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OVER THE STILES AND ACROSS THE FIELDS. It was a long time ago, May 22 1979, when I visited a wonderful old lady, Mrs Letchworth, who was living in her late Victorian home at the upper end of Conisboro’ Avenue. She had just celebrated her hundredth birthday when I called to see her. For some two hours we carried on a most lively and interesting conversation. In spite of increasing blindness and deafness and being unable to walk further than her beloved garden she was in touch with all the latest news and her memory was as clear as that of a much younger person. She had even been to vote a few weeks earlier.Mrs Letchworth had come to Caversham when she was 8 or 9. Her father, Mr Ward, had a photographer`s business in Croydon and moved to the Reading area where he bought three acres of land in Caversham, some at the corner of Richmond Road and Conisboro’ Avenue diagonally opposite the Recreation Ground in Albert Road. Here he built two houses in concrete blocks, a recent new idea in building construction. One was The Firs, the Ward’s home. On the same side but further down towards Kidmore Road he built the other; this has recently been enlarged. Opposite The Firs was a Victorian red brick cottage (now added to) which had been built a few years earlier. A Mr Woodley lived there and kept bees. ALL CHANGE As I talked to Mrs Letchworth I learnt much about this part of Caversham as it was in those days. Close to The Firs was a stile. Having climbed over it you walked across rough meadow land, now the Recreation Ground, to a second stile near the would be site of St Andrew`s Church, for in those days it was non-existent, as were also the local roads — they were just tracks. Men from Caversham and Reading used to come to these fields with little male songbirds in cages to trap the poor little females who were attracted to the little male singers. I learnt of the little piles of flints heaped beside the then unmetalled Woodcote Rd, waiting to be broken up by the road- menders for this important way to Caversham, the bridge and Reading. As they smashed the stones with their hammers some must have damaged themselves and I have been told that some were given thin tortoiseshell eye shields to protect them. Life was certainly dangerous at times for manual workers. As a little girl Mrs Letchworth remembers seeing a labourer walking off to the Royal Berkshire Hospital with his finger cut off. Every day, as a little girl, Mrs Letchworth had to go to Toots farm dairy to get the milk. The Victorian farm house can still be found in Darell Road and is on the site of a much earlier building. To get there meant climbing over the two stiles and crossing the meadows to the farm dairy. Then back again with the milk for breakfast before retracing the journey all the way to school in Caversham. Later a little wooden dairy started up near her home which made life much easier for the little girl. VIOLETS AND "BUTCHER-BIRDS" This young Victorian lass adored the countryside and, as a keen walker, she amassed a great knowledge of plants and creatures. This love of the natural world never left her and whilst with her she told me of the toad which lived under the shed in her present garden. I was told there used to be several ponds in the area and, at a certain time of year, thousands of frogs would appear. Now all these ponds have vanished but many houses have ornamental pools and there are still some frogs around and newts too. I heard about the red-backed shrike, or butcher bird, she had watched in Talbot’s gravel pits where you now find Carlton Road and Silverthorne Drive area. Here she saw him fill his larder” on the thorn bushes. She remembered, too, the sweet scented white violets which grew at the top of the great white chalk cliffs of the vast pit at the foot of St Peter’s Hill. Sadly the flowers are gone and there are houses there instead. At the end of the eighteen hundreds came the winter of the great freeze. That year everyone skated to and fro across the Thames. She joined in, too, and her first pair of skates cost nine pence. If you could not own skates you held the back of an old chair and pushed it along in front of you. That was better than nothing and worked quite well. We got on to horses and horse trains and I was told that more than once my old friend had seen a horse lying dead or collapsed in the shafts of a cart, a sad sight indeed. To get horses to pull heavy loads up St Peter’s Hill drivers used to light a sheet of newspaper under the horses and when it flared up and singed them they leapt forward with their load —a cruel practice indeed. The afternoon passed quickly with so much to talk about, so I had to leave the Victorian house in Conisboro’ Avenue, again built on more of those 3 acres and again made of concrete but full of character with its slate roof. It had been a most happy few hours; I wished there could have been many more. M.K. |