I Lived There

A Memory of Diss.

I was born in Diss but now live in Kilmarnock, if my memory serves me well, down Mount Street, where my granny on my mother's side lived. We, me and my brother, used to visit our cousins who lived beside gran and play in The Rectory Meadows behind it (Mike Webb and The Noble Clan).

I'm still in contact with my other cousin, Pat, also known as Lucy, who's now in the States but hoping to come back home soon. My brother Jim, who changed his name to Smiley Sandy, used to live on Roydon Fen but has since moved away I understand, after getting married and having a child (where exactly he's gone I don't know as we've lost touch with each other).

It seems I've lost contact with a lot of old friends (Jim Church from Harleston, Stephen Hartley from Fair Green, The Crown pub crowd, The Saracen's Head lot, old school friends etc. but that's life). I remember catching a TV program recently that mentioned something I didn't know about The Mere before. Apparently it used to be caves and was considered the entrance to the underworld - I knew Diss meant 'ditch' in Anglo-Saxon but didn't realize it was because of this.

I don't know if anybody else witnessed this or remembers it but when I was at Diss Secondary Modern (1966?), I saw a gigantic UFO over the school, when on my way home. It was mentioned as being seen world wide, in a book called UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse, by John Keel. It was like a big black needle, pointed at both ends. It floated slowly between two banks of clouds and was visible for at least ten minutes. Was it reported in The Diss Express I wonder? I was too young at the time to bother reading it but now at sixty the idea intrigues me.