Phyllis Chidwick

I was born in Wouldham in 1930 and lived there and in Eccles until moving to 10 Barn Meadow in Upper Halling in 1954 with my husband Reg and two daughters.  Life early on there was difficult because I had been struck down with osteomyelitis and spent eighteen months in and out of plaster and on crutches, which made walking the girls to the old  Halling School in Vicarage Road painful. 

Whilst living in Wouldham I had crossed to Halling daily on the ferry paying 6d (old money; two and a half pennies current money ) a time to the ferryman Jack Stevens. You called Jack across the river to come and get you by rattling tin cans . . . . . no mobile phones in those days. My Dad also used the ferry every day to cross to work at the Holborough cement works, carrying his bike on the boat.   I can recall Jack ferrying the Halling undertaker Mr Brown across to Wouldhan  with coffins  he'd made for  bodies to be buried in  Wouldham.  At Christmas the Salvation Army from Snodland would come across on the Halling ferry to Wouldham  to sing carols.

I remember the St Lawrence Chapel, run by Mrs Hilda Still,  where now is the Jubilee Hall and I used to take my girls to Sunday school there.  When the builders were building the houses in Browndens Road  one very snowy winter, on March 5th they built a snowman that towered over me at probably eight feet high.  There was Mrs Bennett lived opposite the Black Boy pub.  Clements Farm was a derelict.  Mrs Wraight had a big family and ran the village shop on The Street, where you could buy everything under the sun.  Her son, Tom, took it on after her.

Folk rarely left the village in those days and families were large so there was a lot of marriage between the families . . . .. .someone’s sister married someone’s brother, and probably their other brothers married the other sisters.  Mr Masson was known as ‘Milky Bill’ because he was a milkman somewhere.  I used to meet up with Mrs Sue Dray every school morning on the way back from taking my girls to school and we’d call in at 9 Jupps Cottages for tea and toast.  There was a sweetshop at the beginning of Jupps Cottages.

A row of prefabs had been built in The Street after the war as temporary housing but they were there for years and years before replaced by the flats.  There were two pubs in Upper Halling, the Black Boy which was a nice little pub run by Mr and Mrs Pankhurst at the bottom of Chapel Lane; and the Robin Hood at the top of Vicarage Road , later named the Pilgrims Rest (although I never saw a pilgrim going in there).  

One morning at Barn Meadow in the late 50s we woke up to see half the road and pavement at Meadow Crescent had slipped overnight into the chalk pit in a landslide. Mrs Baldwin, always in her beret, had lived in a tiny cottage on the edge of the pit and when she died the cottage got pushed over into the pit, along with a lot of our rubbish.

Mr and Mrs Wretham Senior lived in Prings Cottage on Pilgrims Road but it fell into disrepair when they died until Mr Harrison, a teacher at the Maths School bought it.  He had also been involved in running the Jubilee Hall. 

Our family moved to The Street in 1969.  The house was in a terrible state and the grass in the garden was up to your chest but the Council let us choose all the decor and then paid for it to be spruced  up.  When my youngest, Heather, was nine, Reg came home one day and said that  Peter Lingham at Court Farm had nobody to gut his turkeys and could I help out.  So Reg took his wheelbarrow up there to bring them back and I did them all in my little  kitchen, then Reg took them back again in his barrow. Then I thought to myself they’ve got a great big kitchen up there so from then on I did them in the farmhouse.  I worked for Peter for many years . . . . tending the sheep, putting up electric fences, littering the yard (that was laying about six inches of straw for the cows to walk on).  I hated the big brown bull.  I remember once rounding up Peter’s cows on Cuxton Marshes, herding them past the gypsy camp, under the railway line, and up to Court Farm. Peter used to have farm students training at Court Farm and I used to cook and sew for them. The parents of one of the students owned Darrow Green Farm in Norfolk and I was invited up there. I learnt to milk cows up there and I am still in touch with them now.    I used to babysit for the young Andrew (now running the Farm) and his younger sister Fiona.

Through my three girls I was for many years on the Halling School PTA committee,  going with the children to the school camp in May 1976 and again a couple of years later.  The first time was to Kearsney near Dover and the second to Dale Acres near Dymchurch.  I wrote and illustrated our time at the camps and I wrote most of  the School centenary book.  Mrs Donnelly, the headteacher, always invited me to every school function, even into my late eighties, and I’d go into classrooms and talk to the children and help them with crafts.

The first Halling Women's Institute was started in 1967 and I was the first President and made the WI banner.  It closed after 48 years.  In that time I was a lecturer, demonstrator, and produce and craft judge, covering most of Kent and parts of Sussex and Essex.  There is a time capsule from the first WI buried in the cemetery in Lower Halling; and information about where it is, and when it is to be opened is kept in the safe at St John's Church.