by Mrs Celia Duncan nee Cook

Meagers Hill got its name from the ancestors of Mr. John Meager, the blacksmith.

At the top, beside the road was a tremendous barn which was a wheelwright’s shop, and leading through a door off this was the smithy.

My friend Betty Penn and I watched with fascination and awe while the great shire horses stamped about awaiting their turn to be shod.

They were often attended by men in railway caps, who had brought them up from the station from which they took goods carts around the district.

The scene inside was dark and mysterious, with Mr. Meager and his assistants clanging hammers on a great anvil and sparks flying about.

Occasionally, Miss Waller from Newton Longville would be driven up in her governess cart, wearing violets in her straw bonnet. She would hand down sugar-lumps from her enormous carpet shopping-bag for us to feed to her brown pony. We were told Miss Waller believed that her ancestors fought at Agincourt in 1415.

Another favourite walk of Betty and myself was through the ‘rec’ (recreation ground) where there was a swing in the shape of a beautiful little wooden armchair. To get to the ‘rec’ we had to go up a narrow footpath between two long wooden garden fences, called for some mysterious reason the ‘Long-Short’.

The fence planks smelt deliciously of creosote in the summer heat and a dear old neighbour, a retired engine driver called Mr. Tompkins, used to push little bunches of flowers decorated with maiden-hair from his greenhouse, through the cracks in the fence for Betty and myself.

At the top of the ‘rec’ was St Mary’s Church of England School, where a much respected lady, Miss Edith Sinfield taught, and was still teaching, many generations of Old Bletchley children.

We used to stand on tiptoe outside the school fence looking admiringly at the ‘big’ children playing hopscotch in the playground over mysterious squares chalked in the dusty asphalt and stare at the whirling whips that hit tops around and the rapid arcs of skipping ropes while girls in pinafores chanted ‘Sally go round the sun. Sally go round the moon. Sally go round the chimney pots on a Sunday afternoon’.

At four o’clock each afternoon, Miss Sinfield would emerge with a small procession of the ‘big’ children, carrying books and jars filled with wild flowers, which they took to her bungalow at the top of Meagers Hill. Once we saw them transporting jars of tadpoles. We would speculate on why these objects were always taken home after the school-day and enjoyed a cosy daylight bedtime feeling of security.

We would arrange our afternoon walks to coincide with this departure because the ‘big’ girls would always allow us to smell the flowers.

In spring time there would be primroses and cowslips, but in autumn only hips and hawes, which pricked our noses.

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