I lost my parents in the first war before I was two years old. My aunt took me in and I always called her mother. She’d got three daughters and she said that one more wouldn’t make much difference. She lost her husband around the same time. I was lucky; there was plenty of food and drink. There were cows, horses, pigs, chickens, geese, turkeys, you name it, we’d got it.

When I first went to her it was at Lower Penn, right down the bottom end as far as you can go, at the bottom by the church. There wasn’t a school at Lower Penn and so I went to "Wynn School" at Springhill. It was like a church school. I didn’t go there very long from Lower Penn because we soon moved to Penn Common. After we had moved I still had to go all over the common on my way to school. I never used to think anything of it; I used to skip along, singing on my way. I knew the common inside out; I saw a lot of changes. There were very few trees on the common when I was there. It was mainly gorse, grass and sedge.

Penn Common

It was very isolated. There was a cottage right past, which belonged to the Ferguson family. It was one of the old gatekeeper’s houses for the Wodehouse, I think. Then ours was on its own. There were woods there by Chamberlains Lane and one of the cottages by the old brewery had a brook going straight through the back yard and you had to go over it every time you went to the back door.