A Beautiful Early Childhood In The 50's.

A Memory of West Peckham.

My Dad and Mum moved to what was then 'The old Cottage', Water Lane in 1954-5 from Cornwall.
Mum was pregnant and they couldn't get a cottage, so Dad, Ken Johnson, applied to Corfe's Farm to get a tied cottage. He worked with the pigs, in apple orchards and ' the nut platt'
I was born soon after. I remember the whirr of woodsaws in the coppices, the pheasants squawking, the drifts of snowdrops in the garden and the chestnut paling fencing just about everywhere.
I remember girls called Lindy Lou and Sally, and some boys I forget the names of, playing in the orchards while our mums worked in the summer days.
I've been back a few times since then, feeling like a ghost from the past.
It was all strawberries last time in, I think, 2009.
Once I called in on Mr and Mrs Keeler who used to look after me quite a lot and lived at Paddling Brook. That was nearly 20 years later in the 1970's but they remembered me.
40 years after that last visit I can still smell the old roses in their garden.
Nowhere else in the world has felt as special to me and nowhere else is as beautiful as West Peckham, even nowadays when people complain of the roads and busy-ness.
I last drove down what is now, Matthews Lane, but was Water Lane about ten years ago.Not hugely different but my old house is very posh now. 😊

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