There have been improved road services, cars, buses, electricity, radio, T.V, not to mention the huge changes to agriculture.
Young people today know nothing of the joys, and sorrows, of candle light, paraffin lamps, and of having to fetch drinking water from the village pump.
Bath night in a tin bath in the kitchen, walking ten miles (five each way) to get a hair cut, getting lost in the dark, the only transport dog carts and pony traps.
Fetching a bucket of water from the village pump was a daily chore for children.
One bucket between two small children, most in their boots by the time they reached home. Men and boys carried two buckets with the help of wooden yokes across their shoulders.
The pump was a meeting place for the exchange of gossip.
In winter it was wrapped in straw to prevent freezing. It if did freeze a fire of straw was made to thaw the ice, and a stamping of feet while waiting to thaw.
Milk, was fetched from a nearby farm, in white enamelled cans fitted with lids.
Children bowled the lids down the hill, with the cans following! It was easier for them to swing a can of milk over their heads than a bucket of water, clothes were ruined, the handle would break, and explaining things at home was often tricky!
Another chore for children was to collect firewood, which for most was an enjoyable way to spend time, and at home it had to be graded into logs, or kindling wood.
Cleaning and trimming lamps was an elaborate business.
Most of the room was in shadow, even with the lamp lit. Turned up to high, the flame smoked and discoloured the glass. The ceiling got quite black from oily smuts. With all our ‘mod cons’ do we not lose some of these kindlier old-fashioned pleasures?
In the days of piped water, and cattle troughs, ponds are no longer needed, and many have been filled in – there are now no carthorses to drink their muddy waters. At one time they were a favourite hunting ground for children with jam jars and nets, looking for frogspawn, newts and sticklebacks.
These expeditions often took place dressed in our Sunday best, and returning home to the wrath of parents – filthy.
As a change from pond activities we attended, occasionally, a local pig killing. Done by a wizened cottager with a knife, and it was a noisy, bloody business.
Most farm labourers kept a pig then, and the farmer often gave them pig food. Home cured meat was a great standby for cottagers. High wages have made pig keeping less essential than it used to be, (that or ‘elf and safety!)
Nothing from the pig was wasted, women would gather to assist in cutting up the carcass, salting, curing, and disposing of offal.
Chitterlings, critlings, pig’s lard, trotters, and the head, which was made into brawn, it was compressed in a pot and flat irons used to weigh it down. There was a village ‘pig club’, its members paid a shilling (5p) a week and if their pig died the owner received compensation.
When ponds and pigs palled on us children, we would visit the blacksmith’s shop, where, if lucky, we were allowed to pump the bellows. It was like blowing the bellows for the church organ.
The reek of the burning hoof as the hot shoe was pressed on it, the Smith’s language when the horse would not ‘bide still’, all conjured up a sort of Sunday school picture of hell with the blacksmith as the devil.
Today, many village smithy’s have gone the way of ponds and pigsties – no longer needed, no longer used. Tractors and garages have largely replaced carthorses and Smithies, and the clanging of the hammer on the anvil a distant memory.
Village Hall
Many village halls were built in the 1900’s. Before that the schoolroom was used for all meetings and social occasions. Parish Halls, etc. were often built courtesy of local squires, and ‘gentry’, and became the centre of communal life, - unless you were a regular at the ‘pub’.
Trips to town were infrequent, radio and TV unknown, and villagers made their own entertainment. Dances were popular, and villagers came from miles, often on foot, bicycles, in traps or wagonettes, by moonlight, starlight, or pitch-blackness.
Condensation trickled down the walls from the heat of the lamps, and dripped from the roof.
The orchestra, usually a piano and a fiddler jingled out, Waltzes, Valetas, Boston Twosteps, Lancers, barn dances, and at the close of the year Roger de Coverly. No drums, no crooning, no microphones, no jazz!
Sometimes the servants from the big houses came (Marwell – Longwood House), Occasionally the Squire’s lady came and brought her daughters, they danced divinely over the nail studded boards. They never stopped long.
Concerts were held from time to time with a repetitive quality about them.
The sexton sang ‘The Ballad of the Mistletoe Bough’ – verse after verse, with everyone joining in the chorus.
The gamekeeper sang ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’.
The schoolmistress sang ‘A Perfect Day’ and ‘Mother Macree’. The Parson followed with some nonsense called ‘From Wimbledon to Wambledon’.
We all knew what came next.
Whist drives, with incredibly old packs of cards, the light being so inadequate and unevenly shed, that some would ask their opponents to arrange their cards for them! Dances, concerts, whist drives, political meetings, magic lantern shows, cricket club suppers – these were the big occasions for the hall.
Most winter evenings it was simply the ‘Working Men’s Club’.
A major event the purchase of a large billiard table for £30, and its erection on concrete foundations. Billiards, auction bridge, whist, dominoes, draughts, chess and ping pong (table tennis) – played through the winter months.
Some men just sat around the fire sleeping or talking after a hard day’s work in the field.
Today, village halls, electrically lit and quipped with all mod cons are still the focal point of village life, and credit is due to those who seek to hold the village together. |