What Joan Did Next - Epilogue

NEWS FROM OLD GIRLS

Joan Gurney (Appleton 1938-51)

I recorded so many memories from my life and schooldays in the last six episodes of “What Joan did next” that I am now attempting to write an epilogue in order together it altogether and to illustrate that often, before realising it, a series of threads or links exist which do not always become apparent until the events are scrutinised some years, or even decades later, and that there are also certain object, buildings, people, animals, trees or music which trigger this chain of memories.

My chain of memories, with its many links, started behind a Doric doorway in Dedham High Street (right). From then onwards, art, Dedham, events of war and authors came together to dominate my life. This doorway marked the site of my first school, a Dame School, run by two sisters, both called Miss Saunders. This school was one of the last survivors and precursor of infant schools which existed before the sixteenth century and survived into the early 20th century.

I first went to school just before the age of 5. There were only about 7 or 8 children in one classroom at the front of the house. I

learned to write in a neat “copperplate” hand, and read Beatrix Potter. I do not like “Alice and Wonderland” – it was too fanciful. How could a young girl get down a rabbit hole? I even tried it! My life has always been based on reality not fantasy. Art was my

favourite subject and we were all encouraged to paint subjects from natural history – wild flowers, frogs, butterflies and birds.

I was told that John Constable went to school in the building opposite – the Old Grammar School (left) having walked there along the river bank from Flatford each day, and returned to his home in East

Bergholt the same way at night. A few years later, in, my teens, I would make this same journey on foot or bicycle, to join my friend, the late Ruth Wheeler, meeting half way for a swim, or in winter, to skate on the frozen water meadows.

I do not think that I really knew who John Constable was at that early stage in my life, but the Old Grammar School was certainly one of the links in the chain of my artistic interests. Just around the corner from my first school, opposite the Marlborough Head pub in Dedham was the site of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, set up by Cedric Morris and Lett Haines in 1937 and which burned down in 1939, (right), set alight by

Lucien Freud (so rumour has it) from a discarded cigarette when he was a student there. I do not remember this, I was only 7 at the time – but I can recall my father talking about a fire in the village on that night which would have been this epic event. The School was relocated at Benton End in Hadleigh, Suffolk thereafter, where other attendees were to become famous.

I later discovered that Sir Alfred Munnings, who also lived in the village, disliked most ‘modernist’ styles of painting and drove past the remains of this building in his recognisable yellow car shouting, waving and rejoicing at its apparent destruction.

I did know about Sir Alfred Munnings, however, and appreciated that he was a famous painter of horses and gypsies (as they were then called and much respected). He lived at Castle House in Dedham during the time that my parents were farming there (1932-1958). I often used to meet him riding his horse when I was out on my pony in the country lanes, and he always raised his hat to me.

My mother used to take me to school on the back of her bicycle when I first started. It was all downhill from Bargate Lane near the Dedham/Lawford boundary, but harder work on the way back. On each journey we would pass Sir Alfred’s house and sometimes see Lady Violet with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight. Later, of course, when he died, she had him stuffed and could be seen carrying him on the front of her saddle as she rode past.

All this early artistic activity made me appreciate what a very special place Dedham was. Much later on in my life, Tom Keating, the faker, arrived to keep the stories alive and add a new dimension to the scene. By this time I was married and living in nearby Great Bromley, but still shopped at the well-known grocer’s shop in Dedham called ‘Spearings’. Tom often used to greet me with a “good morning” as we passed each other. I was in the shop the day of his funeral (Feb 1984) which had been kept very secret because of the publicity surrounding his trial for forgery. From inside the shop and through its windows I had a first class view of the arrival of the coffin and its passage into the church. I cherished this advantage point.

My time at the Dame School was very short. After I turned 6 years old and was coming up to 7, I transferred to the Preparatory Department of Colchester County High School for Girls in Colchester at Grey Friars, another building with a similar Ionic doorway (left).

I had to travel there by bus. The involved a short walk along the lane from the farmhouse with my mother each morning to catch Beeston’s school bus coming from East Bergholt and Manningtree. A senior girl who was already on the bus took charge of me, delivering me to school safely, and repeating this care for the return journey,

where my mother would meet the bus and walk me home for tea and ‘Children’s Hour’ with Uncle Mac on the radio.

I met a family of four from a neighbouring farm and we became firm friends. We had favourite places to

play and one of these was ‘The Long Meadow’. This was part of my father’s farm and was a dream playground. It consisted of a long narrow stretch of meadowland running alongside the railway line for one mile between Manningtree and Ardleigh stations (right). The meadow’s other boundary was Shir Brook

alongside a slope of woodland. I used to race the steam trains on my pony and all five of us used to dam the stream, swim in it, and use a plane’s discarded petrol tank as a boat.

We gathered wild flowers, ate hazelnuts and frolicked in the sweet smelling hay as we helped my father to gather it in during late summer. This family of five was also responsible for changing my reading habits from Enid Blyton to Arthur Ransome and developing an enduring love of Pin Mill near the estuary of the river Orwell, where Ransome captured the plot for “We didn’t mean to go to sea.” Close to the Long Meadow in my teenage years, I discovered the declining black poplar tree, and was able to research its rarity and relate this to its representation in John Constable’s rural landscape paintings.

This dreamland of so much childhood pleasure was shattered much later in life when I discovered (from the records of Nicholas Winton’s life and his rescue missions) that the trains carrying the Kindertransport escapees from Nazi threatened and occupied countries of Europe, passed along this track. The children occupants might have enviously watched us through the train windows, enjoying our freedom and unrestricted pleasures as they travelled from the port of Harwich to Liverpool Street station where unknown volunteer strangers were waiting to welcome these parentless youngsters with an unknown future. With this knowledge today, every time I pass through Liverpool Street station I pause to stroke the statue which records these events (left) and

decry those who place their discarded plastic coffee cups on the base of these commemoration figures.

My early years at CCHS did not always have distressing memories of wartime. There were also recollections of friendships which lasted for life. Consideration for others, compassion and co-operation were essential in those difficult wartime days. Bullying was unknowns. Two other pupils, who I do not remember very well because they were several years older than me, found fame in different ways. One was Pamela Brown (1924-1989) who wrote (The Swish of the Curtain” (right) whilst she was still at CCHS and followed this with several other books. I had almost forgotten about her when many years later – probably in the 1990s – I was browsing in a second hand book shop in Cambridge, when a lady

came into the shop and said to the shop keeper in a loud voice that she was looking for a book called “The Swish of the Curtain” by an author who was at Colchester County High School in the 1930s and did he have it. I could hardly control myself! I called out “It was Pamela Brown and I was at school with her”. We both looked at each other in astonishment and the conversation flowed for another hour. I do not know if she eventually found it elsewhere, but the coincidence was eerie.

The other pupil was Beth Chatto (then known as Betty Little). I came across Beth again when, in 1960, she moved to Elmstead Market in the same year that I moved to the adjoining village of Great Bromley. Many times over the years I have visited Beth Chatto Gardens and noticed that several of her plants bore the name “Cedric Morris”, indicating her friendship and cooperation with this artist when the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing moved to Hadleigh after the fire at Dedham and after he began to specialise in irises – another link to my schooldays in Dedham when Cedric Morris was next door.

The links to Dedham and artists had not yet finished. When I was in the VIth form I would often, after school, search various art shops for reproduction art and postcards. One such favourite shop was "the Crescent Moon", in Crouch Street. In the window one day was a framed print of a deer which I fell in love with. It was beyond my spending money but I kept an eye on it for weeks, and eventually I succumbed to temptation and purchased it. I only discovered several years later that John Skeaping, the artist, also had connections with Dedham. Previously married to the sculptor, Barbara Hepworth, he finally came to have links with Dedham through the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing.

Another very curious link to a famous plantswoman came via a fan (left) and tennis – not a very usual combination. It happened that one day in the late 1990s Gerald and I were at an Antiques Fair in Suffolk and spotted an outstanding cream satin lady’s fan. It had an even more

intriguing inscription along the guard stick which read EAW Lawn Tennis and ETC Warley Place July 29th 1882. Gerald, of course, immediately decided that one set of initials must stand for X Tennis Club. After much research along these lines with no conclusion, he turned to Great Warley in Essex and almost immediately he found books on Ellen Willmott who was a contemporary of Gertrude Jekyll and both were, in their time, famous plantswomen and writers. The fan turned out to be a trophy for a mixed doubles tennis tournament at Warley Place, Essex, her home at the time and the initials along the guard stick were hers, Ellen Anne Willmott, and her match partner’s. Gerald and I, of course, visited the site in 2000. The house had sadly been demolished and the garden abandoned, but we established the positions of various features which had been well recorded.

And so my many links between art and authors were nearly over. Much later in my life when I was teaching swimming to small local groups of children, I taught two who had the surname Pissarro. They must have been descendants of Camille Pissarro, the French Impressionist, who visited and spent some time in Langham in 1870 and 1890 visiting his son Lucien Pissarro who settled there between 1892 and 1944.

Here, I thought, my chain had eventually ended, but as I write this on Friday 20th January 2023 an obituary notice jumps out at me from the local newspaper. Ronald Blythe has died aged 100. Was this really the young man with the wayward hair who worked in the Reference Department of Colchester Public Library in the 1950s? Here, at the end of my CCHS school days and the early part of my student years, I used to come to research local history and other projects which I was working on at the time. The network widened; Ronnie’s associates included Ralph Currey, Head of English at CRGS and Tony Doncaster at the Castle Bookshop where an hour spent browsing or buying was an enduring experience. All these memories came back to me when Ronald Blythe’s “Akenfield” was published in 1969 and no doubt many more will emerge when I get a little further into “Next to Nature” published on November 6th 2022 as a celebration of his 100th birthday.

I have barely touched upon the events of WW2 and their influence upon my later life, including my addition to the television programme “Dad’s Army”, but perhaps there is one more episode to follow next time!

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