My Young Life At Rilla Mill

A Memory of Rilla Mill.

I was born at Rilla Mill on the 1st of September 1934 in what was, in those days, the Police Station. This house was opposite the Manor Inn. My father was the local policeman, and he was called Ewart Pearce. His family were from St Blazey Gate. I lived in the Police Station with my sister Margaret Elizabeth, and my mother who came from Constantine. She was called Lilian Thomas. There were three shops in the village when we lived there. There was the Davy's, just up from the Police Station on the opposite side of the hill, then there was Mr Dob's who had a shop just below the old Village Hall (where the mobile cinema came on Monday nights), and there was also a shop down the bottom of the village, over the River Lyner bridge and on the right at the bottom of Masome Lane. My friends at my growing up period until we moved in 1943 were the Davy brothers from the shop. There was Peter the youngest, there was Derrick the middle one and there was Jack who was the oldest. We played down in the Lyner valley beside the river and over towards the woods at Plusha Bridge. We all went to the Methodist Chapel on Sundays both to the morning service and again in the afternoon for Sunday School. I used to walk up with Peter and Derrick and we were in our best suits. There was no mains electricity in the village at the time I lived there, but a very basic system was generated down in the garage opposite the Mill house. We had a couple of lights in the Police Station which came on for a while after dusk. I don't recollect what the voltage was or any other details about the means of transmission. There was a little telephone exchange opposite the Police Station where the power for the local calls was generated. I can remember a man called Mr Foster, who came over about once a fortnight to start up a little 2 stoke generator which charged up a bank of batteries which served the whole area. We had a phone in our place but it was for police calls, and the number was 232. I went to Upton Cross School with most of the other children from the area, and sometimes we caught a Western National bus, and other times we would walk, depending what the weather was like. I can recall there were quite a few evacuees billoted around the area at the time I am writing about, which must have been hard for them to leave all their family ties and be dropped off in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Of course, at the time I'm refering to, the 2nd World War was just getting in it's stride and I can remember the bombing of Plymouth. The sky would be lit with flashes and somtimes, there was the sound of explosions in the very far distance. We all had to fit black out blinds to our windows to stop any light getting out, and the window panes were crissed crossed with sticky paper to stop the glass flying around should a bomb explode nearby. One exciting thing I can remember was when a barrage balloon broke it's anchor cable and came to land in a field up towards Bray's shop. My father was called upon to locate it and make it secure, but by the time he found it, the locals had cut it up and gone off with sections to make things out of the rubberised cover. Father got hold of some small pieces, and fabricated some covers for our Gas Mask boxes which we had to lug around with us for a while in the early days of the war. We left Rilla Mill and moved to Hessenford when I was 9 years old. I have been back a couple of times through the years and I'll always have a soft spot for the village.