(The photo above shows 30 & 31 Greens Lane circa 1913: At number 30, left, Mary Jane & Tom Davis with their children Percival, Eustace, Ethel and Ernest. At number 31, right, Mrs Hyde with her son Bill.)
The Rivers family have been living in or near Calstone since at least the 1850s when my Great Great Grandparents Joseph and Maria Rivers were living in the Blackland /Quemerford area. By the 1880s their son, also Joseph and his wife Ann were living here in Greens Lane, Calstone. Living near them in the Lane at that time was their son Joseph and his wife Mary who spent the whole of their married life living here – well into the 1930s. By the 1890s my Great Grandparents Joseph and Ann Rivers had left Greens Lane, but were still in Calstone having moved up into the main village and were living at Tog Hill by the early 1900s. They had 11 children, among them my Grandmother Mary Jane (also known as Polly), Henry, Sarah, James, Maria, John, Albert, Emma, George, Arthur and Joseph (who was always known as Joe Quart Rivers as he never drank pints). To differentiate between her Grandfather Joseph and her Uncle Joseph my Mother always referred to her Uncle as ’Joe with the thirst’. My Great Grandfather Henry Davis and his son my Great Uncle Harry Davis were also living in Greens Lane in the early 1900s.
Life at Toghill for the Rivers family was almost self-supporting with milk from the goats and chickens for meat and eggs. Pigs were kept at the bottom of the sloping gardens with one slaughtered for the family and the others sold. All parts of the pig were consumed with the offal being washed in the gushing part of the stream near the house. Bacon sides were salted and cured and hung in the cool cellar. Joseph and Ann would go to Calne in their horse and cart to buy a sack of flour for bread making. He was a watercress cultivator and had various other occupations depending on the time of year. They were very religious, non-smokers and teetotal and walked across the fields on Sundays, regardless of the weather, to attend a small chapel at Quemerford, now a dwellinghouse near the shop. Their daughter Mary Jane (my Grandmother) was still living with them and in her early 30s at the turn of the Century. She met Tom Davis who was working on local farms and living with his widowed father, Henry, here in Greens Lane having returned to England after 11 years Army service in India. They were married at the Free Church in Calne in July 1905 and walked from Toghill into Calne and back for the ceremony. She wore a dress of cream material with lavender sprigs.
Initially, their married life started at Tog Hill with her parents and their elder children were born there, including my mother in 1907. Her Father, Joseph, died while attending his bees in the summer of 1910. One of my Mother‘s earliest memories was of him being carried into the house and laid on the cool flagstones to await the doctor from Calne. The doctor was said to have remarked what a privilege it was to die with hands so worn with work. His wife, Ann, then almost blind, died the following year and they are both buried at Blackland Church with their invalid eldest son, Henry. The horse and cart were sold and their son Arthur returned to Calstone to live at Toghill as waterworks manager. Arthur married a lady called Rosa from Newport Pagnell and, when he brought her to Tog Hill as a bride, she cried for days. How could she live in such a place after Newport Pagnell? But the magic must have got to her because she stayed and they are both buried at Calstone. There were no children and, after Rosa died in 1936, a lady called Miss Anthony and her daughter Rita, came to housekeep for Arthur. So, after many years, that house again knew children as we visited and used the best swing in the County on the rear slope, where your feet nearly touched the roof of the house.
My Grandparents, Mary Jane and Tom, left Tog Hill and lived at various farm cottages in Calstone, mostly in Greens Lane, other than a short time in Quemerford. Grandmother did not like living by a road and they moved back ’up the Lane’ as soon as they could. She was to have five children after the age of 35, Ernest, Ethel (my mother), Eustace, Percival and Joseph. I was not however to have an Uncle Joseph as the doctor did not come to the cottage where I now live on that Sunday afternoon in February 1915 and probably could not have done much if he had. Baby Joseph died of whooping cough and was buried at Blackland Church along with all the other babies, in graves now unmarked. Mother, then aged about eight, remembered him in his coffin with a bunch of snowdrops in his tiny hands. She never liked snowdrops after that.
Mother attended Calstone School with her three brothers, walking daily from Greens Lane. There was a right of way to get out to the village road but no path as such. Grandfather asked Bowood if he could lay a path so as to keep their boots dry and Bowood contacted Harris’s factory. A load of clinkers from the boiler house was brought out and Grandfather made a narrow footpath out the road. You had to walk single file, but it served its purpose and was still in use until the late 1950s when the first car owners came to live here and a wider track was made.
Mother recalled growing up in Calstone with mixed feelings, but all in all, talked of a poor but happy family life and she adored her brothers to the end of her days. There was enough to eat, but if food was scarce her father would go out into the fields to catch something for dinner. Despite the poverty, they had enough but few extras. She spoke of one Christmas when the children had an orange each and that was all. There must have been better times, however, because she spoke of another Christmas when the family went into Calne on Christmas Eve in the pony and trap to buy the Christmas things. The pony and trap meant better times because it was a horse and cart before that. Mother was left in no doubt that being the only girl wasted money where clothes were concerned. She could not wear hand-me-downs as her three brothers could. They all caught influenza during the 1918 pandemic – the whole family was in bed, but survived. Her Father was first up and tried to entice her to eat some fried bacon sliced from the cured side hanging in the passageway. There was a lot of fat on meat in those days and she could not face it, creeping back to bed.
My Grandfather took a Lease in 1906 on the Calstone Watercress Beds cultivating and selling fresh watercress in the Calne area. He also worked on the withy beds in Calstone. These were sidelines to his employment as a farm labourer. I have been told the watercress was crisp and delicious and much sought after with my Grandmother often being referred to as Watercress Polly. Mother also told me of skinning moles and selling the skins for a penny each. I have several photographs of my Grandmother wearing sacking as an apron and around her shoulders and I am told this was quite usual as sacking was very durable and kept out the rain. Mother remembered her Father getting drunk only once. He had been to the Black Horse at Cherhill and, after a few too many, friends put him in the trap and pointed the pony towards the main road and the pony brought him home to Greens Lane. Grandmother couldn’t understand why she heard the pony and trap outside and her husband didn’t come into the house and it never happened again!
There has, in the past, been much abuse of women in the countryside and Calstone was no exception. Many families were affected, including mine. I have been told that ’fallen women’, as they were called, were sent to All Cannings from Calstone to have their babies. Compton Bassett women went to Marsh Lane.
Mother’s memory of Calstone School was of the girls making petticoats in a needlework class. They had to be shielded from the boys by a hanging blanket so the boys should not see they were sewing underwear. There was one assistant teacher who was unpopular so they put pieces of barbed wire on Sprays Hill and covered them with grass and laid on the high bank nearby to watch her get a puncture as she cycled home.
During the First World War, Grandfather was a guard at Yatesbury Camp where there were prisoners of war. Despite having four young children, Grandmother took in washing from the Camp. Mother hated coming home from school to find soldiers’ thick woollen shirts drying around the fire and the room full of steam.
Aaron Wootten looked after things in the village for Bowood Estate and lived in the bungalow at Theobalds Green. He often carried a gun and wore a very wide belt. One day, Mother saw her three brothers chased up a tree by the dreaded Mr Wootten who stood below with his belt off waiting for them to come down. They all jumped down together and raced home. He would have caught up with them eventually – he knew who they were. You weren’t allowed to put out washing on a Sunday or do gardening because Lord Lansdowne wouldn’t like it.
Annual tea parties were held on the Vicarage lawn. Mother had no best clothes to wear, but was proud of her long dark hair which she could sit on. The Reverend Danneman was vicar and had a young daughter. During the tea party, the young Miss Danneman, who did not mix with the other children, disappeared into the Vicarage on several occasions and reappeared each time wearing yet another pair of exquisite shoes. Mother’s envy knew no bounds – there was no hiding her heavy black boots, the one item she was made to wear hand-me-down from her brother and usually too small. In much later years when we shopped together in Bath I would see her looking at pretty shoes in the window of a shop and we would laugh together and say “Just like Miss Danneman’s”.
The Reverend Danneman visited each villager on their birthday bringing a packet of tea for the lady or tobacco for the man. He always wore a black frock tail coat and carried either an umbrella or walking stick. In 1912, King George V’s coronation was celebrated with much enthusiasm and the village band played on the high bank opposite the Reading Room. In 1919, there was a three hour downpour and the Mill Pond burst its banks leaving huge trout when it subsided. The villagers ate very well for a few days.
Mr and Mrs Anstey farmed at South Farm while Miss Minnie and Mr Hill Maundrell, who were brother and sister, lived at Old Farm. They ran a thrift club where you would pay sixpence through an open window on Friday evenings. The Bowsher family lived at the Mill whilst Miss Norah and Miss Marjorie Jefferies lived at Sprays Mill with their aged mother. Miss Marjorie played the organ at Calstone Church and Miss Norah cycled into Calne every day to her job at Lloyds Bank.
Edwin Green lived at the Whitening Ring Cottage at the top of Spout Lane. A thatched cottage was demolished at the bottom of Church Lane and a bungalow built in its place. Three village women ran a laundry from this bungalow – Emily Rivers (daughter of Joe with the thirst) and Ellen and Florrie Smith. They laundered for people for miles around and a carrier called Alfie Holmes did the collecting and delivering by pony and cart.
A Mr and Mrs Hyde lived at No 31 Greens Lane and Joe Quart Rivers at No 34. One of Joe’s sons was Leonard and a daughter Kathleen, also Emily mentioned above. Both Joe and his son Leonard lived well into their 90s so the drinking can’t have done them much harm.
When Mother was fifteen, she went to work in Harris’s factory in Calne. She always said rather haughtily, “I was never a Sausage Queen – I had a nice job in the packing department”. She was not able to stay there however because at home in Greens Lane she was having to share a small cottage bedroom with her three teenage brothers. Her mother had done her best to give her privacy by stringing a blanket across one corner. So, Mother left Calstone to go into service in Devizes where she spent the rest of her life after meeting my Father, Reg Perrett of Devizes. They were married at Calstone Church on June 10th 1933 by the Reverend Edwin Matthews who was to be vicar of Calstone for many years to come. Greens Lane was en fete with a marquee in the front field and guests coming from Devizes by charabanc.
By the 1930s, my Grandparents Mary Jane and Tom had moved next door into No 31 Greens Lane where they ended their days. Mother recalled her Mother’s joy in the 1930s at being given two tiny oil lamps, one for the side passage and one for the bedroom. They meant she didn’t have to carry candles from room to room. Mary Jane died in 1942 and Tom in 1957. They are both interred at Blackland Church and their son, Ernest, was buried beside them in the mid 1970s.
So, is it Greens Lane or Green Lanes? In my lifetime, it was always called Greens Lane but the Deeds and documents have it Green Lanes. But it cannot be Green Lanes any more because the second Lane between No 30 and the road was merged into the field known as Bowmans in the 1970s by the removal of the hedge which ran from the rear of No 30 to the rear of Three Gables bungalow. A document recently unearthed at Bowood House dated 1762 shows it as Greens Lane.
After the Second World War, there were five cottages – No 30 occupied by Maria Cleverley and her daughter Francie, No 31 by Tom Davis (Mary Jane having died in 1942), No 32 (the only detached cottage in the Lane) by Bill and Maude Hazell and No 33 by Charley and Rose Weston. No 34 had been occupied by Mr and Mrs Yates, but became derelict after they moved to the new council houses at Robins Piece.
To start with Number 30 -Maria Cleverley, one of the eleven children of Joseph and Ann Rivers was bedridden and cared for devotedly by her daughter Francie. Francie was a sweet fragile little lady and her brother Victor Cleverley would come over from Blackland Crossroads to help out and do the garden. Maria and Francie lived and slept in the front room with a bed either side of the range. I have a memory of very white sheets and the sweet bottle behind Maria’s bed. Francie would come out to the well which was in front of the cottages, just inside the garden gates. “Don’ee fall down ther” she would say to me. “Ther’ were a little girl fell down ther’ wi’ a red dress wi’ white spots on an’ she never come up”. I often thought I could see that dress in the depths of the well as I wound up the bucket on its chain.
Number 32 – Bill Hazell was probably the greatest character ever to live in the Lane. A blacksmith of repute for Blackfords, he enjoyed a drink at the Talbot, Quemerford and the Black Horse, Cherhill. He grew fantastic dahlias as big as dinner plates and would wear one in his buttonhole when going to the pub. They were so big he had to hold his head on one side to get them under his chin. I never knew how he managed to cycle down the narrow clinker path on a sit-up-and-beg bike with his head on one side. Of course, returning late at night after a jolly evening was a different story and he frequently fell off. On Sundays, he would come back from his morning drink and sleep it off in the shed or garden during the afternoon, before departing again for the evening. We would often lose our football in his garden and it was quite usual to leap over Mr Hazell as he slept among the cabbages. I am told he did not have a Sunday dinner declaring ’Only greedy people eat and drink’. At the appropriate time of year, his war medals replaced the dahlias and they were impressive. Shook Cleverly took his medals to Swindon once and had new ribbons put on them. Mrs Hazell was a nice lady with little hair, who rarely left the Lane. When she did so, it was in a wheel chair bumping down the cinder path and I was always fascinated how her wig of brown curls transformed her.
Number 33 – I didn’t know Mr Charley and Mrs Rose Weston very well and their daughter, Jean, was much older than me. Just at the end of the War, she married Roy Hurst (who I thought was very handsome – a bit like Errol Flynn) at Blackland Church and I was a bridesmaid. The groom and best man wore RAF uniform. My Mother made the bridesmaids’ dresses which were a plain blue material because of rationing and had to be adapted for normal wear after the wedding. It was springtime and we picked masses of primroses and used the heads as confetti as you couldn’t get confetti because of the War.
My Saturday job was to walk to Quemerford with the accumulator which was the battery used to generate the radio. It was small but heavy and I would leave it at the electrician’s shop for charging and carry the one back that had been on charge during the week. I liked to listen to half an hour of Harry Davison’s Old Time Dance Music on Saturday evenings but, after five minutes, Gramp would take out his watch and then look at the wireless and I would have to turn it off to save the battery so he could listen to the news during the week. However, he never listened to the whole news bulletin as it was at the time of the Persian Oil Crisis with Dr Mossadeq and, after the first headline he would say, “More oil. Turn it off, Missus” to my Mother. Even when we finally had an electric wireless Gramp would still look at his watch in case the electric ran out.
Also on Saturdays I had to walk to Cherhill Post Office to collect Gramp’s pension and an ounce of Digger Honeydew tobacco. There was a pension book and another one for the tobacco – perhaps pensioners had a tobacco allocation or maybe it was rationed during the War.
One of my not-so-nice memories was toothache. Most of my school friends had it and some had earache as well. I never had earache, but was reliably informed by my friends that earache was worse than toothache so when my toothache was very bad I would tell myself that at least it wasn’t earache and try to feel better about it. Gramp kept a bottle of brandy for all medicinal occasions and rubbed some on my gum but it didn’t really help. I put up with the pain for as long as I could rather than go to the school dentist, a man called Mr McMinn who chain smoked cigarettes and had yellow fingers and a burned bushy moustache. The brandy bottle came out on another occasion when our spaniel at 16 produced a large dead puppy on the hearth rug! “I knew ’er weren’t right’ said Gramp, “ Gi’ I the brandy bottle Missus”. We thought he was going to give some to the dog but he opened the bottle and sat there taking large swigs “to steady ‘is nerves”.
Life had become a little more relaxed from the days, previously mentioned, when Lord Lansdowne would not have approved of work on a Sunday. It was still however a quiet Day of Rest for most people in the village whose working lives were so hard. I wasn’t allowed to knit or sew on a Sunday, but I think that was more to do with the Good Lord than Lord Lansdowne. On one Christmas Day, which was also on a Sunday, I received a sewing set. Surely they wouldn’t notice it was a Sunday with all the excitement of Christmas. But yes, they did notice and my sewing had to wait until Boxing Day on the Monday. I felt quietly satisfied however when, on one very hot Sunday afternoon in about 1949, the barn above Summers’s Mill caught fire and the village was full of fire engines and activity.
Free range chickens and goats were kept in the Lane. Gramp seemed to specialise in aggressive cockerels and we were always getting complaints as the Lane was a right of way. People took to carrying umbrellas on the finest day! There was one cockerel called Jimmy, a Plymouth Rock, who was particularly aggressive so we had to eat him. You always knew it was 4pm as the hens would wait at the front gate for their tea. The smell of simmering peelings and layer’s mash was a part of life in a Calstone cottage. One hen liked to come into the front room and sit in the armchair. You had to carry her out if there was a visitor. Many a time, my Mother would ask Gramp for a chicken for Sunday dinner. He would ponder which one to select and within a short time the hen was wrung, plucked, drawn and dressed ready for the oven. Words cannot describe the flavour of that chicken. Every so often, Gramp would take his stack of egg trays in the wheelbarrow to the end of the Lane to await the egg lorry. They might stay there a day or two if the carrier was late but no-one ever took them. Everyone knew they were Tom Davis’s eggs awaiting the carrier and that was that.
On Thursdays, Keens Coaches from Heddington took everyone to Devizes Market. The coach picked up in all the villages and it was always packed. Gramp always wore his best suit to market with his British Legion medallion swinging on his weskit fob. Everyone seemed to carry livestock of various sorts in cages perched on laps. My favourite was the small box of a dozen day-old chicks. We let them run around the front room before deciding which hen would foster them. One hen who had lost some of her own chicks killed the lot, but her own chicks were pecking around quite happily.
As children we were wild and free and never bored. I don’t recall we washed very much, only when going back to the town. The Lane was a completely safe environment. We would be gone all day and our parents never worried. We might be only a field away in a den in a hedge or we could be miles away on the Downs. We would go off with hunks of bread spread with thick beef dripping and plenty of salt. We found an old gramaphone with boxes of records, left by my Uncles in the 1930s and would play it in the front field. Our favourite record was ’Oh, sing to me Gypsy’ and the cattle would wander over to listen and stand in a circle around us mooing quietly. It didn’t matter if the needle was blunt and the records scratched – it was our very own source of music without the fear of the accumulator running low. We knew the best hedges for blackberries and one September picked a bath tub full and sold them to the Lansdowne Hotel in Calne for sixpence a pound. Transportation was a problem – several bikes with boxes strapped to rear carriers. Sometimes, we would wander over to Sprays Mill to see Uncle Harry’s leg. He had a pink artificial leg covered with signatures and he never minded showing us. I always thought he lost his leg in the Great War. He was actually my Great Uncle Harry Davis, brother to Gramp and lived with his wife Sally in a house beside the Mill with all that water constantly rushing under the house. She was such a neat little lady with hair in a silver bun and always wore a long white apron.
Our amusement on dark evenings around the oil lamp on the central table was sewing, knitting, reading the paper, playing cards ( always gambling with pennies) jigsaws and lots of conversation. The floor was partly covered by coconut matting and knotted rugs made from pieces of material. A huge picture of Queen Victoria looked down on us although Gramp never had a good word to say about her. As a soldier, he had been part of an inspection by the Queen – it might have been on Roundway Hill. He always said, “We waited all day in the ’ot sun and ’er come by in ’er carriage an’ never even looked on we”. The other picture was of the troopship which brought him home from India in about 1904. Another important feature of the front room was the 12 bore shotgun. It was not locked away as they are today, but kept handy in case there was the need for food. It was kept in the corner by the front door with two orange Eley cartridges ready to use on the ledge about it. We didn’t have any locks in the house and anyway why would you lock it away? It was part of the room as were the geraniums. We never touched it because it was a grown up thing and heavy and, above all, it was Gramp’s and he was good at using it so it was best left to him. Cartridges were expensive and, even with cataracts affecting his eyes in old age, he rarely missed.
The Reverend Matthews was a long-time vicar of Calstone and had no children. A fiery Irishman, he was very political in the pulpit. Gramp called him ’Ol’ Blood and Thunder’ because of his sermons. When I was 15, he gave me a lift from Devizes in his big black car. We talked of my schooling and I told him I was ploughing through Scott’s Ivanhoe as part of my ’O’ level and finding it heavy going. On the top of Blackland Hollow, he pulled into a gateway with Calstone and his Church in the valley below us. He talked for half an hour on Ivanhoe and brought the book alive as none of my teachers had – it was as though he had read the book that morning. I had a lot of respect for him after that.
The Greens Lane cottages were completely unmodernised at this time. Front room ranges were the only means of cooking and heating water with the odd paraffin stove. Cooking was usually done in one large pot hung over the fire with a boiled pudding wrapped separately and cooked in with the vegetables and meat. The traditional boiled puddings like Spotted Dick, Jam Roly Poly and Apple Suet were vital to feed those labouring for a living. Ironing was done with two flat irons heated on the range and they held their heat for a long time. You used one while the other was re-heating and you tested if it was ready by spitting on it to see if it sizzled. There was no worry about flat irons being too hot for delicate synthetics as such materials did not exist.
In the late 1940s/early 1950s, the five houses in Greens Lane were still all owned by the Bowood Estate and had been deteriorating for many years. Bowood couldn’t wait to get rid of them and my parents were able to buy Number 31 for £100 so that Gramp should have somewhere to end his days. It became our favourite place in the world and we loved it. The other houses were also bought by either the occupants or their employers and all for around £100 each. No one wanted to live up a clinker path in those days – living by a road was the fashion. Surveyors and builders shook their heads and warned the cottages were beyond repair and not worth buying. Despite those initial reservations, the cottages in the Lane have all survived except the one attached to Number 33. Modernisation, extensions and improvements, some of them quite rudimentary in the early days, have continued.
Vehicles could only come up the Lane in the summer – at other times of the year everything was carried up. Each cottage had a wooden box with lid just inside the front hedge of Mr and Mrs Offer’s house beside the road at the Hayle. You collected your milk and post daily from your box and, as occupants became elderly, I would collect the lot and deliver to the houses. Mrs Hazell at Number 32 was always so grateful. During very warm weather, the wells in Greens Lane sometimes dried up and water would have to be collected from wells at The Hayle cottages which, for some reason, never dried up. Charley Weston had a little trolley holding buckets for this purpose. On Saturdays, the co-op delivery man would walk-up the groceries to each house. He was a rosy faced cheerful fellow and always had time to chat. Rationing was still in operation and Gramp’s groceries filled half a shoe box – tiny squares of cheese and butter and the smallest bags of tea and sugar. Making up for this, however, were the lardy cakes brought up by the Co-op man. The best dripping with lard cakes you ever tasted went straight into the range oven to keep warm. Even in the early 1970s, the refuse lorry only came up once a month.
Electricity was installed in about 1950. My father handled the negotiations and I have the sum of £50 in mind, but cannot recall if that was for each cottage or the whole lot – probably the whole lot. It was a great moment when we finally ’switched on’. Most cottages still had a table as the centre piece in the front room, originating from when the family sat around the oil lamp. Now, a bulb suspended itself from the low ceiling and, if you did not keep your table in the centre of the room, you would keep knocking your head against the bulb. The oil lamps were dispatched to the saleroom in Devizes – no one wanted those messy things anymore with their wick trimming and smelly paraffin – we had a switch on the wall now! Of course, in later years this was much regretted as those beautiful lamps with their cut glass and hand-painted bowls were adapted for electric lighting and fetched a fortune.
The Lane was finally put onto mains drainage in 1973. Prior to that, some houses had septic tanks and, prior to that, you used the wooden seat over a bucket in the privy, a small wooden hut down the garden. My Father would empty the bucket on Sunday mornings into a pit in the vegetable garden and then use large amounts of Dettol on the empty bucket before returning it to the privy. As a teenager, I quite enjoyed my Sunday mornings daydreaming to the smell of Dettol as I tore up squares of newspaper and threaded them on a string to then hang them on a nail for use during the coming week. However, mostly the privy was somewhere you nipped in and out of because it was cold in winter and smelly in summer.
Water was brought to the Lane cottages at different times which accounted for the different sources. Numbers 30 and 31 got their water from Calstone via Theobalds Green. In about 1950, two Irishmen hand-dug a trench a couple of feet deep across the two fields between Theobalds Green and Greens Lane, to lay our water pipe. It was a particularly wet time, but they dug all day in the rain. Gramp offered to dry their greatcoats overnight by the fire but they declined his offer. They rolled up the wet coats putting them under the henhouse and returned next morning to put on the saturated coats and carried on digging in the rain for another day. Dispensing with well water and buckets was a wonderful time although our spaniel, Sally, was confused with no bucket to drink from. We had our very own cold, clear Calstone tap water in the back lean-to, above a stone sink, with drainage into the ditch. However, the well still had its uses in hot weather as a cool place to hang food.
As he grew older, Gramp rarely left the Lane. He never lost his nut brown skin from years in India and farm labouring. He never missed a passer-by, peering out through the geraniums in the deep window sill. He would say “Oluck” if anyone walked by which was, I suppose, a version of ’Oh look’. We saw to his needs and cronies called to swap yarns. “I dunno why ’he comes up ’ere with ’is lyin’ and braggin” he would say of one friend only to welcome him warmly a few weeks later and, after the lighting up of baccy, the lyin’ and braggin’ would start all over again. The main tall stories concerned seeing Georgie Brown at Sprays Farm touch his nose with his tongue, throwing a threepenny piece over the Monument (quite possible when viewing from Greens Lane but not quite so easy when standing under its great height!) and the ever increasing depth of the Ox’s Eye whirlpool at Calstone . The latter story knew no bounds – the length of the rope letting down the sack of bricks into the whirlpool was around a hundred yards when Gramp died in 1957 and ’still ’e never touched bottom’! Another much told story, which was true, was of a farm worker called William who, during a break at the side of one of Maundrell’s fields when he was eating his lunch of raw onion and fruit tart, gave a hearty belch. Mr Maundrell said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that”. “Why not” replied William “a good belks wuth dree varts”.
The tragedy of the 1970s was the elm trees. When you first heard about a beetle attacking elm trees you gave it no thought at all. Calstone elms were immune to everything, weren’t they? They were a part of our lives and just too numerous and huge to be affected by a little beetle. They dominated the whole landscape and had been around for centuries. Greens Lane was well sheltered by elms in every hedgerow and field. The Lane children had climbed them for generations and they provided shelter for the cattle. You heard talk of felling elms to wipe out the disease, but they couldn’t mean our elms as they looked just as fine as they always had. As time went on and the news became more dire, you had wild thoughts of someone coming up with a cure or perhaps letting one or two be felled. But, in the mid 1970s, the felling started. You couldn’t bear it so you stayed indoors and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening as you heard the crash of each mighty tree hitting the ground. When you found the courage to look out each evening, there was yet more sky and less foliage as the Calstone landscape changed forever.
Apart from the elms, the biggest change to the Lane, as everywhere, was traffic. By the late 1980s, it became ever increasing and ever faster as the pace of the town came to a once peaceful and safe Greens Lane. Sadly, after centuries of freedom, animals and children had their lives curtailed.
I shall, however, finish my story on an optimistic note – there is much to be thankful for. On a quiet day, being in the Lane can sometimes be much as it was for my parents, grandparents and great grandparents. This corner of the village has survived well and will do so for many years to come as those who care continue to preserve and protect.
Ann Rivers-Davis
Greens Lane, Calstone
at the Millennium