It is a bright sunny morning in 1940. I walk up the avenue and reach the main road. Nowadays they've built a little by-pass. A small curved section of the original main road now acts as a by-road that isolates the entrance to the avenue and Burford Gardens from the main A456. I turn right and there in front of me, on the opposite side of the road is Burford School. Two sisters, Miss Gwen and Miss Marion Price run the school. Like most Victorian schools it has a moveable partition, which slides into position to divide one class from another. Alternatively, if a more open teaching dimension is required it can be rolled aside so that the school becomes one large room. It's there in that vast space that we have morning assembly and hymn singing, here we make paper-chains for Christmas decorations, have lessons with a blackboard and easel and sit at tiny desks and dip our scratchy pens into inkpots set into the desktop. There are fresh daffodils on the window ledges and splotchy drawings on the walls. There is a playground where we chase each other around and scratch our knees. Some of the children's names are still in my mind. Terry Underhill is the village police sergeant's son. He lives in the police house near to the Home Guard huts. There's a boy called Freddie Cheese and twins called Stephanie and Daphne Morris who live in farm on the Wofferton road just past the hopyards on the right.

Charlie is in the Home Guard. Because he's a veteran of the First World War, he's rapidly promoted to sergeant. They meet three times a week in a hut near the almshouses and in the true spirit of Dad's Army, they practice their arms drill with broom handles. Later, they're provided with old-fashioned Lee-Enfield rifles. Many of the local men are in the Home guard; others serve in the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) or become Air Raid Precaution wardens. (ARP) On the Tenbury side of the bridge are the Council offices. Later in the war, when my mother joins me from Liverpool, she gets a job in that building with the Ministry of Food, issuing ration books. Rationing is very unpopular in the country areas, for it is in these very areas where the food is produced. Many people are seen wandering around holding mysterious paper parcels. There is a lot of black-marketeering going on, but I suppose you can't blame them.

Sometimes Auntie Horton takes me to play on the Burgage in Tenbury. It is now a well cared for recreation ground and sports field, with a new swimming baths. In those wartime days, there's another field in between the Crown Hotel and the Cottage Hospital. I think there's a new housing estate there now. It is there they hold the annual sports day where all the children of the area in attendance. There are stalls selling toffee apples and vegetables and bunches of flowers. The are needlework displays and donkey rides. I take part in the sack races and three-legged races. All the money raised through the various raffles goes to help the war effort.

There are a few other evacuees. One I remember is named Peggy. She lives with the other farmer called Morris - I was sweet on her in a childish sort of a way.  She lives on the road to Greete where the squealing pigs are murdered by having their throats cut. This is the period of the phoney war, there are no air raids yet, and so many parents get complacent and decide to take their children back to the cities. In many cases this proves to be a fateful decision, for quite a lot of the kids who live in the Walton district of Liverpool are killed later by the terrible land-mines that drop from the skies on parachutes and devastate whole streets in one mighty burst. Sweet, shy Peggy is among the many children who perish in the conflagration.

They have an old wind-up grammophone which I am not allowed to go near. The record collection consists of fifteen 78-rpm recordings of military band music most of them composed by [and probably conducted by] John Philip Sousa. There was: 'The Washington Post,' of course, and :'King Cotton, The Stars and Stripes Forever, The Fifty-Three Stars, Semper Fidelis, The Liberty Bell, [of Monty Python'd Flying Circus' fame.
"In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree" was another number I remember very clearly.

They play them over and over again.  They became stuck in my memory and even today over sixty years later I cannot get then out of my head.

One of the things I'm asked to do to assist the war effort is to collect haws.[1] Hips and haws grow in plenty among the hedgerows of Burford. We take them to the licensee of The Ship Inn in Teme Street and receive our few coppers for the trouble. He makes rose-hip wine of course, for wines and spirits are in very short supply in wartime Britain. Public Houses are often closed from lack of beer and whisky is kept under the counter for regular or special customers. Whether he is retailing his port wine for a profit, or consuming it himself, we'll never know. We kids believed we were playing our part in the downfall of Adolf Hitler, and as it is often said - 'It's the thought that counts!'

I sing a song  called  'Little Sir Echo' in those days. I sing it as I explore every cranny of Burford Gardens and surrounding meadows and woodlands. Perhaps it appeals to me because of my solitariness and intrinsic lonesomeness. I stand facing the river and sing it aloud at the steep bank on the other side of the Teme where the echo of my voice fits in perfectly with the words of the song:

            Birklands Girls School.
In 1905 a small girls' boarding school, Birklands, moved from Highgate to St.Albans, changing its name to New Birklands (The name reverted to just Birklands in 1923).
It was in the depths of the country, some distance from the outskirts of St Albans. During the war this school was evacuated to Burford House.
The school returned to St Albans after the war in  1946.
Ten years after its centenary, Birklands School closed in 1969.

And so it happened in 1941 that Burford House is taken over by a private Birklands Girl's School. Busses and motor cars appear on the gravel in front of the wide Georgian building. The whole school has been evacuated en bloc for the duration of the war. Soon the ivy-covered walls of the old house are reverberating with the screams and high pitched giggles of the young middle class girls. Now the tennis courts are full of pretty young misses in short, white tennis skirts whilst others loll as spectators with white woolen pullovers tied round their necks by the arms. There was a little girl who I was sweet on.  Her name was Helen Grey.  One day she met me and told me she was going back to London.  We stood in a glade of conifers as she told me. Then she was gone and left me weeping. I was only six years old.

Now the summer evenings are replete with the sound catgut meeting fluffy tennis balls and the umpire's cries of, 'Out!' and 'Advantage Forbes-Wrightington!'

In my days at the house, the building still has the extra side wings, which are later demolished by John Treasure when he takes over the house. Adjacent to the house and part of Lord and Lady Whitbread's estate is a small fire Station. The Fire Station has two large doors to the front and a large brass bell hangs over the doorway. Inside is a beautiful shiny mid nineteenth century horse drawn fire engine. It is painted a brilliant red with lots of gold bordering and embellishment. The embellishments and escutcheons ate solid brass. It has a nest of red buckets and neatly folded leather waterpipes. A large handle sticks out at front and rear and together with some leather bellows forms a pump. On top of the engine lies four beautiful firemen's helmets. They are made of burnished brass with articulated chinstraps of the same l. Elaborate badges decorate the fronts and red horsehair brushes adorn the crowns. They look like the helmets Roman centurions wore. The engine has a plate with the maker's name - Merryweather.

In 1993, just before I lose my previous wife Sue from cancer, I take her down to revisit the scenes of my wartime childhood. It's our last holiday together - I know her time is running out. During that visit I pay to Burford Gardens, we meet John Treasure who tells us the fire engine went to the Worcester Museum. I rang the museum recently, the curator says it has now gone to the Hereford and Worcestershire Fire Brigade Museum in Deansway, Worcester.

We meet the wheelchair-bound owner of Burford Gardens John Treasure on the South Lawn.  He purchases Burford House, and its grounds, in April 1954. Not much of the garden exists at this time. Only the North and South Lawns. The house itself has two rather ugly Victorian wings, which he prudently removes.

Again the elegant Georgian symmetry of the handsome structure is revealed to the world. The impressive Copper Beech tree, together with the London Plane trees and a mature Sequoiadendron are the prominent features. The task of mapping out and landscaping future his dream begins right away. The project is a complete success. The planting which has produced such wonderful blending of shape, texture, colour, and general quality of floras is exclusively due to John Treasure's keen discernment, attainment, ebullience and strivings for quality. He beavers away wholly single-handedly for many years. The superior standard of horticulture attained, together with the plant associations and the collection of rare and unusual plants, particularly the Clematis assortment has guaranteed that the Gardens are esteemed throughout the country.

Together my stricken Sue and I wander among the beautiful flowers. I've known for ten years that poor Sue is doomed. I'm acutely aware the end is drawing near. Of course, it is a very moving experience for me - for a number of reasons. It's very moving to see my mortally ill wife, who I love desperately, walking the paths, opening the gates, and sitting on the seats I sat on as a small boy. The knowledge that time is rapidly running out for her, and the realisation of her brief time-span left in this world - together with the intimations of my own mortality has a profound effect on me. To the juxta-pose the grim fact of my wife's impending death with the familiar scenes of my childhood, is a volatile cocktail of emotion enough to initiate a dull ache and concealed tears.

The weather is perfect. The aromatic shrubs, plants and blooms are at their summer best. The bees buzz from bush to bush in their time-honoured unhurried way, and the murmur of the River Teme, as it caresses the smooth- washed pebbles that form its weedy bed, is like sweet music from another age. I'm suddenly struck by the reality of decay and death. The exquisite herbage that surrounds us, is the green inheritor of its countless annual vegetative progenitors down through the millennia. The very bees are recipients of innumerable donated genes from bees that have flapped their long-gone ancestral wings in centuries past. They've been born, wriggled their way free of their larvae-case, become  pupae - and finally flown and buzzed their brief hour, then fallen - kicked - and been swallowed into the soil - swallowed into history - swallowed into the deep black bottomless sack of time as will poor Sue -  and soon or later all of us.

The funny thing about my relationship with Burford Gardens'  [2], is that  I see the place in a sharply delineated time-slot. From 1939 to 1945, the Tenbury and the people I knew then are on a chronological laboratory slide. I can take it out from time to time - slip it under the microscope - and there they all are wriggling out their lives on the eye-glass of my memory. They never leave their temporal position - they just move around in circles, endlessly repeating their six-year cycle of existence as seen by the eye of my childhood  remembrance. The memories of the area are very special to me.

The girls' school holds sports days and garden parties on the lawn. There are three legged races and egg and spoon races and musical chairs. As a resident and well known figure on the estate, I'm allowed to watch and sometimes participate. As a small intruder from the industrial working class, I'm something of a novelty to the friendly upper class schoolgirls.

One day a large hole suddenly appears right in the middle of the girls' tennis court on the front lawn. A big cave-in of earth has occurred. When the workmen come and look down the hole they see old brickwork beneath. A man is lowered down the hole to have a look around, but is pulled out quickly because foul gasses overwhelm him. Later, when the bad air has dispersed, the men go down and discover a subterranean passageway. They are too frightened to venture far in case of a cave-in, so the tunnel is filled in again.

Uncle Charlie and his cohorts at the bar of the Rose and Crown hotly discuss the origins of the underground tunnel. Many are the colourful explanations for the origins of the mysterious tunnel. The more ale they consume the more profound and wilder the speculation become.

A local historian's opinion is that it is an escape route for a priest during the early Elizabethan period. Apparently, the priests ran like rabbits at the approach of Walsingham's Protestant stormtroopers.

This reminds  me of the wartime song 'Run Rabbit Run'  which the British altered to 'Run Adolf Run Adolf Run, Run, Run.'

Noel Gay & Ralph Butler

In the lower part of the Gardens, there is a fantastic machine. It's called - The Ram. It's a pump for lifting water from one level to another. It doesn't need any power and is the nearest thing to perpetual motion I've ever seen. The power appears to be provided by the incoming water pressure, yet why a pump is required if the pressure is already powerful enough to power the pump is a mystery to me. Surely, the pressure is already forceful enough to lift the water to the higher level without the pump?

When I first arrive at Burford Gardens in 1939, I am given the job of starting the pump. This involves holding down a valve for a short time. After a couple of minutes, the pump begins to hiss, spit, and thump. Then it bursts into life.

Years later, Uncle Charlie tells me that the pump was already there when he arrived at the Gardens in 1919, which takes us back twenty years. In 1993 when I speak to the then owner of the Gardens, he tells me that the pump was still working up to 1961, when he got rid of it to make way for a re-modelling of the garden lay-out. Apparently, this old faithful workhorse was just scrapped. It was known to have been working for over sixty years and had certainly earned its retirement in an industrial museum.

What a wonderful bit of British engineering!

FOOTNOTES

[1] Haws. Local name for the hips of rose hips.

[2] I kept contact with Charlie and Edith Horton, my wartime foster parents right up until they died. I have paid many visits to the area since and have friends there.