'Come along then Sunny Jim!' says Charlie. The big countryman always calls me: 'Sunny Jim.' He carries my little suitcase as we walk the short distance from Burford School towards the church of St. Mary Burford. We turn off the main road and walk down an avenue of red and golden leaved sycamores that filter the pale evening light into a roseate glow. We hear the sound of laughter and pass white-flanneled figures sprawled in candy striped deckchairs on the rectory lawn. In a few minutes, we arrive at the church and the entry to Burford Gardens.

At the time of the Doomsday Survey of 1086, Burford was one of the larger manors in South Shropshire. Burford means the 'burg' or 'fortified place by the ford and indicates a pre-Norman settlement on or close to the parish church. The very way in which Burford church was mentioned in the Doomsday Book implied that it wasn't a new church even then. The old narrow arch, which used to divide the nave from the chancel, was believed by some to be of a Saxon architectural form.

The entrance to the churchyard is through a fine example of a "modem" lychgate, erected in 1889 by friends and tenants of Burford Estates, in memory of George, Lord Northwick. A lych-gate got its name as the place where the coffin bearers at a funeral rested the lyche (the body of the deceased) before entering the church grounds

At Burford church we turn right, and walk down the long drive towards the large gardener's house. We pass a rectangular pond with its borders of swaying blue narcissus plants with sword-shaped leaves and erect stalks bearing bright-coloured flowers. Dabbling moorhens scurry about self importantly among the waterlily pads on the slimy-green water. We pass a white, pillared, concave, open fronted building, which I'll later learn is an eighteenth century imitation of Greek temple. We walk towards a house with high-pitched roofs and tall chimneys. The tall, burly countryman with the grey herring-bone pattern cap his severe-looking, baggy-eyed wife in her prim thirties-style hat and a tired little boy with his buck teeth and small steel-rimmed spectacles, his evacuees label flapping in the wind. An unlikely threesome in the September twilight - three figures from a bygone landscape.

This is to be my home. Here is where I'll spend the next four years of my young life? 'Go and look round the garden little nipper,' chuckles big Uncle Charlie.

I wander into the walled garden at the rear of the house. It has that typical warm pinkish crumbling brickwork of the nineteenth century. There are lots of wooden forcing frames and greenhouses. I look through the streaky glass of the hothouses, and see the fat, rusted heating pipes under the slatted wooden shelves with their burden of seedling trays. Peach and apricot plants bifurcate their way up the beige brickwork like nectarine engrafts with their hands held high in surrender. The plants are frozen to the masonry proscenium as if caught in the act.

At the far end of the walled garden, hiding shyly behind an extended fan of dwarf roses - a bed of Lilly of the Valley, conceal their white, nodding, chaste, bell-heads. Their delicate scent bestows an aura of reverential immortality to this magical Elysium. I can still remember the feeling of intoxication and tiredness. Of course, my young mind doesn't conceptualise these things as I do now, but I like to dream or imagine - at this half century historical remove - that the nimbus of perception touched me in that solitary witching moment, and maybe fired a bolt of knowingness into my innocent eyes.

Later I'm taken to the scullery and given a good hot bath. Then Charlie says. 'Up the dancers, first door on the right.'
Auntie Horton takes me upstairs and tucks me into bed. The sheets are crisp and clean. Downstairs, I hear the Westminster Chiming clock striking twelve midnight:

Dong-ding dong-ding - ding-dong ding-dong.

Dong-ding dong-ding - ding-dong ding-dong

Dong. dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong

Can you discern the melody?

Burford House was built in 1728 for William Bowles, M. P. for Bewdley and proprietor of London's famous Vauxhall glass works. The house, which is an excellent example of Provincial Georgian architecture, stands on one of the country's most historic sites, that of Burford Castle, which dated back to Saxon times. It is recorded that during the reign of Edward the Confessor, Richard, son of Scrob held Richards Castle together with vast lands including Burford. It then descended through the de Says, and Mortimers to Sir Geoffrey Cornwall who became the first Baron of Burford. It remained in the Cornwall family for the next 400 years when Francis, the 16th and last Baron, sold the Castle, then in ruins, to William Bowles. Many relics of the once powerful Cornwall family may be seen in the nearby Burford Church.William Bowles MP, who proceeded to build Burford House in 1728.

It remained in the Rushout (Northwick) family for some generations. When I'm at Burford House Gardens the property belongs to Lord and Lady Whitbread of the brewing family. It was sold in the early nineteen fifties to John Treasure and his brother.

There's an old wireless in the dining room. In these wartime years, the wireless is a very important item in every home that can afford one. Very few of them are mains electric. Most of them work by connection to a glass accumulator and a square battery about the size of a small handbag. The accumulator is filled with acid, which you can see through the thick glass sloshing around the metal plates inside. It has to be recharged every week. We take it to a little shop in Market street in Tenbury and leave it there, whilst at the same time picking up another accumulator we'd left for recharging the week before. It has a rather awkward wire carrying handle with a wooden roller as a grip on. It is heavy to carry.

After our meal, we go to listen to the news from London. I'm allowed to listen to children's hour, and shortly after that, I'm put to bed. There are plays, music recitals, and comedy shows. There's Tommy Handley in the ITMA show with all the funny catch phrases. There's Mona Lott, the cleaning lady, 'Can I do you now sir? and 'It's bein' so cheerful that keeps me goin'. Colonel Chinstrap - 'I don't mind if I do.' There's no commercial radio at that time of course. We have the BBC Light Programme, the BBC Home service and the BBC Third Programme. Some popular songs are played many times in one day. The popular wartime song is always on the wireless. It's inspired by the fact that in the period of the so-called phoney war, the only casualty caused by Hitler's bombs is a rabbit. Of course, it isn't long before the wits substitute the name Adolf for rabbit and it isn't long before Charlie introduces me to the art a rabbit shooting.

'Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,
The farmer is coming with his gun, gun, gun.
We'll get by without our rabbit pie,
So, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.'

On Our LeaderIn Liverpool, 95,000 children were evacuated from the city as War broke out in September 1939. 57,000 of these were school children, and 31,000 were mothers and children under five years of age. However, as it appeared that the city was in no immediate danger from German bombing attacks, around 40% of the children were returned home by January 1940.

51,000 evacuees from Liverpool were sent to Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire in England. Another 44,000 evacuees were sent to live in Wales.


Heavy bombing of Merseyside began, however, in August 1940, and became more frequent throughout the year. The second programme of evacuation began following the ‘Christmas raids’ of 1940. Between 20-22 December 1940, 1,399 children were rushed out of Liverpool. Thousands more children were evacuated during the ‘May Blitz’ of 1941.


                                                          Liverpool was severely damaged. 3/4 May 1941


As the bombing threat to Merseyside lessened after the summer of 1941, more and more evacuated children began returning home, particularly in late 1944.

Uncle Charlie has a twelve-bore shotgun. We walk into the gardens of Burford House and then he unlocks the padlock to the gate over the little hump backed bridge across the Ledwych Brook. We walk into the big field and make our way down towards the bank of the Teme where all the rabbit holes are. The field is shaped like a triangle by the course of the River Teme and Ledwich Brook and the tall trees stand like anticipant spectators awaiting the slaughter to come. Charlie takes aim at the distant bobbing brown bodies with their powder-puff tails. His face is a study in concentration. Charlie has been a cavalryman in the First World War and he's proud of his ability with the firearm. One side of his white moustache droops over the gun's chamber as he gently squeezes the trigger. There's a loud bang and the gun kicks back into his hunched shoulder. One of the bobbing powder puffs suddenly stops moving. When we approach, it is lying there with its snowy white underside pricked with crimson. The brown fur is sleek and glossy. The eyes are open as if mystified at a changed state of being. Occasionally one of these recumbent little animals kicks convulsively. Charlie lifts it by its back legs and hits it behind the head with a stick. The stick is pointed, and Charlie pushes it through the soft tendons of the back legs. There it hangs slotted on a stick, over Charlie's shoulder. I walk behind him sorrowfully like an unwilling acolyte, eyeing the jiggling upside down marionette in its puppet-show of death.

Back in the scullery, Auntie Horton pulls at the skin of the limp creature, which comes off a sucking, tearing, plop. She eviscerates the stomach and gives the offal to Bonzo. The pink-eyed Bull terrier salivates in greedy anticipation outside in a kennel, surrounded by soil covered bones. She cuts the small nude body into pieces and drops it into a big, black witch's cauldron. She adds vegetables from the garden, basil, and thyme from the herbarium . She fetches a drip pan of stock and pours some into the huge container over the bloodied body parts of the dead rabbit. Then holding the curved handle with a gloved hand, she plunks it down on flames of the Aga cooker and rakes the coals beneath.

The first time I refuse meat they're very perplexed and vexed. They assume I'm sick and consider calling the doctor. It takes them a long while to understand I simply won't eat it and I've a natural inborn revulsion for eating dead flesh. Countryfolk find vegetarians rather bizarre.

Things turn out OK though. After all, they run one of the largest vegetable gardens in the district. Although the gardens in peacetime are flower gardens, meant to bring joy to the absentee owners, Lord and Lady Whitbread on their occasional visits, the wartime regulations insist that all cultivatable land is given over to the growth of vegetables and fruit. In some areas, even public parks are used for horticultural purposes. The Ministry of Agriculture is very strict about this law, and any smallholder caught growing flowers for sale is dealt with very severely. I am never short of high quality vegetables fresh from the garden. At that time, I eat eggs. My brown-feathered clucking friends in the hen house provide a plentiful supply, and it's my job to take a basket and collect the still warm eggs from their hideaways in the straw.