Park Farm

A Memory of Kettlethorpe.

Having just read the article on Park Farm written by Gillian Emerton, I am the above mentioned Glenys, nee Button. Those where the days. I can remember all the things that Gillian wrote about making butter with her mum and mice catching at harvest time. I also went to Newton-on-Trent school and remember playing marbles with a boy called Michael Miles and also a boy in my class called Walter Easton. Mrs Moore the school teacher had a son called Richard Moore. I would go to the pub in the village that sold sweets and get with my 3 pence one bag of broken crisps, gob stoppers and 4 chews for a penny - old money that is. My twin brothers that were born at Park Farm were christened at the church in Newton-on-Trent. The game keeper was called Mr Massey and he lived at Thorney village and he had a black car that he called Josephine and I would go with him to feed the baby pheasants to fatten them up ready for the shooting season. We would go to school on the bus even when the snow was 6 feet deep at the side of the roads and the electricity wires would be on the floor due to the weight of the snow. We would go just up the road where there was a bungalow that grew strawberries and we would pick our own. I had an auntie that lived at Drinsey Nook and my sister and I would walk to visit her. At the school we would go up the road to a nudist camp to learn swimming in their outdoor pool, it was freezing, the nudists were told to keep out of sight on that day. We used to walk to Thorney over the fields and the local wood was a mass of bluebells and wood anemonies, also in the field over the main road would grow wild mushrooms. I would go bush-beating with my late father, yes, a girl bush-beating, and enjoy the day with all the men, sometimes going through kale that was higher than myself. I would also do beet singling to earn pocket money and potato picking, back breaking work but it never did me any harm to work hard. My family left Park Farm when I was 14 to go and live near Belvoir Castle where my father worked for the Duke of Rutland.

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