‘Memories of an Old Bulmer Boy’ looks back on growing up in the countryside near Sudbury and follows its author Peter Rowe to the present day
Plaster was falling off the walls, brick floors had been worn by generations of hobnail boots, and doors and windows let in draughts and rain.
Water came from a well in grandad’s garden next door. In summer it could run dry and then the only source was a spring-fed ditch 300 yards away.
When retired builder Peter Rowe sat down to write his life story he realised there was only one place to start – the cottage where he was born.
He grew up in the heart of the countryside in a world so different from what we know today.
Now, aged 82, he has brought those times back to life in a book that begins with a vivid picture of the joys and hardships of a village childhood in the 1940s and 50s.
Peter lived with parents Tom and Elsie, and older sisters Jean and Esther, in the hamlet of Upper Houses on the outskirts of Bulmer, near Sudbury. Grandparents, aunts and uncles all had homes close by.
The fields, farms and meadows were his playground and where he discovered his lifelong love of wildlife and history.
“The book took the better part of two years to put together, but I wrote some 20 years ago when I thought I should get something down about the family history,” he says.
Home now is a bungalow he built for himself and his wife Wendy 50 years ago, and from where he can still see what he calls ‘the ancestral home of the Rowes’.
When Peter was born in 1940 it was, like most country properties, in a sadly run down state.
“Our cottages didn’t even have a kitchen sink with a drain, so the washing up bowl had to be emptied on to the garden,” he recalls.
The only form of heating – and at first cooking as well – was a huge inglenook fireplace.
Jean had a narrow escape when a huge ham, hung up the chimney to cure by their Uncle Albert, crashed down and landed beside her on the hearth rug.
An oil lamp lit the living room, but everywhere else a flickering candle was the only illumination. Electricity arrived at Upper Houses in 1958, but mains water was not connected until Peter had married and left home.
The bucket lavatory was in a ramshackle weather-boarded closet a few yards from the back door . . . stifling and smelly in summer and freezing in winter when a trip to the loo could mean braving a snowstorm.
Of course, the contents of the bucket had to be disposed of – let’s just say their garden grew very good vegetables.
Over the years his father’s DIY skills produced many improvements and his materials could be unconventional.
They included part of a packing crate that once contained parts of a wartime troop-carrying glider – probably acquired from one of the local airfields.
With expensive shop-bought playthings out of reach, home-made toys were the order of the day. “I remember a model of a swan - about two feet high – fashioned from naturally formed growths which someone had selected from a hedgerow of their firewood pile.
“One toy Dad made me had four little aeroplanes suspended from cross arms. This was driven by the clockwork mechanism of an old roasting spit used to turn meat hanging in front of an open fire.”
He also had a monkey mounted on two sticks made by Italian prisoners of war billeted in the village.
A visit to his grandparents next door would often be rewarded with an apple. Their favourites were called Darcy Spice.
“I always think of my dear old granny, whose teeth weren’t up to biting into anything very hard, scooping and scraping away at one with a teaspoon before popping the resulting puree into her mouth.”
Peter was only five when the Second World War ended. “I do remember seeing a plane come down,” he says, “and Jean saw an American plane blow up in the air and the parachutes coming down.”
He also collected strips of tin foil dropped from enemy aircraft to mask the planes from radar – some of which found their way on to the Rowe family’s Christmas tree.
His dad – whose work at Bulmer brickyard was a reserved occupation – joined the Home Guard, with duties including all night fire-watching.
“The fire watchers’ hut was an old railway cattle truck, which stood in Albert Rowe’s Threshing Contractor’s yard . . . where our bungalow now stands.
“I remember Dad in his khaki uniform, including the hat and great coat, which to me as a toddler seemed as stiff as a board.”
After the war, when fruit he had only gazed at longingly in picture books was at last available, he was bitterly disappointed to find bananas were not juicy.
But for country dwellers there were the hedges laden with blackberries, and meadows full of mushrooms including ‘shiptud’ (sheep’s turd) mushrooms which grew where sheep had been grazed.
“We always took Mum’s old wicker shopping basket with the broken handle held together with wire.
“It seemed huge to me then and I remember it overflowing with mushrooms or seeping with blackberry juice.”
Other childhood nibbles from nature were sorrel, with its spicy leaves, and half opened hawthorn buds which they called ‘bread and cheese’.
Wild rabbits were a prime source of meat during rationing. “But,” he writes, “I wonder what today’s kids would make of the delicacy that Dad used to prepare for me. The head of a rabbit split in two. I remember I really liked the brain and tongue.”
Pip the milkman delivered to the door in large cans from which he filled pint bottles with a ladle before fishing in the pockets of his grubby overall for a cardboard cap.
Young Peter often headed for the farm next door, where the two teenage sons played some horrendously hair-raising pranks. “They scared the wits out of me at times, but I must have loved it, to keep going back for more.
Once they took my sandal off and threw it, and when I ran after it they had made a ring of petrol and they lit it so I was surrounded by a ring of fire. At least it burnt off very quickly!
“When I was old enough they used to plonk me on the tractor so I could hold the clutch down and let it roll forward slowly while they were loading the sheaves – or shocks as we called them.”
He remembers his first day at the village school. “We infants were marched into our classroom through the Gothic arch of the porch, the sides of which were lined with coat pegs.”
Heat came from a coke-burning stove surrounded by a fire guard which on wet days would be hung with saturated coats, steaming in the heat.
Every child got a daily third of a pint of milk, which in winter often froze in the bottles and would be lined up around the stove to thaw.
Drinking water was kept in a pail in the porch, with one enamel mug shared by all the pupils.
Sunday afternoons meant accompanying father to the Congregational Chapel. “I remember old Mr Fouracre who sat right at the back and was tone deaf. He used to bellow out the hymns which amused us youngsters.”
In 1947 one of the coldest winters on record blanketed the country in snow. “Our lane was full of packed ice and snow, some of the ruts were so deep they came up to my knee.”
It was followed by severe flooding and with Sudbury’s Ballingdon Street awash he recalls his sisters – by then working in the town – being ferried with their bikes through the water on a lorry.
Peter finished his schooling at Sudbury Secondary Modern, where he says the teachers could be ‘heavy handed’, and the redoubtable Miss Herbert – strict but fair – ‘could keep order just by looking at you’.
At school he was introduced to folk dancing, at the time a curriculum subject, which became a much-loved lifelong pastime for him and his wife Wendy who he married in 1963.
He left school at 15 to join the building trade. An early memory is working in a cellar on Sudbury Market Hill and wondering why his older workmate spent so much time staring up through the grill in the pavement.
All was revealed when his mate remarked: “Boy, come and look at the size of these bloomers – you could make a tent out of them.”
The book moves on through his life and work – meeting Wendy at ballroom dance classes in the Red Cross Hall, and the births of their children Caroline and Richard.
The heart-rending tragedy of Richard’s death from gastro-enteritis aged only five was by far the hardest part to write.
Peter’s gift for description and eye for detail mean his book is not only a memoir, but a journey through the social history of life in a village from the 1940s to the present day.
Memories of an Old Bulmer Boy will be on sale, priced £9, in Sudbury at the Tourist Information Centre, and Gainsborough’s House shop, and from Peter (01787 375935).
