Cookham Dean, Uncle Tom's Cabin 1950

cricket on the village green

When I worked for Samuel Jones the boys in our office played cricket against a team in Cookham Dean and we girls went along as support. What a great place this is!  I remember a lovely village in lovely countryside - must be a nice place to live.  I didn't realise at that time the connection with Wind in the Willows but that just about sums it up.  I hope its stayed much the same.

My Childhood

I was born in Cookham in 1952. I attended Holy Trinity Primary School and sang in the church choir. One Remembrance Sunday I was given the honour of carrying the cross at the head of the procession from the church to the war memorial. I was extremely lucky to spend my childhood in such idyllic surroundings. My brothers and I, along with many of the other local children spent many hours swimming in the river at Odney or playing on Cockmarsh. In the winter when we had snow, we used a sheet of corrugated iron as a sledge to whiz down the steep slopes before being launched into the air by the track at the bottom, like a giant ski ramp. We would spend whole days playing in nearby Quarry Woods before the onset of the evening darkness forced us to return home. My gran lived in Station Road and on my way home from her house I would stay and watch the steam trains coming through the station. My father helped to build the cricket pavilion on the Green at Cookham Dean and was captain of the 1st Eleven for many years. I later played for them myself for a short while in my late teens. It was a fantastic site to play on with a view across to Winter Hill. After the match we would all troop into the Hare and Hounds for a well earned pint (or two). I was married in Cookham church in 1977 but sadly the area had by now become a victim of the commuter belt, and myself, and many of my schoolmates, were forced to leave the area as we could no longer afford to live there. I now live in Cornwall with my wife and two daughters, but have very fond memories of how Cookham once was.

The Green (Wayside Cottages)

My paternal grandmother, Kate Paine Whitbourn, was born in these cottages in 1896.  Her father was the head carpenter at Bisham Abbey. The Paine family had lived in Bisham for several generations. When I was little, Gran and I would visit the kirk and 'water' her grandad.  He was a great cricketer. We would stop at the monument, the war memorial, to read the names of Charles Paine and Guy and Berkeley Paget (Vansittart Neale). When Kate married after the Great War, she went to live in Eastbourne, Sussex, but returned to' The Green' with her children in W.W.II in search of safety.  She never left again. Uncle Harry, Kate's older brother, lived at the other end of the row and he was a beekeeper.  Uncle Curly, Aunty Nan, and Aunty May lived in the village, and so did Kate's second son, David, his wife Frances and my cousins Fred, Bernie, and Wendy.  The Paines have disappeared from Bisham now, as have the Vansittart Neales whom they served.  You will only find them in the churchyard, or bearing other names, scattered in the wide world.  My grandfather, Frederick Whitbourn, told me that he really meant to leave Bisham after the war but he never could.  Perhaps it was the 'magic' of the place that held him, just as it draws me back to remember.
                                              
                                               Below Quarry Wood

                        When I was little, my father always stopped the car
                        At the top of Bisham Hill,
                        One of the old, chalk Chilterns.
                        Out we climbed,
                        My feet scrambling to the middle rung
                        Of the farmer's fence.
                        Stretching below us
                        Fields of golden corn,
                        The river, a silver ribbon, distant,
                        And behind us on the hills,
                        Shadowing, towering beech.
                        "Look," he would say. "Feel how beautiful."
                        I could not really feel, at five,
                        But he would swing me up, laughing,
                        Pointing out cows and crops.
                        He was tall and strong and fair,
                        And he taught me what was beautiful
                        Over and over,
                        Until I knew.