1985: 20th century memories of childhood and country life in Cuckfield, Burgess Hill and elsewhere in Sussex.

Tales from the Past

By Doris Avery, née Rowland, born in Cuckfield in 1905

Introduction

Born in Cuckfield in 1905, Doris Avery recorded the stories, customs and hardships of everyday life in Sussex as remembered by herself and her grandmother. Her vivid recollections offer a personal glimpse into a vanished world shaped by poverty, hard work, family pride, folk beliefs and a deep attachment to the Sussex countryside.

Editor’s note This article condenses Doris Avery’s journal while retaining her facts, family memories, beliefs and personal judgements. Spellings of a few names remain uncertain in the original manuscript.

Stories from my grandmother

My grandmother, Sara Ann, was born in about 1854 in a keeper’s cottage near the entrance to Pickwell Lane, between Ansty and Bolney. Her father was gamekeeper to a gentleman named Clark. Gran was not very talkative, but she spoke her mind without fear or favour. She worked hard and, like many poor people, went without much that we now take for granted. In different circumstances she might have been artistic. We walked for miles together in spring, picking flowers and peeping into the many birds’ nests along the lanes. It was a joy to go walking then, although she also had stern moments that made you take notice.

She told me about Victorian customs and beliefs. When a baby was born, the woman who undertook the confinement washing received a bottle of gin as well as her payment. Some believed that unless she drank it, she might have a baby herself within nine months. Two old ladies once saw my newborn daughter putting her tongue in and out and decided that, while expecting her, I must have longed for some food I had not received. The next morning they sent raw rabbit brains for the three-week-old baby. I thanked them rather than hurt their feelings; our dog, Peggy, ate them.

Babies wore tight flannel binders around their stomachs, sometimes with a penny sewn into cloth and placed over the navel to prevent a rupture. Feeding bottles had long rubber tubes reaching to the milk at the bottom. Children often suffered from thrush, and I have wondered whether those difficult-to-clean tubes harboured germs. Instead of a dummy, sugar was tied in a dampened piece of rag for a child to suck.

Childhood clothes and remedies

Boys wore much the same clothes as girls until they were about three, when they were ‘breeched’ and first given short trousers. I remember little Robert Anscombe running to meet me after school, thrilled with his first pair: ‘Look, Bobbie has got some pockets!’ Alas, Bobbie does not need pockets any more.

Fleas and other insects were easily caught. A visit to the cinema could bring fleas home, and someone sometimes walked around with a pump spraying a fine, pleasant-smelling disinfectant over the audience. Flea-ridden cinemas were known as ‘bug hutches’. When rough, sore patches appeared on our faces, Mother rubbed them with the cut side of a raw potato. She called the condition ‘scurf’; looking back, I expect it came from a poor diet.

My family disliked the wild field daisy—called the horse daisy in Sussex, and also known as the ox-eye daisy—because my five-year-old cousin Bertha Rowland died after biting the ends from its stems while gathering flowers. At the inquest, pieces were found in her stomach and teeth. This happened around 1916. She is buried at St John’s Church, Burgess Hill, near the front gates overlooking St John’s Park, but has no stone. ‘Who plucked the flower, saith the Lord; and the gardener was silent.’

Poverty pride and hard work

Society was sharply divided between the high class, the middle class and the poor. People received nothing like today’s help. One old woman living alone made ‘kettle broth’: bread cut into a basin with salt and pepper, then covered with boiling water. She said it made her a meal. It was quite pleasant, perhaps because people were hungry and the bread from the old ovens was good.

Those too old to work, and without children able to support them, could be sent to the workhouse. Husbands and wives were usually separated and given work to do. It must have been very sad. The old-age pension introduced under Lloyd George was known as the ‘Lloyd George pension’ and amounted to ten shillings a week. Sick benefit existed, but its rules were strict. A visitor could arrive unexpectedly to check that an ill person was neither working indoors nor going out at forbidden times. My grandmother once answered a visitor who claimed to smell a cooking kipper: ‘Yes—and please God I am going to eat it.’ Most people would have been afraid to answer back in case they lost their money.

When I earned about £1 a week at twenty-one, I paid insurance from it. We worked from eight in the morning until six in the evening, sometimes until eight, ironing with flat irons weighing ten or twelve pounds each.

Mother worked from eight until six and, in haymaking time, went straight from her ordinary job to a farm. She and another woman raked hay into cocks for the men to load, working until nearly dark. She did this extra labour to buy me strong boots for my long country walk to school. She made a bag to hang around my neck and put in only a little money at a time, in case I lost it, for the school boot and shoe club. Rubber boots were almost unheard of.

We were poor, but Mother and Grandmother had pride. For a time, Mother could afford only one pair of navy-blue fleecy knickers for me. She washed them at night and had them ready by morning; that one pair lasted the week. I do not remember hearing of jumble sales.

Saturday baths and Monday washing

People attended church and chapel more often, wearing different clothes on Sundays. Poorer children had their weekly bath on Saturday night in the same tin bath their mothers used for washing clothes on Monday. It stood before the kitchen fire, with everyone sitting around. One lot of water served all the children, with more added for a large family—and families were often large.

Monday was the hardest day. Cotton and linen sheets and clothes were boiled in a large copper heated by coal and wood, with soda in the water. Soap powders did not arrive until about the time I married, and many could not afford them. Clothes needed two or more rinses; blue from a lump kept in a little bag went into the final water, and starch was widely used. Dinner was usually Sunday’s leftovers fried up because mothers had too much else to do. Afterwards, the soda water cleaned floors, lavatories, drains and chamber pots.

There were no washing machines or electric irons. I still have my flat irons; each weighs ten pounds. Rain meant drying heavy, wet cotton indoors on lines above the household’s only fire. People did not own enough clothes to leave anything dirty. Some middle-class families employed a washerwoman or sent sheets and towels to a laundry, but they too lived before easy-care fabrics. I have a bonnet upstairs that takes half an hour to iron.

Our family around Ansty and Rottingdean

My grandmother had three sisters—Martha, whose name I may not spell correctly, Louise and Jane—and two brothers, George and the unmarried James. Martha first married Mr Battup and, after his death, Mr Mockford. She had a daughter, Pattie, who died in middle age. Martha was a stately figure and had a good home in Rottingdean, where she sometimes took gentlemen boarders. The poor did not take holidays. Mr Mockford was comfortably well off and owned a small fishing fleet.

Martha entered service very young and never went home again. She began as a sewing maid and later became matron of a boys’ school. She was refined and respected in Rottingdean, where she lived at 6 High Street and was buried near the church entrance. An old shepherd, Tom Bennett, lived there with two bobtailed Old English sheepdogs that slept in large beer barrels. Bob Cooper mentions Tom in one of his books, I think in Early to Rise.

Gran kept in touch with Martha but quarrelled with Jane over a ring. When Jane became very ill and asked to see her, Martha refused. I know little about Louise—nothing much to her credit. Gran once had a young man named Amos Wickens. Though fond of him, she gave him up because he was younger. Jane did not mind the difference: she married Amos and had a family. I think Gran regretted her decision. She always spoke well of him, and he was always pleased to see her.

Cuckfield tales

We all lived within the parish of Cuckfield, where our births were registered. I often heard the village discussed when Gran’s brother James came in the evening. The Sergisons were the principal Cuckfield family and lived at Cuckfield Place, a large manor house with a clock tower. James and George had been carter boys on the home farm.

They said the place was haunted. When they fetched the horses in the morning, the animals appeared ‘hag-ridden’: their coats white with dried sweat, their manes and tails knotted. They also spoke of Madam Sergison’s carriage and pair rushing past their Pickwell home. It may not sound feasible, but these were two down-to-earth people talking. Years later, my stepfather, William Henty, recognised Cuckfield Place—under another name—in a Conan Doyle book because the country-road names had not been changed. One Sergison was said to have ordered that the clock tower should never be opened; a later member of the family opened it and found bones.

Gran also described pig-killing. Families kept a pig and made large quantities of sausages, heavily seasoned with herbs and pepper and hung around the kitchen. With open grates and no refrigerators, smoke and drying must have helped preserve them. When I asked whether they became dusty, Gran replied that there had not been so much dust before motor cars.

People living near woods could ask the landowner for permission to use a pole to knock down dead branches and collect fallen timber. Bundles of twiggy wood, often hazel, were called faggots and sold by the hundred. Our first married home had a brick bread oven about six feet deep. Burning faggots heated it; a long-handled rake removed the ash before the loaves went in, followed by pies and little cakes as the oven cooled. It must have meant a great deal of dusty work.

War seen from Sussex

I was six when the Great War began. Men and boys were called up; women took over men’s work, and horses and mules went overseas. I often stayed with Great-Aunt Martha in Rottingdean. Every evening after dark, Mother took me to the sea wall to look across the Channel towards France. Many people stood there, seeing the flashes of gunfire and hearing the dull boom of explosions. It was very sad because Mother and the others stood quietly, thinking of those across the water.

In one bitterly cold winter, the 6th and 7th Company of London soldiers stayed in a large Burgess Hill house whose owners had left. Their rations were so poor that they hung their meat from street lamps and cut off a daily portion. A card beside it read: ‘Our King and Country need us—and this is how they feed us.’ They did not remain long. Mother later heard that nearly all had been killed. In peacetime, most had been office workers.

After the war, I saw unemployment and hunger. From our home in London Road, Burgess Hill, I watched men who had walked from London pass silently towards Brighton. They carried no noisy banners and did not shout; they looked exhausted and poorly clothed. God help them. After the dreadful war they had endured, they deserved better. Little happened after their march beyond a small amount of dole. There was no family allowance and home ownership was beyond them. Whatever help exists now, we expected none then and, looking back, I think we were more content. I also knew that the poor were kept down by their so-called betters and suffered great hardship.

Old food and folk cures

Gran remembered an annual ‘rat supper’ held in a barn. When I objected to eating dirty rats, she explained that these lived among stored wheat and fed upon it. People gathered and enjoyed the evening. Before condemning them, we should remember that meat was scarce, game belonged to the rich and hungry men and boys had once been transported for taking sheep or poaching birds to feed their families.

Wealthy households preserved meat in ice wells: deep holes filled with winter ice. Mother retained the expression ‘as cold as an ice well’. Mice also appeared in folk medicine. In Gosport, a man told me that swallowing a mouse was the best cure for whooping cough; I heard the same belief in Sussex. Other supposed remedies included letting a dog eat a sufferer’s vomit so it would take away the illness, or paying sixpence for a child to breathe fumes at the gasworks. People must have had great faith in that treatment, because sixpence before the war was a considerable sum.

The cat and the farmer

One of our cats was Lillian, a beautiful, glossy jet-black hunter and Mother’s favourite. One morning she reached home dragging a rat trap from a broken front leg. A retired farmer, Mr Divall, arrived to reclaim it. Gran refused: he had left it in the open, the cat would have to be destroyed, and he would not have his trap back. Mr Divall then tangled himself in his words, saying he had meant to catch the rat, not the cat. Gran remained firm. The trap hung in our shed for years.

Poor Mother travelled more than ten miles on foot and by train to Brighton to have Lillian put to sleep; there was no veterinary surgeon in Burgess Hill, and the flesh around the broken bone had begun to turn green.

The mail van and a final word

One late night, when I was ill and crying, Mother told me to be quiet because midnight was near and I would hear the mail-van horses gallop past. I cannot remember whether there were two or four. They carried mail from Brighton to London, and I understood that two men sorted the letters inside as they travelled. The horses tackled Clayton Hill, by the Jack and Jill windmills, at full gallop, then were rested and exchanged for a fresh team farther along the route—perhaps at Box Hill. Soon afterwards, the horse-drawn service gave way to motor mail vans.

These are the things I remember, written for those whose lives are very different from the days of yesteryear. I wrote the final entry at seventy-seven and a half, when my sight was failing.

A note from Doris’s son Alan Avery

Doris left Burgess Hill for Gosport, Hampshire, to join her husband, Bill Avery, who worked in Portsmouth Dockyard during the Second World War. Their two daughters went with her. She always missed her native Sussex and remained a countrywoman throughout her life. She was mother to Pearl, Hazel and Alan, and grandmother to twelve grandchildren, who brought her great joy.

Doris died aged eighty after collapsing at her Gosport home on 4 June 1988. Her final years were blighted by glaucoma, which her doctor neglected. Her formal education had ended at the village school, but she taught herself and became knowledgeable about many subjects, especially history. Her writing and remarkable memory preserve a vivid record of past lives and events.

Doris Avery Tales from the Past