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G'day Rob,
First may I congratulate you upon setting up such a worthwhile project. On the basis of 'mony a mickle maks a muckle' the result should not only be of interest to others of our older generation but will form a valuable archive in time to come. Few young folk are able to visualise the vast changes that have come about in the last hundred, or even fifty, years and here we are having lived through them all.
Second, I was fortunate as a lad in having a father who loved his London (where he was born in 1870) and so early gained an enthusiasm to experience so many aspects of the world around me. Before the war we moved from London down to a small village near Heathfield in East Sussex and so the items I have read that are associated with that county were very real to me.
How did I find your site? Well it was passed on to me by the President of our local Forest Computer Pals for Seniors group for comment. He also wished to know whether I thought a link would be valuable. As you may gather, I am enthused by the site and you may be assured that I will be encouraging him to create the link on perhaps a rather wider basis (we are but a part of a much larger grouping of Seniors that is starting to spread Australia wide).
This is a small item from a collection that I am putting together for a small book for private distribution. It comes under the general heading of 'Living in Another World.' Background -- dad was just about due to retire, mum was returning to work as a teacher and, on the advice of Great Ormond Street specialists I was only allowed to have part-time education - but more of the detail later.
From the beginning of 1936 my mother and I became commuters. Each Sunday evening we caught a train from Victoria station in London and travelled down to Heathfield in Sussex. There we caught a taxi that took us to our lodgings at Turner's Green where we stayed with the Mephams in their home and guesthouse, 'Woodlands'.
From there my mother caught a bus each morning down to Rushlake Green where she taught at the village school. It had been advised that I should only have part-time schooling and so I travelled on a bus in the opposite direction into Heathfield where Mrs. Hilda Pettit gave private tuition to three or four children in her own house.
Each Friday afternoon, we caught the bus to Heathfield station and travelled
back to town. As dad did not retire until the end of the year so we got to see the seasons through and every journey proved to have something new to offer. Sadly, the branch line that served the villages of Rotherfield & Mark Cross, Mayfield, Heathfield & Waldron, Horam and Hellingly was later to become an early target of Mr. Beeching's cuts and is no more. Today those interested in exploring the route will find it is now a walking track.
The evening train on Sundays was an important one for many farmers in that area of Kent through which the line ran for it was also the milk train. So, as the train snorted into Cowden, Hever, or Ashurst, the milk churns started rolling. Usually there was only one porter assisted by the guard to roll the full churns on their bottom edges from the platform and into the guard's compartment. With around forty churns at each of these stations, the journey was a leisurely one at the best of times.
Then, in the dark winter months, as the train drew out of the station, the porter could be seen hurrying along the platform dousing the oil lamps before setting off on his bicycle for his home in the nearby village. All this milk was destined for a dairy in Tunbridge Wells, that being the destination of this train.
This meant that we had to change trains at Groombridge. This could be a bit of a scramble at times as one had to get oneself and one's luggage out of the train, along the platform and down stairs into a tunnel under the lines, back up the other side and into the waiting Eastbourne train. As I remember it this was more likely to happen on the dark nights.
In the summer everything seemed to go more quickly and we quite often had to await the arrival of our second train from Tunbridge Wells. Oh, the smoke that belched from those locomotive funnels. They had been refuelled with Kentish coal and that always made a lot of heavy sulphurous fumes.
Then on to the slow amble through Eridge and down the 'Cuckoo Line.' We often used to quip that unlike some slow trains where one could get out and pick a bunch of wild flowers, with this one it was possible to grow them from seed and pick them before the train got out of range.
Best wishes,
Alf Rogers, in Forestville, Sydney, NSW
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