somewhat distant figure to us younger children, whom we saw only at Sunday lunch. He used to have a beard and moustache and I remember feeling very embarrassed when he came home one day clean-shaven and I didn't like to look at him. He usually came home [to Sway] only at weekends and used to put on a pair of thick leather gloves and go down to the turkey run to play quoits. The iron discs were flat on one side and convex on the other, and were quite heavy. He used to put a feather in the ground to aim at, and threw the quoits from some twenty yards away. You had to make the quoit spin and land so that its edge cut into the turf to make it stand up; if it fell over it was no good. In the Brockenhurst days I believe they used to play in teams but at Kettlethorns he played alone. He must have had tireless energy as Mother told me that sometimes in the summer, after a long days work in Bournemouth, he would have supper and then walk twenty miles to arrive at Kettlethorns at two o'clock in the morning. He would then get up early and walk a mile to Sway station to catch the early train to Bournemouth for the next day's work. [Note: 'fishing'. Tom never completed this, but fly fishing was an important part of family life. His father was a keen fisherman, the children were all taught to fish, and many family holidays were spent fishing.]

After Shiplake, Daddy bought Stagsden, a large house on the West Cliff in Bournemouth with line views across the bay to the Swanage downs and Old Harry rocks. This he adapted and enlarged, adding a first-class operating theatre with a ceiling entirely of plate glass (which was difficult to black out in the Second World War when there were frequent air raid warnings). For many years nearly all the private surgery in the area was done here, as he had many friends among the other doctors in the town and his opinion was often sought by them. Very early he had an X-ray department which was run by one of the pioneer technicians in this speciality, who later developed X-ray burns on his fingers from too much unguarded exposure. And this, too, was kept up-to-date as facilities for chest and stomach X-rays developed.

Aunt Georgie came from Brighton to be matron of Stagsden. When she retired, her place was taken by a cousin, Katie Scott, who had succeeded Aunt Georgie as matron of the Sussex County Hospital, holding sway there for twenty-seven years. When she in turn retired, my sister Marjory took over and was matron throughout the Second World War until Stagsden was sold after my mother's death in 1947. So that in all its near sixty years, Stagsden had only three matrons and they were all Miss Scotts.

Of course I never knew Mother (Lydia Margaret née Whitworth) when she was young, but she must have been beautiful, attractive and lively if one may judge from her photographs and from what I remember of stories of her. Mother had had a sad start to her life. She was an only child. Her father was a solicitor in Liverpool, though not with the same firm as his brother-in-law, Uncle Albert Wright. One day he came home silent and upset and the next day did not go to work. Grandmother followed him down the garden to the orchard where she found him holding a gun and preparing to shoot himself. She took the gun from him, whereupon he broke down and told her that his two partners had disappeared, taking a lot of their clients' money with them and leaving him, penniless, to face the storm alone. He managed to get work as some kind of export agent, and this took him as far afield as India and South America. He brought home pictures of strange birds and fruit, including bananas which were unknown in England at that time. Granny had the pictures made into a firescreen which I well remember at home. [It was later at Fairlea.] After some years he returned home ill and it became clear that he had consumption. In desperation they went to St Jean de Luz in the south of France, hoping the climate might cure him; but he became worse and eventually returned home to die. I think Mother was seven years old at the time, and she remembered the sea voyage through the Bay of Biscay to Bordeaux on a small trading ship; Mother had no berth and had to sleep in a cupboard.

After his death they went to live with Uncle Albert's family at Tyn-y-Roose in Cheshire, but this did not work out, so they moved to Windermere where they had friends who, I think, helped them. [Grandchildren remember her saying that they had a house on the estate of rich friends and there were lots of parties and dances, two girls' cricket teams (one with pink sashes and one with blue), and skating on Lake Windermere.] Later, Granny came to spend the rest of her life near us in in the New Forest, at Sway, in a small cottage near the post office, and I remember going to visit her there.

Mother was, I know, somewhat overawed by the family. She told me of her arrival at Grandmothers house in Brighton, walking up the street with all twelve Scotts standing on the roof of the porch. watching her, and l know that Aunt Georgie, Daddy's eldest sister, was fairly critical of her. But I think there was gaiety and fun too. On their summer holidays in London, although Daddy spent a lot of the day at Guy's, they went to theatres and parties in the evenings, and they were devoted to each other. They once did a short walking tour from Newbury to Lambourn and back, and l often wonder just where they went. They also used to stay at Bradfield with Aunt Ellie [Stevens], at Havant where Uncle Sam [Scott] was Rector, and at Firle with Aunt Dora and Uncle Walter [Firth]. And later they had the holidays on the Thames in Psyche. But children came regularly every two years or so, and Daddy's work took up more and more of his time.

As I remember Mother, she was, I think, somewhat overwhelmed by running a large house with a big staff of maids, gardeners and farm hands, not to mention ten children. She was easily upset by our rowdiness and used to try quite ineffectually to stop us quarrelling by saying: 'Now, gently, gently!' But she had a most infectious laugh and could quickly become charming and gay. She read a lot and could skip very cleverly when she read aloud to us. I still have vivid mental pictures of Meg Merrilees, a tall gaunt figure striding across the moor. She loved Scott's novels and certainly made them come alive to us. She was intensely religious and read a passage of the Bible to us every night at bedtime, and she used to play games with us when we came down to the drawing room after tea in the evenings.
BROTHERS AND SISTERS

MAITLAND, b. 1887, was educated at Saugeen [a prep school in Bournemouth] and then privately at home with a tutor, and he was sent to France to live with a family and learn French. He always loved the French and used to go to France for his holidays after the war, before he got married. I was talking to a friend one day and he had been on holiday in Le Touquet and told us that [missing] [We remember Tom saying that Maitland was met at the station by the mayor and the town band, and that Le Touquet remained en fete during his annual visits. He was also a marvellous ballroom dancer.] He trained as a doctor at Guy's Hospital and when war broke out in 1914 he was doing a House Physician appointment at St Andrews. He joined up in September 1914 and spent the whole of the war with his regiment in the front line trenches [refusing leave seven times] until at one point he and the Colonel were the only original members of the regiment left. After the war he came to Bournemouth to work with Daddy. At this time he was living at home and was rather depressed and morose. Then he married Ursula Richards and they had two children — Angela and Michael. He died [in 1942] at the age of fifty-three from a coronary thrombosis.

MARJORY, b. 1888, stayed at home helping to run the house and educate us boys until the First World War. She then trained as a secretary and became secretary to Mr Beloe, headmaster of Bradfield, when I was there. After the war she went to Winchester Hospital and trained as a nurse, becoming ward sister there. Later, she was Assistant Matron at Chelmsford Hospital and at Bath. When Cousin Katie retired from being Matron at Stagsden, Marjory came there and was Matron all through the Second World War and until Stagsden was sold in 1947. After this she came to live in Newbury until her death in 1969. In her younger days she played the piano well and I have haunting memories of her playing Beethoven Piano Sonatas, particularly the 'Pathétique', very beautifully.

HETTY, b. 1890, was said to be 'delicate'; in fact she was pretty tough. She and Marjory had a years education at the Bournemouth High School, after which Daddy decided that girls' schools were a bad thing and they had a series of bad governesses at home. Hetty was artistically inclined and had considerable facility in drawing. Some of her drawings of church architecture were good. She should have gone to an art school. Instead, she had no real education but was kept busy running the dairy at Kettlethorns and holding art and craft classes for the village children until 1914. She then went to the Sussex County Hospital at Brighton, where Cousin Katie was Matron, and trained as a nurse. She went to London and took her training as a Queens Nurse for District work and for Midwifery. She went to Bradfield when Aunt Effie Stevens had a stroke, and looked after her for four years until she died. She then went to Briantspuddle in Dorset, where she was District Nurse to Tolpuddle, Briantspuddle, Turners Puddle and Aflpuddle for ten years, drinking up the atmosphere of Hardy's Dorset, which she loved. When she invited Marjory to stay with her, Marjory replied: 'No, I hate Dorset; it reminds me of Thomas Hardy!' They were very different characters. Hetty retired to her Forge Cottage in Tolpuddle, which she had managed to buy some years earlier for £200. Here she stayed for some years until she finally came to live in some Nurses' Almshouses in Newbury, where she died in 1977.

DORA, b. 1891 [d. 1979], was the rebel. Marjory and Hetty were good; Dora was naughty. She was full of fun, enterprise and non-conformity. She too had a year at Bournemouth High School but the school then asked that she be removed. She too had no education. She was at home enjoying herself in various rebellious ways when, in 1910, the Canadian parents of a boy at Saugeen — Sir George and Lady Drummond (he was president of the Bank of Canada) — invited Dora to go to Canada for a holiday. Their son Guy had been taken ill, I think with appendicitis, and Daddy looked after him in Stagsden. When eventually he recovered he came to live with us to convalesce and Sir George and Lady Drummond came over to fetch him. On the boat going over to Canada, Dora met Tom Longstaff on his way out to climb in the Rockies, and they became engaged.

I remember Tom's first visit to Kettlethorns very well. He asked me my name, to which I replied, 'My name is Tom, too.' And the immediate reply was, 'Fine, then I am Tom one,' and so we always remained: Tom I and Tom II. He stayed with us for quite a time before he got married, and I adored him. He taught us to play poker and we used to play every evening, and kept records of our accounts. We always played with matchsticks for pennies and cowrie shells for shillings. And he taught me how to cut down trees properly, and how to watch and listen to birds.

Tom was forty and Dora just twenty when they got married on 28 December 1911. Harmsworth, the sexton, was determined that the church should be warm, so he lit a good fire in the vaults. When the congregation arrived they could hardly see across the church for smoke billowing up through the grating in the nave. Dora wore a bright red coat and skirt and Tom a green tweed suit. There was a large gathering of the Scott and Longstaff clans, and a _Times_ correspondant came down to record the event. He got hold of Hetty who listed all the Scotts but none of the Longstaffs and this bias was recorded next day in _The Times_ , to the fury of the Longstaffs.

Mr George Damen, the station master, was determined to do his bit, so laid a lot of fog horns on the line for the 'up' train in the afternoon. Unfortunately, Tom and Dora went off by car and he had to explain a whole series of explosions as the train left the station.

Diana Longstaff was born in 1912, six months after my youngest sister Meg, and Sylvia in 1913, and Tom and Dora certainly lived in the Bungalow for a time after they were married, but later moved to Black Bush in Burley [while their house, Picket Hill, was being built]. [Tom I once caught Tom ll spying on him and Dora in the Bungalow, and Tom II received a large jugful of cold Water on his head as he ducked down under the window; but no ill-will was borne.] In 1914 Tom was sent out to India in the army, and in 1915 Dora went out to join him, leaving Diana and Sylvia with us. [Tom and Humfry nicknamed the little girls 'the Furies'.] Dora came home a year later [for Ursula's birth] and went to live in Normandy Cottage between Kettlethorns and the village. Dora tried to be helpful in the village and engaged a conjuror, Mr Douglas Dexter, to give a performance in the village school in aid of something or other. The village was plastered with posters headed 'Modern Miracles'. Within minutes, the three Miss Bernards were at her house, complaining that this was a direct insult to the Deity and demanding they be all removed — so they were! But the conjuror was fine and after he had finished Maitland Wright played Dvorak's 'Humoresque' and then 'God Save the King' and I was terribly embarrassed because Elsie, Lettie and Maitland all sang. I could never sing in tune and was terrified to open my mouth.

After the war Dora and Tom built Picket Hill, near Ringwood. [Designed by Kester Wright, it was in fact started in 1913 and Dora and Tom moved in shortly before Tom left for India in 1914, though Dora, finding the new house very lonely, later moved back to Sway with the three little girls until Tom returned in 1917.] I remember going over with them and being rather horrified at their choosing a bare, stony, stubble field on which to build, but they made a wonderful home there. Barbara, Joanna, Sally and Anne completed the family, each of whom demand a whole book to themself.

BERNARD, b. 1897, was the darling of the family, adored by Mother and said to be like her father in looks. He was good-looking, with dark curly hair, and clever. He went from Saugeen to Charterhouse, where he was head boy and got a classical scholarship to Oxford; but he never got there. He joined the army and was killed in France in 1916.

ELISABETH (Billy), b. 1898, combined forces with her great friend and close neighbour, Sybil Clement-Brown, to attack their respected fathers and demand to be educated. So Elisabeth went to Redmoor at Canford Cliffs, where she found some good teachers and a rather nice collection of girls. Discipline was strict and a dark, curly-haired Irish beauty called Doreen Geoghegan (whose brother was a contemporary of mine at Saugeen) was very nearly expelled for sending a postcard to a boy friend! After Redmoor, Elisabeth went to study architecture at the AA [Architectural Association] and was working in the oflice of a Mr Chesterton when she won the competition for the best design for the Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon. She had been to France and Germany [as well as Russia and Finland] to see theatres, and was perplexed that in England there was no 'freestanding' theatre — all you saw was a facade. Mr Chesterton had made a model of her design but when they offered to send this with her plans to the selection committee the curt reply came back that models had not been asked for. Imagine the excitement a fortnight later when she received a telegram: 'Please send model.' It was George Bernard Shaw on the selection committee who insisted that her design was the best from the point of view of a producer, and the theatre was built.

Elisabeth was in a flourishing partnership with two young men architects in London when the Second World War began, and she and her husband, George Richards [brother to Maitland's wife, Ursula], evacuated to Bournemouth where she found work and where she lived in a nice flat at Poole until she died in 1972.

George, I (Tom) and Humfry are the chief figures in this story.

GEORGE, b. 1900, later trained as a solicitor at the offices of Longborne, Stevens and Powell in Lincoln's Inn, after leaving Charterhouse where he was at school. After an initial time when he worked in Bournemouth in the ofhce of Daddy's solicitor, Mr Hayden, he moved to London. He had married Gwen Bainbridge whose brother had been a friend at Charterhouse and whose father was a well-known solicitor in Norwich. They had Valerie, Nancy and Janet. During the war George was an air raid warden in London all through the blitz. After the war he left the London firm and worked on his own at Wivelsfield Green.

TOM. I was born 27 August 1903, went first to Saugeen and then to Bradfield, from where I went on to Guy's. George and I shared a bed-sitting room with bed and breakfast in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury, for a time, and after he left I moved to Endsleigh Street and then went to share a flat with Elsie and Lettie Wright, first in Heathcote Street and then in Regent Square where we were joined by Jane Raine and Mona. I qualified in 1927 and was at Guy's doing house jobs until 1929. I then went to Lambeth Hospital, Brook Street, until 1932 when I went to Edinburgh and obtained my FRCS Ed. I came to Newbury in April 1933, and was married three months later .

HUMFRY was born on 28 December 1904. Looking back, I think he always had an original mind with a pretty sense of humour and quick, apt and witty repartee. He also had a violent temper and was easily provoked, and I remember feeling fearful as to what would happen when he joined me at Saugeen; luckily nothing untoward ever did, except on his first day when a well-meaning master thought to help him over his shyness by asking him to go out and see what the time was by the school clock. Unfortunately, Humfry had no idea how to tell the time!

The same worry was in my mind when he came on to join me at Bradfield. There were many school rules and customs as to what you might or might not do during your first term. Humfry disregarded all these, if indeed he ever knew of them, but no one ever corrected him or remonstrated. There was just something about him. He was clever. During his last year he was in the Upper 6th. They read one of Euripides' Greek plays; Humfry read all the others! The Old Mole (Mr C.E. Nichol), out headmaster, who could be fairly terrifying and was definitely of the old school, wrote to me after I had left. Humfry was head of the house and The Mole told me he had just had a long talk with Humfry about certain things he wanted done in the house. When he had finished, Humfry said, 'I don't think I altogether agree with you.'

He got a classical scholarship to Oxford and was disappointed that they would not let him switch to English, which he wanted to do. We saw rather little of him during his three years at Oxford, and only learned later that he was a leader of the Boy Scouts brigade and helped to organise the first International Scout Jamboree in this country.

After Oxford he did various odd jobs and appeared in London at intervals. He did some research, I remember, on Irish poetry, and did some teaching. He got a job for a term teaching at the Edinburgh Academy, and they asked him to come back if he would teach German. So he went to Vienna to learn the language and stayed there a year, I think, teaching English. At one time he walked from Vienna to Florence and arrived there the day Mussolini arrived. He wrote a very amusing letter describing how five separate bands had been organized to start playing the same tune from five different entrances to the main piazza at a given signal. Unfortunately, long before this the whole place was packed with people, the instrumentalists rapidly became separated, individual fights broke out, and soon the martial air disintegrated into a Collection of disjointed discords.

We were expecting him home after this, when a postcard arrived saying that he had decided to go to Moscow for a year or two. This was, l think, in 1929 or 1930. Letters arrived at intervals of six to twelve months and obviously life was difficult and housing very hard to find. One letter said that he had been lucky to find rooms in what had been the front porch of a rich house, which he was sharing with a man, his wife and three children and grandmother.

In 1937 he passed through London with the International Brigade to fight against General Franco in Spain. He was killed soon afterwards near Cordoba. [The family learned later that Humfry had married shortly before his death a Sudeten German, Hedwig (Hedi) Zappe, who, in protest at the rise in fascism, had gone like Humfry to Moscow. She visited the Family in England after the war.]

MEG was born seven years after Humfry, in 1912. She was six months older than Diana Longstaff, and she went to the Bournemouth High School with Diana and Sylvia after we left Sway and moved into Bournemouth. She did very well there and was head girl, afterwards going on to LMH at Oxford to read English. She was sent down when Diana Longstaff was found escaping from Megs rooms alter a coffee party, at 10.30 pm. However, she was quickly reinstated after protests from both sets of parents. Tom Longstaff softened Miss Grier's heart by calling her Mrs Grier! Meg married Norman Cameron and went to live in Shetland at Gardie House, Bressay, until Norman died, after which she moved to Edinburgh, leaving our son John and his wife, Wendy, to run Gardie.

What follows is the story of my childhood in the New Forest. Or perhaps rather of we three boys — George, Tom and Humfry — numbers seven, eight and nine in this family of ten children. We were a family to ourselves; the rest were 'the grown-ups'.
THE BUNGALOW

IN 1896, my father had a bungalow, made by the Wine Wove Co, sent down from London and erected on a plot of land at Brockenhurst so that the family could spend the summer months there, away from their home in Bournemouth. I have no memory of the Brockenhurst days as they ended in 1905, when I was only two, but to the older members of the family this time was a very happy one and they revelled in the freedom of the Forest after the rather dreary walks along the Bournemouth Chines.

After we moved to Kettlethorns the Bungalow was taken down and re-erected in a small field at the bottom of the garden, and became a wonderful place for picnics, playing in, and later for camping. Still later, probably in 1913, after Dora had married Tom Longstaff and Diana and Sylvia were born, the Bungalow was once more taken down, to be joined onto Kettlethorns as a home for the Longstaffs until Tom was sent to India and Dora went out to join him. [It must in fact have been earlier, since the Longstaffs were at Black Bush, Burley, by 1913, where Syl was born.] After the Longstaffs left and went to live at Picket Hill, the Bungalow was left empty and became a wonderful series of playrooms where we used to lay out our clockwork trains, often combined with forts and tin soldiers. We had a magic lantern in here, with exciting brightly coloured slides of Bob the Fireman. It was lit by a paraffin lamp behind a large magnifying lens, and it gave off a strong smell of hot japanned tin. Someone once gave us a Basset Lowke steam railway engine. The water was heated by a methylated spirit lamp, but it all became very hot and spurted steam in all directions. I think we were just too timid or needed extra help as it never got going properly, although when you pressed the right lever it gave a realistic and most penetrating whistle. Later, I converted the end bedroom into a photographic dark room where I used to develop and print my No 2. Box Brownie snapshots. We had most exciting races, climbing from a bed in the end bedroom through a trap door in the loft, crawling the length of this in the dark, then dropping down from another trap door on to a bed at the other end of the house. For years, on a shelf in one of the bedrooms was a large glass sweet jar containing five adders preserved in spirit, which Dora. and Bernie had killed. (Since then, the Bungalow has again been moved, and is now a separate house on the other side of the Mead End Lane in The Wood.)

The Bungalow was really a magnificent thing. You went up four or five broad wooden steps to the verandah, which must have been about twenty-four feet long by eight feet deep. It was roofed above, and enclosed by railings at the sides. A door led into the main sitting room in the middle of which was an enormous brick-built fireplace with rather beautiful if very dated small green glazed tiles. It was said to weigh two tons. When it was moved up to the house I remember seeing it hoisted with block and tackle and sheer legs onto a farm cart, pulled up the lane by horses, and offloaded on to its new site. Behind the sitting room were the kitchen, the larder, a lavatory and the bathroom. To the left were two bedrooms, one leading out of the other, with two beds in each. All the beds were covered in bright red blankets. To the right was a big playroom with two bedrooms behind. In retrospect, I think the Bungalow had been specially designed to burn well if it ever caught fire. It was raised some two and a half feet above ground level, supported on iron mushroom supports. It was built of stained pine, and the roofing was of fine wire mesh impregnated with tar and stained red (hence the name 'Wine Wove'). We used bits of this roofing, left over from the move, for lighting our fires, and it never failed! The only solid structure was the fireplace.
KETTLETHORNS

WHEN MY FATHER bought Kettlethorns at Sway in the New Forest in 1905 the family finally left Bournemouth and moved here. My father came home at the weekends.

Kettlethorns had a large garden, some farm buildings, and about thirty acres of farmland. It was a mile from the centre of the village with its railway station, church, post office stores, pub and a few shops, and some scattered houses. Walking along the lane one came to the white swing carriage gate at the corner, where the lane divided — right going down to the Forest and Setthorns, and left downhill to cross the stream at Mead End and up the far side to Tiptoe and Hordle. The lefthand gatepost was surmounted by a frame made to hold an oil lamp, but I do not remember it ever being lit. Inside the gate the gravel drive curved to the left past the front door to end in a circular area large enough for a carriage to turn round in, and surrounded by shrubs and flowers. At Christmas time the village brass band used to come and play carols outside the front door. They carried lanterns to light them, and an enormous banner supported between two high poles. These poles were supported in leather cylinders suspended from the shoulders of two men by straps.

To the left of the front door was a glass-covered Verandah in which grew a large lemon-scented Verbena which gave a wonderful smell when you pinched the leaves. To the right of the front door was the old part of the house, which had once — so we were told — been used by smugglers. The walls of this part were made of clay and straw [cob], as were most of the old houses in the Forest, but had been faced with brick. Some of the floors — particularly those in Hetty's bedroom — were so uneven that a marble would roll quite fast from one side to the other. But the main part of the house was only about ten years old, having been built by Mr Herbert Moser who had sold it to us when he moved to another house near the middle of the village. This part of the house was three storeys high, brick-built with a slate roof and with large sash windows flanked by white painted wooden shutters.

The porch opened into a hall which went straight through the house to a door at the back and so to the yard with the coach house and stable block. Opening out of the hall were the drawing room and dining room, which were large and of the same size except that the drawing room had a bow extension to it.

The drawing room had William Morris wallpaper and was beautifully furnished. It was lit at night by oil lamps on the tables and by candles in two wall sconces of yellow and green faience pottery on either side of the fireplace. The fireplace was surrounded by blue Dutch tiles, various chairs and sofas covered with shiny Chintz covers for summer and softer materials for the winter, and at the further end of the room was the grand piano which I think came from Mother's family. It was a beautiful Broadwood of pale rosewood with a fine grain. The front part of the lid opened backwards and under it were two squares of fretted wood, one on each side, on which Humfry and I would sit while Marjory played nursery rhymes from The Baby's Opera. In the centre was the music stand which was lifted up and fixed at the right height by a ratchet, and on either side of this was a brass candle holder which could be swivelled round to a convenient position. It had a very sweet tone and Marjory played well the Beethoven sonatas.

In their early married life Daddy and Mother used to go on touring holidays, driven by their German chauffeur, Blűcher. On these holidays, often as far afield as Yorkshire, they would buy pieces of furniture or china and have them sent home. Things were very cheap then, and they collected some very beautiful furniture for a few pounds; I think they must both have had a good eye for nice things.

The drawing room also had a large mahogany bureau bookcase with fretted glass panels to the upper bookcase part, several small pedestal tables, a set of Hepplewhite chairs for which Mother later worked seat covers in gros and petit point, and an 18th-century sofa. There was also a Sheraton double-decker tea table with fitted trays, which held the silver teapot and its kettle on a stand with a spirit lamp.

There was a glass display cabinet full of treasures which we were allowed to play with sometimes when we came down from the nursery after tea — silver folding fruit knives with mother-of-pearl handles; a gilt baby's rattle with a whistle at one end, bells, and a coral handle; some antique watches; silver snuff boxes, vinaigrettes and other trinkets. There was also a miniature Japanese Chest with drawers in which smaller treasures were kept.

There were a lot of pictures; I remember the Baxter prints and two of his watercolours, a copy of Whistler's portrait of his mother, and an oil painting of a lamb under an apple tree covered with pink apple blossom, by Frank Richards, which I loved very much. There was also one of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition, and one of a girl posting a love letter in a hole in an oak tree, called 'The Tryst'.

There were a lot of books, mostly, I think, in the drawing room, where some of the walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a nice complete first edition of R.L. Stevenson bound in black. Uncle Tom had been his doctor, and one of his novels ( _Underwood_ ) has a most effusive dedication to him. Daddy often saw him if Uncle Tom was away.

We had a complete set of the Waverley novels, which Mother knew almost by heart, and nearly all the Victorian classics were there: the Brontes of course; Mrs Gaskell; George Eliot; Rider Haggard; John Buchan — well as books by Thackeray, Macaulay, Caldecott, Walter Crane, H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, copies of _Punch_ , and a complete first edition of Hardy's novels. In the nursery there were George MacDonalds, Mrs Molesworth, Kenneth Grahame's _Wind in the Willows_ and _Dream Days_ , Charlotte M. Yonge, Beatrix Potter, and some favourites such as _Brave Dame Mary of Corfe Castle_ , _The Children of the New Forest_ , the _Golliwog_ books, the _Boys' Own Paper_ , _Little Folks_ , _Aunt ]udy's Annual_ , and, at Christmas, _The Play Box Annual_ , _Rainbow_ and _Tiger Tim_. There was a great favourite called _The Two Supercargoes_ which Bessie read to us many times but which I have never been able to find again. Nesbitt, Andrew Lang Fairy books, Grimm, Lamb's _Tales from Shakespeare_ , Conan Doyle, Kingsley's _Waterbabies_ , _Our Island Story_ , _Feats on the Fjord_ , _Pilgrim's Progress_ , _Two Little Savages_ and _Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac_ by Seton-Thompson, and _The Call of the Wild_ by Jack London. I had several books by Cherry Kearton who was one of the earliest bird photographers and like many of his era produced some very beautiful photographs. In those days the camera was big and heavy and had to be fixed on a tripod as it often meant taking time exposures. All photographs were taken on to glass plates, often half plate size, and these were heavy and cumbersome so that only a few could be carried at a time. His photographs taken on St Kilda and on Shetland of skuas and gannets were superb, as well as many of many smaller and commoner birds.

Games kept in the drawing room included snakes and ladders, ludo, spillikins, jigsaw puzzles, and some were kept especially for Sunday, like the six-sided wooden cubes with six different pictures of biblical scenes such as Christ entering Jerusalem on the ass and Christ clearing the money-lenders from the Temple.

Many years later, probably in 1913, I remember coming into this room and being completely mystified by the sound of Harry Lauder's voice singing 'I love a lassie' coming out of a box. I had never even heard of a gramophone until then.

The dining room next door was largely filled with the mahogany dining table which could be extended to fill almost the full length of the room, and which later doubled up as a ping pong table. A set of very beautful Sheraton chairs had a wheat sheaf carved on the backs. People sitting on the fireplace side of the table were protected from the heat by wicker shields which hooked onto the backs of their chairs. Over the fireplace was an oil painting of a pond with waterlilies on it, and a windmill by Frank Richards; we had several other paintings, both oils and watercolours, by him. He had been a patient of Daddy's who had a long and severe illness following an appendicitis, and since he was very hard up he paid Daddy's fees with his pictures.

There was also a very beautiful mahogany 18th-century sideboard in the room, and on it a pair of silver Candlesticks with a three-bracketed candelabra in the middle, and a very fine silver teapot in a mahogany case with its silver teaspoons round it. And there was a nice corner cupboard just inside the door.

At Christmas the room was completely full. Aunt Georgie, Aunt Mary and Uncle Willie came out from Bournemouth to join us — Aunt Georgie from Stagsden and Aunt Mary and Uncle Willie from the house they shared. Aunt Mary was unmarried, and had been a founder of the Girls' Friendly Society. She was full of good works but charming and full of fun. Uncle Willie had been a brilliant mathematician but was unfortunately epileptic. He was an enthusiastic teacher of Esperanto, and tried to make us learn it by giving us each a small book explaining it.

All the silver Candlesticks were polished and put on the table, as well as small silver dishes filled with chocolates, nuts and crystallised fruits. In the centre of the table a large frosted mirror was placed, covered with cotton wool, tinsel and small ornaments. For many years the Christmas dinner was supplied by a Mrs Duncan Gibbs, a rich and grateful patient of Daddy's. It was always an anxious time, waiting to see if the great parcel would arrive, but it always did and it contained everything — turkey, plum pudding, champagne, crystallised fruits, stilton cheese, chocolates and more. We children were allowed to sip the champagne and I can still sense the feeling of bubbles up the back of my nose. Next day there were groans when it was decided whose turn it was to write and thank our benefactor.

After Christmas dinner there was a period of waiting while the servants had their dinner in the servants' hall, and then we all — staff included — repaired to the drawing room which had until then been forbidden to us. The Christmas tree was lit with candles and presents were distributed. We made all our Christmas presents — cross-stitch kettle-holders, pen wipers, French knitting bed socks and scarves, paintings, etc. The servants, poor things, were always given a length of very good dark grey or black serge with which to make themselves clothes. And finally, back to the dining room for an enormous tea with the iced Christmas cake.

In the hall, next to the drawing room door, stood the grandfather clock. This had belonged to my mothers family who lived in Lancashire near Bolton. When, in 1811, the cotton mills were attacked and much damage done both in the mills and in private houses by the Luddites, who thought the new machinery was taking away their livelihood, two very beautiful Charles I silver tankards were hidden inside the clock and thus escaped being stolen by the strikers. Caroline now has this clock; its tick is one of my earliest memories. Next to it was an oak dresser with blue and White china, then a large anthracite stove with talc Windows which did its best to warm the house.

At the further end of the hall was a door leading to the yard, and beside this was a room in which Hetty used to entertain a collection of children from the village, who came in one evening in the week to do various crafts. (In the summer this class was held in the Bungalow.) Hetty was much loved by these children. However primitive the craft she set them to do, she managed to give the impression that they were doing something important. She drew geometric patterns on the tops of Wooden pencil boxes and showed the children how to cut these out with small chisels and a mallet; it was called 'chip carving' and was very popular. Or flower pots were coated with putty, onto which were stuck pieces of brightly coloured broken china. There were also classes in drawing and watercolour painting, and Dora's mother-in-law, Mrs Longstaff, gave a large box of Montessori educational toys for the younger children. I remember small wooden slats wound round with different coloured silks which had to be arranged in the right order through the spectrum.

Leading out of the hall, opposite the door into the dining room, was a broad staircase with oak bannisters, and just beyond it was the passage which led into the old part of the house, and to the kitchen regions. Off the passage was a small room where every morning all the oil lamps were brought to be cleaned and refilled with paraffin from a big drum. The wicks were trimmed level with a special pair of scissors made with a curved shield attached to the upper blade, which collected the burnt bits, and the glass chimneys had to be carefully cleaned and replaced, with the chimney fan fixed to the top. (This was a piece of talc shaped as at shallow inverted cone and fixed to a metal upright which was slipped on to the top of the chimney to prevent smoke from rising and making a black mark on the ceiling.)

At the end of the passage was the telephone, with the mouthpiece fixed to the wall and the earpiece on a long flex resting in its holder on one side. On the other side was a handle which you had to turn if you wanted to call the exchange. Our telephone number was Sway 3. [The telephone only came to Sway after 1911.]

On the right, beyond a green baize-covered swing door at the end of the passage, was the servants' hall, a cosy little room where we often used to go and play with the maids. This was the room where the servants ate, and where they sat in the evening. ln the mornings it was used as a schoolroom where Marjory taught us reading, writing and arithmetic. We learned to read from _Reading without Tears_ , and I was rather proud of being able to read 'ten men in a den'. We had pens with nibs, ink pots and copy books, but I never attained perfection at imitating the pot-hooks. Copperplate was not my line and I was always (and still am) a very slow reader. This was all the education I had until I went to school at the age of nine and a half. But l could cut down a tree, use a cross-cut saw, plant and dig potatoes, milk a cow, and harness and ride a pony.

The kitchen was a large and friendly room, with a picture of a sweep kissing the cook on one wall. ln the middle was a scrubbed kitchen table, and at the far end the Eagle range. The front of this range was flush with the wall, the rest lying in a recess under a long high wooden mantlepiece on which stood a clock (which Eliza, the cook, had won from collecting enough coupons from, I think, Sunlight Soap) and some brightly polished copper saucepans. The range itself was black, polished to a bright shine with blacking lead, put on and rubbed hard with a brush. The handles which opened the oven doors were shiny steel. On the top there was always a large black kettle full of water near to boiling, and saucepans of various sizes for boiling vegetables. To bring the kettle quickly to the boil, one or two rings were removed from the top, over the actual fire. In front a small iron door could be opened back to show the fire retained by vertical bars, and below this was the hob on which the flat irons were heated for ironing, or where toast was made, either with the toasting fork or just propped up against the iron. Before using the flat iron you always spat on it to see if it was hot enough; the spittle would run off with a sizzle if the heat was right. There was an oven to either side of the fireplace, and small levers could be moved to right or left to control the temperature by diverting the heat through flues surrounding the ovens.

On one side a brass tap produced hot water for hot water bottles or other purposes from a water tank. The water was always hot as the flue went round the tank on its way to heat the ovens. There was a polished steel fender in front of the range, and a rail at the side with a kettle holder, and another for the toasting fork.

There was always a wonderful smell in the kitchen, either of cooking or the singey smell of ironing, which was done on a blanket on the table and then aired on an airer slung from the ceiling.

Before Christmas, we all had to come to the kitchens to help stir the Christmas pudding in an enormous pudding basin, with the help of a large Wooden spoon. We were allowed to lick the spoon afterwards, which tasted very good, and when Eliza (whom I called Lilac) was making scones she gave us the leftovers to eat when she had finished cutting out the shapes on the pastry board.

We ate a lot in those days. Porridge followed by bacon and eggs or sausages for breakfast, and a large midday meal with meat and vegetables followed by rice or tapioca pudding with stewed fruit, or apple tart, or apple suet pudding (known later among the Longstaffs as Uncle Humfry's squashed hat), or apple dumplings or rhubarb. Some of our favourite meat dishes were boiled Lancashire hotpot with dumplings, carrots and turnips, casserole, rabbit stew (curiously, we used to fight as to who should have the head, and the tongue was considered a delicacy), and roast mutton served cold and covered in white sauce with capers. For tea there would be bread and butter and jam, with rock cakes and large plum cakes, and when we were older another large meal in the evening with soup, meat and vegetables and a sweet. [Note 'seed cake, cherry cake, bread and dripping'] I think Eliza was paid £18 a year!

Adjoining the kitchen was the pantry. This had a large cupboard with sliding doors where all the china, glass and silver were stored. There was a table where the parlourmaid would sit and polish the silver with a cloth dipped in jewellers' rouge and methylated spirit, finishing it off with a chamois leather.

Next door, the scullery had a large enamelled earthenware sink and a wooden draining board and plate rack, and beyond this was the larder with broad shelves and iron cross rods from which hams and sides of home-cured bacon were suspended by meat hooks. On the shelves were butter (either as half pound pats or as butter balls) kept in bowls of water covered in butter muslin; milk, in jugs also covered in white butter muslin with coloured beads sewn round the edges to keep it in place; rashers of bacon; eggs; and vegetables. Meat was kept under dome covers of fine wire gauze.

And beyond this was the dairy. This was Hetty's domain, and she ran it entirely on her own. Round the sides were wide slate shelves on which stood the shallow earthenware pans, cream glazed on the inside and red glazed on the outside. After the cows had been milked these pans would be filled with milk poured from the bucket and left to stand overnight. Next morning the cream would be skimmed off the top with shallow metal scoops, perforated to let the thin milk strain through while the cream was slid off into a separate vessel. Later on the separator arrived, and this indeed was magic. Milk was poured in at the top; the big handle was turned slowly at first and then faster as the low-pitched drone gradually rose up the scale to a high-pitched penetrating whine; and then the miracle started as the cream came dribbling out of the smaller spout and the bluey-white skimmed milk poured from the larger.

Next the cream was poured into the barrel-shaped churn and the top screwed tightly down against a rubber band. The handle was turned, making a satisfying 'clumphing' noise as the cream was thrown from one end of the churn to the other. There was a pressure gauge fixed to the side, and when this registered too high a pressure a lever was pressed and air released. After a time the lid was opened to see if the butter 'had come'; if it had not, there was more churning. When all was well the butter was transfered to a wooden trough with a sloping floor, where it was squeezed by rotating corrugated rollers to get rid of the buttermilk, and then finally pressed into half-pound slabs between two wooden butter pats. Each slab had to be Weighed on the scales and either have a bit cut off or a bit added to get the weight just right, and then reshaped between the pats. Finally, each slab was shaped into a round, square or oblong shape and Wrapped in greaseproof paper with the ends neatly folded in. Or it might be rolled into butter balls. If the butter was to be used at home a wooden mould might be pressed on to the top of the slab, leaving either a pattern or the shape of a cow on top.

The dairy floor was tiled and sloped down to a gutter leading to an outside drain so that the floor could be sluiced clean after all the implements, churn and parts of the separator had been scrubbed and scalded with boiling water.

I think most of our own milk must have been used for cream and butter, the skim being given to pigs and calves. I certainly remember the milk float coming round each morning. The float was always very low off the ground at the back. It had a large round tin milk churn, with half or one pint measures hooked over the brim. With these the milk was doled out into milk jugs which were brought out of the house to the float.

I remember one very hot summer day when we were all sitting on the lawn in front of the house. It was sultry and stuffy and the sky had been cloudless when suddenly things darkened and heavy clouds came up very fast. There was a clap of thunder and the rain poured down in torrents. The cover of the drain outside the dairy had become blocked with leaves and the rain water ran back into the dairy, along the passage past the kitchen, and into the hall where there were several inches of water. Daddy came down with bare Feet and his trousers rolled up. He carried a slop pail and his huge bath sponge which he very slowly dipped in the water and then squeezed this into the pail! The water disappeared fiiirly quickly once the drain had been unblocked. I remember also seeing a vertical crimson streak of light on the horizon, and later flames as the school at Tiptoe was struck by lightening and burned down.

At the top of the stairs was a broad landing, and if you turned right there was another passage over the downstairs one. Off this was a lavatory with a peculiar wash basin which you emptied, not by pulling out a plug, but by tipping up the whole basin like a meat cover, so that the water spilled over the back and ran away. On this basin were printed NIS PULL, which I have never been able to construe. An innovation in this passage was a slab of thick translucent glass let in as part of the floor, and as it was beneath a window it helped to throw light into the ground floor passage which was rather dark.

At the end of this passage was a door into the store room, which had a window onto the passage with red and blue stained glass. Twice a year an enormous case arrived from the Army & Navy Stores with supplies for the next six months, and all the precious contents had to be unpacked, checked, sorted and stored. Currants and sultanas went into giant metal drums with round lids; sugar came in coarse cotton sacks, with lumps in blue paper containers; cooking salt came in bars; scrubbing soap also came in bars, and it was one of our jobs to cut this into chunks with wire cheese cutters, after which it was stacked to dry hard before being used; rice, tapioca, angelica, flour came; lavatory paper, toilet soap, coal tar soap and Monkey brand soap; black lead; boxes and boxes of candles, night lights and lamp wicks. lt took days to get it all sorted.

But our great joy was the catalogue, at least five inches thick, with everything you could possibly want, and most things illustrated. The real gems were the bacon, ham and pork illustrated in colour on thick shiny paper that smelt wonderful. On wet days we were given these to cut out and stick into scrap books (homemade from good quality brown paper), but it always seemed sacrilege to cut up these beautiful pictures.

Beyond the store room you were again in the old part of the house. Ahead were the back stairs which came down outside the kitchen and pantry and were very useful for games of hide and seek. To the right was, first, Hetty's bedroom with its sloping floor. Hetty had a lovely reading candlestick on her green-painted bedside table. This had a polished metal reflector shaped like a bicycle lamp, inside which was the candle, and there was a cunning arrangement with a spring inside the stem of the candlestick which pressed the candle up against a guard so that as it burnt away the wick was always kept at the right height inside the reflector.

Next was the bath room. The bath was free-standing in the middle of the room, which made it difficult for Bessie to catch us as we could always escape by running round it! And there were two rooms for Lilac and the maids, but I don't know how these were arranged as I never ventured in them.

Off the landing there was, first, a room which George had later on. I remember that when he came back from Charterhouse in quarantine for mumps he was not allowed out of this room and I was not allowed into it. We were found playing chess in the doorway, he leaning over the board from inside, and I from outside the room! I did not get mumps and never have. We fixed wires and electric buzzers between our rooms and used to carry on conversations in morse code.

Half way along the landing was Daddy and Mother's bedroom, and they had a large white-painted verandah built outside their big sash window, with a blind they could wind down over it. I think the plan was that they could sleep out there, but as far as I know they never did, and so many sparrows built their nests in the awning that the winding mechanism never worked.

Beyond this room was a large bedroom with two windows facing on to the drive, in which Humfry and I slept. It was here that I started to sleep with my feet on the pillow and my head at the bottom of the bed. We had been read a frightening story involving wolves and lions, and I thought I would be safer this way round. I did this for years. And I remember one Christmas Eve when Father Christmas was foolish enough to bring a large teddy bear which growled when it turned over and which, being too big to go into the stocking, was left at the foot of the bed. I turned over during the night and so did the bear, and the whole household was woken by my terrified screams!

Every bedroom had a wash stand in it, with a big china jug and basin, a soap dish and a dish for a sponge or flannel. There was a glass water bottle with a tumbler inverted over the top. Under each bed was a chamber pot and by the wash stand a slop pail. Every morning the housemaid came with a can of hot water which was left in the basin with a face towel folded over it. Later she came back with another can of cold water. The contents of the chamber pot and the basin were emptied into the slop pail, the tooth glass washed and dried, the glass water bottle and the water jug refilled, and the slop pail emptied down the lav, rinsed and dried.

Before she married, Dora had a small room next to this. She used to play the flageolet which was a kind of glorified penny whistle. She had a tune called 'Silver Heels' with which she used to tease me.

Then up a steep flight of stairs to the top landing, with the nursery, night nursery and another bedroom. At the end of the landing was the nursery cupboard, full of toys and with the doors beautifully decorated with scraps — some large, some small, and so many that you could look for hours and still miss some detail.
BESSIE

IN THE NURSERY was Bessie. Bessie Mary Valenza Head had gone as under nurse to Uncle Tom and Aunt Adeline in Bournemouth at the age of fifteen, and five years later came as nanny to Mother and Daddy when Maitland was born. She brought up all ten of us children, and died at Fairlea after fifty-two years with the family. Her father had been a butcher and had a shop in the main street in Christchurch. She had a sister, Lizzie, who was nanny to the Howells. They were in India a good deal and she used to bring the two boys, Roddie and Hughie, to stay at Kettlethorns sometimes during the holidays.

Bessie had another sister, Julie, who lived at the Black House at Mudeford, and I remember going there for tea by motor boat from Christchurch. This was the only house at Mudeford in those days, and was painted black with tar. It stood at one end of the Bar where the Avon and Stour, after joining forces below Christchurch, entered the sea. [It is still there today.]

Bessie was our complete background. She was short and plump with very fat legs. She was kind, good-tempered and unrufflable, and life without her would have been unthinkable. She read aloud to us. She knitted our stockings and jerseys. She taught us to knit, to crochet, to do cross stitch, to make kettle holders which hung on a rail beside the fireplace (there was always a kettle singing on the hob), make pen wipers, do French knitting on cotton reels for use as scarves or bed socks, to cut out pictures and make scrapbooks, mixing paste out of flour and water. She never failed, on wet days or during minor illnesses, to produce some form of useful occupation, and when the rain stopped she would take us out for 'a mouthful of fresh air'. She was in indefatigable walker and we used to love her walks — down to Setthorns and down the stream to the bathing place, or up through Setthorns to the keeper's cottage, or along the Brighton Road to the corner of Setthorns, or through the village, past the church, to Durrants Town, pausing to do gymnastics on the railings over the Stanford Brook and to buy some sweets and variegated wool at Mrs Delicate's shop, along the Manchester Road past Isaac Shelley the baker, and back past the brick kiln in Middle Road; or sometimes, down the lane to sail paper boats under the bridge at Mead End, and on up the hill to call on Mrs Feltham at the farm. Bessie was tireless. On one occasion, in 1911, she took four or five of us by train to London to see the White City Exhibition at Earl's Court. We did the flip flop, the wiggle-woggle, the scenic railway, the lions — the lot — and came back home in the evening. It was the only day that London has recorded a temperature of 100°F in the shade! [98.8°F, according to The Times!]

Bessie had some funny expressions and pronunciations. As well as 'a mouthful of fresh air', bedtime produced, 'Get yourself in between the sheets' or 'Take yourself off to roost'; of three forty, 'It only wants twenty minutes to four'; The smoke went up the chimbley'; she always talked of mothers 'julery'; and the door had to be 'trigged' open. During the war we had, 'And Lissie says the noise made by the Seppelins over Westminster Cathedral was tremendrous.' [Also, 'Flowse your hands under the tap.']

Bessie usually had an under nurse to help her, as all the meals as well as coal and hot water had to be carried up all those stairs to the nursery. It was only on Sundays that we had lunch and tea downstairs in the dining room. After tea, on weekdays, we were washed and tidied and then we went down to the drawing room to play with 'the grown-ups' until it was time for bath, in a tin hip bath, and bed. There would be a coal fire in the grate, which made diamond-shaped flickering patterns through the fireguard onto the ceiling, and we were bathed and dried in front of the fire. The hot water for the bath was carried upstairs from the bathroom in large hot water cans. If we were ill with coughs, colds, croup, earache, we stayed in bed in the night nursery, where we slept with Bessie when we were young. When we had croup our chests were rubbed with camphorated oil and 'cresolene' was burnt in a special container, with a saucer shaped like an ivy leaf, over a tiny oil lamp, and if we had earache warm olive oil was poured down our ears from a teaspoon.

Bessie was 'Chapel', and on Sunday evenings she put on 'me black skirt' and disappeared, leaving us somewhat forlorn. ['Here I am in me black skirt / Is it the colour or only dirt?'] She had special black metal clips which fastened over the bows in her shoe laces to stop them coming undone. I have never seen these anywhere else, and I used to think they were the 'latchets' of Jesus's shoes which John the Baptist was not worthy to undo.

The nursery itself was a beautiful room. On one side was the fire-place surounded by the fireguard topped with a brass rail and with a second rail some few inches out for drying and airing clothes after ironing. There was a large picture over the fireplace of a girl dressed in a white pinafore and with long golden curls. Beyond this was Bessie's armchair where she sat and read to us while she knitted. Opposite was the nursery table. This had big round cross bars between the legs. When we were small we could put our feet and legs over the cross bars, but as we grew we could no longer squeeze our legs through. The table had two wooden struts at each end, which could be pulled out by big iron rings to support extra leaves if we had friends to tea. The room was lit by a lamp hung from a metal hook in the ceiling over the table.

At the further end of the room was a big sash window with a broad window seat. This window came down to some eighteen inches from the floor, so that even when young we could see out into the tall beech tree on the lawn to one side, then over an apple tree to the tennis lawn and croquet lawn, and over the rose garden and turkey run and across the Valley at Mead End to the road winding uphill past Mr Feltham's farm to Tiptoe and Hordle. There was a white-painted wooden dado round the room, finishing at some three feet up, with a narrow ledge on which were numerous precious objects, including a model fleet of naval ships.

The view to Hordle became exciting to us later, as this was where Hordle John came from in Conan Doyle's _The White Company_ ; and there was another reason for feeling kinship with him, for the garden of the butcher's shop in Christchurch, which had been Bessie's home, ran up to the ruined walls of the castle from which, if you remember, Hordle John picked up a vast piece of masonry and hurled it with a great splash into the river Avon.

The nursery always seemed full and busy, and I don't think we squabbled much. I had a much loved doll called Rosemary Sweetbriar Scott, but unfortunately she got dropped and her china face shattered. We had masses of tin soldiers and a wonderful fort with a drawbridge. We collected regiments and I think the Black Watch was our favourite. We had great battles with these, and used to fire match stick shells from the cannon. There were also masses of games: snap, old maid, happy families, tiddly winks, snakes and ladders, draughts, spillikins and backgammon (with a beautiful leather-bound board which folded up to look like two books; we were told that monks in a monastery were not allowed to gamble so they hid the board in their library). We played dumb crambo, hunt the slipper and, out-of-doors, French and English and grandmothers steps. The only rule I remember was that we were not allowed out of the house before six o'clock in the morning. As the grandfather clock struck six there was a wild rush and three boys disappeared from the house until the old cow bell called us in to breakfast.

Bessie read aloud to us every day after dinner. I loved this, but my mind did wander, so that although many scenes were vividly remembered, I rarely got a whole story together in my mind. I also learned to use the 'machine' (as the sewing machine was invariably called) quite early, and machined all Meg's nappies before she was born — Turkish towelling only in those days. Later I made all the tents I used on walking tours. I also made myself a wonderful hair oil — a confection of gorse flowers mixed with the sticky soap from the stems of hyacinths. It smelt wonderful!

The nursery always seemed the centre of the house, and after family lunch downstairs on Sundays everyone, including Mother and Daddy, would collect up there for a long chat and a cup of tea. When the telephone went, Mother would fly downstairs as though the house were on fire, and shout up, 'Bernie, Bernie, the telephone.' Daddy would finish his story, very slowly fill and light his pipe, and walk downstairs and along the passage with deliberately unhurried footsteps, and then we would hear his familiar 'Halloa' floating upstairs to the nursery.

Beyond the nursery was the night nursery, with a window looking over the drive into The Wood, and away beyond could be seen Sway Tower and in the distance the outline of the Isle of Wight. Next to this was the room where Marjory slept. At one time there was a scare about fires and Daddy had an outside wooden fire escape built from near the front door up to Marjory's room. Then there was a scare about burglars so the bottom twelve feet were removed and we were presumably expected to jump!

In the ceiling of the passage outside the night nursery was the trap door into the loft. There were hooks on which the ladder could be fixed, and you then pushed the trap door up with your head. The loft extended the whole length of the house, and a window at each end gave some light. About half of it was boarded and full of treasures. There was a big easel and a lot of old oil paints and brushes, as well as trunks, wicker clothes baskets (in which we used to have races), tennis racquets, picture frames, etc, and we used to play up here for hours.
OUTSIDE

LEAVING THE HOUSE by the back door you came into the yard, in the middle of which was the windmill, some forty feet high, on metal struts, which pumped the water from the well beneath. It was, I believe, efficient, but it squeaked and rattled horribly in a wind. There were metal footholds up one of the main struts and you could see the Isle of Wight from the platform at the top. Near the windmill was a strawberry tree which used to have lots of reddish round fruit which we ate — rather tasteless but quite good — and it had a rich red-brown bark.

Beyond was the stable block, a long building with the coach house at one end, where the pony trap was kept as well as the mowing machine and other tools, and at the back were apple racks to the ceiling so that it always smelt deliciously of stored apples. Then there was the harness room — a cosy little room with a tiny fireplace in it, full of saddles, reins, collars, bridles, whips, and with a good smell of leather and saddle soap. And next the two stables, one for my pony Tommy and the other for Bess who pulled the trap. Daddy had one of the first cars in Bournemouth, for his work, but there were virtually no cars out in the country and we went everywhere by trap. Taking Bess out of the stable, backing her between the shafts of the trap, putting on the bridle and bit, collar and harness, and fixing the leather straps and reins was all so familiar that when quite young I could do it all without thinking. I couldn't do it now! It seems strange that horses used to shy if they met a motor car then, and many a trap ended up in the ditch. So if you saw a car coming you drew up and got down and held the pony's head until the car had passed. We used to collect car numbers if we went out for walks, and I remember one day when we collected five! We used to hold hands, straddled across the road, to make the car stop before we allowed it through.

Fixed against one wall of the stable was a ladder leading into the hay loft above. Here a door opened to the outside air and a beam above it carried a wheel round which a rope passed for hauling bundles of hay up into the loft. There were holes in the floor of the loft so that you could push the hay down into the hay rack for the horses to pull out from between the bars. And there was the chaff cutter with a big circular wheel which you turned to cut the hay into chaff to be mixed with oats for the manger or nosebag. This made a most satisfying noise as the great blade came round to cut the hay, but it can't have been a very safe toy as it could easily have cut a hand off.

Beyond the stables — all part of the same building — was a shed where Jim Tregunna used to clean the boots and polish the knives. In one corner was the copper with a little fire underneath, and it was here that he used to boil up the old potatoes with the mash for feeding the pigs and chickens. The round copper rested on a brick base above the fire, and a flue ran round the outside, to collect in the chimney behind. It had a wooden lid, and quite a small fire brought the mixture to near boiling point quite quickly. There was also a big wooden bin with a liftup lid in which the potatoes were stored.

Lastly, at the end of the building was the cowshed which held six cows. They were brought in morning and evening for milking, and were tethered by a chain round their necks, though I think they would have stayed quiet without this. We often helped with the milking, or wiping the cows' teats and udder with a damp cloth, but used to squirt each other with the milk if no one was watching. The cows were surprisingly good shots at flicking us with their tails if we were milking roughly.

At the back of this long building were two large lean-to sheds, one open, where logs were sawn on the wooden horse, with two men working the cross-cut saw, and then split with an axe or wedge and stacked for use in the house; the other, enclosed, contained an old bath in which hams and sides of bacon were soaked in brine for some weeks before being hung. We were not allowed to watch the pigs being killed, but I remember the slowly fading squeals as they had their throats cut and the blood was allowed to trickle into the pudding pan. I think they had boiling water poured over them to remove the hairs before being cut up, and then all the odd bits (lights and offal) were made into brawn, which we loved.

Near the end of the cowshed was a small area enclosed by a low laurel hedge, and inside this was the pump. This temperamental instrument needed priming by pouring two or three cupfuls of water down the top while working the pump handle up and down furiously, after which if you were lucky a gurgling sound was heard and water appeared from the leaden spout. This water was used for filling water cans or the galvanised water cart — a metal tank which, when filled, could be lifted by a metal projection on either side which fitted into slots on its carriage. When the handles of the carriage were pulled down from a vertical to a horizontal position this lifted the tank off the ground and on to the wheeled frame, when it could be wheeled to any part of the garden, hopefully without too much water being spilled on the way, and the contents distributed by water can.

Beyond the stable block was an area surrounded by a tall laurel hedge for shelter, in which were the greenhouse, the potting shed, and some cold frames. The greenhouse was heated from a small fireplace on the outside, which burnt a mixture of coal, coke and sifted ashes The fireplace had a boiler at the back, and the hot water circulated through large metal pipes supported on the brick wall that formed the base of the building. Inside were plants for the house, seedlings, ferns — especially maidenhair ferns — and always a delicious small of warm geranium leaves when you went in.

The last building was the pigsty with a brick wall round the straw-covered run, and two cosy little houses under a sloping slate roof. We used to love scratching the old sow's back with a stick, and she seemed to appreciate this and grunted comfortably. Against the end wall was a cold frame with a hot bed in which cucumbers were grown, and I remember once looking inside this and finding an adder with a lot of tiny babies which she had just produced, tucked away in a corner underneath the cucumber leaves.

A gate beside the pigsties led into a field which was usually down for hay in the summer. The hay was cut by a horse-drawn cutter and we all took part in tossing the hay with pitchforks and then raking it, first into lines and then into piles or haycocks with wooden hayrakes. It often had to be tossed and raked up into haycocks many times, especially in bad weather, until it was really dry. The girls helping in the fields all wore Very pretty sunbonnets made of a cotton material with a tiny patterned print, mostly of a mauve or pink colour, and the men wore unbuttoned waistcoats and collarless striped shirts. Trousers, often of corduroy, were kept up with a Wide leather belt and they wore a narrow strap just below the knee, and hobnailed boots. They wore no tie, but often a red handkerchief tied round their necks. In the summer they wore straw hats of a Panama type. They carried their lunch with a bottle of cold tea in a bag made of plaited straw with webbing binding and handles.

I think the haymaking and harvesting were done by men from a nearby farm who came in just at those times. The ordinary farm cart was just a wooden platform fixed on cross-bars and supported on two wheels, with a frame resting on the thick wooden axle. There was a low railing on each side, with a bar across the front on which the driver sat. There were slots at the four corners into which any old bit of wood could be stuck to contain the hay or straw. The driver sat on the rail to one side of the horse and the reins were usually made of rope.

The Waggon was a far grander thing, and we never had one. It had four wheels and a higher rail at the back and front, as well as at the sides. The exact design varied from county to county, as did the colours. In the south it usually had a blue body and red wheels. They all carried a skid or shoe made of iron, which was slipped under a back wheel when going downhill to lessen the weight on the horse, and a wooden roller held by a chain at either end, which could be rolled behind a wheel going uphill. If the horse needed a rest the wheel rolled back on to the roller and was held until the horse was sufficiently tested to continue.

The wooden teeth of the rakes snapped easily and it was our job to knock out the old ones and cut new ones to fit the hole. They were hammered in tight and the end cut into a rough point with a knife. When the hay was dry it was pitched on to the farm cart which had had posts stuck into its four corners. One man would stand on top, spreading and treading the hay while others passed it up to him on pitchforks. When the cart was full it was taken to the rickyard where the rick was made on a pile of faggots to keep it off the ground. It was skilful work, for the man on top, spreading the hay as it was pitchforked up to him, had to keep the rick trim and symmetrical. If it was badly made it would lean to one side and then wooden props had to be used to keep it from falling. The ricks were roughly thatched with straw by one of the farm men. Chopping the hay from the rick was another skilful job. lt was done with a huge blade kept razer-sharp and worked by a wooden handle at one end. Thick cubes of hay were cut out of the rick with this, and taken up to the hayloft.

Beside this hayfield were two cottages. The first was the laundry cottage where the Tregunnas lived. They were an elderly couple. Mr Tregunna was the gardener, a nice short stubby man, bewhiskered at the sides of his face but clean-shaven round the mouth and chin. I used to watch him potting up plants in the potting shed, mixing compost and sieving peat mould. Mrs Tregunna ran the laundry and did all the washing for the house. There was a big laundry built at the side of her cottage and this was always full of washing, airing or ironing, with a strong smell of singe, steam and soap and the mysterious bluebag which somehow made things extra white. She always had crinkly washerwoman's fingers and reminded me of Mrs Tiggywinkle. When the laundry was done it was folded and packed into a large laundry hamper and sent down to the house.

Their son, Jim, was a bit 'simple' but very useful doing lots of odd jobs. He cleaned all the boots and shoes for the family, and these were often covered in mud as there were no gumboots in those days. And he cleaned all the knives, which had to be done daily as there was no stainless steel. He had a board covered with floor-cloth on which he sprinkled a dark brown emery powder from a tin. Holding a knife in each hand, he very deftly moved them up and down the board, turning them over at each change of direction. Another job was to go through the potato bin, removing all the long shoots and taking the worst tubers out for the pigs and chickens and bringing the better ones down to the kitchen. In his spare time he played the fife in the village fife and drum band; and he used to cut forked sticks for making catapults.

There was a very nice under gardener called Jim Gates. We used to help him when he mowed the lawns. This was done with a large mowing machine drawn by the pony, and first you had to put leather shoes on the pony's front feet, fastening them with a strap and buckle, so that the hooves would not leave marks on the lawn. I often used to lead the pony while Jim steered the mowing machine. Jim was killed in France during the First World War.

In the cottage next to the laundry lived Mr and Mrs Hyde. Mr (Eddy) Hyde was farm manager and a great friend. When I was nine I was given a New Forest pony called Tommy. I remember Eddy driving Mother and me over to Brockenhurst to buy him for (I think) £14. Eddy was supposed to teach me to ride, but although he took me riding I wasn't really taught and I never gained confidence. But I used to love the long rides in the Forest, even though I remained nervous at jumping streams and low fences. I used to do all the grooming and mucking out, which I enjoyed, but I often wish I had been taught properly.

There were four fields between us and the Forest — I suppose some thirty acres — and these were rotated between hay, corn and roots. At harvest time men with scythes first cut the outside swathe, and this had to be gathered by hand into sheaves and tied with a rope of straw which was made by twisting the straw, using an instrument with a hook-shaped piece of wire with a wooden handle. This swathe made room for three horses walking abreast to pull the reaper-binder which threw out the automatically bound sheaves to the side, where they were picked up by the men and stacked into stooks to dry. When thoroughly dry they were loaded onto the farm cart and taken into the stackyard where the rick was built, again on a bed of faggots, with the butt ends of the sheaves facing outwards. When completed, the rick was thatched.

The sheaves remained in the rick until some time during the winter when the threshers arrived with the threshing machine, pulled by the steam traction engine. The threshing machine was pulled alongside the rick and the traction engine left a little way off. The belt was fixed between the fly wheel of the traction engine and the threshing machine, and the tension adjusted. When all was set, the engine started off, and all the many parts of the threshing machine started to move, making a wonderful and far-reaching humming noise. Now a man on top of the rick started pitching the sheaves on to the thresher, having first cut the binder twine with his knife. Straw came out at the back, chaff dropped to the ground under the thresher, and the corn came out of a shoot to which a sack was attached. It was very dusty work and often took two or three days before the men departed to the next farm with the traction engine and thresher. As the rick was finished there was always excitement, with men and dogs trying to catch the rats which ran out.

There was always an aura of excitement and secrecy when the cess pit was emptied. This was done at dusk so that we should all be safely indoors, and all windows were firmly shut. The men came and pumped the contents into a horse-drawn tanker which was taken out into the hayfield and drawn several times around in a wide circle, with the stuff running slowly out of the outlet pipe at the back. The result of this was a series of dark green lines around the edge of the field, on which grew some very good-sized mushrooms in September.

When the Bungalow was moved up from the turkey run field it was joined on to the house by a door and some steps leading into Hetty's classroom. Before this could be done, the cesspit had to be emptied and filled in, and this necessitated laying a drain from the corner of the house across the top lawn, just missing the tennis court (but uprooting a weeping cherry), across a gravel path and through a hedge into the orchard, where a new and better septic tank was built. The scar of this trench took a long time to fade.
THE GARDEN

IN FRONT OF the house the ground sloped gently down to the tennis lawn. To the left was a long gravel path with a flower bed on each side, ending in a flight of steps. To the right was a big beech tree, some apple trees and various flower beds, one entirely filled with paeonies. There was a high bank with some fir trees on it, and wild planting of periwinkle and Solomons seal. Between this and the gravel path was a gently sloping lawn with an apple tree which forked very low down and was a nice place to sit, and this levelled out on to the tennis lawn. Beyond there was a grass bank with a drop of some four feet to the croquet lawn below. There was a flight of steps at one end, leading down, and at this end of the croquet lawn was a rustic thatched summer house with a concrete floor, where the tennis nets and croquet hoops were kept. At the far end of these lawns was a gravel path with a rose pergola and a flower bed with a large pampas grass, columbines, red hot pokers, Canterbury bells, etc. This path ended in a small gate leading to the lower field and pond, but also turned at a right angle to pass the lower end of the croquet lawn, with a flower border backed by a tall hedge beyond. In this bed was a tulip tree with its exotic flowers and improbably shaped leaves. At the further end of this hedge was a rustic archway covered with a white Wichuriana rambler rose; in summer this was covered with huge trusses of very small flowers so that the whole archway appeared white.

Through this rose arch you passed into the rose garden. This had a formal design with a yew hedge down the middle, a rose bed on each side of this, then a long grass path going to join its fellow at the far end in a grass area under a big silver birch, and another rose bed on the outer side of this. At intervals were standard roses, the rest bushes and all beautifully labelled with lead labels with the names of the roses punched on them. At the other end was a rough area with a very large American currant bush, and concealed behind this a wooden lavatory with an earth closet. Here, too, was the end of 'Hetty's Path'. We never really won the battle of this. It led from behind a clump of fir trees above the tennis lawn, passing between the ends of the two lawns and the summer house on one side and the hedge separating the garden from the lane leading down to Mead End on the other. It was a nice secret area, but brambles took over and however hard we (including Hetty) worked they always won.

A small gate led out of the rose garden to a field beyond, in which was the Bungalow when it was moved from Brockenhurst and before it was moved again to be joined onto the house. Hetty used this in summer time for her children's classes, moving them up to the house in winter. I remember we had our hair cut here. A Mr Booker used to drive over from Brockenhurst twice a year to cut the family's hair. But after one visit it was found we had nits, and for a long time we had our hair combed with a curry comb each night at bedtime. After this, Bessie had to take us into New Milton to a barber's shop, but the barber was rude and charged 6d instead of 3d as he said we ruined his scissors. As our hair was often full of resin from climbing fir trees he may have had a point.

In this same field was the turkey run where the turkeys and chickens lived in a long wire netting enclosure with a wooden chicken house. The birds had to be shut up at dusk, and this job fell to me. It was quite a long way from the house and, unfortunately, a badger had taken up residence in the old earth closet at the end of the rose garden. I had to pass close to this on the way down, and I was terrified by these evening walks. It was useless, of course, to go early as the hens wouldn't go into their house until it was near dark. No one told us about badgers, and they were regarded as sinister animals. Unfortunately, one of the men went down one evening and shot the badger, but I was still frightened.

On the opposite side of the field to the turkey run was the pond, and this played an enormous part in our lives. It was fed by a small field drain which trickled down from a damp area above, and was puddled in clay. The lower end had been built up artificially and it was mostly some one to one and a half feet deep, with patches of water lilies in the middle, and some magnificent bulrushes at the lower end where you could always find several moorhens nests in the summer. We had a flatbottomed tarred punt in which we spent hours exploring the pond, often falling in and coming home covered in slimy evil-smelling mud. We found that if you pulled up a water lily leaf with its long stem and broke off the leaf, the stem had five tubes running through it. If you blew down one end of this a lovely line of bubbles came up from under the water; and if you sucked up, you got a drink of very dirty pond water. This once led me to make an epoch-making discovery. At the back of the coach house was an old metal rainwater tank, and one day I was playing here and found a length of red rubber hosepipe. I put one end in the tank and blew bubbles. Then I sucked and got a mouthful of dirty water — and then the miracle happened — the water went on running! I had discovered the phenomenon of siphoning water. I was, of course, terribly excited at this; it never occurred to me for one second that anyone else could have known about it!

And the bulrushes were exciting, too, with their magnificent five or six-foot stems ending in those wonderfully soft velvety brown poker heads. And below water their roots were pure ivory white with very sharp pointed growing ends. You could snap those roots easily and they looked as though they would be good to eat; but they weren't. There was a large old quince tree by the pond, large enough for us to climb and sit in, and it had lots of fruit with a soft grey velvety fur on them, following the beautifully pure white blossom.

At one time Daddy thought he would have the pond cleaned out and stocked with trout for fishing. Some men arrived and after much searching discovered a wooden bung which, when removed, allowed the water to run out through a drain at the lower end of the pond and on down the valley. They then spent weeks shovelling mud into wheelbarrows and pushing these along scaffolding planks raised on boxes, to be emptied in a great and evil-smelling heap on the bank. We used to walk about with bare feet on the muddy bottom of the pond, catching eels which we felt with our toes and then picked from the mud with our hands.We tried cooking them but they tasted like cotton wool and were full of bones. At length the great work was finished and the bung returned to the bung hole. Slowly the water collected and the pond refilled. One day a small tanker arrived and poured a lot of rainbow trout fry into the pond. Alas, they were never seen agan, dead or alive; the mystery was never solved.

In the winter half the village used to come for skating and sliding on the pond. Sliding was quite a skill. We wore hob-nailed boots and having taken a good run on land you leapt onto the ice and slid across with the hobnails cutting a track on the ice. It needed quite a lot of practice to keep your balance. The skates were shaped pieces of wood with the iron cutter let into them. A screw stuck up from the heel end, which you screwed into your boot heel, and at the toe end the skate was held in place by a strap and buckle. The vicar, the Revd Arthur Leigh Barker, was very tall and wore a pair of skates which curled up in front like Turkish slippers. Once he had been on the ice the pond was declared safe for all. When we were young we used to sit on wooden chairs and were pushed around in front of the skaters. Somehow it seemed to freeze over every winter in those days. We used to go for long walks carrying skates, as there were innumerable small shallow ponds in the Forest — good enough, if not for skating, at least for a good slide. The best pond was a big one near Brockenhurst, called Whitten Pond, where a great many people turned out to skate.

A little way above the pond was a tall spruce fir, so well grown that every branch was outspanned by the ones immediately below, right down to the ground. We soon discovered that we could roll off any branch on to the next one, even starting at the top. So when visitors came we used to delight in climbing to the top, then scream 'Help!', and fall backwards! We rolled easily from branch to branch, slowing up near the bottom by holding on to the branch tips and finally walking off at ground level. Unfortunately, our hands, hair and jerseys got covered with resin which was difficult to get off. Above this tree was the orchard, and I remember particularly the red sweet Devonshire Quarrendens, so delicious when eaten fresh off the tree. And from the orchard a gate led through a tall hedge into the large kitchen garden with a central gravel path leading up to the pigsties and greenhouse at the upper end. There was a high brick wall on the north and east sides, against which fruit trees were trained, and at one end of this was a big fig tree with a bed of sweet violets underneath it. There was a large strawberry bed with posts and wires over which the strawberry net was spread as the fruit ripened, and nearby a cherry tree with very sweet red fruit. There was an old dog kennel near this, and we used to sit on the roof, from where we could reach to pick the cherries. There was a fruit cage for gooseberries and raspberries and currants; and at the lower end next to the tall hedge was a row of rhubarb plants. On hot summer days I loved to come here and sit in the cool shade of the huge leaves and just think. We three boys always had our own gardens where we grew lettuces, radishes (always, and still today, 'French Breakfast'; do the French really eat them at this meal?), gooseberries, currants, potatoes and a few flowers — polyanthus and some annuals: love-in-a-mist and larkspur. Humfry had an enormous rhubarb plant which had a flower stalk much taller than him.

And We always also had a 'house'. These houses played a big part in our lives, and if one of us became unpopular the greatest punishment was to be 'chucked out of the house'. The house could be in an old shed, under a big planting of rhododendron, up the beech tree, at the base of the spreading spruce by the pond. Apart from the one up the beech tree, We always had a fire and cooked, usually frying bacon, eggs and chipped potatoes in a small frying pan, with dripping provided by Eliza. We had quite a collection of tin plates, knives, forks and spoons, which could all be bought for a few pence at the post office stores. One day Eddy Hyde came to see us and jeered 'You're no gypsy' when I had to go out to escape the clouds of smoke. This became a family saying. Somehow we made these houses very cosy, blocking up draught holes and sweeping the earth floor clean with a small broom we had.

But the best of all our houses was The Caves. This was in the bottom field between the turkey run and the pond. Here was an area of firm yellow sand in which some rabbits had made a small warren. One day we got some spades and started to dig this out, and we soon had quite a big hole dug, in which we could stand up, and a bay off the central area for each of us, with a rabbit hole at the end. Next we got an axe and cut down a couple of small spruce fir trees and these were sawn into suitable lengths and laid across the cave as a support for the roof. Then we got a crowbar with which we enlarged each of our three rabbit holes, blocking up the backs and making a hole from above at the far end of each one, down which we were able to force pieces of tin chimney which had conveniently been left behind from the Bungalow when this was moved up to the house. Finally, we covered the roof with branches, boards and bits of corrugated iron laid over the fir trees, and heaped the excavated earth on top so that eventually there was only a gentle mound to be seen, and this soon became grassed over. The roof was so firm that a cow could walk on it. The entrance was by a giant rabbit hole which grown-ups found difficult but was no trouble to us.

The fires burned beautifully in the blocked-up rabbit holes, and there was a magnificent draught up the chimneys. We used to spend whole days down here and did a lot of good cooking. We had a pet mouse which used to come out and sit on a special ledge we cut for it in one of the walls. We fed it with rolled up pellets of bread which it ate with its forepaws while sitting up on its back legs. It was a gloriously cosy and warm place on a cold day, with three fires going and throwing a red glow on the yellow sand of the walls. We made tables and chairs from old boxes and were marvellously comfortable.

Then there was Jacky, our pet jackdaw. He came to us as a fledgling from the nest and was a great friend, following us wherever we went. One day we all had to go to Bournemouth shopping. Jacky followed us, flying from tree to tree down to the station. And when the train left the station he flew outside the carriage windows for about a mile before flying off; and when we came home at teatime there he was, waiting patiently for us at the station. He had a very sad end. Humfry and I were busy gardening and as usual Jacky was flying around watching. He was perching on an iron railing which was propped up by a stake. My foot caught the end of this, and the iron rail fell, trapping Iacky between one of its rails and the stake. He died instantly but I suffered agonies of remorse at having been the cause of his death.

Across the lane opposite Kettlethorns was a bit of land which we owned and which we called (for some unknown reason) The Wood. It was just a piece of waste ground of perhaps two acres — a thing one never sees today. There were a few pine trees and clumps of gorse, bramble and hawthorn. In one corner there was a rectangular area surrounded by a bank where there had been a cottage, and here was a tall old pear tree which had been grafted with three different pears — all cookers but good enough for a boy to eat. At the further side of The Wood was a small valley almost surrounded by gorse and bramble and full of rabbits. I used to spend hours here, often just sitting and watching, and I built up a wonderful fantasy of a secret garden which only I knew about and which could only be entered by crawling through a tunnel of gorse.
VISITORS

IN THE SUMMER there were often visits from some of our many cousins — there were, I think, seventy-two in this generation! — and I remember especially the Stevens from Bradfield: Henry (though I do not remember him at Kettlethorns), Amy (who was touchy and came down one morning complaining that she had found Toby, the fox terrier, on her bed, to which Mother with complete naiveté replied, 'Poor Toby, he's got eczema'), Tom, Polly, who was a great friend of Dora and Bernie, Jack and Bill the twins, and Miriam. Their mother was Aunt Effie [Tom's father's sister] whose father-in-law founded Bradfield College. I believe some of them once walked from Bradfield to Sway in a day.

Mabel and Ray Scott used to come, and once Geoff and Marjory. These (except Marjory) were children of Uncle Sam, Daddy's eldest brother, who was Rector of Havant. Geoff married Marjory Wright, which complicated relationships as she was the daughter of Uncle Abert who had Marjory and Peter by his first wife, after which he married Aunt Emily, a younger sister of Daddy's. To complicate it yet further, Uncle Albert was also Mother's uncle, her mother having been his sister.

During the visits there would be a lot of tennis played, with long walks in the Forest, and in the evening games — charades and dumb crambo or up-jenkins. Occasionally a dance would be held and then the dining room would have to be cleared and we would be set to work polishing the floor with French chalk to make it slippery, and we had great fun sliding on it in bedroom slippers with the result that it became so slippery that no one could stand up on it. Sometimes, on a fine summer night, mattresses would be hauled down, and we would all sleep out-of-doors on the lawn, and wake up next morning wet with dew.

Among ourselves, or when other children came to tea, favourite games outdoors were French and English, Grandmothers' steps, French cricket, Tom Tiddler's ground, rounders, touch last or tig. Indoors, or indeed anywhere, dibs and knucklebones, hunt the slipper, hide and seek, conkers (in season), tops of all kinds, cats' cradles, blind man's buff, hunt the thimble, general post, little words out of big words, racing demon, dominos, cribbage, bézique, snap, old maid, beggar my neighbour, and later vingt-e-un, forfeits, khem khan, throwing lights, consequences, poetry on fold:

Mother cried 'Gently, gently!'

But the house re-echoed with laugh

Her voice was heard but faintly

Like a breath on the ocean rough.

Or:

Where has the Crown Prince vanished to?

The grave, I hope, and the Kaiser too.

And what of Enver Pasha the proud?

And when will Ferdinand don the shroud?

BOUNDARY FORD

AFTER UNCLE ALBERT'S death the Wrights built a house [designed by Kester], Boundary Ford, on the lane leading to Setthorns, only a quarter of a mile from Kettlethorns, and came to live here in 1912, so that we saw a lot of them. Peter and King were killed in the First War. Kester was a very successful architect. Molly stayed on to look after Aunt Emily at Boundary Ford. Maitland, the youngest of the eight children, was a contemporary of George and played the piano well, especially 'Humoresque' by Dvorak. He married Star Wedgwood and became a director of the firm.

Aunt Emily, one of my father's sisters, was a most delightful character, full of life, fun and humour, and loved talking. She was intensely musical and as a girl used to go up to London from Brighton to have music lessons at the Royal College. There is a story that one day when she was fifteen, she went for a walk from their house in German Place in Brighton [No. 15; the name vvas changed to Madeira Place in 1914], and was much struck by someone playing the piano in a nearby street. She listened for a while, then hurried home and started to play what she had just heard. After a time the front door bell rang, and Granny was summoned. She was confronted by an elderly man with a long beard who asked her who was playing the piano. He was much perplexed. He had been composing that morning, and being pleased with his composition went off for a walk, only to have his music played back to him in the next street! He was the Abbe Liszt. Aunt Emily had a most beautiful touch on the piano and would often sit down, play something or other, and go on developing variations on it until the next mealtime. She was an identical twin with Aunt Louisa from Hull, and once when she was young a young man whom she did not know rushed up to her in the street and cried, 'Louisa, what has happened? Why will you not speak to me?' She used to tell me about the difficult time they had when Grandfather died, leaving Granny with thirteen children. Some of the family had to be sent off to well-meaning relatives, which made them all very sad, and children in those days were certainly not pampered and were given very inadequate diets (jam and cake on Sundays only; eggs bad for children; rice; tapioca). She herself was sent off for a time to some relative.

When Aunt Emily had her own family she behaved very differently with them. She told me that an elderly uncle once found her on the floor romping with her children. He called her outside and said, 'If you behave like that your children will never respect you', to which she replied, 'I don't want to be respected; I Want to be loved' — and I am sure she was.

I used to spend a lot of time helping to build Boundary Ford. One of the first things they did in those days was to make the limepit. This was a shallow pond scraped out of the ground, with raised edges, which was filled with unslaked lime. When water was poured onto this it created a great heat and used to bubble and spit. We were told terrible stories of children falling in and being burned to death. The water and lime were mixed with a long instrument shaped like a hoe, and as the mixing continued the temperature fell. All mortar was made with this. I think a mixture of one part cement, three parts lime and seven parts sand was generally used, and, of course, building could not start until this was done.

As the walls rose, tall wooden scaffold poles were erected and secured with ropes, and from there 'putlogs' were tied, crossing to the wall where a brick was left out of the course to take the end, and across these were laid the scaffold planks on which the bricklayers stood. I spent a lot of time climbing about on the scaffolding and watching the men working. Boundary Ford was a beautiful home. The Wrights had inherited a very fine collection of furniture and chairs, and it was superbly polished and looked after by Molly, Elsie and Lettie. Every day after meals the dining room table was swept clean of crumbs with a half-moon shaped brush, and then 'hurred'. 'Have you hurred the table?' one would say to the other. This meant breathing heavily onto the surface of the table and then polishing hard with a duster.
THE FOREST

THE FOREST was so near — two fields, over a hedge, and there we were, and next to the garden it was our life. Often on hot afternoons in the summer we would go off, usually with Bessie or some of the 'grownups' to the bathing place on Avon Water. First we went along the lane past the back of the cottages where the Tregunnas and the Hydes lived, and past the field where later the Wrights would come to live in Boundary Ford, then down a short hill to the Forest. Here was an open glade with a small stream running down to join Avon Water, some holly trees and some big bramble bushes, wonderful places for blackberrying in September, and where I once found six White Admiral butterflies on a single bush. Tall clumps of bracken smelling strongly in the hot sun were scattered around. Straight ahead was a broad track going into Setthorns, and this went on winding up through the wood, crossing the railway line over a high bridge to the keepers cottage at the far end.

There were various side turnings off this main track, where the trees were mostly oak. One to the right led up through a stand of Scots pines to the corner of Setthorns, where the trees formed a hilltop landmark for miles around. We used to watch the woodmen felling timber at Setthorns; they felled a lot of timber here in the 1914-18 War, mostly mature oak, rather than thinnings. First they would decide where the tree was to fall. Then they would take an axe and cut off the bark and the outer few inches of wood down to ground level, cutting deeper on the side where the tree was to fall. Next two men would start Work with the cross-cut saw, cutting at ground level and again on the side of the fall, until they had cut about a third of the way through the trunk. They would then take out the saw and change over to the other side, and saw until they almost met the first cut, and the tree began to sway. Then, with the saw still in place, they would fix an iron wedge in the cut and with one or two strokes with the Sledgehammer they would crack the half inch or so of unsawn wood in the centre, and the tree would fall exactly where they had planned.

After this a chain would be fixed around the bole of the tree and a horse would pull it clear; when two or three trees were collected, they would be rolled up improvised ramps on to the pole waggon by ropes or chains attached to horses on the far side. They were then fixed to the pole waggon by chains which were tightened by twisting a sapling around the chain and under a log to hold it tight. Then the waggon would be hauled out of the wood, usually by three horses, one behind the other. The work was highly skilled and fascinating to watch, as the horses knew exactly what they were meant to do.

A turning to the left off the main track sloped down to a part of the wood where there were some big Spanish chestnuts and here we used to come in autumn to collect the fruit for roasting at home in the fire. The nuts were difficult to collect as the cases did not split easily and the prickles were very sharp. There was a wonderful acrid smell from the rotting leaves in autumn as we turned them over looking for the nuts. This path came out of the wood near the bathing place, thus cutting off a corner.

But mostly we turned to the left at the bottom of the hill, skirting the edge of the wood along a rough track made by ponies and cattle, and soon came to a bridge over the stream which had been built for hauling timber out. During the war they had an improvised sawmill just on the edge of the wood under a clump of very high and well-grown holly trees. A traction-engine, which ran on the offcut wood, had a big heavy flywheel and webbing band which worked a circular saw on the sawbench. The sawn wood, mostly for pit props which I think were used for supporting the sides of trenches and roofs of dugouts in France, was taken across this bridge and thus by road to Southampton. The stream in which the bathing place lay was mostly three to four yards wide and one to two feet deep, but it twisted so much that there were deep holes cut under the banks as it turned. In winter it often flooded but as the level dropped in summer the water was some way below the top of the bank, leaving steep sides of gravel exposed.

The bathing place itself was on a straight length of the stream where the winter floods had washed up a bank of sandy gravel at the lower end, leaving some ten yards of water which was just deep enough to swim in. Each spring we used to dig it a bit deeper by piling gravel from the bottom on to the bank. And on either side was a good area of closely cropped turf that was good for running races, playing French cricket or rounders, or just for picnicking. And up and downstream from here were lovely places to explore, behind banks of bracken, bog myrtle or bramble bushes, where a shallow bit of the stream was covered with smooth patches of water buttercup or other waterweed, wonderfully soft to lie on. And there were narrow bits to be dammed and bridges to be made. There were minnows to be caught in the shallows, with jam jars, and occasional small trout were seen. In summer it was alive with the song of willow wren and chiff-chaff, and often a shrill whistle followed by a streak of vivid blue declared the presence of the kingfisher; and he could often be seen perched on an overhanging branch, diving into a pool and coming up with a small fish in his beak, to toss it up and swallow it headfirst.

The boggy ground was full of flowers between the clumps of bog myrtle: bog asphodel, small starry yellow potentillas, cotton plants and the sundew which eats flies; spotted leafed orchids were also common, paler and taller than the ones which grew in the fields and which we called 'baby in the cradle'. And always we were on the look-out for adders basking in a sunny patch of dry sand, or winding their way through grass and heather, with the dark V showing on the back of their heads.

As we grew older so our horizons grew wider, and we went futher afield, exploring the New Forest either on foot or on bicycles, or in my case on Tommy, my pony. Aunt Georgie had been given a tricycle which she never rode, so she gave it to Aunt Emily up the lane at Boundary Ford. Aunt Emily never rode it either, so it was given to [her son] Maitland but was really shared by him and us, and we often went for rides across to Brockenhurst or anywhere, with one boy riding behind with his feet on the back axle, and two others on bicycles. We had great fun with visitors. Everyone rode bicycles then, and we used to bet them they couldn't ride the tricycle along the lane. Now, you steer a bicycle by leaning in the direction you want to go, but if you do the same on a tricycle you go straight into the ditch, and this happened time and again, to the great exasperation of grown-ups. Nothing looked simpler than to sit on a tricycle and steer; and nothing was simpler, provided you sat still and didn't lean. Some of the grown-ups got quite huffy when we pulled them out of a holly bush while we roared with laughter.

A very favourite walk was to follow the valley of Avon Water, past the bathing place, across bridges made from the trunks of trees with a strip sawn off at the sawmill to make a flat footwalk, and with a narrow wooden handrail, finding wonderful glades of smooth nibbled turf between banks of sweet-smelling bog myrtle or gorse, with willows, alders and in the autumn red spindleberries with orange seeds showing, past Holmsley station, over a hill we always called Mount Sion, up to Burley with its attractive cricket field merging into the Forest, past groups of New Forest ponies with their foals, and so on over the 'Hill of Difficulty' to the Longstaffs at Picket Hill.

Or up through Setthorns, stopping to look down on to the railway line from the high ridge near the keepers cottage, and from there on, either to explore Wilverley Inclosure and the old dead oak tree outside, known as the Naked Man, or across the valley with the five Scots pines and on up the hill to Hincheslea with its ponds, and perhaps on to Brockenhurst.

We used to go to Brockenhurst in the autumn to buy fireworks for bonfire night, and masks which fitted over our faces with holes for eyes and mouth and were fixed only by an elastic round the back of the head. These had a peculiar smell.

There was a grand quaking bog in the valley below Hincheslea [Longslade Bottom]. This was a pool of fine grey clay partially covered in turf and weed, and we used to love jumping on the turf to see the whole area quaking. One day, ona walk between Setthorns and Avon Water, I found a cow stuck in a bog with only its head and shoulders above ground. I had to run back home to give the alarm, and some men came with ropes and pulled the poor thing out, after a great struggle.

Once Sir William and Lady Hale-White came to stay and were taken for a walk in the Forest. Lady Hale-White went into a quaking bog up to her knees and came back covered in mud. She was very embarrassed at being discovered walking into the bathroom in her bloomers, trying to get cleaned up. We children knew all the boggy bits in the Forest and often ran across them, jumping from one familiar tussock to another.

And then we had paperchases. For days beforehand we tore up old newspapers into little bits, and these were put into a laundry bag. A lot of friends were invited out from Bournemouth for the event. Two hares were chosen and given a short start. They usually chose a route through a lot of wet, boggy places so that everyone arrived home later in the day covered in mud and ready for a bath. We were lucky as we knew our way through every bog for miles around.

Setthorns was the nearest wood and we knew every pathway in it and all the different parts, each with its own character. It was not an 'inclosure'; that is to say, it had no fence round it and animals — ponies and cattle — were free to stroll in and out and graze. [It was enclosed later.] Hincheslea was the same. These unfenced woods were mostly of mature trees with a certain amount of natural regeneration: young seedlings that had escaped being eaten and had found enough light filtering down through gaps between bigger trees to allow growth. These woods had originally been planted and later thinned as trees were extracted for timber. This had left trees standing in a natural way — not in straight lines — and they were spaced unevenly. Here they were mostly oak and beech, with an occasional Spanish chestnut, but at the further end, up at the corner of Setthorns, was a large stand of very fine old Scots pines, and under them was a smooth carpet of pine needles with here and there some bracken pushing up through. It was quite silent to walk on. There were also the cores of pine cones from which the seed had been eaten by red squirrels — the greys had not arrived and the reds were far more beautiful and attractive to look at, just like Squirrel Nutkin in the Beatrix Potter book. When you passed they would stamp their feet and scold from a high branch:

With all the prettiness and feigned alarm

And anger insignificantly fierce.

Holmsley and Wilverley, on the other hand, were 'inclosures' and were surrounded by a fence made of two inch-wide iron straps nailed between posts, usually set on a bank with a ditch on the outer side; the main 'rides' which were cut straight through the wood had large five-barred wooden gates in the fences for forestry use and small ones next to them for walkers. When the hunt came they would open the larger gate and both gates could be opened by a horseman without dismounting, by slipping the leather loop on the end of the riding crop over a knob on the top of the gate latch and pulling. These inclosures had been more recently planted and as they were not grazed by ponies and cattle there was a much thicker undergrowth of brambles, hawthorn and holly, and it was difficult to walk if you got off the main track.

In both kinds of wood the hollies grew very large, with enormously thick old trunks and smooth wrinkled grey bark looking like the skin of elephants' legs. They sent up long straight sideshoots from their branches, and I used to cut these to make walking sticks, carving their heads into fancy shapes of humans or animals.

Holmsley was a rather dismal wood, heavily brambled, and the trees mostly spruce and Scots pine. Once, walking here with Bessie, I stuck my stick into a queer grey-looking mass in some undergrowth and out came a swarm of very angry wild bees. We ran hard and Bessie had to keep up as best she could, to escape. I don't think any of us got stung.

Wilverley was also enclosed, but a much prettier wood with plantations of oak, beech and larch, as well as conifers. There was another keeper's cottage on a small knoll outside it, and the Naked Man was always an attraction. lt was one of the favourite rendez-vous for a meet of the hounds — either fox or buck. The huntsmen wore 'pink' for foxhunting and green for buck.

The railway line from Brockenhurst to Bournemouth West cut across between Setthorns and Wilverley, and there was a station at Holmsley where the line crossed the Avon Valley before going on to Wimborne. This had been the original line to Bournemouth until the new line was built through Sway, New Milton, Pokesdown and Christchurch to Bournemouth Central [opened 1888]. We felt rather important because a ticket from Waterloo to Bournemouth on the old LSWR London South-Western Railway] was marked 'Bournemouth Via Sway'.

In the woods, particularly under the Scots pines, were enormous ants' nests, often two feet or more high and made of pine needles which the very large brown blackheaded ants carried along well-marked tracks to pile up on the nests. If you disturbed them by driving a stick in, you could watch them rushing around carrying their big buff-coloured eggs to places of safety.

But the biggest excitement was to come on a herd of fallow deer. You needed to be downwind of them as they caught your scent very quickly and were off. There might be just a few, but often they were in large groups of twenty or so, with two or three stags, some with large and beautiful antlers. You mostly found them early or late, as in the afternoon they lay down among the bracken and undergrowth and could not be seen. The fences round the inclosures were no bar to the deer as they could jump over them with the greatest ease, and they often came to lie up here in the afternoons as there was more groundcover. I remember once coming upon a magnificent stag with a white cross on his forehead, which leaped easily over a six-foot bramble bush quite close to me. I only once saw a white hart and he really looked as though he belonged to a fairytale book.

Birds, of course, were everywhere. Green woodpeckers (or yaffles) with their jocular laugh were very common; greater spotted fairly common in the woods, and in the spring their drumming could be heard a long way off. Often the first clue was a heap of fresh chippings at the base of a tree where they had been chiselling a nesting hole with their remarkable powerful beaks. I don't remember lesser spotteds, but I'm sure they were there. There were no buzzards then; I think it was in the 1920s that they first came to the Forest and started to nest in trees instead of rocky cliffs. The Valleys were full of tits and warblers, while inside the woods the song of the woodlark and the trill of the wood wren shivered through the leaves. [Note: 'Nightingales; garden birds; birdsnesting; collecting eggs']

At night the 'fairy motor cycle' shirr of the nightjar started so regularly that you could almost set your watch by it — usually around ten thirty pm — and sometimes you saw it flying low between trees and, like the owl, completely silent. It had a series of low whistling conversational calls as well as its whirr, and would sometimes appear to follow one if walking at night. It made no nest and its very excitingly marked eggs (dark brown streaks on a pale background) were laid on a piece of barren ground and were so well camouflaged that one felt a glow of pride on finding them. Owls were common, particularly the white barn owl, and the twit-to-whoo of the tawny owl was heard nightly all through the autumn and winter. [Note: 'bats common']

Setthorns was a famous place for butterflies and moths. Mr Barker, the Vicar, was a keen collector and there was a terrible time when someone rushed out on a bicycle to find him with his net and a killing box in Setthorns, when he should have been taking a funeral which he had forgotten about. They were kept waiting for over an hour before he could be found and then change into his clerical clothes. White admirals were particularly common, loving the oak trees, but red admirals, tortoiseshells, peacocks as well as painted ladies and lovely large fritillaries and many more were common, including whites, brimstones, heaths and meadow browns. And at night some people went off to look for moths on tree trunks they had earlier 'sugared' with treacle. They carried a 'dark lantern' with a shutter which could be slid back to expose the candleflame light with which to look for the moths feeding on the treacle with their long tongues.

In September there were certain places in the Forest, as well as in our fields, where mushrooms grew, and these were always picked early and eaten with bacon and eggs for breakfast.

We often found gypsy encampments in the Forest, and sometimes used to stop and talk with them. Their 'tents' ['benders'] were very roughly made of branches of hazel or willow bent over in the shape of a U, with both ends stuck in the ground or one end joined to others at the top, and covered with canvas or any kind of cloth to hand. The fire was inside, with a black pot hanging over it, and there was no smoke exit apart from a gap in the covering on the front, and this could be closed by drawing a flap of the canvas across it. On the whole they were a friendly and cheerful lot but they poached and begged shamelessly. They made clothes pegs which they hawked round for sale and in season appeared with large wicker baskets full of violets, daffodils or primroses which they had picked in the Forest or stolen in early morning from gardens. They always came to the house as Mother could never resist giving them money generously. They were dark-skinned with long black hair and brown eyes and walked with an easy graceful swinging gait. The women mostly wore long black skirts, dark-coloured print blouses and black shawls round their shoulders; the men wore corduroy trousers, long jackets lined with big poachers pockets that would hold a rabbit easily, very old boots and cloth caps.
THE SEASONS

IN THE SPRING we looked for the first sign of the bracken fronds pushing up above ground and gradually unfurling as they grew, with the tip showing last, until in the heat of high summer they were often four or five feet high, smelling strongly in the hot sunshine. Then there was the pageant of the returning migrants. Every morning there was the dawn chorus, and the birds nesting. [Note: 'birds' nests, birds' eggs, butterflies, primrosing expeditions for Easter, wild daffies in the Forest, and wood anemones'] The earliest beech leaves were a great joy and soon all the leafless branches were covered, followed by the hawthorn blossom, wild rose, honeysuckle and the rest. The Forest got hot and sultry in August and the long summer days never seemed long enough.

After the heat of August the first fresh nip in the air of a September morning was enormously stimulating, and autumn brought a host of new joys as the Forest turned from green to yellow and gold. The fires were lit in the evenings and we roasted the sweet chestnuts we had collected from the woods, and played conkers with the horse chestnuts. We also played dibs a lot, with small smooth stones, or knucklebones with bones that the butcher used to save for us. Marjory always won this.

Then winter. We were quite accustomed to the dark. There were no electric light switches conveniently located just inside the door, and no electric torches. We could walk everywhere at night, and darkness had no terror — apart from shutting up the chickens, and the time I walked into a cow.

Everyone wore boots with hobnails, and on a frosty night the clatter could be heard a long way off and you could see the sparks as a hobnail struck a flint on the road.

We seemed to get more cold winters then, and the innumerable small shallow ponds all over the Forest froze easily, often leaving an inch or so of air under the ice. These were all good for a slide.

In winter they often used to burn patches of the Forest where the gorse had grown tall and lank. Next year a new growth of lush green grass would appear and improve the grazing for ponies and cows. A lot of villagers had commons right to graze a few cows, so it was important for them to do this as the feed was pretty poor over most of the Forest.

I remember coming home on a Saturday evening from [my prep school] Saugeen on a very cold winters evening. There had been a spell of hard frost and it was blowing a strong north-east wind. At the station we were told there was a big forest fire going the other side of the village. This was always exciting, so we ran home, changed into old clothes and rushed to find the fire. There was a wall of flame several hundred yards long, leaping high into the air and fanned by the strong wind, and it was getting perilously near two thatched cottages. Water was short as all the ponds were frozen, and men had formed a chain, handing on buckets of water which had to be raised from a well. The water was being thrown on to the thatch while a lot of other men and women were trying to beat the fire out with sticks. Of course we joined in, and luckily the fire was held on the edge of a green sward in front of the cottages. We got home excited and very black.
THE VILLAGE

THERE WERE VARIOUS other families in Sway, who played a large part in the lives of the older brothers and sisters, and on whose fringe we three boys just touched.

Raymond, Christine and Sibyl Clement-Brown, who lived at Little Arnewood and whose house comes into _The Children of the New Forest_ , were roughly contemporaries of Hetty, Dora, Bernard and Elisabeth. Hetty and Christine were great friends, both artistically inclined, and I remember the great excitement each month when our copy of 'The Studio' arrived, with articles about modern painters and always one or two beautiful coloured reproductions of pictures, protected by fine tissue paper. We had a whole shelf of earlier issues beautifully bound in green and gold leather each year, and I recall discussions about the acceptance or rejection of the French Impressionists which the world was so very slow to admire, and particularly the place of Van Gogh, whom most people thought terrible.

It was, I think, Hetty and Christine who produced monthly editions of 'The Swayoscope' with watercolour sketches and poems by Hetty, Christine, Sibyl and Elisabeth.

Opposite Kettlethorns, on the lane leading down towards Setthorns, lived Mr and Mrs Sladen, with Stanley and Violet who were, I suppose, in their early twenties and much despised. But they joined in with the amateur theatricals, in particular Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring and Shakespeare's King John. These were major undertakings and were performed at a small theatre in the grounds of some people who lived the other end of the village, whose name I have forgotten. I remember that the line 'This is a damned and bloody corpse' had to be altered to 'This is a horrid and a beastly corpse' in deference to the feeling of the three Miss Bernards who were very puritanical. Humfry, dressed in Dora's tartan petticoat in lieu of a kilt, recited 'The Relief of Lucknow' before one of these plays. At the end he made a low bow and his makeshift glengarrie fell off into the footlight, which was an oil lamp, and caught fire.

Then there were Mr Herbert and Mr Fred Moser, two brothers who lived in the village. Herbert had been a champion croquet player and had a superb croquet lawn. Mrs Herbert was stone deaf and had a large black ear trumpet into which you had to shout, but even then she rarely heard what you said. They had no children. Herbert was very kind to me and let me use his photographic room to develop, print and enlarge my snapshots. He lived close to the station and his house is now a hotel. Close by was a small bungalow in which my grandmother, Mother's mother, came to live for some years until she died. I can remember her bedridden and giving me biscuits out of a barrelshaped Royal Derby china jar.

The Fred Mosers lived near the Clement-Browns and close to Sway Tower, a tall concrete building and a landmark for miles around. They had a daughter called Kara and used to give Christmas parties with progressive games, which we all went to.

At one time a great scandal arose in the village as it was alleged that Mr Herbert Moser was misbehaving with Nurse Kelly, the district nurse who lived next door and used to visit his wife. The village was split down the middle, with Fred siding against Herbert. Maitland's friend, Tom Bennett, from Guys, wrote:

If poor old Fred

Stabbed Kelly dead

There'd be an almighty stir; but

I almost swear

He'd never dare

To send the corpse to Herbert.

Then there was the Vicar, Arthur Leigh Barker, and his Wife, Eleanor; she had very magnifying glasses so that her eyes always seemed too big. Mr Barker had a much exaggerated clerical voice and Maitland Wright used to take him off mercilessly, preaching whole sermons in his voice. He was tall and went about on a strange bicycle whose seat seemed to be suspended on a framework of green string. He ended up by leaving Eleanor and eloping with the wife of Lord Arthur Cecil who lived nearby, and whom I remember reading the lessons very badly in church.

Church [St Luke's] was awful, and every Sunday morning we had to be dressed up and walk there with Mother. The one bell had no resonance and Mother used to encourage me by saying that its monotonous noise was calling, 'Tom, Tom, Tom.' [In 1912 the Revd Leigh Barker, who also disliked the harsh sound of this one bell, had four hemispherical bells from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry installed.] I remember old farmer Feltham used to go to church in a smock on Sundays. The church was, I should guess, 1860-1880 [1839 with later additions], and it had stained glass windows to match. Mr Harmsworth was the sexton and used to say all the Amens and Responses from the back of the church.

We all had collecting boxes to collect money for the Waifs and Strays. These were sealed with sticky paper on the bottom, and our names written on it. They were opened at the end of the year. They had a pathetic picture of some children dressed in rags and sitting on a doorstep. Once a year our garden was thrown open with a grand sale of work in aid of this charity. There were various stalls at which we all sold things: old clothes, hats, sweets, things made by Hetty's children in the craft room, pots of jam and marmalade, cakes, and more. The whole village came and I think we enjoyed it a lot more than the grown-ups. One year George and Sybil Clement-Brown made quite a lot of money taking people's snaps with my No. 2 Brownie box camera. Unfortunately none of them came out!

Sometimes Bessie used to take us up to see Mr and Mrs Feltham in their old thatched farmhouse on the hill beyond the Mead End bridge, on the way up to Hordle and Tiptoe [since burnt down]. We could just see it from the nursery window. They had an enormous fireplace with a fire of large cleft logs and a big wide chimney. We used to creep in and sit on stools by the fire and look straight up the chimney to watch the smoke curling up and away into the sky. Mrs Feltham [a Sway girl] used to give us homemade scones to eat, and she showed us all round the farmyard and let us scratch the backs of the pigs in the pigsties.

If you walked on past the church the road wound down a hill to a bit of the village called Durrants Town. There was a small stream here, with an iron bar between posts to stop people falling in, and this was lovely for amateur gymnastics. Beyond this was a very favourite shop run by Mrs Delicate, who sold tobacco, variegated wool, liquorice bootlaces, and sugar-almond sweets which we called goose eggs. [Mrs Annie Delicate, a young widow, shared the house with her sister, Miss Hood]

From here the road ran on to the Forest and Setthorns Corner; or left past the brick kiln and back to West's butcher's shop, Hopkins the baker and Station Road. Mr Hopkins had a magnificent baker's van with Walter Hopkins & Sons painted on the side and a door at the back through which you could see all the shelves full of loaves and cakes. Bessie walked us for miles round all this, and much more, and I never remember feeling bored or tired. And later, of course, we bicycled further afield, to Lymington, Boldre, Brockenhurst and Burley.

I remember the first time I ever stayed up until midnight. George and I had bicycled up to the Clement-Browns and Mr Clement-Brown and Raymond were playing a hundred-up at billiards. It was an exciting finish, ninety-four to ninety-seven, I think, when abruptly and without explanation they stopped. The green baize was brushed clean and covered with a cloth, and the cues returned to the cue rack. The clock had struck twelve and it was Sunday. Mrs Clement-Brown was a strict Congregationalist.

On November 5th the MP for the New Forest (Conservative; in those days it was either Conservative or Liberal) gave an enormous fireworks and bonfire party to which we were invited. We had a hired cab and I can still recall the wonderful smell of the leather lining and of the seats and sides. The MP lived, I think, near Boldre, and it must have taken us over an hour to get there. There was a huge tea party, and. as soon as darkness fell fireworks with rockets, squibs, Roman candles and Catherine wheels, and finally a vast bonfire into which were thrown sackloads of potatoes. The difficulty was that the outsides of the potatoes were too hot to hold and the middles were raw; but it all seemed exciting, and they smelled good!

And then home in the dark with a candle in each of the sidelights on the cab. At one point we had to splash through a shallow ford and this gave us the only clue as to how far we had got. The sound of the iron-bound wheels on the gravel road and the squeaking of the leather was soporific; we fell asleep and were woken by our heads 'falling off' whenever the cab gave a big jolt.

I also remember going to a children's party on the outskirts of Brockenhurst and on coming out to find the cab seeing Halley's comet with its long tail. This must have been in 1908.
CRAFTSMEN

IN THOSE DAYS there were very few cars and everything in the countryside had to be moved by horse and cart. So every village had its own brick kiln, timber yard and blacksmith's forge. A favourite walk with Bessie was to go and see bricks being made at the brick kiln in Middle Road. The bricks were hand-made in a wooden mould from clay dug from the clay pit in the same field. When finished, they were dusted with sand and stacked on racks in the open air but with a light wooden shelter to keep off rain, and they would be left here to dry for several weeks. When thoroughly dry they were stacked inside the dome-shaped kiln with airspaces between the stacks. The kiln was built of bricks, too, and had a central opening in the roof to act as a chimney, and four small arched entrance doors around the sides. When all was ready, a very small fire was lit in the centre and this was gradually increased by feeding in faggots from the entrance doors until the whole kiln was red hot. Then the four entrance doors were blocked up with clay and bricks, and the whole left for several days to cool slowly before the doors were knocked open and the red bricks removed on flat-topped wheelbarrows and stacked for use in the field.

There was a big timber yard at Brockenhurst [Lunn Bros] and next to this a factory where they made toy wooden Dobbin horses. We used to walk over to watch the big trunks of oak, beech and pine being sawn into planks or posts on the sawboards by a big circular saw worked by a belt from the steam traction engine, and then on to watch the Dobbins being put together and painted with large black spots, horsehair manes and tails, a leather bridle and reins, all standing on a wooden base with big wooden wheels.

Later, I made great friends with Mr Tom Holley, the Sway blacksmith, whose forge was the far end of the village, past the church and on the Arnewood Bridge road which led up to Sway Tower. I often held the horses' heads while he made them new horseshoes and shod them. The old forge was just a pile of dark grey-black ashes until the great bellows were pumped by raising and pressing down the long wooden handle. Very soon a glow appeared in the middle of the pile of ash and sparks started to fly, until the whole mound was red hot. Every now and then he threw a handful of coal dust on top.

He would take off the old shoe, first twisting off the bent-over ends of the old nails from the hoof. The bottom of the hoof was cleaned of dirt and stones and the horn cut down with a sharp curved knife and filed smooth with a large iron rasp. Then he would take up a straight iron bar in his long tongs and thrust this deep into the heat of the fire. Soon this would come out red hot. With great dexterity he would take this out of the fire with the tongs in his left hand and lay it on the anvil, while with his right hand he would shape it around the beak of the anvil by repeated strokes with a heavy hammer until it had the shape of a horseshoe. This would then be taken to the horse's hoof to judge the size, heated again, and the size adjusted by more hammering. After further beating, the nail holes were punched, a small guard [a calkin] raised in the front, and small downlip made at the back. Next he would lift the horse's hoof, bringing it forward between his knees which were covered by his long leather apron, and the still hot horseshoe burned onto the hoof so that it fitted exactly. Then the shoe would be plunged into the tank of cold water with a great hissing noise, while the smell of burned hoof pervaded the forge. Finally the shoe was nailed onto the hoof with nails which penetrated the hoof and came out on the outside to be bent over and beaten flat.

This was only one of his many skills, for he was forever mending bits of machinery, making ploughshares, or fixing new iron tines for waggons and carts and wheelbarrows, and one came to realise what a perfectly shaped instrument an anvil was for so many jobs and with what skill he handled the red hot iron. He also made iron hoops for us children to roll along the roads with either a wooden stick or a bit of bent iron attached to a wooden handle. We used to take these hoops for long walks along the Forest roads and tracks with us. In those days the roads were perfect playgrounds for children as there were no cars and only occasional horses, carts or bicycles. Few of the roads were tarmacked and in the summer you could always feel and taste the dust between your teeth if you were bicycling. Shoes were full of grit and the hedges were white.
HOLIDAYS

IN THE SUMMER we went off by train with Bessie and some of the older members of the family for a holiday at Swanage. We had to change at Bournemouth West from the LSWR [London SouthWestern Railway] to the S&DJR [Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway]: Poole, Hamworthy Junction, Wareham, Swanage. Swanage was a 'terminus', and from there the engine had to reverse, pushing the train back as far as Wareham. We had lodgings on the Marine Parade where the family had been going for years. One year, before my day, there had been trouble: Marjory and Hetty were nice, well-behaved children and used to collect and press wild flowers. Dora clearly thought this occupation tame, so she decided to try pressing sea anemones. Unfortunately, faute de mieux, she pressed them in the family Bible of the lady who kept the lodgings, which was not very popular.

In front of Marine Parade was a narrow road with a railway on the other side, and the sea wall, and at the further end of this was the tunnel through which the stream ran out from under the town into the sea. Half way up the sea wall was a ledge some nine inches wide, which was covered at high tide but exposed at low tide, and it was great fun getting 'along the ledge' as close to high tide as one dared.

There were expeditions to Peveril Point beyond the pier, where there were rocky pools full of sea weeds, sea anemonies and shrimps, and beyond, past the stone Globe, to Tilly Whim caves where, it was alleged, smugglers used to land contraband from the cliff beyond. Some benefactor [George Burt] had laid out this area [Durlston Head] and had the huge stone Globe with the map of the world carved on it erected. He also had pieces of rock made smooth, with biblical texts carved on them. There was one which read, 'The Earth is the Lords and he made it.' Unfortunately, the adjoining landlord had put a notice quite close, which read: 'Private property. Trespassers will be prosecuted.'

There were trips round the bay in motor boats, regattas, and processions round the town ending up with a fete in the recreation ground. One time we were taken down one of the stone quarries where Purbeck stone was quarried. We went down a long slope and were each given a candle to carry, as it was, of course, quite dark. I ducked my head going through a tunnel with rather a low roof and singed the hair off my forehead. It was fascinating but rather frightening and I think I got confused later between this expedition and the ones with George MacDonald's Curdy and the Goblins, which frightened me for years.

Then We had to have our photographs taken. The photographer had a glass-roofed studio with lobster pots and palm trees around it. In those days, having got his prey nicely placed, the photographer retired behind his very large camera on its tripod, covered himself with a black cloth, and looked at the image thrown through the lens onto ground glass to make sure all was well. Next he put a cover over the lens, slid in a glass photographic plate, and said, 'Now, keep quite still.' Then he deftly removed the cover for two or three seconds before replacing it.

As soon as the photographer said, 'Keep quite still', my head shook violently, and this annoyed the man as he had to go through the whole rigmarole over again and had wasted an expensive plate. He brought up an adjustable metal support standing on a tripod and ending in a semicircle of metal with a padded block at either end. These were placed at either side of my head to help keep me still. But as he pronounced the magic words, 'Keep quite still', my head still shook and the whole apparatus rattled furiously. In the end the thing got done, but somehow I didn't look my best. Humfry kept still all right, but he either shut his eyes or looked up to heaven while tilting his head towards the ground. But there was a nice background of lobster pots and palm trees.

We usually had one expedition to Bournemouth and back on one of the old paddle steamers — the Edinburgh Castle, perhaps. It seemed such a sensible way of turning round, to have one huge paddle wheel going forward and the other backwards! There was plenty of deck space to run about and explore, and it was exciting to go into the engine room with its heavy smell of warm oil and watch the huge engines turning the immense piston rods. We went quite close to Old Harry Rocks at the end of Ballard Down, leaving Studland and the entrance to Poole Harbour on our left, and looking across to the Isle of Wight and the Needles, with the lighthouse on the right, and so to Bournemouth Pier and then back to Swanage.

It all seemed exciting but after a fortnight it was nice to catch the train home and catch up with the news.

One day, I suppose around 1911 or 1912, we went off with Bessie and Marjory by train to Southampton where we went round the docks to see some of the big steamships, and then on to something quite new at that time: a cinema. Here, we saw the artillery demonstrate the old and the new way of getting a field gun over a wall. I think the new way was to blow a hole in the wall; the old way was to take the gun to bits and haul it over with ropes and pulleys. In any event it was a moving picture and as such was new and exciting.

When I was seven or eight I went with Marjory on a visit to stay with Aunt Effie and the Stevenses at Bradfield, where I later went to school and spent many happy days at their house, Horselease. We went by train from Sway, changing at Eastleigh and ending up at Theale. Here a cab was waiting to take us the four miles to Bradfield. This was a slow journey as the horse came down to a slow walk up the hill around Englefield Park, and I remember getting exasperated as I could never quite see over the wall between road and park. Just as the park came into view the wall would rise up a foot, and over and over again I just missed the view. Then faster down the hill, and again slow up the hill past the workhouse and finally down the long drive and up to the house.

Horselease had been built for Uncle Tom Stevens whom I never knew. He had died earlier, been buried in the garden, and an oak tree planted over his grave. The house had been designed by Johnnie Vaughan, an old family friend and a good architect. It was memorable as having been built of concrete as a one—storey building surrounding an open courtyard, but as the family grew a second storey was added and the courtyard turned into a central hall with a staircase leading from this up to a gallery out of which led all the bedrooms. All this was nicely panelled in wood (oak?) and there was a large fireplace on one side which burned big logs of cleft wood. The rooms were beautifully furnished. There was a grand piano in the drawing room, a library with a fine collection of books, and a big dining room. All the downstairs windows opened outward, with no central pillar, which gave one a nice illusion of being half out-of-doors. There was a big drying room where all wet clothes were hung up to dry, and where a boiler kept the room always warm.

A bell rope had a big school bell above it, and this was rung at a quarter to one and again at five to one so that the family could be summoned from a distance in time for lunch. Outside the back door was a big free-standing brick-built baking oven with a chimney behind. On baking days a whole faggot of brushwood was placed in the oven and lit. The iron door was shut, with a ventilator open, and when the faggot had burned itself out, the ashes would be raked from the oven and the bread, pies or tarts placed inside and the door closed. The bread was delicious. The house had a very characteristic and lovely smell which I think was due to a mixture of beeswax polish and wood smoke.

Aunt Effie had been married when only seventeen, and had started her married life in London where Uncle Tom was a solicitor, but as her family grew (Henry, Amy, Tom, Polly, the twins Jack and Bill, and Miriam) they moved into the country. She was small, very attractive to look at, with a firm mouth and strong views on everything. Definitely someone to be reckoned with, but always kind and sympathetic.

There was a large garden with two grass tennis courts, a cluster of Lombardy poplars and a cedar of Lebanon, farmland with a cowshed and other farm buildings, a large area of woodland which the sons used to coppice, a bit each year, a good orchard beyond with two cottages, and a large acreage of let farmland which included the River Pang with good trout fishing, and the Rising where half the river rose out of one great hole. Here you could see fountains of white sand being forced up by the perpetual springs of water which gave the whole Rising a jetclear blue-green colour. There were long sinuous stems of water weed coming up from the depths, to fan out on the surface, and large trout would swim around. This water ran out at one side of the Blue Pool to feed a beautifully kept watercress bed.

My first morning I went out to explore the garden. It was a brilliantly fine sunny day in early summer, and I wandered out over the front terrace with brickwork beautifully laid in herring-bone pattern, past the end of the front tennis court and between some big evergreen trees towards the cowsheds. I rounded one of the trees and came on a sight I shall never forget. Here was a peacock strutting up and down in an open grass glade with his tailfeathers fully fanned and showing magnificently in the morning sunlight, while his three peahens stood watching with obvious admiration. Truly this seemed a magical place.

Beyond this a path passing under a large Portuguese laurel led into the wood, and there were a lot of side paths off this, and endless places to explore as the paths wound their way through oak trees underplanted with hazel often covered in honeysuckle. Eventually you came out at the far end of the wood into the orchard with its cottages beyond, and the road leading down to Folly Bridge, the Pang, Kirnber's Farm and the Rising.

Every morning I used to go along the drive to the white entrance gate where there was a pillar box with a basket where the postman left the letters, and these I brought back to the house. The drive was, I suppose, only a quarter of a mile long, but it seemed quite an expedition. And from this drive was a footpath crossing a big field with Wellgrown trees growing here and there. This led back to the road and to Bradfield College with its attractive buildings all designed by various Scott architects, and its beautiful playing fields going down to the river.

Aunt Effie was an old and intimate friend of Buffy's grandmother, who then lived at Pangbourne, and it seems more than likely that Buffy [Tom's wife] and I met at a children's party at this time, but neither of us can feel sure of this.

There was a wonderful old man called Johnson who used to bring two pails of milk in each morning, suspended by chains from a wooden yolk across his shoulders. He talked such broad Berkshire that most people could not understand much of what he said.
INFLUENCES

THERE ARE four things in particular about my childhood which I think had a big effect on my later life. The first was that I always loved the early mornings. When the old grandfather clock struck six and we were allowed out, there was a wild rush as we disappeared into the garden. At this time I often went off by myself, exploring favourite and secret places, and often going into the greenhouse to admire the maidenhair ferns and sense the delicious smell of warm geranium leaves; or across the lane to The Wood, to watch birds and rabbits and dream of my secret garden; or pick a bunch of divine-smelling violets from under the fig tree in the kitchen garden. And in autumn and springtime the wonderful crisp smell of a frosty morning and the warmth of the first rays of the sun.

One morning I went across the hayfields, over a stile and out into the Forest. I came to a shallow gravelly stretch of the stream and, coming round a corner from behind a gorse bush, came upon a heron standing on one leg in the stream, fishing. The heron was as surprised as I was, and with an enormously loud 'Kraak' it flew just a few feet over my head and away.

The second thing I learned to love was walking. There were, of course, very few cars and we walked everywhere and almost tirelessly, although I remember suffering from heat and thirst. In the summer we used to carry small round pebbles in our pockets, to suck when we got thirsty, and we used to eat the leaves of the wood sorrel whose sour taste produced a flow of saliva. Often the whole family would join us and go for lovely all-day walks and further afield, to Rhinefield, Mark Ash, Wilverley or Boldre. Sometimes we walked at night, our eyes quickly getting used to the darkness so that we could find our way easily; though sometimes the woods were very dark and once I did get badly frightened. I was walking through a heavily wooded part of Setthorns on a moonless night with low cloud when I walked into the side of a cow.

The third influence was home-making. The houses we always had may have been primitive clearings under trees or rhododenrons or up trees or underground, but to me they were always cosy and comfortable, with the floor swept, the warmth of a fire (except in the tree houses) and something cooked to eat. And this love continued later, on my frequent walking tours, when we often carried homemade tents and made comfortable camps each night — especially with Jack Till who for years was my companion on these expeditions [a fellow medical student at Guys and lifelong friend].

And lastly, of course, my love of gardens and gardening. Very early, I think, the smells attracted me, if only of the great piles of lawn mowings which we used to dive into. Lavender, lad's love, columbines (we used to nip off the ends of the horns and suck the nectar out), and, of course, roses. I used to spend hours in the rose garden, sitting under the shade of the big silver birch or basking on the grass. Sometimes (but publish it not in Gath) lying on top of the yew hedge. I remember the wonderful smell of the big American Currant and of the white Wichuriana rambler, and also the tulip tree with its improbable-shaped leaves and curious but beautiful flowers.
SCHOOL

WHEN I WAS nine years old I was sent to the prep school in Bournemouth called Saugeen. Maitland and Bernard had both been there before, and George was already there when I went. Humfry followed a year later. We came home on Saturday after games, and went back on Monday morning, walking to the station at Sway with Daddy and being met at Pokesdown station by Fawkes and the car. The headmaster was Mr P.H.L. Evans, a lifelong patient of Daddy's since he contracted syphilis when at university and developed _Tabes dorsalis_. He had a strange sense of humour and on his garden seat had written:

ORE STABIT

FORTIS ARARE

PLACET O

RESTAT

[Try this in English!]

We had a maths master called Mr Raisin and as he had a cockney accent he was always called Gripes. We slept in long dormitories with wooden partitions between the beds, and curtains drawn across the front. I remember an 'old boy' writing a poem in the school magazine:

If your homework is not done

Do you egg your master on

Into lengthy dissertations

On the history of nations;

The discussion deftly turning

Into various fields of learning:

Mountains, valleys, rivers, passes

While the hour of danger pases?

Do you climb on lawless missions

Up your dormitory partitions?

We had just the self-same tricks

We that lived in '86!

This was the first time that I had been in a house with any form of lighting other than candles and lamps. Here we had gas light — plain jets which flickered in the passages, and gas mantles in the classrooms. These broke easily, and new ones had to be fitted carefully. When new, they had to be lit with a match, when the wax covering would flare up, giving off a strange but not unattractive smell. There was a ring at the base of each gaslight which swivelled over an inlet hole; this regulated the amount of air entering, to mix with the gas, and needed regulating to get the best light.
THE 1914-18 WAR

THE WAR STARTED on 4th August 1914 and I remember bicycling down to Sway station and coming back with the newspaper announcing this. At school we had to learn the national anthems of all the allies, including Serbia and Montenegro, and we had a vast map of France on which flags on pins were moved to mark the battlefields. There was of course no radio or television.

In 1915 I went to Bradfield and in 1916 Bernard was killed, aged nineteen. This shattered both my parents and they decided to give up Kettlethorns and settle in Bournemouth. This was a terrible blow to us, and I remember feeling quite devastated when Mother wrote to me at school, telling me this. [Dora, who never ceased to regret Kettlethorns and shared in the devastation of Bernie's death, was so sorry for the three younger boys that she bought them all new second-hand bicycles.] We had one wonderful fortnight when several of us went out and camped in the Bungalow in the summer holidays before the sale took place. We played a lot of tennis, went for the old walks in the Forest, and, I remember, quenched our thirst with vast quantities of orangeade: one lemon, five oranges, a quarter of a pound of sugar and about four pints of boiling water, left to cool.

We moved first into 'rooms' in Bournemouth, run by a Miss Jeremiah, whose boarding house was furnished entirely in red plush. She and Bessie made friends and she gave Bessie a corded silk black dress which had belonged to Queen Victoria and had been given to a lady's maid — a friend of the Miss Jeremiahs. After some months we moved to St Wilfred's and finally into Fairlea — a lovely house with a garden opening onto the West Cliff, with views across the bay to Ballard Down and Old Harry Rocks.
SWAY NOTES (2003)

_For most of this information we are indebted to Tony Blakeley whose_ Sway from A to Z _is available from him at 1 Middle Road, Sway, Lymington, Hants SO41 6AT._

The name Kettlethorns was given first to a large area of common land between Middle Road and the open Forest before the Sway Enclosure Act of 1811. In 1820 most of these areas were fenced and new roads laid. Brighton Road Was originally called Kettlethorns Lane; it is believed that Brighton Road and Manchester Road were named after the home towns of the gangs of navvies who built the new railway (opened 1888).

The Scotts' house, Kettlethorns, was probably built some time between 1817 and 1841. Herbert Moser added to it after 1895, and in the 1930s further extensions were said to have been made by Gilbert Scott. The older part of the house remains today, but Herbert Moser's and Gilbert Scott's additions have gone, along with most of the land. New houses now surround it.

The lane beside the house that still leads down to Setthorns Inclosure was originally called Forest Gate Road, then Kettle Gutter Lane (after Kettlegutter Ditch, 1670) and finally Adlams Lane after the farmer who lived at Kettlethorns at the end of the 19th century. Setthorns was named after the custom of planting thorn with acorns to protect the young oaks from being eaten by deer. It was eventually enclosed after the 1914-18 War.

Boundary Ford remains, though it has been substantially altered and extended.

The bathing place on Avon Water is still there, at what is called Broken Bridge.

Bernie's death: The New Forest Magazine, July 1916, writes: 'Lieutenant Bernard Scott of the London Regt was reported wounded and missing after leading an attack against the German trenches at Vimy ridge on May 21st. There is no further news at this time of writing, but it is fitting to express the great sympathy with his family in their anxiety for a life of such bright promise and high hope.' He is commemorated, along with some 35,000 others, in (Bay 10 of) Sir Edwin Lutyens' Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais and also on the Sway War Memorial and on the Memorial Board in the church.

Jim Gates, who was also killed in the 1914-18 War, came from a family who had been in Sway since the early 1600s. There are still Gates in Sway today.

Mr John Harmsworth, the sexton, was a retired police constable and Parish Clerk.

Herbert Moser, who came to live in the Village at the end of the 19th century (as did his brother, Fred), was a great local benefactor. He built a new house, Heathey House, in 1906 and donated land from the Heathey Close estate for public buildings: a post office and shop, Nurse's Cottage, and a WI hall. He helped to establish a district nurse in the village (the nearest doctors were four miles away at Lymington) and was chairman of the Parish Council from 1895, when it was first set up, until 1922. Heathey House is now the White Rose Hotel.

The Sladens lived in a little house called Forest Edge opposite Kettlethorns. Their son Stanley had been baptised Eddystone Winstanley after the builder of the first Eddystone light, who perished when the lighthouse was destroyed by storm in 1703. The Revd Arthur Leigh Barker wrote of Mr Sladen: 'an elderly man who had made a failure of farming in Australia, and without the heart or the pluck to turn to anything else, was trying on insufficient means to start his three children in life. A crabbed and disagreeable person, he never counted for much in the village but everyone was fond of his wife and sorry for her.'

The Misses Bernard lived at Birchy Hill. There were in fact four of them. The elder two were described by the Revd Arthur Leigh Barker as 'some of the most troublesome people who ever came to torment and plague the unfortunate Vicar of the Parish'. Humfry used to recite a jingle which began: 'If Miss Bernard were made of lard . . .'

Lord Arthur Cecil lived at The Mount, now the Passford House Hotel.

Picket Hill, the Longstaffs' house, is now a B&B.

The Sway brickyard, which closed in 1914, was in Middle Road, where new houses at Stanford Rise now stand. It was owned by Jesse Sparks, landlord of the Forest Heath Hotel in Station Road, which was built at the time that the railway opened in 1888.

Lunn's timber yard moved from Brockenhurst to Sway in 1920. A description of it there gives some idea of the excitement it must have provided for the small Scott boys: 'A jostling, thriving timber yard with the constant whirr and scream of steam-driven saws and the clatter of huge horse-drawn waggons bringing in the timber hewn from the Forest to be sawn, stacked and weathered.' Pope's turnery works next to it in Brockenhurst made toy wooden horses, brush heads, table legs, banister rails etc, which were sent all over the country. It was destroyed by fire in 1909 but reopened at Balmer Lawn.

Saugeen prep school in Bournemouth was founded in 1873. Mrs Brackenbury, the wife of the first headmaster, named it after a district near Lake Huron in Canada, inhabited by a native North American tribe known as the Saugeen. We do not know why.
SUBSEQUENT HISTORY

TOM SCOTT was in general practice in Newbury from 1932 to 1964. He married Elizabeth Mary Beverley Ross (Buffy) in 1933, and his architect sister, Elisabeth (Aunt Billy), built Wattlefield at Speen for them in 1934. Tom worked in the Newbury area throughout the Second World War, also acting as surgeon at the Newbury District Hospital and standing in for many other doctors who had been called away to the war. Exhaustion, and his family's anxiety that this might lead to a recurrence of the TB that he had suffered as a student at Guys (when he spent a happy year recuperating at Picket with the Longstaffs, and planting a nuttery), forced him to agree to some months of rest in Stagsden after the war (when he read favourite Trollopes and played patience), and angina eventually led him to retire early from the Newbury practice. He died of a coronary on 10th November 1979.

He was by nature a man of great gentleness, who loved poetry, classical music (but he also adored Gilbert & Sullivan operas) and Trollope and was easily alarmed by Dickens. Above all he loved people, especially his family and grandchildren, and had a gift for friendship of which I think he was completely unaware. He loved working with his hands: never without a penknife in his pocket, he whittled driftwood, grafted trees and got into trouble at airports. He taught himself to pot, make glazes and build a kiln by reading Bernard Leach's books — we took turns through the night feeding the firing with 'perfectly dry pine'. He was also a man of great stamina, energy and physical strength: he laid land drains at Wattlefield and made a grass tennis court; planted rare apple trees and built an apple house; built an Anson shelter in a clay bank (which, mercifully never used, collapsed during one night of heavy rain); made a repeat of the Kettlethorns 'houses' in the form of Twigina; turned huge compost heaps; and planted a nuttery. He and Buffy became enthusiastic and accomplished gardeners, making memorable gardens at Wattlefield, at Kimber's Pond in the Honeybottom Valley outside Newbury, at Warren Down, a mile down a farm track near Peasemore (huge, with a large pond, made against doctors orders), and finally at Holly Bank in Peasemore itself. Here, Buffy dressed some twenty-five Sasha dolls in the clothes she remembered from the beginning of the First War, while Tom knitted jerseys on hairpins and made beautifully carved farm implements to go with them. These dolls are now in the Dunster Doll Museum, in Somerset, with pride of place as the Scott Collection.

Tom was a great knitter, knitting his own socks and jerseys; at his funeral fifteen of his sixteen grandchildren wore Guernseys knitted by him (the youngest, Sophie, two months old, wore a christening dress). After Tom's death, Buffy moved eventually to a house at the end of Elizabeth (Twig's) garden in Wootton Fitzpaine in Dorset, and from there to nursing homes in Lyme Regis. She died in 1997, shortly before her ninetieth birthday.

To Tom and Buffy's delight, Tom's cousin, Ray Wight, and his wife, Janine, moved into Wattlefield with their family. The house was later threatened with demoliton, but architectural protest in the press saved it — as an example of Elisabeth Scott's work and as good architecture of the period. It remains today, but shorn of its acre of garden and diminished by new houses clustering round it.

Marvellous if sometimes fraught family holidays, often with extra children added to the five of us (Caroline, John, Simon, Elizabeth and Georgina), were always in 'real' country — Cornwall, Devon, Pembrokeshire, Dorset, the Lake District, Isle Martin in the Summer Isles, Skye; sometimes camping (Tom's homemade, down-filled sleeping bag was found stuffing a cushion in 2001), sometimes in farmhouses, and often near the sea. One holiday at Penare on Dodman Point in Cornwall was pretty much ruined when Tom started Arthur Ransome's _We Didn't Mean to Go To Sea_ ; he was so terrified that he was quite unable to put it down. We learned from him, as he had learned from Tom I and those who lived in the Forest, to know and respect the forces, plants and inhabitants of the natural world — gales at sea, rock pools, rivers, birds, animals and wild flowers. Stories about the New Forest never failed, and my brother John, who climbed into our parents' bed in the early morning, saying, 'Daddy, tell me about when you were a little boy', can now have these stories 'properly out of a book'.
SCOTT ANTECEDENTS

SOURCES of further information about the Scott family are the Genealogical Table compiled by Revd Stephen Adye Scott Ram, Canon of York (1922; brought up to date 1926), which shows the descendants of John Scott of Braytoft (1701-1777); George Gilbert Scott's _Personal and Professional Recollections_ (Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1995); a family tree provided by a cousin, Anne Martyn (née Scott) which corroborates the Genealogical Table and has an additional tree of Scotts from Boston, Lincs, dating back to a John Scott who died in 1570; Bill Scott in South Africa, whose website on the Scott family, including information on the Scott's Hall Scrolls, can be found on http://users.iafrica.com/s/sc/scottwwl; and published reference books.

The Genealogical Table is an enormous and complex document in five sheets, which starts at the end of the 18th century, and although some of the dates differ from those Tom gives, the family ramifications are very clearly set out; it is only disappointing that they do not continue to the present day. Cropping up over and over again from the early part of the 18th century are churchmen, doctors (sometimes both at once), architects, lawyers and nurses, with the Church claiming the greatest number in every generation. Many daughters married into the professions, and those professions often ran in families: Tom's grandfather, father, an uncle and one brother were all doctors, as he was himself; Furley cousins had been surgeons in the 18th century; Ryles had several generations of doctors; several of the women became nurses and matrons of hospitals. Tom's father's first cousin, the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott, had two sons (George Gilbert 'Middle' or 'Mad' Scott and John Oldrid) who were architects; three grandchildren (Sir Giles Gilbert, Adrian and Charles Oldrid); a great-grandchild (Sir Giles's son, Richard Gilbert), and there have been others since. Winifred Ryle became an architect and married an architect; Kester Wright was an architect; and Tom's sister Elisabeth designed, among other things, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon, Wattlefield for Tom and Buffy, and a house for Sybil Clement-Brown in Swanage. In 1978 Roy Strong, then Director of the V&A, invited any Scott relations to a party to celebrate the opening of a centenary exhibition of the architectural drawings of Sir George Gilbert Scott. It was striking to see the Scott physiognomy repeating itself down the generations, and striking, too, how many architects of all ages there were.

In the Genealogical Table various other occupations are mentioned for nineteenth and early twentieth-century members of the family. In no particular order or date they include: Maitland Wright's brother Ralph who worked for the book dealers Birrel and Garnet (and also wrote a delightful breathless account, at the age of thirteen, of travelling to Southsea to watch Queen Victoria's coffin being brought over from Osborne on the Isle of Wight); Sir Richard Everard Webster QC, Viscount Alverstoke, 1842-1915, Lord Chief Justice; Martin Ryle, radio-astronomer, joint astronomer royal and joint Nobel prize winner for physics; Gilbert Ryle, philosopher at Oxford; Lionel Scott, chief cashier of the Wembley Exhibition; Eustace Lindsay Scott, assistant chief secretary for native affairs in Uganda; Sebastian Gilbert Scott (a grandson of Sir George Gilbert), born in 1879, radiologist (X-rays were introduced in Germany in 1895); his brother, Henry Gilbert Scott, manager of the Siamese Tin Syndicate, who married a Siamese girl; Dukinfield Henry Scott FLS, FRS (youngest son of Sir George Gilbert), an eminent palaeo-botanist working at Kew and assistant professor of botany; Oliver Dennis Scott, a masseur and medical gymnast; Scott Rams, many of whom worked abroad — Herbert for the Asiatic Petroleum Company in Penang, Arthur in British Columbia and Manitoba, Percival for the P&0 steamer service, Revd Humphrey as chaplain in France and Salonika during the war, before later working in Winnipeg and then for the South African Railway Mission; Elinor Hubbard (whose mother was a Scott), who married Comte Bernard de Pourtales in 1913; John Scott Parker, chief horticultural officer, Imperial War Graves Commision, St Omer; Hilda Agnes Parker, a nurse at the missionary hospital in Yunnan Fu, South China; Celia Parker, headmistress of the hospital school at St Nicholas-at-Wade, Birchington-on-Sea; a number of engineers and a few soldiers; Revd Charles Perry Scott, Bishop of North China 1880-1913; Revd Thomas Arnold Scott worked for the North China Mission and became Bishop in Shantung, North China, in 1921; Dorothy Mary Scott MB, ChB. who received the Kaiser-I-Hind medal in India in 1924; Tom Stevens, accountant in Vancouver; and William Henry Webster, a bachelor and wine merchant. Many members of the family died in the First World War.

Family ties were strong, and many of the boys were, like Tom, sent to Bradfield College, founded in 1850 by Thomas Stevens, the father-in-law of Aunt Effie (a sister of Tom's father) who lived nearby at Horselease. Some went to Charterhouse where there were also family connections. Younger children were often sent to prep school at Windlesham House, founded in Brighton by Charles Robert Malden in 1837, and whose son Henry Charles married another Euphemia (Malden) Scott in 1855.

Tom's seventy-two first cousins included (apart from Scotts and Bodley Scotts), Wrights, Ryles, Stevens and Firths; further afield (again, in no particular order) there were more Scotts, Oldrid Scotts, Scott Rams, Scott Maldens, Websters, Nicholsons, Spyvee Coopers, Gees, Hunts, Hubbards, Gibsons, Savages, Pares, Daltons, Sharps (in Australia), Boyces, Cowgills, Graernes, Pourtales, Furleys, Wights, Keymers, Savorys and Cockins — some, of course, better known to Tom's family than others. Like many families in the nineteenth century, numbers were large: Thomas Scott the Commentator was a thirteenth child; his son Thomas had eleven children; Tom's father was one of fourteen; Tom himself was one of ten; and of the immediate cousins there were eleven Bodley Scotts, ten Ryles, seven Wrights and seven Stevens. Cousins often married each other, and there are several sets of twins. John recurs over and over again as a first name for the eldest son.

Given Tom's love of gardening, there are two nice family connections: John Scott of Braytoft's aunt, Bridget Wayte, married Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (with whom Thomas Scott the Commentator stayed when he first went to London); and, more tenuously, William Henry Scott married in 1840 a Helen Repton, said to be a descendant of the garden designer Humphry Repton (I752-1818).

Tom mentions John Scott of Braytoft's wife as being a Wayte descended from 'John Bradshaw who signed Charles I's death Warrant'. Bradshaw was president at the trial of Charles I and died in 1659 with no issue, so it is more likely that Ann was descended from Thomas Wayte [or Waite or Wayet], another of the regicides; he was later imprisoned, leaving his wife and children in dire straits, and last heard of in 1658. But the sword mentioned on page 1 could have been Bradshaw's.

On the exploration side, Tom's great-grandfather, the Revd Thomas Scott, married Euphemia Lynch who claimed descent from the sixteenth-century Devonshire adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, brother of Adrian and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh. (Humphrey Gilbert was given a charter by Queen Elizabeth I, in June 1578, 'to discover and possess any distant lands which did not belong to any christian ruler'; a letter from Elizabeth still exists, bearing wishes for his welfare when he sailed west from Plymouth with five Vessels on 11th June 1589.) Euphemia's grandfather, Nathaniel Gilbert, had owned the Gilbert Estate in Antigua, but his three surviving children all returned to England: Euphemia's mother was married in Antigua, but when she was widowed she brought her four children to London, in 1788. And Tom's sister Dora married Tom Longstaf, a doctor, climber and explorer who was expedition doctor on the 1922 Everest expedition.

As for the Church, John Scott's descendants seem to have been pretty mainstream Church of England, though Thomas Scott the Commentator was much influenced by Wesley (as was the Revd Nathaniel Gilbert, Euphemia's brother). Some were also academics; some were bishops (both at home and abroad) and many were canons. Two at least switched from medicine to the Church.

Remoter antecedents are interesting. Sir George Gilbert Scott writes in his _Recollections_ , 'From the arms made use of by my grandfather's family, I gather that they must have sprung from the Scotts of Scott's Hall [Scott's Hall, near Brabourne] in Kent, who left Scotland in the thirteenth century.' Other information supports this, though John Scott of Braytoft's line seems to be a benjamin one from Lincolnshire, which can be dated back only to the sixteenth century.

These arms — three Catherine wheels sable, a bordure engrailed gules — appear on Scott tombs in Brabourne church and on Sir George Gilbert's tomb in Westminster Abbey, but also much earlier on three of the bosses on the ceiling of the Divinity School in Oxford (c. 1478-83). Sir John Scott, or Scot, of Scot's Hall, was a relative of John Kemp, Cardinal and (Roman Catholic) Archbishop of Canterbury, whose arms also appear on the ceiling. Kemp and his nephew Thomas, Bishop of London, are known to have been major benefactors in the building of the Divinity School, and it seems probale that Scott,a man of wealth and power, was also involved.

Sir John Scott (d. 1485) is described in the _DNB_ as 'a consistent Yorkist', and this too might have been an attraction to Oxford, as the house of York was identified at the time with power, money and privilege. Sir John was Comptroller of the Household of Edward IV, who gave him considerable (additional? see William de Balliol below) lands in Kent, where he built Scot's Hall. He was appointed Sheriff of Kent in 1460; was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Commerce with Burgundy in 1467, and of the associated marriage treaty; was returned to Parliament for Kent in 1467 and 1471; was Lieutenant of Dover Castle, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Marshall of Calais. Sir John's son, Sir William Scott (1459-1524), was appointed Comptroller of the Household to Henry VII as well as becoming, like his father, Lieutenant of Dover Castle, Warden of the Cinque Ports, Marshall of Calais and Sheriff of Kent (1501 and 1516). His son, in turn, another John Scott (1484?—1533) fought for Prince Charles, later Emperor Charles V, in the Low Countries and was knighted by him for gallantry. Reginald (or Reynolde) Scott (c. 1538-1599), second son of Sir John and MP for Kent, wrote a well-known and still highly regarded manual on hop culture in England, _A perfite platforme of a hoppe garden_ , published 1574 (hops had been introduced in 1524), and also a famous exposure of witchcraft, _The Discoverie of Witchcraft_. (I doubt that Tom knew this, which is a pity because he would have enjoyed that bit of information.) Until the late 17th century Scotts held important posts and the last Scott to inhabit Scot's Hall died in 1787, when the old house was sold — and pulled down in 1808.

There are many Scott tombs in Brabourne church, which Pevsner charmingly describes as 'a collection of considerable eccentricity'.There is also a heart shrine which is believed to have once held the heart of John de Balliol (d. 1269), husband of Devorguilla who is known to have carried her husband's heart with her and was herself buried at Dulce Cor 'Sweetheart' Abbey in Scotland (1289). It is said that their son John later removed it to Brabourne.

The Brabourne Scotts are believed to have descended from Norman Balliols (Bailleuls from Bailleul-en-Vimeu in Picardie) who came over with William the Conqueror and were given lands, in addition to those they possessed in Normandy, in Northumberland and later in Galloway. John de Balliol, Lord of Galloway and Lord of Barnard Castle and his wife, Devorguilla, Countess of Huntingdon and Lady of Fotheringay Castle, founded Balliol College (the oldest Oxford college) in about 1263, and may be the source of the catherine wheel device found on the Scott tombs and on the Divinity School ceiling. The land on which the Divinity School was built was formerly owned by Balliol College and Devorguilla's special devotion to Saint Catherine of Alexandria (whose symbol it is) is mentioned in contemporary documents; the college feast is still held on Saint Catherine's Saint's day, November 25th.

In 1292, John Balliol, a son of John and Devorguilla, was made king of Scotland (for reasons of descent on his mother's side) by King Edward I. However, the Scots repudiated Edwards demands for military aid against the French, signed a treaty with France and raided the north of England. Edward responded and in 1296 Balliol ('Toom Tabard') was defeated, consigned to the Tower, and later exiled to France (he is buried in the church of St-Vaast in Normandy).

Meanwhile a younger brother or cousin (historians disagree) of the Scottish king, William de Balliol (William de Balliol 'le Scot'), disposed of his lands at Berwick-on-Tweed and moved to Kent and (after his brother/cousin was defeated?) dropped the Balliol in favour of Scot or Scott. An assize judge, Sir William Scot died in 1350 and is believed to be buried in the Monastery of Whitefriars in Canterbury. (Another brother or cousin, Sir Alexander Balliol, also moved at about this time to Chilham Castle in Kent.) William is thought to have lived at Brabourne Manor and from him are descended the Scotts of Scot's Hall.
