FOREST ADVENTURES part 1 (General)

by Segilla , Monday, January 28, 2013, 20:00 (4319 days ago) @ mjames

I hope some of this may be of interest.

FOREST ADVENTURES

After a spell of being evacuated to Abergavenny in 1940, (brought back home by indignant parents who thought the danger from the bombing of London was far less worrying than the moral damage of being allowed to roam about until after dark and being discovered with no seat to my trousers), when I was about seven, my brother and I spent two long summer holidays at Yorkley Slade near Blakeney. We stayed with a cousin of my Uncle Jack, (John Henry Jones, an orphan my Mother said), in a cottage which was adjacent to the Forest, at the foot of the hill and very near to the Williams and Cotton shop.

I didn't get on too well with the lady of the house [Mrs Jones?], who was very strict with me and got very cross when I put a dirty glass into the water she'd just drawn from the well in the front garden. And another time she railed at me when I slapped my brother on his sunburned back. Once I was not too pleased with her either since we used to go early morning mushroom picking and one small harvest we'd gathered was condemned as 'horse mushrooms' and unfit to eat - which I later discovered being eaten by the resident family for their supper.
Separated from the cottage by a garden was a modern bungalow occupied by miner Alec Isaac Jasper Snook, his wife Marjorie (Madge) Alice née Morgan and their son Gordon who was older than both of us. Gordon knew his way round the Forest and taught us a lot about country life. We got up to all sorts of things like damming up and bathing in Blackpool Brook about a mile distant, tying knots in the tops of young trees, gobbing onto black beetles saying "spit blood or die" - they did, but I'm not sure we always kept our promises. Gordon showed us that if you cut through bracken, close to the root, the shape of an oak tree could be seen in the stem. Once we lit a fire at the foot of a tree. The smoke alerted a look-out in one of the towers scattered throughout the forest and earned us a good telling off. And so on, in those mainly carefree days.
Sweets being on ration we were only allowed about 2 ounces a week, but the other shop near Yorkley sold only peppermints.

One particular pleasure was go fishing at Ned's Top. This was a pond about 26 metres in diameter in a depression with a wealth of newts and salamanders as well as a population of large dragonflies of varying colours. We believed them to be dangerous and spent much time fruitlessly flailing at them with bracken. A rod cut from a hedge, string and a worm on a bent pin gave us a whole day's pleasure.

A couple of times we walked to the Severn near to where the railway bridge stood towering above us while we waited to see a steam train go across. The engine driver waved to us. I also recall walking along a railway track near Lydney and watching a man go wading into the Severn out for a swim, coming out and covering himself from head to foot in the oily mud.

Another walk took us to a large rock which jutted out of the side of a hill. We called it the Rock of Ages and maybe it was somewhere on the way to my Uncle Jack's cousin Amos' house. Amos grew a lot of roses in his garden which sloped down a hill and it was here that I first learned of rose grafting. As I recall, the house, looked out over a valley and was reached by going over a wooden donkey bridge, remote from anywhere, or so it seemed. Amos might have been one of the charcoal burners whose piles of timber were dotted about the Forest. Our initials carved into a tree near the donkey bridge will long since have disappeared, even if the tree survives.

On our first expedition to Soudley Ponds there was a wood full of dead spindly trees. We had great fun pushing them over, shouting 'Timber!'. We found a slow worm near to the pond - which had to be killed. Remember the different perspective of fifty years ago?

And there was the expedition to Speech House. Suitably primed with a little history we were disappointed to find it used as a hotel and seeing diners through the windows. The likes of us were not to be admitted to such places.

I later heard dark mutterings about the Alec Snook who shot himself and on a brief visit some years back the inevitable building and infilling made it difficult to identify the cottage at Yorkley, but there it still was with its well now bricked over. The Williams and Cotton shop is now a house.

It is nearly always a disappointment to go back to places recollected with pleasure, but perhaps someone can reassure me that Ned's Top is still flourishing and not within a concrete culvert. That there is still a Rock of Ages and that someone can recall the donkey bridge and perhaps Amos James - all within a walking distance of Yorkley.

NOTE.

The above is adapted from an article which appeared in the Gloucestershire Family History Society Journal, Number 41 June 1989.

Continued....