Forty Years in Chandler's Ford - a Journal (Part 70)

A visit to Salisbury; Jane’s twenty-first; Vaughan Williams’ Bridal Day; preparation for a visit by Mr Summerhayes; “eight hateful shops”; a return to tennis; an invasive plant, and the New Forest – still good for Red-backed Shrikes.

In the second week of May 1955, Gran visits Salisbury with her friend Joan Sheppard, to see an exhibition of floral art at the Guildhall there. She fully describes, in particular, those exhibits that she finds most attractive, noting that there is only one male contributor – Gordon Clarke from Dorchester – and whose work was “truly sensational”.

Afterwards, they visit the town and its Cathedral – not seen by Gran since she was a child, and, in her opinion, “not wholly as beautiful as Winchester Cathedral”. But the stained glass window above the altar, “whilst lacking the brilliant colour of many I have seen, is, nevertheless, quite the most strikingly beautiful of all”. And in her journal that night, she describes it in detail.

“Quite the most strikingly beautiful of all.” Image by Tony Lloyd via Flickr.

May 13th:

Jane’s twenty-first birthday, and I have been miserably depressed all day. Partly, no doubt, because I hate to admit that my adorable baby is now a grown woman, and partly because she is away and I have been unable to share this great day with her.

A hurried letter from Jane, written on her birthday, tells Gran of the wonderful day she is having, and of the gifts and cards she has received, “among them, flowers from the mother of her room-mate”. She knows that Tommy and Bob, in Eastbourne anyway, meeting a friend from Switzerland, will be taking her out to dinner that night. Gran writes, “She must never know how depressed I felt yesterday”. She adds, quoting further from Jane’s letter:

Vaughan Williams had been to the dress rehearsal of his “Bridal Day”, which the students are doing next weekend, and, when it was over, he just stood up and said, “That was grand. Thank you.” He seemed to be very impressed with their performance.

May 15th is spent in the company of Mr Roseweir, from Bitterne – a member of Southampton Natural History Society, and already mentioned several times in earlier journal entries – on the South Downs around Petersfield, locating orchids, particularly Man Orchids, “…for Mr Summerhayes the Orchid specialist from Kew, who is anxious to see them in these localities and is coming down when they are in bloom”.

Man Orchids – good at hiding in long but sparse grass. Image by Bjorn S via Flickr.

They find several Man Orchids, including, after much searching, one emerging underneath a crushed and discarded bucket exactly where Gran had found the plant two years ago. Gran has a wonderful, flower-filled day, learning too, that Musk Orchid, which she still needs to see in Hampshire, “is prolific in this area of downland”. She seems to have started the day with some trepidation though, saying:

Admittedly I had not wanted to go out with Mr Roseweir on my own, but I found him a pleasant enough companion, no nonsense and as keen a naturalist as myself, and he behaved in a decorous and gentlemanly way throughout our outing. This may sound priggish, but I cannot bear a man who – ah well. It is difficult to say what I mean, but male or female, it makes no difference to me who I am with now, since I cannot be with the only one who means anything to me.

Gran attempts to save the last Wintergreen plant flowering on the ground opposite The Ridge, where, “a man and his infernal machine” was “tearing up all the little birch trees and glorious flowering gorse”. She plants it in her garden and prays for overnight rain, “to give it a chance to settle in safely”. It does rain all night but Gran is still incensed, writing angrily:

It has been a sad day – the infernal machine tearing up more of my little trees and gorse, and tearing my heart also until I could have wept at my futile fury over it all. Eight hateful shops are to go up there! Picture it! No lovely old Yew trees, that I have looked at and loved for over twenty-seven years, no early Brimstones to be eagerly watched for in the warm sunny corner, no Nightjar in the soft evening dusk, no Wood Pigeons crooning at dawn, no dawn chorus to be recorded from my garden – only soul-less shops that I shall hate from their first brick. Thank God I have my own little woodland in the back garden…

…how sadly I bid farewell to Chandler’s Ford, the village, and reluctantly, resentfully accept Chandler’s Ford, the suburb of the hated and despised Eastleigh. Nothing will ever be the same.

“Eight hateful shops” – and now just one “lovely old yew tree”.

Dad adds to this, telling me that there are still plenty of Woodpigeons – and also Collared Doves, newly arrived in the UK in the early 1950s, but yet to make an appearance in Chandler’s Ford. Gran will be excited when that happens!

Late snow falls the next day, May 18th, to match Gran’s mood, although it is much lighter than in many other English districts. However, the weather appears to be suitable for tennis the following day, because, after painting Yellow Archangel –“not an easy subject but very effective and I obtained good results”, and the fifteenth in her first album of paintings, she visits Winchester with friends, John and Joan Sole:

…to try my first game of tennis since I injured my shoulder nineteen months ago. John picked me up in his car on his way home and took me to their flat for tea first. This is on the ground floor of the beautiful Brambridge House…

Gran is much taken by the view from, and the gardens surrounding the house, which she describes, ending:

In the garden is what is said to be the largest Magnolia tree in Great Britain, which bears greenish-white flowers. It is colossal. On it, or rather, hawking insects from a branch of it and returning to it after each sortie, was the first Spotted Flycatcher I have seen this year.

Of the tennis she writes, “I enjoyed it and managed far better than I had dared to hope… Of course, tomorrow’s awakening will be the real test – just how stiff I shall be – but the shoulder is not painful at present”. A week later, she plays again, saying, “I enjoyed several good games, certainly feeling rather restricted in movement, but not too bad considering all things”.

The apparently new habit of foxes in town, the result, Gran thinks, of the loss of country rabbits due to myxomatosis, continues to exercise Gran’s mind as she crosses Southampton Common on her way to Bassett, where she regularly gardens for the Fowlers:

Foxes are causing havoc among poultry right in Southampton… and some have even “moved in” in gardens, making their lairs there. Unfortunately though understandably, I suppose, they have been attacked with cyanide gas and the helpless cubs killed. The parents are still at large. It is all wrong for Man to upset the balance of nature.

Gran, with Tommy and Bob Fowler, travel by car to Eastbourne on the 21st, to see, at five o’clock, the production of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Bridal Day” by the students of Chelsea College, where Jill Fowler and Jane study. They take their seats, having briefly met Jane in her room at Bishopsbourne:

First the College choir, under the Conductor Mr E.T.E. Davies, rendered Vaughan Williams’ cantata, “In Windsor Forest”, with great expression and exquisite precision, some sixty girlish voices singing as though they really enjoyed doing so.

The “Bridal Day” is described as a new masque, designed for Vaughan Williams by Ursula Wood out of Spencer’s poem “Epithalamion”. In today’s production all the dresses, with very few exceptions, were designed and made by the students themselves and were most effective and beautiful and the whole thing, to my mind, was a perfect combination of music, movement and art…

The statue of Ralph Vaughan Williams at Dorking. Image by Leo Leibovici via Flickr.

Over three pages Gran describes the setting, each scene, the action, the costumes, the dancing and narration. Jane plays one of several bearded men in Elizabethan costume. This was the second performance; the first, with full orchestra and in the presence of the Composer, had taken place the evening before. “Jane”, Gran tells us:

…was among those lucky enough to receive a handshake and a pat on the back from Vaughan Williams himself, who had been truly delighted with the production. Tonight, after it was over, the students came among us so that we could examine their dresses at close quarters, and it was not until Jane spoke to me that I recognised the bearded gentleman, in maroon doublet and hose, as my own daughter!

Another trip to the New Forest takes place on the 22nd, Brother and Fin again visiting from London and collecting Gran just after 10:15. Their goals this time are to hear Wood Warblers in song and also to find Red-backed Shrike, a new bird for Fin. Gran writes:

Passing through Lyndhurst we saw the notices painted on the road, which have caused much comment and speculation in the local press of late, since the Police, Foresters and Commoners all say they have no idea who is responsible for them. In large letters are the words, “Animals. Do not feed”. A dangerous practice, this feeding of the ponies and donkeys at the roadside, and one which, I agree, should be rigorously discouraged.

They first visit Keyhaven marshes, where Gran sees Fenugreek, the little pea-family plant, in flower for the first time. Back in the Forest, near Brockenhurst, they hear and see many Wood Warblers – a bird much harder to find in the New Forest today, although small numbers are still present every summer. Red-backed Shrike no longer breeds there at all, but on this day, near to Denny Wood, they see first a single male, then, while watching a female Cuckoo prospecting for a nest in which to lay her egg, “two males, posturing to the same female, who sat, appearing to be quite indifferent to them, on a tree stump, and two pairs. Other single ones were seen later”.

Birds seen on Gran’s regular route along Oakmount Road into Eastleigh also highlight the sad changes that have taken place since her days: on May 24th she notes “Swallows near the first farm”, and “Larks in full song above the meadows and a pair of Peewits cried plaintively as I passed by in the lane”.

The Peewit was such a typical bird of arable farmland in Gran’s day. Image by Jo Garbutt via Flickr.

When she returned home from this visit:

…I was surprised to hear that an Inspector from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had been to see me whilst I was out. I had written at the weekend to ask if the Society had the authority to find out if and when our Yew trees were to be cut down, and if so, could the builder be made to wait at least until after the nesting season as many birds are nesting therein. The Inspector was most encouraging and said I had done the right thing in drawing the Society’s attention to the matter.

It is suggested that she phone the RSPCA later to find out what the Inspector has achieved. This she does, learning that the agent concerned with the sale of the land had been made aware of the new Bird Protection Act and would pass on this information to the builder, asking him to refrain from felling until at least three weeks to a month had elapsed. The Inspector asks Gran to “keep an eye on developments over opposite and if I saw any suspicious moves I was to phone him immediately”.

The garden at The Ridge, as usual in Spring, gives Gran untold pleasure. She is a great one for transplanting “lost and unwanted” plants from the wild to the garden, and on May 30th she records that she receives another transplant:

Earlier this year, Mr Donahoe, a member of Southampton Natural History Society and of B.E.N.A., gave me a few plants of the rare Triquetrous Leek (Allium triquetrum), which he brought from Cornwall some years ago, and which have increased in his garden. In Britain, this plant is confined to Cornwall and the Channel Islands. Today I was pleased to note that one of mine is in flower and a second in bud.

The white flowered Three-cornered Leek – out-competing other woodland flora. Image by Mossy Carey via Flickr.

This plant, also called Three-cornered Leek, and not native to the UK, is a good example of the ecological trouble that can be caused by introducing potentially invasive species to areas outside their normal range! I have received garden plants from The Ridge, with which to stock my own garden. The soil coming with these plants contained seeds from Gran’s leeks and after a few years, Triquetrous Leek was rife thoroughout the garden. The ground layer of some hillside woodlands in the Scottish Borders is nowadays a monoculture of this species, introduced there, where it out-competes most other plants of the woodland floor.

On the last day of May, Gran goes “to Southampton to see Jane away to Eastbourne in quite extraordinary circumstances!”. There is a rail strike, which prevents Jane and Jill Fowler undertaking the journey back to college, following a vacation, in the usual way. Jill phones the emergency Information Bureau, set up at the Civic Centre to enquire about alternative transport. Gran continues:

They took particulars and later phoned her to say that a gentleman, who was taking his sister to Folkestone, had two spare seats in his car and would gladly go through Eastbourne and take the girls! They also told Jill the number of the blue Javelin car, and said that they would be picked up at Bassett Crescent at two o’clock.

A 1953 Jowett Javelin – this is probably the model Jane and Jill were driven in. Image by Pete Edgeler via Flickr.

Gran clearly feels the need “to see what sort of a man was going to take her”, and this is why she accompanied Jane. She goes on:

However, when the car drew up and the driver emerged to pack in the luggage, I knew at once that all was well, and, as he shook hands with me and I thanked him, he remarked, “I am picking up my sister at the Home of Recovery so they will be quite safe!” Is it not a grand thing how wonderfully people help out in times of national emergency and how this spirit warms the heart?

She returns home, content that her daughter is safe, and makes a start on a painting of a recently found Meadow Saxifrage.

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Tags: Chandler's Ford, Chandler's Ford Today, family, Hiltingbury, Hiltingbury Road, history, Joan Adamson, Joan Adelaide Goater, local interest, memory, nature, writing

Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 70)

A visit to Salisbury; Jane’s twenty-first; Vaughan Williams’ Bridal Day; preparation for a visit by Mr Summerhayes; “eight hateful shops”; a return to tennis; an invasive plant, and the New Forest – still good for Red-backed Shrikes.

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A visit to Salisbury; Jane’s twenty-first; Vaughan Williams’ Bridal Day; preparation for a visit by Mr Summerhayes; “eight hateful shops”; a return to tennis; an invasive plant, and the New Forest – still good for Red-backed Shrikes.

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