Hobbs Farm

A Memory of Yapton.

Our family moved from Bognor to Yapton in 1951 just before my 10th birthday. I was only 13 and attending Chichester High School for Girls when I started working weekends at Hobbs Farm, Bilsham Corner. It was a pedigree Jersey dairy farm and we used to bottle gold top milk with cream that came half-way down the glass pint. The milk was fresh, not pasteurized. I can't find milk like that today. Most of these cows' milk tested much higher than 5.5\% butterfat. I used to do almost everything, including relieve for the herdsman during holidays and weekends until 1960, when I went to college in Liverpool. We lived in Yapton Gardens (full of potholes), South Yapton, near the old Lamb Inn, and on summer evenings we used to hear the pub revellers singing songs outside.
My not-so-fond memory was when our cesspit had to be emptied. We were limited to four free empties by the council a year, and many people allowed theirs to overflow over their gardens. It trained me to be abstemious with our water supply! In this relatively rural area of Canada, where I live now, we have a "septic tank" instead, and I pride myself on managing it better than the other locals here.
While I haven't seen Yapton since 1962, I've seen it on Google Earth. I don't think I'd recognize it if I were to drive through it again. But the same thing is happening in Gibsons, BC, the sea-side village I moved to in 1967. It's now changing so rapidly and I'm trying to warn the local council about what has already happened in English villages.
But no one pays attention until it's too late. . . .

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