As the autumn days go by and winter approaches, I become more accustomed to my new environment. The memory of my mother and the sooty street begins to fade. There's so much here to occupy the mind of a young child. I start to explore my surroundings. There are only two other men working in the gardens for most men have been called up into the forces. Only the old or the underage are exempt.

My son Connor at the Weir 23.07. 2004 He is the age I was when I was evacuated - 5-years old.

Stan Holmes is a bachelor and a very shy man. He looks a bit like Stan Laurel of the Laurel and Hardy comedy partnership. He's a quiet and nervous man. He wears a flat cap on his head like most working class men of the time. He lives alone in a cottage on the road to Greete. I can still see him in my mind's eye. He's crouched low  in the avenue clearing up the fallen sycamore leaves. He has two short wide pieces of wood in his hands. He brings the wood together, trapping the leaves between, which he then deposits in the  handcart. The cart has bicycle wheels. He uses these same two cracked and splintered  pieces of wood for all the years I know him. The two wooden slats are treasured - like his spade and fork, as part of the tools of his trade. In all my travels since, I never see this method of lifting leaves used anywhere else.

Stan, like the other men, speaks with a delightful Worcestershire burr - the soft musical cadence of the countryside. It is so different from the harsh nasal vowels and glottal stops of my native Liverpool. Soon I too adopt this soft dialect and it stays with me long after my eventual return to Merseyside.


Every day brings a new discovery. Yesterday it was a parsnip, which I think is a new species of carrot; today there's an ant's nest to investigate. The little ruddy-brown ants scurry round the bottom of a tap post, some carrying little white globes which Stan tells me are eggs. There's a lamb tethered to a post on a piece of land outside of the garden area. There are woodsheds smelling of freshly sawn timber, and there's the apple shed. It is my job to go into the apple shed and throw the apples against the wall. This bruising of the apples is said to improve the quality of the cider. As I type, I can still smell the sickly sweet aroma inside that shed, hear the fluttering wings of a trapped bird in the rafters, and see the dappled sunlight through the half open slatted door.

Charlie is a churchwarden. We have a reserved pew in the church. He never strikes me as being a particularly religious man. We never say grace before a meal. We attend church every Sunday. We walk through the old lych gate - under its elaborate tiled canopy.  "Lych"  means "corpse" or "dead body" in old English, and it was there that the pall bearers used to rest the coffin and drink the traditional pint of cider. There is a horizontal solid oak pillar between the two gates as a resting-place for caskets as they are carried to the grave and funeral service.

Around the inside of church is an array of figures in the corbel table, which supports the eaves and parapet. There are angels, clerics, aristocrats and demons; the result of the mason's sense of humour and superlative skill. I look up in wonder at the stern figures. They seem so disdainful, so aloof in their sanctity and untouchable holiness.

The vicar's name is Mr Freeman. Sometimes he invites us to garden parties and other parochial events on beautiful rectory lawn. The church is very English. There's recumbent figure of a Knight in chainmail, his metal hands clasped in prayer. Sometimes I trail my fingers over his cold face.

The Weir at Burford.
Behind the church, at the bottom of the graveyard is a little stile. I climb over and tread my way down a dusty path at the side of a cornfield. I pass some cowsheds on my right where a cow is rubbing her body against the wooden upright. A cloud of flies seethe around her rear end and crowd around the eyes like patches of moving black velvet. The path leads to the river and as I get nearer, I can hear the sound of the water rushing over the weir.

Only the lonely sound of a distant peewit answers my plaintive and insistent hellos. Then it is quiet again, with the noise of the water rushing over the stones.
I'm a seven-year-old boy and a drowsy July hotness lies heavily over the sweet smelling fields. Through a shimmering haze, the sun pulses down upon the weary elms of the old Church. The trees endure like reassuring sentinels in the faraway distance of the Worcestershire countryside.

The spider is one of those large fat bodied ones that spin cartwheel webs. There it hangs, in the middle, distorting the web with its somnolent weight. The boy, myself, blows at it without enthusiasm, but the spider merely curls up its legs. Only the slightest quiver disturbs the stillness of the immobile knapweed stem and the stalk of wheat to which the web is anchored. I hunt for a grass straw to tickle the spider, then thinking better of it, roll over in the rutted grass. This is my lonely place.

I come every day. The birds know me. The sparrows come in flocks; they accumulate in a twittering cloud in the neighbouring hedges and, watching for their opportunity, drop quietly onto the wheat of the verges. First one, then another and soon the whole flock are feeding on the ripening corn.
I'm proud of my stone-flinger. It's an ash stick cut from the hedge and slit at the larger end. Into the slit I place a flat stone, fitting it not too tightly. I've practised with it most of the morning and now can drop a projectile neatly into the middle of the flock of birds, though I haven't hit a bird and have no desire to do so. There are plenty of pebbles on the riverbank. They're worn smooth by the ageless water of the River Teme. The clear water gurgles and swashes as it hastens over the ancient stone blocks of the Roman ford, to swirl away to the Severn and the beckoning sea.

I am the seignior of this secret place. An abandoned little boy secure in my secluded domain. A quiet ancient place, the place of my solitary childhood. My lonely, beloved place.

The glowering hills with their thick covering of dark trees and thorn-crowned ridges are mine. So is the steep bank on the far side of the river with its bare earth and innumerable rabbit warrens, stubby hawthorns and junipers. The only sound is of the roaring water as it courses over the mossy lip of the massive stones. The splashing water overwhelms the sound of the buzzing insects and the bird song. In this remote place, I am inviolable.

Sometimes I shout, and for a moment, I can listen to the echoes of my voice rolling faintly back over the dim empurpled, wooded ridge. A bevy of startled woodpigeons flutter up protestingly from the leaves, curve around in slow-motion flight, then return to the somnolence of the branches.

Soon the omnipresent splash and roar of the resentless water drowns out any intrusive sound.

       
The Weir as it is today - Friend  Phyllis Maiden
    snapped by Husband John. Late June 2004.

I lie on my back and watch the stippled cloudlets sailing serenely overhead. The baked grass scratches my neck, but I'm too lazy to move. The pungent smell of the river assails my nostrils, an aroma of rotting vegetation, nettles, and smelly mud. I chew a piece of grass. There's sweetness on my lips.

Sometimes a lark rises from the grass to soar in ascending aerial steps, until it becomes a scarcely discernible pinpoint in the blue. The bellowing of far off cattle is heard above the rush of the river torrent. The rabbits nibble on oxlip leaves and watch from the far riverbank. If I move they do not start but munch away and watch inquisitively. The lark reappears still unwinding its chain of liquid melody. It drops to a tussock not many yards away. It watches me from behind a cloud of campion and cowslips with one beady eye. I am no threat. This is my lonely, beloved, secret place.

On wet days I sit under a juniper with and old coat or sack thrown over my shoulders. A lonely little boy far from his mother. Far from the big city with its noise and bombs. I witness the dejected harebells bowing sullenly in the weight of the rain. Every now and again I wipe the tiny trickles of water from my cheeks; the rivulets of rain mingle with the liquid of my tears. Even the ever-restless powder-blue butterflies that flit about the thistles of the riverbank are quelled to comparative inactivity.

The storm must have gathered in the west, but such is the haze I never notice its imminence until the sun begins to lose its brilliance in the first wispy flying heralds of the thunderclouds. This is my lonely, secret, sad, beloved childhood place. There's a map to this secret place. The map is in my will. This is the place where my ashes will be scattered. This is my lonely, secret, Godless place, where I shall be forever alone.

I've been back to the Roman weir many times in my lifetime, for me it is a place of magic and spiritual meaning. My lonely place. My peaceful place and yet the river isn't always so tranquil and benign as my childhood idyll might suggest. The Teme, an important tributary of the River Severn, has its lonely source far away in the hills of Wales. The infant River Teme comes tumbling and splashing along beneath the undulating heights of the Clun Forrest and passes on to Ludlow where it winds beside the Castle Walls. Near to Tenbury, the Teme travels into Worcestershire, where it stays until it joins the waters of the Severn. On its way, the Teme collects the waters of the Clun, the Corve, the Onny, the Ledwych Brook and the southern Rea. Other innumerable brooks in the Tenbury and Burford area feed into the Teme. The Kyre, the Wren, the Corn the Bednal and the Cadmore Brook all make their contribution to the evergrowing watercourse.

Indubitably, the main cause of all the severe floods at Tenbury is the fact that when these local brooks flood heavily, at the same time as the Teme itself is full of water from the Welsh hills the river banks aren't high enough to contain the full volume of the water and it overflows into the surrounding low lying ground.

I'd love to know the precise history of the weir at Burford. It is said that a mill dam, which was situated a little above the bridge, upstream, caused the great flood of 1700, which destroyed Tenbury Church. It is further said that there are traces of these old-time mills all along the banks of the Teme. I've often wondered if the weir at Burford is Roman or part of an ancient damming system for Burford House, or the remains of a long gone water mill. When I am talking to the then head gardener of Burford Gardens in 1994, he tells me he's heard it is the remains of an ancient damming system to provide water for the moat of the castle, which once stood on the site of Burford House. It was constructed to cause a back up of water for this purpose. I try a bit of hurried research in Tenbury Library on the matter, but am unable to come up with any answers. I am further surprised to learn that at one time navigation was possible from Burford House to Tenbury. The following account of the 1886 flood makes it plain. It wouldn't have been possible to sail over the weir of course, so the Burford House ferryboat mentioned below must have been moored near to the weir. The following record comes from the pen of  M. S. Joyce of Tenbury, and was written in March 1926.

'It is well to recall the brave way in which the Griffin family was rescued. Mr. Barnes, a butcher in Cross Street, was watching the flood when, coming down the torrent, he saw the Burford House ferryboat, which had broken loose from its mooring, a mile up the river. Having succeeded in hooking it from his window, he and Mr. Hubert Mytton got in and most cleverly guided it towards the Tenbury Bath House, where every one knew the Griffins must be in deadly peril. As a fact, they spent sixteen hours up to their waists in icy cold water. From the boat, they had to pull up some gateposts, to get through to the house. Altogether, it was an athletic as well as a brave performance.

According to Miss Joyce's account, at the same time in Church Street, a Mr. Venmore and his daughter, owing to the rapid rising of the flood had retired to a bed­room. As they watched the water rise, a barrel of cider floated up the stairs. Having landed it in the bed­room, they managed to tap and plug it there. In Teme Street, at the entrance to the Church Alley, a little pig floated in at an upper window and was duly secured.'