Growing Up In Chapelton

A Memory of Chapelton.

I was born in Chapelton in 1933, my auntie and uncle and their children lived at the top of the village, and my grandmother and grandfather lived on the main road, about a quarter of a mile away towards Barnstaple. They used to serve petrol in the early 1930s but I remember them selling teas from a wooden cabin.
When it was time to go to school, I had to go to Herner, but when the Taw flooded it was impassable,so they sent me to Harracott.
I did not do much schooling there! My father's mother and father, who lived in Lake, needed taking care of in their later years, so my mother spent a lot of time there, and it was thought best that I should go to Tawstock school, the headmistress was Mrs Maude.
And during the early war years, we used to make camoufladge netting, and I remember collecting rose hips from the hedges, towards the war effort.
We had to move back to Chapelton because we had billeted on us an evacuee whose name was Graham and who came from Bristol, a girl about my age and her younger brother were billeted with Mr and Mrs Osman, who was at that time the station master at Chapelton. This lad was certainly different from me, from a rough area, and was given my bedroom. I did not like him, I am afraid to say, and he seemed to get a lot better treatment than I, and I seemed to have carried that upset with me, until I married and left the family home.
I had some good pals who lived locally, Arthur Milton who lived at Bridgedown Farm and Colin Shapland who lived at the end of Newbridge.
In the early part of 1945 my mother and father cycled from Chapelton to the outskirts of Birmingham, my father at the time was a sawyer, and the chance of a better position and a house took us in late 1945s to Stourbridge, in what  is now the West Midlands.
Going from a small country school like Tawstock to a secondary school with over 300 pupils was quite a shock.
When I left school I went to work on the railway footplate, and after three years in the RAF I returned to this job and finished up being a steam engine driver on the railway.
I still have all my cousins living in the Barnstaple area, and always call Devon my home.