Joan West

In September 1961 I married John West, who had been born and now worked with his father at Stocken farm in Lacey Green. We moved into no.1 Coronation Cottages, one of a pair of houses in Kiln Lane built for the farm workers by the landlord in 1937 – hence the name. I’ve no doubt it was modern for it’s day. For instance, it had a bathroom. Mains water had only come to the village in 1934. There was a sink in the kitchen and a cesspool in the garden to take the waste. The main drains were not laid in the village until about 1970, so every house had to call in the cesspool emptying lorry from time to time.

In the front door. Stairs up straight ahead, beside a short passage through to the kitchen and on the right a small sitting room and a living room. The kitchen was not big. Narrow, with on one side a copper boiler to heat the water which had a fire underneath. Next, a sink and wooden draining board and an electric cooker. There was a cupboard under the sink and that was it. Cooking must have been prepared in the living room, for there was a walk-in larder in there and room for a small table and chairs. A fireplace with a built in cupboard floor to ceiling beside it and room for some easy chairs. The bathroom and three bedrooms upstairs. The paintwork had not been changed much since it was built. All the woodwork was still the original, then fashionable, matt brown. The green painted walls had been livened up in places with a pink potato-cut pattern, or was it the other way round? Anyway we papered over it.

We took out the old fireplace in the living room and replaced it with a new one with a back boiler to heat the water. This let us knock out the big copper boiler with it’s fire from the kitchen. We had been given a dated washing machine which just fitted in the space and put a worktop over it joining up with a new stainless steel sink and drainer and an up to date electric cooker. It was like a mini galley. There was no garage but that didn’t matter because we didn’t have a car.

I had worked full time in my father’s business. Now I was a full time housewife and I had a lot to learn. John started work at six am and came back at 8 for twenty minutes for a cooked breakfast. The main meal was at 12 o’clock when the farm stopped for lunch for an hour. Five o’clock brought John home for a quick, full, old-fashioned tea, or if anyone was working in the fields a picnic tea was taken to them. Supper, usually something hot was eaten around 9pm. This gave me plenty of opportunity to practise my culinary skills which were very basic at first but increased rapidly – they needed to. I enjoyed needlework and changed from dressmaking to curtains and upholstery.

All that cooking needed ingredients but getting them was not difficult. The fishman, Mr.Harper called on Tuesdays, so fish and chips was supper on Tuesdays. A butcher called twice a week from Stevens in Prestwood. I can’t remember the man’s name but he was very saucy. I had the time to cook the cheaper cuts that needed long slow cooking but asking him for a piece of skirt or a breast of lamb took a lot of bravery. Then there were Bert and May Dell at Hickman’s Stores. They stocked all I needed and I collected my bread from them four times a week. They also sold petrol and paraffin which we needed for a convector heater that we stood in our hall in the winter. “ Bert’s” was a wonderful place to get to know people. At first it seemed that everyone in there knew everybody else. And they probably did. But Bert and May always had a word for everyone and all were included. They were first class village shopkeepers to my mind and a great help to me in feeling at home here.

The farm was just behind our house across the field. The cows were taken past the side of our garden into Kiln Lane, down as far as the cross tracks and left into a field called Hillocks to graze. Then they were brought back again at milking time. That was a daily occurance but less often cattle and the flock of sheep were driven around the village or along to Walters Ash on the New Road. There was not so much traffic then.

It was not unusual for the village to be cut off with snow in the winter.   Gerald Bedford who worked at the farm lived in Naphill.   He would go home on a tractor and in the morning clear stuck cars from the New Road on his way back.   The snow would blow against the fences and hedges and drop the other side blocking the roads.   Then the council took to erecting snow barriers some way in the fields so the snow dropped over them and thus it piled up in the fields.   Side roads such as Slad Lane however could be filled to the top.   It is already some years ago that the council no longer deemed it necessary to put up those snow barriers.   The bus from Wycombe only ever came as far as the RAF camp at Walters Ash.   That was the Lacey Green stop.   In snowy weather a snow plough cleared to there, turning and throwing a bank of extra snow across New Road  just to make sure we were inaccessible.

The village was pretty self sufficient. The Stores of course and along at Loosley Row, opposite the Whip was the Post Office. The district nurse, who delivered the babies lived in Greenlands and a doctor held a weekly surgery in Bill and Phyllis Dell’s House. The policeman lived in a house on the Main Road. There was a road sweeper, “Wido” Bowler, to keep it nice, sything the grass verges as well. If he got a little weary he would sit in his barrow and take a nap. In 1961 Joyce Delnevo was just getting her baby Louise to walk to the village shop. Our daughters and Louise became good friends. Joyce was a great help to me and someone I could always turn to. Many village schools were being closed down at that time but Lacey Green was chosen to stay. If it had closed Lacey green would be a very different place. As it was, our children made close friendships there and I met many more people. In 1969 our son Richard was born. John’s mother was not in good health and they built a bungalow for her and Dick. In January 1970 we moved to the farmhouse. I couldn’t have had a better start in Lacey Green.