It’s always sunny in Ramsbury

It is always sunny in Ramsbury, isn’t it? Or perhaps we really do remember only the sunny days of our childhood.

My grandparents lived in a little terrace house in Oxford Street, Ramsbury, where Grandfather Pickett was head gardener at Parliament Piece. During World War II, my mother and I spent a lot of time there, away from the bombs falling around our home in Surrey. The house had no mod cons. No running water, so no taps or sinks or bathrooms or lavatories. No power supply, so no machines like we had at home, no vacuum cleaner, or electric cooker or iron or fires. No gas, so no gas stove or fires. No telephone. And I loved it.

So how did we manage? The water came from a deep well just outside the back door, with a bucket on a long rope. The top of the well had a little wall round it and a little roof over it, just like the ornamental ones you see in garden centres today. The water was heated on the kitchen range, or in a big copper in the kitchen when large amounts were needed for bathing or laundering. We didn’t bath very often & we certainly had no deodorants in those days. (Pooh!).

To cope without WCs there was a potty in each bedroom for night-time use and during the day we trotted down the garden to the little house. It was VERY smelly there, but it was actually a superior little house as it had two seat holes - one adult size and one child size. I don’t every remember anyone emptying it, but I suppose that happened sometimes.

Before the war an enterprising person set up a small electricity station in the village and in my grandparents house there were three electric lights, one in the kitchen and one in each front room downstairs. That was all though. We used candles everywhere else.

All cooking was done using the kitchen range. I think we ate better there than in Surrey, for we sometimes had real eggs (not powdered), we had the occasional chicken and quite often a delicious rabbit stew. All the fruit and vegetables came from the garden. Food was stored in the pantry - a back room in the house with one small window, blacked out for the war, so it was completely dark. I only ever saw that room by candlelight. On one side was a heap of coal for the range and on the other shelves full of bottled fruit and other supplies. Meat was put on a plate under a mesh ‘meat safe’. It all sounds pretty unhygienic now. Sometimes for a treat we went round to have lunch at the British Restaurant in Back Lane. You could smell it as soon as you turned into Back Lane - it smelled like school dinners. At the BR our ration coupons were exchanged for coloured tokens, which had to be given up with the payment for the meal.

The garden was very long and very narrow. It was almost entirely vegetables and fruit. Down the end was the little house and beyond that a woodshed, where my grandfather kept chickens and a pig in earlier days. What I remember most is the smells - the smell of the box bush in the sunshine, the smell of the little house and the smell of the sawdust in the woodshed.

The house had been rented by the family for many years from a farmer in Froxfield. I have heard that my grandfather was given the chance to buy the property for £64 (about US $105) in the 1920s, but it was an offer he could not afford.

I went to a little school at the Vicarage, run by the Vicar’s wife, for children under school age and learnt to read. On Sundays I went to Sunday School in the Methodist Chapel. They gave me beautiful coloured stamps to stick in a little book. And they had wonderful harvest festival services in the Autumn.

Then the Yanks came. (Please forgive us, you guys over there, but to us you were all THE YANKS). They were all big and handsome and smiling and wonderful. Based up on the hill, they were all over the village and they had CHEWING GUM and POPCORN: what treats for a child brought up during rationing.

Is there anyone out there on the www who remembers popping corn in the Vokins kitchen in Ramsbury and giving some to a little girl called Diane ?

That brings me to those very special people - the Vokins. Norah Vokins was my mother’s friend. When Norah was 16, in 1915, she developed a form of arthritis and was put on complete bed rest for a year. Yes, a whole year. She never walked again and could not even feed herself. She had various home-made gadgets on sticks, such as a hanky holder and a scratching stick, and could just manage to write, but could hardly move apart from that. Her older sister Ella devoted the rest of her life to looking after her sister. These two middle-aged spinster sisters, one so severely disabled, sound like strange company for a young child, but I loved being with them. I never heard a word of complaint or bitterness, they were always cheerful and interesting.

Ella and Norah went to everything that went on in Ramsbury and joined in everything. Norah wrote poetry, mostly about trees and plants. I learned two very valuable lessons from them: firstly that a person in a wheelchair is a person, and secondly to love the countryside, especially trees. (There is - or was - a tree in Crowood called "Diane’s tree") Almost every afternoon they went out for a walk, with Ella pushing the great heavy basket wheelchair, and I loved to go with them and help push. They had a heavy tarpaulin cover for the chair, but never used it - it was always sunny! Sometimes my mother came too.

In Spring we picked primroses and filled the house with great bunches of them, then it was bluebells. Later in the year we gathered blackberries and sloes. Once, there were cows in the field where we were picking mushrooms; I was scared in case they were bulls - nobody told me the difference!

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