Growing Up In Rumford

A Memory of Rumford.

I wasn't born there but the years I spent in Rumford were some of my happiest. We moved there in 1960, my parents bought a house in the very centre of the village which also had a grocery shop attached. It turned out that I was the only girl actually living in the village although there were only a couple of other children near my age in the village surrounds. Rumford didn't have its own church
a mile up the road was the parish church of St Ervan but in the village were two chapels and the regimens of chapel life ruled the day to day lives of most of the villagers.
Our shop sold all sorts of things besides food such as wool, thread and leather bootlaces but mainly food. Across the road was another shop which also included the Post Office and both of these shops managed to survive which is incredible in this day and age. Rumford didn't have any buses although one came and passed by at Dolgey Post which was at the top of the village just a short walk away. A coach came every day to take me to school to Wadebridge which was 8½ miles away but only us schoolchildren could travel on that.
In the evenings the teenage farm lads took to coming into our shop to buy their cigarettes and bottles of pop. There was Archie, Michael, Ivan, Paul, Kevin and Dickie, they all worked on farms doing various jobs some on their own family farm or others for employers. In the summer we all used to play hide and seek. This may sound silly now but back then in a village almost devoid of traffic, where we knew every inhabitant and warm summer evenings were the norm we had a riotous time. One or two of the lads (I was included as a lad!) would be the chasers and the rest of us would hide. There was no limit as to where we went, in neighbours gardens, over hedges into fields, paddle up the river, apart from going into houses we had the run of the place. One of my best places was jumping on top of an extremely large hedge, I sunk down inside the scratchy branches and the hedge closed in over my head, perfect. From here I could see the chasers rushing around and hear their every word but they couldn't see me, brilliant. We would be playing this game until sunset which was quite late in the summer but my mother knew I was safe and not far away. One year on Bonfire night us boys (I was an honorary boy having proved myself by keeping up with them all) decided to pop down to the church area. This was a small residential area consisting of the church and Rectory, two farms, the old schoolhouse and a couple of cottages and bungalows referred to as Churchtown but about half a mile from the village. Down below the church and over a ford was Millington Mill and Cyril Buscombe lived here. A footpath known as the Leat wound up around and behind his cottage and from this elevated spot one could look down on the back of his cottage and his corrugated iron privvy. Yes you 've guessed it, we waited until he came out to visit this tiny building and one of the lads lit and threw a banger or even two to land on the roof of said building. From a distance we waited and watched as Cyril fell out of the door deafened by the reverberating noise. We ran! Two were delegated to return and see if it was safe to casually walk back to the church so I went with John Wherry and fortunately as Cyril waited to catch us and give us a piece of his mind he smoked a cigarette. John saw the glow of this and we both ran like mad up the Leat with Cyril hot on our heels diverting up the steep steep slope into Biddicks fields, he didn't catch us! The other lads had scattered but eventually we all met up back at the shop in the village to remark on our escapade and tell our tales of a lucky escape.

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