As is mentioned several times on this site, particularly in the Tales of The Angel, Glemsford is full of characters and personalities
Roy is a cabinet maker and master story teller. Some of his stories are a mite taller than his cabinets, but he is a fund of anecdotes.
He is also a scribe of no little skill and a lot of humour. He has contributed verses of his own to the Poems and Pints evenings at The Angel.
This text was first written down in 1994, as an effort at recording the exploits of the Glemsford Auxiliary Fire Service during the Second World War.
It is all Roy's own work; all I have done is to transcribe it and adapt it for this medium.
Read it with the twinkle in eye and voice with which it was written.
Please respect it as Roy's copyright.
If you wish to use any of it, please do, but do two things first:
let me know you are borrowing it and,
acknowledge it as Roy's original work.
I was born on the right side of the Stour valley, some 66 years ago: the right side being, of course, the Suffolk side. Those unfortunate individuals that existed on the other side, known as North Essex to the present generation, were known as foreigners to us superior people of the Suffolk and (naturally) the Glemsford side.
The kind of life that went on in them days of long ago was as different as chalk and cheese to the present apology we know as modern life. For the countryside was then governed by the horse. Not the prancing skittish object ridden by over-dressed individuals one sees today, but the huge four-legged friends of man. Without their co-operation very little would have been achieved on the agricultural face of the land. Besides, he or she still held sway over a fair proportion of ordinary transport. Yet to come was the foreign farmer that knocked down trees and hedges, filled in ditches that had drained the land for hundreds of years, often without piping the same, turned the small meadows into large desert-like areas, destroyed the fragrant smells of spring with the vile smell of ICI, smothered the roads with mud from their beet crop, filled the air with smoke and smuts at harvest and, after all this carnage, called for monetary subsidies.
Still to come were the TV soap operas, transistor radios and that insult to the artistic profession of the noise of what some people call music. The Suffolk countryside, and for that matter the foreigner's side as well, was a Constable-type picture of small fields and meadows, divided by small hedges set on earth brows. Trees of all types stood in abundance, trees that had known the Roundheads of Cromwell. It was a countryside on which night descended like a black velvet cloak, leaving peace and tranquility; a countryside that had answered the call of Mother Nature to a time to work and a time to rest as laid down by the great creator. Look out tonight at the same spot in the same land and you will observe by the electric glow from Lands End to John O' Groats a land devoid of meadows, hedges, horse ponds and above all the peaceful silence that dwelt there in my younger days.