Memories of Being A Duckpaddler,

I was born in a little cottage in Whetstone in 1938, just across the road from the brook. When it rained it used to flood all the bottom end of the village, and when the buses went through the floods, the furniture in the houses would move with the ripples,. The bus drivers would stop across the road, and there would always be a cup of tea for them from the people in the cottages. In 1942 we moved up to Enderby Road, into a larger council house, and that is where we grew up. Anybody who was born at the bottom end of the village was known as a 'duckpaddler', due to it being flooded regularly.