Daisy Rose Hunt (nee Puddephatt):
Chesham Vale in the Twenties & Thirties
I was born in 1920, in "The Vale" a very small village just outside Chesham with about 24 houses and one Public House "The Black Horse". Also in the village we had a small chapel which we would go to every Sunday afternoon. Sunday school teachers would walk from Chesham to teach us.
I had four brothers and three sisters, Mother and Father making ten of us, all living in a two up, two down cottage and all fed and clothed on one wage. We always looked neat and tidy. Sometimes an older sister would grow out of a coat, so it would be turned up for me, I was ever so pleased I liked it better than mine!
We had no electric, gas or tap water in our small cottage, Father would draw it from the well. We used about two tin bathfuls a day. We also had a very crude toilet, which the council supplied us with free disinfectant for. In the cold dark nights Father would have the task of taking the four girls up to the top of the garden to the small brick structure that housed our toilet. This brick building was about eight feet high with two bricks left out to supply fresh air, no windows! Father would carry an old empty jam jar with a candle stuck inside, a piece of string tied round the jar for a handle to light our way up the garden and we would take this in the toilet with us as there was no light inside. We didn't have a bathroom, we did have a copper boiler that boiled the white clothes, sheets etc. with a place beneath it to burn fuel. We filled the copper boiler with cold water and also used this boiler to supply us with water for our weekly bath. When the water was heated we would use a large enamel jug to scoop the water out and into a large tin bath on the floor. For light we had paraffin lamps down stairs, one in each room, to go to bed we had a candle in a "candle stick" we had to blow it out once we settled down to sleep.
Porridge was one of our favourites for breakfast especially on cold winter mornings, great with jam on. About midday to one p.m. a proper hot meal, then about four thirty to five p.m. for tea we would have paste sandwiches sometimes with banana in and also marmite and Mother's very own home baked cakes. My younger sister and myself had to keep the bedroom tidy and she would stand one side, me the other to make our bed and fold our nighties up nicely, put them under our pillow, we had to share a bedroom with two brothers, one younger, one older, but boys and men didn't do housework things in those days.
I was nine or ten years old when we first had a radio, before that we would play ludo, snakes and ladders, cards or dominoes, sometimes we would just chat very quietly of course, our house before the radio was very quiet!
My Father kept chickens. He also had an allotment at the back of our small Chapel so we were never short of vegetables, you name them he grew them, even flowers so Mother had flowers from him as well as our wild ones. In the spring time we would pick blue bells, violets, primroses, cowslips, horse daisies, periwinkles and honey suckle from the hedge rows. Mother would put them in vases on the windowsill. We also used to pick baskets of dandelion heads, because Mother made dandelion wine, just snip the heads off. We also used to go blackberry picking so Mother could make jam, pies and puddings. We used to get up at six o'clock in the morning to pick mushrooms when the fields were fresh with dew.
We played when young, hoop, top, skipping and hopscotch. Ruff and tumble football with the boys as well as cricket, although we didn't get chance to bat much, the boys saw to that!, we also played in the fields and woods climbing trees and swinging out on the boughs.
When we went out we did not have to worry about locking the door, our Co-op delivery man would just come in and leave the groceries on the table for Mother and shut the door behind him! The baker would do like wise with our bread order, crime was rare. Our milkmen would measure our milk out in Gills - 4 Gills in 1 Pint - this would be poured into our own jugs, the milk bottle was unheard of and we could only obtain milk from the milkman. He delivered the milk in a small two wheeled horse and cart which had a little step at the back for him to get to his seat to reach the horse's reins. At the back of the cart were two very large milk churns. The only milk we could buy from a shop was condensed in a tin and was very sweet.
Another delivery we had was coal for our only method of heating, it would be used for cooking and in the fire grates. We would make our toast by putting the bread on the end of a fork and hold it up in front of the grate bars to brown it. In the summer Walls ice cream was sold to us by a man on a three wheeled bike which had a large square box on wheels containing the ice cream, Mother would take a basin out and have four penny worth for herself and Father while we children would have cornets which cost two pence each (old pence). This was quite a lot of money!
We knew all the delivery persons by name, we lived in a very friendly environment.
Daisy Rose Hunt (nee Puddephatt)
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