Boraston Mill and the Tan House are situated in a very deep fold between the hills. The mill is brick skirted up to a height of twelve feet. Above that, the black oaken timbers and white panelling speak of its Elizabeth provenance. It is a very isolated spot which, at certain times of the day, depending upon the time of year, suffers from a lack of light, due to the angle of the sun's rays. This topographical aberration gives the place a dark brooding quality and a physical dankness to the surrounding vegetation. This, together with the presence of the brook, which runs across the road at the bottom of the hill where the houses lie, imparts a dampness and chill to the small vale, which disappears quickly when the sun appears over the basin's rim. Cattle, horses, carts, and cars splash through the shallow ford at he lower part of the valley. There is also a narrow pedestrian footbridge. We live with Diana Morris from the beginning of 1943 until 1945. The Davies family consists of Mr and Mrs Davies and their daughter Jane. We locals call her Miss Jane. Jane has a beautiful white pony called Merrylegs. Mrs Davies gives me some of Jane's books, which I still have to this day. Later she marries a local Boraston farmer called John Bentley. They live at his farm in the centre of Boraston village directly opposite the church.

I called on them once in the early seventies and they were most hospitable. You can imagine Jane's surprise when I show her a copy of a photograph of her riding Merrylegs I've kept all these years.

Boraston Mill is a very old building in the Elizabethan style. At the time we live there with Diana Morris the house is owned by Mrs Davies who lives in the nearby Tan House which shares the valley bottom but is situated on slightly higher ground on the other side of the Cornbrook. I'm not sure about the precise origins of Diana Morris. She's undoubtedly a local girl. She dies sometime in the early sixties without enough money to provide a gravestone. She lies in Boraston Churchyard in an unmarked grave. I visited her a few times since the war and I've a photograph of her and the Mill I took in the fifties. Diana seemed not to have any relatives or friends. Someday I'll try to find the position where she lies in the churchyard. I might even provide a small marker for her grave.

Even in those days, the Peacock Inn fascinates me. The imposing facade, the black and white aspect, presents a welcoming picture for any thirsty traveller. What a wonderful looking place. Joe Noakes is always kind to me when I visit the pub to see my mother. He gives me bottles of ginger beer and puts sixpence down on the floor which if I can pick up wearing a boxing glove I can keep. He has decorated the paths at the rear of the pub with coloured bottle tops. The bright colours glint in the sun. The smells that waft out of the building are still in my memory. There is the wonderful, indescribable smell of stale beer. Other smells inhabit the storerooms of my senses. The smell in the main lounge combines the odour of fresh flowers, which always adorn the tables, together with the pungent smell of lilac polish from the tables, and chairs my Mum has been assiduously polishing. Mixed in with all this, is the smell of the wooden bar itself, where the various slops of beers and spirits and cigarette smoke have leached into the timber itself to provide a musky odour of its own. It goes well with the barmaid's cheap perfume. The whole combination produces an olfactory feast for anyone's nostrils.

Joe Noakes tells my Mum that towards the end of the eighteenth century, about 1784, they buried the body of a woman called Anne Hinton at Boraston cross roads with a stake driven through her corpse. This was the recognised custom in those days for those who had committed suicide. Many of our crossroads, if they could speak, could no doubt tell us the same tale. They are of course generally regarded as haunted.

Mrs Davies is a tall, slim, gracious woman with bright blue eyes set in a perpetually sunburned face. She's always in the garden tending her flowers. Often, like her daughter Jane, she wears jodhpurs around the farm. One day she takes me into the little dairy shed and asks me to turn the handle on the butter-churn. It's a very boring and tiresome job that seems to go on and on forever and ever. After turning the handle of the wooden churn for what seems like an eternity, I open the little inspection door and look inside to see if the milk is turning to butter, but it seems not to have changed at all. Behind the Tan House is a beautiful cherry orchard. In the early summer when the trees are a blaze of roseate blossoms I wander beneath the dusty purplish pink canopies and listen to the buzz of the flies that congregate in cushions of black satin on the fresh horse dung. A cuckoo repeats his call determinedly in a far off grove of trees and the cry of a lapwing echoes across the little valley. Later in the summer, when the wine red cherries dangle invitingly on their slender green stalks I reach up and pop a cherry in my mouth pulling at the stem to disengage it from its luscious burden. Today, whenever I see a punnit of cherries displayed outside a greengrocer's shop, my mind flies back to the orchard and there's Merrylegs cantering amongst the blossoms kicking her heels up in sheer joy at the fact of being alive.

Knighton School.[4]

In the winter, I start for Knighton School when it is still dark. Up the narrow winding lane from the ford, wide enough for only one cart or car, is a crossroads. I turn left and then immediately right. It is the way to the New Inn, but it is also the way to my school at Knighton. It is a six-mile walk to school and back. Usually my only little friend in Boraston accompanies me. His name is Freddie Wall. Each morning I walk up the narrow way, looking at the clumps of primroses, shyly hidden in the high banks of the hedgerows. I know the position of each cluster and often stop to admire their simple beauty. He lives not far from the crossroads with his parents in a small cottage on lower ground from the road; it is almost hidden in the trees and sometimes can only be identified by the plume of blue-grey woodsmoke that curls skyward from the yellow chimney. Each morning he waits for me and we walk the three miles to school together through a gated field, past Knighton Church. The headmaster's name is Mr Abbott. The school has the same sliding partition as all the other small Victorian schools. It allows classes of different years or grades to share certain lessons. It also means that one master or mistress can supervise two classes at the same time.

It is at this school where sadly I lose an important formative part of my schooling. Due perhaps to the absence of proper sanitation and the paucity of hygiene at the mill, I contract yellow jaundice. I'm off school for two months at a critical time in the school curriculum for learning the basics of mathematics, (or sums as we called the subject in those days.)

When I eventually return to school, I find I'm behind my classmates. It marks me for life, and I'm never able to catch up. In the late afternoon, we would make our way back to Boraston in the twittering twilight. Often in wintertime, it is dark by the time we arrived home and already the bats would be out, swooping and flitting amongst the trees after their evening meal of flying insects. Gypsies often camp near to where the Wall family live, but they never seem to cause any problems.

Fifty years later I'm having a drink in the Royal Oak in Market Street, Tenbury. I see this fellow standing next to me at the bar waiting to be served. In an instant, I recognise him as Freddie Wall. It is the first time I've seen him since he was nine years old. We reminisce together for the rest of the evening. He reminds me of our old headmaster's name - it was Mr Abbott. We talk about the willow switches we used to have, on the end of which we compressed tight balls of red clay. With these sticks, we could throw our clay missiles long distances using the cantileveric power of the extended arm. At the time we meet, Freddie is a foreman in Showering's Bottling Works, where the famous Babycham was developed.

One day I look through my bedroom window and see a khaki-clad figure is marching down the hill towards the Boraston Mill My Mum's voice rang up from downstairs - '"Quick Jud - it's your Dad. I rush down stairs and up the hill to meet him. I see the white piping of his sergeant's stripes as he swings me high up onto his shoulders. As we walk hand in hand together through the apple orchard towards the ruined summerhouse, he stops and throws stones with both arms. I'm very impressed at this ambidextrous feat. He tells me about the years he was in India. He went out there as a boy of fourteen. As a little lonely boy, I'm very proud of the confidant stranger who is my father. We are only together for a few hours.

In those far off days, the average countryman isn't highly educated. The standard of schooling for the sons and daughters of agricultural labourers isn't of a high standard. The same is true of course for the children of the urban proletariat; people like my mother who comes from the industrial working class didn't have much of an education either.

There is a competition between the countryman and the townie. The citydweller is like a fish out of water in Tenbury. I sometimes detect a gentle but not unkind banter towards my mother from the locals. Generally speaking, the country people are kind. When they learn to trust you, they accept you unconditionally. It can take a bit of time of course. Overall, the disposition of the folk in that part of Worcestershire and Shropshire is one of acceptance - that's if they've the feeling you aren't being patronising with them. The greatest mistake a townie can ever make is to underestimate the intelligence of a countryman and to abuse their openheartedness and natural good nature. If that happens - and the countryman detects it - he'll wipe the floor with you either verbally or physically.

Living at Boraston Mill is very difficult for shopping. Whether there was a bus service, I don't know. Mum and I always walked to Tenbury. It is a very long way for a little eight-year-old boy to walk, and it can't be much fun for Mum either. We walk up the steep hill from Boraston Mill to Boraston village, through the village and down the long hill and under the railway bridge towards the Peacock Inn and the main A456 road. From there, it is a long hike to Tenbury, past the Cottage Hospital to the bridge and the shops on Teme Street. I can remember one particular moonlight night walking back with my Mum from Tenbury. The night is cold with a sharp winter wind. There is hoarfrost on the ground, which sparkles, in the dimmed taped up headlights of the occasional passing car. We both sing the words of a popular song together to cheer us up and to make the journey seem shorter:

In 1945, when the war ends, we leave Boraston and get a lift in the Davies' pony and trap to Tenbury railway station. Although I am to return to Tenbury many times in later life, it is to be the last time that Mum ever sees Tenbury. We take our seats in the little train and place out luggage on the string shelves above our heads. I am carrying a cardboard box with holes pierced in the side. Inside is a little kitten called Muff, (because it has an M on its forehead.)

I look across the track at the platform where six years previously out little crocodile of bewildered children with there labels hanging from their lapels had filed out through the exit - out into a different world. There is a whistle and the carriage jolts into motion. Soon the train gathers speed and the fields and lanes of Tenbury slip away past the steamed up windows. Soon they are gone.

They are all gone now and I can't have all that long left myself.  I have a feeling that if I hadn't written about them they would have been forgotten completely. Many millions of ordinary people like us  have lived and loved, and seen time rise and fall like the punctual tides, and are now rapidly  fading into a perhaps an understandable forgetfulness.   All that is left  now are a few photographs in dusty albums kept in dark drawers - or a mention by well-meaning  old people at funerals or weddings, where they are  impatiently humoured  by the young. I always kept in touch with the Charlie and Edith, right up until the time they died. Though a dour and undemonstrative woman, I knew that Auntie Horton continued to love me. She would have adopted me given half the chance. Charlie, as ever was more realistic, and it was he who had calmed things down during the dreadful confrontation on the stairs and who had quietly asked his wife to hand me over to my mother. I often visited Charlie and Edith Horton. When the Gardens changed hands Charlie retired, he was already in his seventies by this time. They moved to a flat in a large house opposite the Castle Tump. Later, when they both became rather frail, they moved into a purpose-built pensioner's flat somewhere behind the Swimming baths. It was there in the seventies, during one of my visits to Tenbury that Edith lay on her deathbed. I was able to go and hold her hand for a while, to kiss her forehead and express my gratitude for the last time. Charlie died a few years later.

Their only daughter Betty, who never married, devoted her life to the nursing service and ended her career as Matron of Sheffield Infirmary. Sadly, she died of breast cancer when she was quite young. All three of them are buried in the same Horton grave close to the south wall of Burford Church. Whenever I go to Burford, I make a point of placing a small bunch of Lilies of the Valley on their last resting-place. If by chance you ever pass that way please stop for a moment.