NEWS FROM OLD GIRLS
Joan Gurney (Appleton 1938-51)
WHAT JOAN DID NEXT - Part 4
By the end of the 1980s my wildflower meadow, grazed by two ponies, was well established. The hay crop scented the air in late summer and the orchards were carpeted with snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells in spring, as the geese wandered amongst them. The fruit got picked in early autumn, the dovecot got painted and in winter out came the homemade toboggan of my childhood.
The year 1987 had been a year of heavy rainfall, but it had been very mild. By the early autumn many broadleaf trees were still in full foliage, and there had been little sign of premature leaf drop or early autumnal colour change. With hindsight it would have seemed that with these events the roots of large trees were less securely anchored and the persisting canopies provided enormous resistance to winds, like the sails of a yacht.
On the evening of October 15th, the usual weather forecast by Michael Fish was nothing out of the ordinary. He jokingly said that a television viewer had suggested a hurricane was on the way, but he dismissed this as nonsense - and so I went to bed that night at 10.30pm.
During the night I was aware that it was rather windy and every so often, in the early hours of October 16th, there was a splattering against the window as if bursts of raindrops had bit the glass.
It was not until next day that I realised this was not lashing rain, but showers of leaves torn from trees as they came crashing to the ground. And so I dozed on regardless, as many other people did, on that devastating night of the Great Hurricane. In the morning when I looked out of the window I could not believe what I saw. Mature trees were totally uprooted (left). Fruit which had not been picked was covering the ground like abandoned tennis balls, sheds, roofs and stables were wrecked and bales of hay and straw, from the partially destroyed barn, were strewn across the meadow like discarded matchboxes. One hedgerow suffered ‘leaf burn’ from the salt-laden wind which it had picked up from its passage over the sea.
The clear-up and replacing of our twenty lost trees took months and then years. One success story was a mature walnut tree which was winched upright from its 45ÌŠ fallen position using a tractor and chain - and it survives to this day reminding me of the walnuts in the Grey Friars garden during my schooldays. The events of October 16th/17th went down in my memory as another extraordinary meteorological event which only ever happened (according to our physical geography textbook of the 1940s) in outlandish other places, rather than the gentle and unlikely climate of East Anglia. But despite all the devastation, I had my garden officially recognised as a wildlife haven in 1988.
Grey Friars garden escaped severe damage because of its protective walls on all sides, but the roots of some trees were, no doubt, weakened. An ancient yew, which may have existed since the time of a monastery on the site, came down a few years later, and from its timber (which is valued for furniture making) one of the Grey Friars College tutors, who was a woodturner, made me a set of decorative toadstools (right) as a memento of my life-long love of the site.
​
All the household labour-saving devices which I had seen change and develop over the earlier years, were continuing to evolve. Carpet beaters had given way to the vacuum cleaner, kitchen ranges to electric cookers, washing lines to tumble driers, and putting food down the well to keep cool now only required a refrigerator. But the most innovative appliance of the late 1980s and early 1990s was the microwave. It must have been developed almost exclusively for the busy housewife. This was the decade where women worked and had jobs outside the home. What a bonus this was for the quick preparation of an evening meal as I discovered when I was working evenings in adult education!
There was still time to watch television however, but even here, the style of humour was changing. Gradually, leading up to the beginning of the 1990s, no longer was it a stand-up comedian who told a series of funny jokes, but a very subtle form of situational humour took over, within a conversation between two people, or a small group of people. Each one bombarded the other with relentless sharp-edged wit often set against a background of everyday life. The most memorable were four neighbours, Tom, Barbara, Margot and Jerry in “The Good Life”, the family in “Butterflies” and the sophisticated conversations between Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. My favourite of all time, however, will always be “The Two Ronnies”. The exceptional acting ability of Ronnie Barker, his double ‘entendres’ and his clever play on words have never been surpassed. How I wish I had been with my husband, Gerald, when he visited Ronnie in his antiques shop in the Cotswolds (left), after his retirement from acting, and was treated to a spontaneous piece of dialogue with him which could have come straight out of “Open All Hours”!
My work in swimming at the Adult Community College in Grey Friars still continued into the 1990s but the programme was gradually being curtailed by financial cuts from Essex County Council and temporary closure of some school pools, which decreased the availability for hire. This, however, allowed me to increase other aspects of my swimming teaching in schools and other organisations, but venturing into the less publicised aspects of the sport. I had been involved in lifesaving for many years, but synchronised swimming had always attracted me. This ‘novelty’ was described as a mixture of ballet, gymnastics and swimming performed to music and the recent Tokyo Olympics brought to the forefront the extreme difficulty involved in the breath control required, particularly in team events, where much of the physical support work is under the water surface. It rightly deserves its new title - Artistic Swimming. My favourite piece of choreography will always be the sequence which I put together for the theme music to Inspector Morse, borrowed from television! Many of my ex-students will remember it!
Trees are one of my greatest passions. They had been there in abundance during my childhood on a farm in Dedham, and during my early schooldays at Grey Friars. I knew every tree, its name and position around the playground - the yew trees, the walnut, the pear tree and the stories of the black mulberry which fed the silkworms which we kept - and of course the butterflies, moths and songbirds which they attracted. Not only did the Hurricane stir up all these memories but it was a time when the climate change controversy and the importance of protecting wildlife and trees for the continuing survival of all humanity, was given great importance. I began to plan how I might compensate for my loss of trees, and at the same time, contribute to the overall survival strategy.
In 1995 I started my tree restoration project. I fenced off a small part of the meadow which ran alongside a very wet ditch, and a native tree spinney started to take shape. Amongst the endangered and rare ones, I wanted to include fruit and nut bearers to encourage wildlife. Native saplings of hazel, ash, and others were easy to obtain, but the rarer ones were more difficult, so again I sought the advice of an expert, the eminent but amateur environmentalist, Miriam Rothschild, an authority on native species, who had already helped me with my wild flower meadow. The wild service tree which originally gave its name to pubs known as “The Chequers” (from its speckled fruit and the drink made from it), and the wild pear were two of the more unusual which I wanted, but I had long had a love affair with the black poplar, an endangered variety which I had first discovered growing beside a stream at my parents’ farm in Dedham when I was 14 years old. Its massive height, trembling leaves, fat red catkins and scented leaf buds in spring captivated me, and when I discovered that it was perhaps even heading for extinction after the water meadows and river habitats were being drained, I knew I had to have one. Not only that, it appears in several of John Constable’s paintings, its wood is almost fireproof and was used for clogs, cruck-framed buildings and floors of wagons - maybe even “The Haywain”. The spinney took two winters to plant and since then it had flourished.
The decade of the 1990s was my travel decade. I am not sure how it started, but my husband, Gerald, had never been inspired by the thought of holidays preferring to spend the long school summer break sitting in the garden, tending the plants, cutting the grass and looking after the animals. But he also cherished this time alone to work on his extensive racket collection, writing articles, finishing a few books and some contributions to radio and television programmes. So he sent me off to explore! Although we had both enjoyed more primitive holidays when our son was younger, camping, cycling and youth hostelling now gave way to my desire for something more sophisticated and leisurely.
I have always regretted dropping history as a subject when I was at CCHS, but I had too many others to fit into the timetable as I was approaching School Certificate in 1948, and I could not take on any more. My historical knowledge is still very limited, but pre-history fascinated me. In my early working life I searched for arrowheads at Walton-on-the-Naze, shark’s teeth at Wrabness and helped on a ‘dig’ at a Bronze Age burial site in Dedham. But a whole new world opened up for me in the 1990s. I travelled by train, coach, boat, but never by plane. I explored the art and architecture of Florence, Venice, Paris, St Petersburg, the archaeology of the Orkneys and Outer Hebrides, then the atrocities of World War 2 and their affects on Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic, the physical features, vegetation and climate of the Scilly Isles, and Scandinavia, including the spectacular geysers of Iceland (above). All, of course, were influenced by what I had learned at CCHS.
I still managed to devote some time to my Bathing Bygones Collection, and in my mind, the ultimate possession for a collection such as this would be a bathing machine! These originated in the 1700s, and were specially aimed at the ladies. They were pulled buy horse, or winch (or even by a strong man) to the water’s edge, so that the lady could enter the water in her all-enveloping bathing costume without being exposed to view. Together Gerald and I often used to search along beach-hut-lined coastal areas to see if we could spot any huts which were the remains of a bathing machine with its wheels removed. There are one or two around and, after all, Queen Victoria’s bathing machine at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight is reputed to have been found in a dilapidated state being used as a chicken shed.
​
I almost abandoned my search, except that I kept thinking the only difference in appearance between a bathing machine and a shepherd’s hut was the fact that the former had wooden wheels for more durable sand and water travel, and the latter had metal wheels for hard surfaces and meadow travel. A shepherd’s hut was towed by horse, steam engine or tractor to the lambing fields in spring, and lived in by the shepherd day and night to help with the lambing and to nurse the sickly lambs beside the tortoise stove, returning them to the slatted pen under his raised bunk bed after recovery.
And then one came up for sale at a farm auction in 1997! Of course I bought it! In the mid 1990s a shepherd’s hut had not yet become a fashionable garden hideaway, nor was it widely reproduced as it is today. Its advantage over other garden offices and playrooms was that it had wheels, and therefore could be moved, and did not need planning permission.
​
My work-worn Victorian shepherd’s hut was delivered on a low loader, was swung over a hedge and ditch by crane (left) and arrived in our meadow where it was towed by tractor to its final position in a corner of the field. It needed several repairs - the curved
corrugated iron roof was replaced, the solid weather-board walls treated with wood preservative, the floor strengthened, window glass and stable door replaced and wooden steps from an old boat added.
The corner of the meadow where the shepherd’s hut found its final place had been earmarked by both Gerald and me for a pond, which we had wanted for years, and so in 1998 the digger arrived to make a 40ft by 20ft tear-drop shaped cavity (right) with the point of the tear just near the base of the steps into the shepherd’s hut. Once the liner was fitted and the pond filled, I had to have a swim! The water was colder than the River Stour at Dedham where I learned to swim as a child! But afterwards, I curled up in the warm shepherd’s hut.
I had hardly finished planting the marginal plants, the submerged ones and the floaters, before the wildlife began to arrive as if by magic - newts, frogs, dragon flies and their larvae, and over time nesting moorhens and mallards and a temporary watervole visitor. Honey bees took up residence amongst the original sheeps’ wool insulation of the cavity walls. Memories of the Grey Friars pond came flooding back once more and the beautiful garden of the 1930s (left) aflutter with bees and butterflies which has now sadly disappeared under the tarmac of a car park.
Helvetica Light is an easy-to-read font, with tall and narrow letters, that works well on almost every site.
My work at Grey Friars continued throughout the 1990s and the ‘Learn to Swim’ programme retained its success and was still giving confidence to more and more adults who had learned to swim in their later years. Keeping the team of tutors together, co-ordinated and motivated when they were separated in different pools, at different times, on different days, was a difficult, but necessary duty to during that decade I started to produce a Departmental Newsletter, once or twice a year to which any swimming tutor could contribute any article or letter, on any topic. As I was short of articles in 1997, I decided to write something myself and so a three part article about Grey Friars, when it was part of CCHS between 1920 and 1957 when I was at school there, was planned. The content was a mixture of anecdotes, personal experiences and historical facts, all based on a set of photographic postcards of the building and its grounds in the 1920s. It was intended to be spread over three issues of the Departmental Newsletter.
Two parts of the work had appeared in two separate Newsletters and the third part was unfinished when some alumnae of CCHS who were planning a 50th anniversary reunion of the 1948 School Certificate Year heard about it and wanted it completed in book form and ready for the event in late 1998. Writing, printing and photography all had to be accelerated and there was much burning of the midnight oil! And so ‘Pictures from the Past’ was born in A4 format (later to be revised and reprinted in A5 size). I ‘signed off’ the book on the final page with a photograph of myself performing long jump (right) in my final year at CCHS where a newly created long jump pit had been excavated at the North Hill site. I had given
up my successful skills at high jump after trying to transform my scissor style to that of the ‘Western Roll’ which I had seen in pictures of the Olympic Games. My attempts to copy it were disastrous after landing heavily in a wet, muddy bed of farmyard straw, which I had hoped would give me a soft landing!
​
‘Pictures from the Past’ was completed for the 1998 Reunion and what a day of story-telling that turned out to be! But more of that another time.
​
​