Village Games

BY DAVID WYNNE

Baston in 1940 with the Black Horse public house dominating the street scene.

I was evacuated to Baston in the autumn of 1940 at the age of six and soon settled down to the relaxed, friendly way of life in this village, four miles south of Bourne. All the other children accepted me from the start and I soon felt very much at home. We youngsters enjoyed a carefree existence in those days, with few restrictions on movement or territory and very little pressure at school. The main street was a safe place to play, as there were few vehicles. 

Our lives were largely unaffected by the momentous happenings in Europe at that time. We did not share the adults' fear of the consequences of war. It did not occur to us that we might lose and the inconvenience of rationing barely touched us. As we grew older and began to take an interest in these events, the fortunes of war had begun to swing in favour of the Allies. If anything, the situation gave our lives an added piquancy. 

The evening skies were full of Halifax and Lancaster bombers heading for Germany from bases in Lincolnshire and we heard the throb of their engines as they returned in the early hours of the morning. We all wanted to be Spitfire pilots and news of Allied victories was played out in our war games in the playing fields of Baston. In the meantime, life went on undisturbed. School finished at four o'clock in the afternoon, the time when most farm workers also came home for their evening meal. Double British summer time had been imposed, two hours more daylight instead of the extra one that we know today, and so in the long summer evenings the men went back to work but the younger children were free to play in the street, in each other's yards or in the fields. 

A dyke ran parallel to the village street, separating Baston village from the hamlet of Thetford. The village boys spent many hours during the summer months along this dyke and the adjacent fields, climbing trees, birds nesting, making dens and playing games of hide and seek, Cowboys and Indians and of course, those ubiquitous war games. Kite flying with home made contraptions was also popular but usually not very successful. Our bows and arrows were made from willow or hazel saplings. Some of the games or pastimes were cruel and would be classed as environmentally unsound today. Catching birds under a riddle was popular and some boys took a sadistic delight in blowing up frogs with a straw, a practice I found repugnant and did my best to stop. 

Boys were also great collectors of birds' eggs. We would prick a hole in each end of the egg and blow out the yolk and the white, leaving the shell intact. Competition to get the largest collection was intense. The tragedy is, of course, that many of the eggs we collected then were from birds that are now very rare, such as the skylark, the plover, the yellowhammer, the barn owl, the bullfinch, the goldfinch and the mistle thrush. 

When a consignment of oranges arrived at the village shop, a very rare occurrence, there was great excitement. It was not merely the fruit that was so highly valued. The boys were more interested in the wooden crates in which it was packed. Using old pram wheels and the wood from the boxes, we made trucks which were big enough to sit in and when pushed acted as a primitive form of go kart while the boxes were also utilised for the construction of rabbit hutches. 

We also spent hours playing in the many farm buildings in the village, climbing in the rafters and on the bales of straw and sacks of sugar beet pulp. Street games largely followed crazes that were with us only for a short time, each new one replacing all other activities. There were crazes for whips and tops, marbles and bowling hoops whilst others followed the seasons, such as conkers. Some activities, such as skipping and hopscotch, were decidedly for girls only but in most street games, both sexes mixed freely together. 

Hot days in the summer were particularly enjoyable. We would lie for hours in the long grass listening to the drone of piston-engined aircraft whilst searching desultorily for four-leafed clovers or making daisy chains. Meadows in those days were full of flowers such as buttercups, vetch and cowslips and the dykes were a mass of kingcups, flags and yellow water lilies while the verges along the fen road turned white when the cow parsley, or kek as we called it, burst into flower. 

Swimming was an important activity too during the summer months but this entailed a two-mile walk to the River Glen and so we usually took our lunch and stayed on the riverbank for the day. Sometimes, we would go down Park Lane and swim at Thetford, other times at Kate's Bridge, but the most popular spot was Fletland Mill. The owner was Mr. Carr, a very pleasant and generous man who allowed us to swim there and although the mill was no longer used for grinding corn, the mill race was still operating and we used to dive off the concrete edge into the fast flowing water where it entered the mill pool. We were not strong swimmers and it took us a long time to pluck up enough courage to swim right across but the water was always cold and we seemed to spend most of our time shivering on the bank wrapped in our small towels. 

We also tried our hands at fishing along the River Glen at Kate's Bridge or at Thetford. Our attempts were not very successful, mainly because we did not have any tackle. We made fishing rods from bean sticks and although we had one or two fish hooks, many of us had to make do with bent pins. I do not recall any adult fishing in Baston and so no one had any real idea of how to fish and we basically just dangled worms in the water but rarely caught anything. As someone said, we were good at drowning worms. 

We were really little savages but at least we had the freedom to be children and allowed to mature in nature's good time. This was my childhood, a part of growing up, and I enjoyed every minute of it. 

Adapted from his book A Baston Childhood - An Evacuee's Story, published 2000, by David Wynne who also supplied the photograph. 

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