Challoners Hill

A Memory of Steeple Claydon.

I lived at no. 1 Challoners Hill otherwise known as The Stores. In the photograph the petrol pumps are just visible on the left hand side of the road.
Across the road Vic Burrows ran the bakery and we were treated to the smell of freshly baked bread every morning. Mrs Whiting had the newsagents and Cyril and Ruby Griffin ran the Fountain Pub. There were five pubs in Steeple Claydon whereas poor old Middle Claydon, East Claydon and Botolph Claydon didn't have one between them. We had nine shops including a post office and they supplied all our needs. At Austins you could buy fishing tackle and a penknife and get a haircut if you wanted one. Dennis Robinson, who also ran the Phoenix pub, would mend your bike and, (and this was torture for us boys) would display the latest Raliegh bike in his workshop window. We would gaze at it for hours making ambitious plans to raise the ten or twelve pounds required to buy it. We vowed to get jobs on the local farms or, when the season came, spend the summer evenings fruit picking at Claydon House. We went fruit picking but five shillings at the end of the week was a long way short of ten pounds and it burnt a hole in our pockets and was soon spent. If anything more exotic than the village could supply was required Langston and Tasker would, on Tuesday and Saturday, take us by bus to Buckingham.
Steeple Claydon was a proper working village, self contained, sleepy and slow it was the tail end of a thousand years of history
I was seven when My family moved to Steeple Claydon from London in 1956. They ran the Stores untill the late sixties. The village was a wonderful place to grow up. Village school, the meandering stream that ran just outside the village known as the planks, long walks down the Calvert road, camps hidden away in quiet corners. Cricket matches down the rec on a Sunday afternoon and rowdy football matches on autumns Saturdays. Dances at the Library hall always followed by a fight. Church on Sunday for some Chappel for others and the public bar for the majority
In 1965 aged sixteen I returned to London but Steeple Claydon has always remained my home.

Paul Curtis 2010