"Before I Catch the Bus"

This afternoon, I happened to notice the clock out of the corner of my eye.  It was '3.15 on a Friday afternoon' and that expression wafted me back to a time about sixty years ago.  Family ties were much closer then than now, and I suspect less formal, too.  If I were away from school, either from sickness or at holiday times, my mother might see the clock and say, apparently to me, "Well, it's a quarter past three; I don't expect we shall see uncle Arthur now."  There was no formal arrangement, no plans to be upset: sometimes he'd call, sometimes he wouldn't.

Picture if you will, the busy town on market day.  The town's population would have swelled by several bus-loads of folks who had taken the chance to meet old friends, to get essential provisions or do some special shopping not possible at the village store, or just to see what was going on at the sales.  There were live- and dead-stock auction sales at a number of locations in the town most Fridays and the Corn Exchange still functioned as was intended when it had been built in the 1850s.  Here tall square stands would be manned by merchants from miles around, buying and selling on the strength of samples brought along by the farmers.

A short, well-built man would emerge from a shop, pub or café, his dirty white raincoat probably open, unless it were raining, and the ubiquitous flat cap firmly seated on his head.  His shopping and other business completed, he would take his fob watch from his waistcoat pocket and decide whether or not he had time for a family call before catching the bus home.  Nowadays, there is a regular service between Diss and Bury St Edmunds, which calls at Hinderclay three or four times each weekday.  In those days, there was just one into Diss in the morning and one back in the afternoon on market day, to cater for the needs of the villagers.  He knew that he had to be there when it left at 4.0 pm.

To visit ours, he would have to walk up from the town.  It wasn't far, something a little under half a mile, but it was up a moderately steep hill, and a bit of a challenge for a man in his mid- to late-seventies, especially after walking around the town for a few hours.  After a rest and the inevitable cup of tea and a home-made bun, he would then need to walk back through the town to the bus station on the far side, probably half as far again as the upward trek, so he needed to make sure of his timing when deciding.  In former times he would visit his younger sister, who lived nearer the town centre and just before that same slope which, in her road, was more steep further up.

Uncle Arthur - he was really my mother's uncle - never married.  He was one of a family of six children born in the village of Hinderclay between 1877 and 1891.  When I was growing up, I knew only two of them and, since they lived in the same place and were known as 'uncle Arthur' and 'auntie Annie', it was some time before I discovered that they were, in fact, brother and sister.  I then realised that my grandmother (known as 'nanna') was in fact their sister who, while she was alive had been in the habit of receiving Arthur's Friday visits.

The eldest of the family, William, proved to be the 'black sheep' and was ostracised because he had dared to fall in love with a woman who had suffered at the hands of her first husband and had managed to divorce him.  The eldest daughter, Lizzie, born just two years later, died soon after I was born, so I never knew her.  She had been in service in London at the turn of the twentieth century, and later in Felixstowe, but by 1939, she was back home in rural Suffolk.  Arthur was next, and his younger brother Albert died in 1917 of wounds sustained in one of the preliminary actions in the Ypres area leading up to to the 'muddy and bloody' battle of Paschendaele.  My grandmother, Emma, and her younger sister Annie made up the six.

When their father died in 1922, Arthur took on the family farm; by the time my cousin and I - their only third generation - visited as children thirty-odd years later, the farm consisted of little more than an orchard and a few chickens and the house was quite dilapidated, but it had successfully provided for the ups and downs of that family for some seventy or so years.