You Can Take the Boy ...

In general terms, I'm content with my present life in the First Garden City.  Most of my modest needs are catered for in the town, and those that aren't can find satisfaction nearby.  Occasionally, though - and especially when there are blue skies overhead like those this glorious summer has brought - I yearn for cornfields.  Yesterday afternoon I actually drove out to find one to walk around.

That yearning for the wide East Anglian skies was heightened last weekend when much of our church family migrated to Letton Hall for two days of great teaching, fabulous fellowship ... and a great deal of equally fabulous food!  My mind, however, was to a certain extent focused a few miles away.  I had taken with me a slim book, most of which I read during free time over the weekend.  It told the story of Lucilla Reeve, a strong-willed woman who, in 1938, had exchanged a job as a land agent for the role of farmer, and taken over one of the properties she had formerly administered.

Little did she know that, within five years, the village where she had been born, the one where she now lived and worked, and four more would be under military occupation, with all the inhabitants cleared out on just a few weeks' notice to find homes elsewhere, and with precious little by way of compensation.  Lucilla Reeve took a few belongings, samples of the crops she had grown on her farm, and scraped a living just outside the cleared area.  "It's all right," they had been told by their landlord (who lost his own home at the same time), "You can come back when the war is over."  It never happened, of course.

Although the fundamental reason for the expulsion of civilians was their own safety, it soon became apparent that the military training for which the area had been commandeered would be impossible if they were to keep to their initial undertaking that the homes would be left intact.  On Armistice Day, 1950 Lucilla Reeve took her own life.  Many believe that the loss of her farm was a major factor in this tragedy.  She is buried at the corner of the churchyard of St Andrew's church, Tottington.

After the end of World War II came the Cold War, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Balkans and Iraq.  While the homes of the original villages of Buckenham Tofts, Langford, Stanford, Sturston, Tottington and West Tofts are now just humps in the ground, a new 'village' has been built, representing a typical settlement in Afghanistan, complete with street markets, lots of signs in Arabic and even a mosque ... all in the cause of urban warfare training.

Each of the villages had its own church; two of these had already disappeared before the nineteenth century, but the remaining four are carefully protected by the Ministry, with high fences and severely restricted access.  The roofs of the larger two have been replaced by blastproof panels in the style of pantiles.  The villages themselves will never be re-habited.  While the material losses of the individuals was, in the overall scheme of things, minimal, what was destroyed was the sense of community, as they were scattered far and wide across the county and beyond.  In their absence, the old, and largely unmechanised, farm and village life of pre-war Norfolk disappeared for ever.  The only civilian connection with the area now is a fast-declining sentimental link with family graves and the memory of Breckland childhoods that are now eight and nine decades into history.

The occasional visits allowed by the MOD to the area usually merit a mention in the local press.  It was just such a report that prompted my interest in what had hitherto simply been a blank area on the map, and my purchase of the book that I took with me last weekend.  Although my journey to our retreat venue passed close by, I knew that it would be pointless to engage in a sightseeing diversion.  For one thing my curiosity relates only to the past, and there is no longer a past to be seen, and for another, I have no personal interest in the villages at all, save for the basic one of filling in a gap in awareness about my native county.

It's true what they say about many a birthplace - "You can take the boy out of Norfolk (or wherever), but you can't take Norfolk out of the boy!"