The following is a series of notes from a conversation between the two men on 6th October 1999.

John Harris was born in Grafton Regis, in 1939, and lived in the School House until he was eleven years old when his family took a pub in the next village where John spent the remainder of his childhood years.

Don Allen was born in Grafton Regis is 1936 and stayed in the village for over twenty years apart from National Service. After a short spell working near Dunstable he returned to the village with his new bride to live in the house in which he was born twenty five years earlier and staying five more years.

Amusement was homespun. Collecting the trays from matchboxes which were slotted together to form a wheel, then pushing something through to form a spindle so that it would turn like the mill wheel when placed over the brook.

Don
Toys were mostly hand made by parents. A wooden truck which Don pushed for miles, sometimes as far as Yardley or Stoke Park where he would pick bluebells. He even had a light for it so that he could take it out at night.

Clothes were handed down from one child to another and no-one ever thought to ask questions about what they wore. Neither boy had a pair of long trousers until he reached his teens.

John
On Sunday morning my Dad used to cook the small potatoes up in the copper for ‘pig potatoes’ to last the week. When he had finished Mum used to have to clean the copper out ready to boil her washing on Monday.

Don
Washday Monday was quite a busy occasion. The water for washing at Tudor Cottage had to be collected from the pump at the Council Houses reached by means of a gap in the hedge, where the ground was often quite slippery. One day when Don was due to go to school to sit exams he fetched a bucket of water, sat down in the gap in the hedge, and tipped the water all over himself, pretending that he had slipped and spilled the water accidentally. By the time he was dry it was too late for school!

A black range stood in most kitchens as a means of cooking, and some were lucky enough to have a primus stove which not only heated water much more quickly but, particularly in summer meant that the house did not get quite so hot when cooking.

Although food was limited we never went hungry. Most of the boys knew how to set a snare so there was often rabbit on the menu. There was a strip of garden ground on the west side of the main road which stretched from the pond at the bottom of the hill towards Yardley to halfway down the hill towards Stoke. It had been the gardens of the cottages which stood there, but by the time of the war only one remained occupied and a block of three stood derelict. The others had all been pulled down. Various people in the village rented pieces of the gardens, William (Bill) Allen, Don’s Dad, rented the piece down Yardley Hill known as The Slipe. This is where Don set most of his snares, but when he met P.C. Wells whilst out checking his snares he was afraid the constable might realise that there were snares set on the other side of the hedge, too!

The water supply for the village was from a number of wells. On one occasion when Bill Allen went down the well to renew the rubber seal he was almost overcome by the foul gases. He afterwards made a practise of lowering an open umbrella down the well first and using a pumping action to disperse the gas. The well that served all the council houses and Tudor Cottage was in the front garden of what is now 1, Church Lane, and water was drawn by means of a hand pump. Through heat and drought this well was never known to run dry.

John
The pump in the School yard however, which served the cottages around, was less reliable, and often it was necessary for residents to carry their buckets halfway down the hill to the well under the nut tree there. It was quite a chore to walk back up the hill with full buckets. Eventually ‘the tank’ arrived, a large rectangular galvanised tank with a tap which was filled up by a tanker lorry. ‘The tank’ was a favourite meeting place for village children who were often to be found sitting on it. In summer the tank was uncomfortably hot and the water inside not much cooler. Sometimes they would put a wind-up gramophone on the tank, playing records until the needle became blunt and then sharpening the needle on the stone step.

Don
We used to be given time off school at harvest time to go potato picking. We were paid for this, one shilling and three pence an hour (about 6p). Sometimes we helped to ‘shock’ the corn, and when a field of corn was almost cut all the men and boys stood round with sticks waiting to kill any rabbits or rats that might run out.

In Grafton in the dark days of the war it was safe for children of eight or nine years old to play out at night. They did run home in a hurry one night though. A moonlit night with clouds hurrying across the sky seemed like a good night to climb to the top of the church tower, but just as they stepped out there was a neigh from a nearby horse which terrified them.

John
Most food was rationed – BU coupons for bread and B2 for sweets. Sweet rations were carefully selected at the shop, run by Percy Morton, a casualty of the First World War. The shop, a wooden building, stood at the top of a slope on the west side of the main road opposite Church Lane. On one occasion Brenda Harris used her coupons to buy a tin of evaporated milk, which would have been alright had she not hidden it behind a plant pot on the spinnet, ( a sort of harpsicord type instrument) where it was subsequently spilled making quite a mess!

Soldiers were billeted in the old school which had closed a few years before the war. They used to light fires in the school yard so that they could cook in their billycans. And we often saw them practising manoeuvres in the street

Mrs. Mac kept the White Hart and John remembers the Sunday morning ritual of collecting what was probably a two pint container of beer for his father. Mrs. Mac was quite strict with her customers and when the Home Guard called in to slake their thirst after exercises she ordered them to take there guns out of her pub whereupon they were left leaning against the front wall of the building