Milfield Roots

This is a brief, if somewhat patchy, history of my family's connection with Milfied. My maternal family came from Milfield. My Grandma, Isabella Elizabeth Chave (known as "Tibby"), was born in Milfield in August, 1900. She married Robert Hay but he died of TB after serving in the army in WW1, and Grandma had to raise my mum, Joan Johnstone Hay (known as "Bunty") and her little brother, Robert Ian Hay (Ian) alone in the 1920s and 1930s. Grandma worked as a cook while her mother looked after my mum and Uncle Ian. I believe they lived in a stable house or a house near a stable, at the time. My mum and Uncle Ian attended the village school and mum won a scholarship to attend Berwick High School. Mum told me she had to cycle fifteen miles per day and catch a train, to travel to and from Berwick High School each day! I remember being told a story about Uncle Ian, as a small boy, trying to help a village resident by chopping down her "weeds," which turned out to be ornamental thistles!

After leaving school, Mum worked in Wooler for a while then she joined the WAAF and was a teleprinter operator during WW2. Uncle Ian joined the Navy. Grandma married a joiner called John Henry (Jack) Kirkup and they lived on West Plain, Milfield, in a green wooden bungalow that had a white roof with a red border, in the middle of an enormous field with a burn running across the bottom. West Plain is opposite the aerodrome...and the dark blue AA 'phone box, if it is still there! They kept poultry, bees and, sometimes, a farming couple called Mr and Mrs Hogg would bring their cattle to graze and on the grass at West Plain. My grandma was a truly wonderful person, and people would come from all over the country, specially to visit her and buy eggs or sample her jams, preserves and the honey collected from the bees.

My grandparents lived a simple life and didn't have electricity in the bungalow until Uncle Ian had it installed for them in the 1970s! My parents had a business to run and I would spend every school holiday at West Plain, right up to the very sad year when my grandma passed away. Often I was permitted to take a friend with me and I have many, many happy memories of my holidays at Milfield.

My parents and I continued to holiday at West Plain and my mum and Uncle Ian always looked after Grandad Jack, after grandma passed away, but it was never the same because I left school shortly after and was rapidly growing up and Grandad Jack's family (who were of the Plymouth Brethren cult) suddenly began to "home in" and take over. Grandad Jack very much disapproved of this cult and was terribly upset when a host of strangers from the Plymouth Brethren turned up to my grandma's funeral, at Kirknewton.

Tragically, once my grandad fell off his bike, in the 1980s, and began to develop alzheimer's, his Plymouth Brethren family members cut off my mum, my Uncle Ian and I and refused to allow us to see Grandad Jack ever again (I still have the letter from his Plymouth Brethren sister, Evelyn, telling me to stay away from him). They broke my mum's heart and, when he passed away, they sold my grandma's land and kept the money. We never returned to Milfield after that, my mum (Bunty) passed away in January, 1993 and my Uncle Ian a couple of years before that.

My eldest daughter, Jessamyn (her name being a variation of the north northumbrian "Jessamine," the flower Jasmine), and her partner paid a short visit to Milfield a couple of years ago and they visited Kirknewton Cemetery, to see my Grandma's grave, and that of Grandma's sister, my Auntie Edie, who used to live in the old railway cottage in Wooler. Jessamyn was privileged to be able to stay at West Plain as a small child, with my husband and I, while my Grandad Jack was still in control of his life and she felt grateful to be able to return.

Milfield is a part of a region known as Glendale; barren in its intense beauty, overwhelming, almost to the point of agoraphobia-inducing, but with utterly charming villages and lush areas to break up the vast plains and heather-coated hills. The warmth and hospitality of the people is immeasurable. One day I would love to return to Milfield, to visit all my old haunts and evoke all the memories from my youth, of which I will write in more detail at a later date.