From a Distance

The summer of 1959 was record-breakingly warm and sunny.   I was 15 and came home from boarding school on 24 th July and according to my diary, the sun shone every single day for that whole holiday.   The loveliest thing was that the sea was not only beautifully warm but day after day, it was as flat and still as glass.   It seemed to swell and roll in almost imperceptibly at high tide. Even Dad had a daily dip after work using his strange and rather awkward Trudgen stroke; -  breaststroke legs and a sidestroke like crawl with only one arm which he’d probably learned on holidays in South Wales during his childhood in the 1890s. That summer was idyllic in other ways too.   There were lots of families with teenagers staying in Bognor and Felpham for the summer.   Cheap foreign travel had yet to come.   We formed a group of teenagers who idled around together each day, swimming, riding our bikes, playing tennis with trips to the cinema in Bognor. ...

For several years before the War and for 20 years after it, my father Wilf Richards commuted to London via Three Bridges from Barnham Junction.   He drove from Middleton to the station and although my father was a dear and lovely man, he was a hopeless driver.   Born in 1892, he was from that generation who’d gone into WW1 on horseback and who’d learned to drive before there was a test.   Stalling and jerking, he’d crunch his way up through the gears, though the fourth remained an unattainable mystery to him.   He drove so slowly that the milk float or a sprightly pedestrian could overtake him.   He would leave at 7 am, drive up the Yapton Road past PC Luck’s house and Comet Corner where the old stagecoach stopped.   Up towards Bilsham where our family admired the handsome farmhouse covered in Virginia creeper.   He’d grind and buck through Yapton, past the old windmill and under the railway bridge to park in a friend’s garage near the station. ...

It's time to celebrate the work of  Gerard Young, the author of Down Hoe Lane. He was a well-known resident of the tiny hamlet of Flansham, near Felpham.  His beautifully observed pieces from the 1940s and '50s make him something of a Laurie Lee  for this small corner of West Sussex.   He captures the spirit of the place perfectly with his descriptions of lambing, scything and the arrival of a threshing machine.  He wages a ceaseless war against the rampaging weeds in his garden.  He introduces us to local personalities, to a  benign ghost and   helps a child build a snowman. He describes adventures into amateur dramatics, records braving winter storms as well as cycling to the local beach for a swim on a balmy summer night.  Here's a taste of his writing, topical after the recent spell of freezing weather: The Giant in the Snow - Extract from Down Hoe Lane by Gerard Young I could not break my promise to him. ...