GROWING UP IN 1950’s CATHERINGTON 

I arrived at Michaelmas 1948 sitting on a wicker basket containing Captain Tigger, a large black and white cat, on the floor of a furniture lorry. Catherington Lane was narrow, winding and lined with horse chestnuts, beech trees, hazels, farm cottages, bungalows and several farms. Victory Avenue was an un-surfaced track. We went through the village past St Catherine’s, The Farmer Inn, the blacksmith, the school, the pond, the church and the old vicarage. There was then a field full of Jack Turner’s cows and then Edge o’ Beyond, where we took root. My father had just come back from a year in the Far East and my mother had decided that having got to Edge, she was not moving ever again!

Although the village was then quite isolated, we were well served with an hourly bus service to Petersfield, and another to Southsea. There was a paper shop at the top of the Causeway, Jack Tremlett the butcher at number 122 who delivered meat whenever required, barely wrapped, certainly not refrigerated and with the price stuck into it on a bit of paper on a skewer. Fish was delivered on Fridays; halibut for us, rock salmon for the cats. Bread was delivered frequently and Queensferry Stores in White Dirt Lane delivered groceries. Wool, cigarettes and ice cream came from Mrs Fletcher in Wrexham Grove and there was a post office next door to her. Logs came by horse and cart and coal from May’s Yard. Bins were collected weekly from one’s backdoor. Father’s shirts, our bed linen and table cloths were collected by St Michael’s convent and returned a week later all starched and cold in large, flat boxes lined with tissue paper.

There were farms and cattle everywhere and Prescott’s cows went through the village twice daily to be milked at Kinches Farm. We often went with Robin and Steven Prescott to walk behind them, while they ambled down the village in what would now be the rush hour. They were then milked, fed and the cowshed hosed down with no noticeable interference from adults – although there must have been. In the winter the boys would then play football in the cow shed and if lights got broken, local lamp posts were shinned up and bulbs removed to use as replacements!

Another interesting place was Old Dick’s. He was the village blacksmith and wheelwright and an absolute craftsman. We spent hours with him. He hand made every shoe he ever fitted and it seems incredible that when we were bought a pony, a set of shoes, hand made and fitted cost a pound. While he was shoeing, he would often hand us an old tin jug and ask us to get Jack Turner, the landlord of The Farmer, to fill it. He had been a surgeon farrier in the First World War and once rolled up his trouser leg up to show me some terrible scars that had been, ‘done by a Hun in the trenches’. I had no idea what he was talking about and regret that it was at least another twenty years, when Dick was long gone, before I realised. He kept rabbits, chickens and ducks (he probably ate these, but we were blissfully unaware of this if he did). There were always kittens and a gentle collie, sometimes he sold eggs. The chickens and the kittens were always wandering all over the lane.

St Catherine’s was owned by Mrs Long, as were The Forge, Tudor Cottages and several others. When we first arrived, the families who lived in them were employed to keep her house and grounds respectable. The lady who stands out across the years was Miss Snelling. She was very small, thin, with scraped back hair and dressed just like Mary Poppins. Always immaculate, I never saw her smile, she was the launderess. Years later, when the Mays bought Tudor Cottages, they said the garden shed was full of old mangles, buckets and washday paraphernalia. When I started school, Mrs Long would often be waiting for me outside with her Pekinese and mother and I would go back to St Catherine’s to have tea with her. The lawns seemed enormous; there was a vegetable garden, fruit trees and the apple house. She also allowed Dick to grow vegetables in an enclosure in the field behind the Farmer.  I understand that Mrs Prescott’s Mothering Sunday flowers usually came from the garden at St Catherine’s. Robin and Stephen used to have to deliver her a two pint can of milk to the servants’ quarters which were around the back. Apparently the Peke was not as nice as I remember and, if he was out, the milk was abandoned on the drive leading to recriminations! A certain amount of scrumping went on, and when caught by the chauffeur the lads said they were collecting conkers. They were sent to Mrs Long to be dealt with, which she did by telling them off and asking the staff to gather conkers and leave them in sacks by the back door.

All Saints’ Church was also a great part of our lives. On Sundays we always knew that we should be out of bed as the Vicar rang the bell for the 8 o’clock mass. He would start at 7.45am which gave us time to be clean and tidy by 9.15am for the Sung Eucharist, for which all the bells would be rung. This service changed to 9.30 when the Sunday bus timetable changed. Once a month there was a wonderful thing called the Parish Breakfast in The Farmer Hut. A lot of banging and scraping of chairs while people erected trestle tables, laid table cloths, boiled kettles, made tea and put out the breakfast of hot crispy rolls, marmalade, butter and some sort of meat paste that came out of tins. This was far nicer than any of the normal stuff that came out of jars and was apparently sent over by the Americans. After a feast like this, we still went home and enjoyed our usual Sunday lunch. If our father was away, my sister and I had to go to Sunday school at 3pm and evensong at 6.30pm as well. When he was at home, lunch took too long!

There was always a Church Fête on the field between the school and The Farmer with a marquee where competitions for the longest bean, funniest shaped vegetable, flower arranging and cooking were held. There were also coconut shies, races for children, mums, dads and a raffle. A vicarage garden party used to happen in the summer and a Christmas Bazaar, which also had amusements for children – one being a large face with an open mouth at which one was encouraged to fire a ping pong ball. I don’t remember Father Christmas appearing, but there was a rather frightening pirates’ cave. Money made at these various functions always seemed to be in aid of the church restoration fund, the heating or the organ, which Mr Gleed nursed along until he died.  In 1956 after the Hungarian uprising, the Vicar, his wife and parishioners of Catherington and Clanfield spruced up the old school house in Clanfield to enable a refugee family to come and live and work here. Sadly the church was reordered in the 1980’s but in the fifties there was a rood screen separating the beautiful sanctuary and chancel from the nave. At festivals some leaky triangular tin pots would come out and be tied to it wherever possible and filled with flowers. Harvest Festival was particularly difficult as all sorts of things would be tied to it, piled around it and placed up the pulpit steps. The whole church was filled with a beautiful Holy smell and pumpkins, marrows, potatoes and huge bunches of dahlias, Michaelmas daisies, stooks of corn etc would be cluttering the place up. Children would scrape moss off the graves to line the window sills and hide the small jars containing seasonal flowers.

At Christmas time, even more candles than usual would be lit and masses of holly and ivy with as many berries as possible was draped everywhere. A crib lit by an electric star would stand near the ancient cross and the cannon balls. On high days there was always a procession around the church and how the vicar, crucifer, servers and acolytes got around without causing utter chaos, I don’t know. Neither do I know who cleared up all the debris. There was always a decent choir at All Saints’, but it seemed a great injustice that the boys wore normal cassocks and surplices but the girls had to have their heads completely covered with huge, heavy blue veils. Somebody must have known what they were doing, because I remember learning Elijah, The Messiah, St Matthew Passion and Stainer’s Crucifixion. I also remember my father thinking, when he was helping out the vicar by taking evensong, that instead of a sermon, he would play them pieces from Father Geoffrey Beaumont’s folk mass.  We thought it was all very jolly, but the experiment was never repeated.

Starting school was definitely not the happiest day of my life. I should have smelt a rat because I was fed my favourite breakfast, dressed up and walked down the village to meet Mrs Pitts. She was fearsome, with flaming red hair, a very sharp tongue and was always armed with a ruler and a pointer and didn’t mind which she used to assault one. I don’t remember learning to read, but we all sat in rows chanted our tables, wrote our numbers and were subjected to quite a tough regime. Milk was provided and in winter was put on the stove to warm, which made it even more disgusting. We had school lunches that cost 1/11 for five days. Everything was cooked from scratch but it was only ever meat, potatoes and vegetables – no rice, spaghetti or anything tinned. Puddings were usually stewed fruit and custard, tapioca and jam and there was never any choice. Mrs Wynn and Mrs Maddeley cooked the lunches and Mrs Folland looked after us in the playground. When small we were ‘sent across the yard’ (for the loo). These were utterly foul, a wooden box with a round hole over a bucket containing Jeyes fluid, or something like it. The paper was shiny and hard on one side and like sandpaper on the other and it was freezing cold in there. If someone had wet the seat, it was almost too much to bear! I don’t remember much handwashing either. The boys used to attempt to pee over the wall of their section. The School Nurse and Doctor were regular visitors and one boy was found to have been sewn into his clothes.

When King George VI died, as a class of infants, we sat and solemnly listened to part of his funeral service on the wireless. After Mrs Pitts’ class, we would graduate to Mrs Cutsforth who taught Standard One and Two where we learnt cursive writing, scripture, a bit of geography and sums. For Standard Three and Four we went up to Mrs Reeves, the head mistress where we learnt English grammar and fractions, for nature walks, played cricket or rounders, sometimes had our lessons outside and used to go and sing in the Petersfield Music Festival. The only thing separating the two class rooms was a curtain. Right through the school, our day started with a hymn, a prayer and the register and ended with another prayer. Every Friday morning the Vicar came and took assembly for the whole school and on Friday afternoons we were read a story and had a sweet before we went home. The school had a percussion band and just before the Coronation, Lynton White’s four in hand came through the village. We were put in the lane to bang things and scream and shout, waving flags to accustom the horses to a London crowd. It seems they were going to be used in the Coronation procession. The centenary of Catherington School was celebrated by a production of Hiawatha. I think I was too small to be in the cast, but I can remember people dressed up in sacks and wearing headbands with feathers stuck in the top.

We seemed to play a lot in the surrounding fields and farms, with no regard for health and safety. This included playing hide and seek around Prescott’s huge water wheel (now in the Weald and Downland Museum and deemed a great treasure) with only a dodgy slab of slate preventing us from falling 300ft down the well. We were always off on a mixture of ponies and bikes all day long, my father once found my sister and me in Chalton one evening as it was getting dark and patiently followed us in the car, lighting the way as we rode our pony home. In summertime we used to go to Wittering and Hayling with my parents and any children that were around, on the choir outing to Climping, or to gymkhanas at the weekends. In the winter, there was hunting, Christmas parties, the pantomine and musical evenings at Cadlington. During the Summer, grown up men would have great fun playing comic opera cricket matches, dressing up as the Old Men of Catherington versus the Ancient Mariners, drawn from local naval servicemen. The game was played with curved bats, two stumps and was scored by a Notcher. I think beer was drunk if anyone hit the ball and I think it was drunk again if they missed.

We had no television because we were given the choice of that or a pony. There was a radiogram and a wireless so we enjoyed, Listen with Mother and later Children’s Hour and Journey into Space. With hindsight Music while You Work played during the morning to keep the ‘dusters and hooverers’ cheerful seems very non-pc these days. There were few cars in the village, and one evening Mr Prescott loaded his entire family onto an ancient Fordson tractor and drove them up to Windmill Hill to watch the Queen reviewing the fleet in the Solent. There were no convenience foods for dogs, cats, horses or humans, so my mother cooked for the cats and the dogs as well as us and we mixed up our own horse food. It seemed that we knew everybody and everybody knew us. There are all sorts of things and people I remember, but one door closes and another opens. In April 1959 my father received a draft chit and the whole Scott family went to Malta.