It isn’t much more than half a century ago that I grew up in Edge, but much has changed in the interim, while much has also stayed the same.
My father had been a humble insurance clerk in Scotland but after the end of the Second World War he boldly retrained as an archivist and was appointed as Gloucestershire County Archivist in 1949, living with his wife and three small children, of which I was the youngest, in a house in the centre of Newent, the other side of Gloucester. Having no experience or talent in such a field, he nonetheless took on the project of renovating a tumbledown barn on Back Edge Lane in Edge, near Painswick.
To help you identify the house, it is the first one on the right as you come down from the main Stroud Road. It’s a long thin building, reflecting its origins as a barn, and fronts directly onto the lane. When we moved there in 1953 I was only five, so in no way privy to the actual ins and outs, but from many stories told later, it appears the whole operation was pretty catastrophic and entailed two firms of architects and three firms of builders, all either going bust or doing runners. Financially I think the whole thing was a disaster but many laughs have been gained from reflecting that the actual bill at the end of the conversion was a grand nine thousand pounds. Because they had to borrow so much and decided to move away in 1969, at a time when house prices were at record lows, they actually made no profit at all, selling the house for an identical £9,000. Now I’m sure it must be worth well over a million, but of course I am not bitter, at least not very bitter.
Moving into a rented flat in London after retirement at the age of 65 seems an extraordinary thing for my parents to have done, considering the idyllic place in which they were living, and I suspect that they had failed to pay off the mortgage and thus were forced into it. Either that or Father feared that the garden would be too much of a challenge in old age. I will never know the true reason why they left. I had a distant relationship with my father but one thing I am sure of is that he gave me the greatest gift a parent could: a fantastic place to grow up. Even now, in my mid 70s, I think daily about Edge and all the adventures we had.
One thing I remember very clearly is that my parents were always short of money, which meant that I seldom received any treats and we never went on holiday. They had no car (neither of them could drive) and we had no television, not even a black and white one. We had no washing machine and for many years not even a fridge but the kitchen was equipped with a solid fuel Aga which kept that end of the house warm and was used for all the cooking and heating of water. The house had no central heating and I genuinely had to do that thing that people often reminisce about, which was scraping the ice off the inside of the window every morning in the winter. Thick blankets and hot water bottles were very much needed. In the main sitting room downstairs there was an open fire which was fuelled by coal and logs. A large coal bunker was next to the kitchen where coal was delivered in sacks and poured through a chute.
I am afraid that Keeping Up With The Joneses was very much part of my parents’ motivation in those days, although there were several very wealthy neighbours with whom they could never have kept up! I’m assuming that my father’s salary must have been okay but my mother never worked, although we had both a cleaner and a gardener, which seems extraordinary now. On top of that they somehow managed to send me to a private school, which they achieved by denying themselves almost everything in the mistaken belief that this would give me an enhanced education. In fact the school was terrible and left me scarred for life but we won’t go into that here.
My father christened the house The Gate House because, guess what, it had a gate, a large five-barred style farm wooden gate at the side of the house. There was no garage but next to the gate was a pile of sand left over from the building works. As I was still extremely young when we moved to The Gate House, I used this sand pit for making roads to drive my Dinky cars along. The bottom part of the garden was fairly wild and useful for a young boy to play fantasy jungle games.
My father was never much of a gardener but he did show willing, despite leaving the heavy digging mainly to the gardener Mr Jackson, who visited once a week. He was a rotten-toothed Mr McGregor style gardener but quite affable towards me. Things I remember from the garden include two separate tree houses, one in an apple tree and one, bizarrely, in a hedge separating us from the next door garden, which belonged to a family called, guess what, Jones. My father planted a fig tree which took years to start bearing fruit but when it did they were quite delicious. The tree is actually still there, as I noted on my recent visit.
The centrepiece of the garden was an enormous greenhouse. It was quite old so I don’t think Father had it built. I think it was left over from the garden of the next door house when they sold off some of their land for Father’s building project. My mother planted large numbers of tomato plants in the greenhouse each year and they flourished very successfully, largely because I was given the task of watering them every day. Mother meanwhile sat in her own little end portion of the greenhouse which she had repurposed as a sitting room. There she would read her books and do her knitting for hours on end. I absolutely loved that garden, which had numerous parts that were highly suitable for screaming round on my bicycle. Almost daily I would skid on some gravel, fall off and graze my knee, just like little boys ought to.
Our cleaner was called Mrs Berry, an extremely kind lady who lived in a quiet, modern house immediately next to the Rectory on the main road. She shared it with her husband Ben, who was the local builder. Ben was quite a character, whose doubtful building skills were legendary. Allegedly he once built a house and when the day came to hand it over to the new owner, they realised they didn’t have a staircase. Ben had been going up and down every day on the ladder and got so used to it that he forgot to replace it with an actual staircase. Mr and Mrs Berry were a childless couple and seemed to really welcome me visiting them on an almost daily basis for tea. There was a hole in the hedge allowing me to enter the bottom of their garden. Mrs Berry liked to tell me her troubles and was unwittingly instrumental in getting me involved in music because her nephew, who visited quite often from the Midlands, was a massive fan of Buddy Holly and introduced me to his music. Ben Berry had a nervous habit of saying “Agreed, agreed” whenever anything was being discussed so “Agreed, agreed” became one of our stock family phrases in conversation. Mrs Berry would hold séances on a weekly basis, to which she invited me Roger and Rob and I have to tell you that the way the wine glass scooted around the table was spooky and highly impressive. I decided not to pursue any interest in the occult.
One mod con that we actually had was a telephone. The number was Painswick 2188 and it was a party line which we shared with next door. Up by the bus shelter at the top of the lane was a red phone box which entailed a complicated sequence of pressing Button A or B but a friend told me of a good trick whereby you could tap out the numbers on the receiver cradle and thus be able to make a call for free. I have managed to live a remarkably uncriminal life and this is one of the few things that I’ve ever done that I probably legally speaking shouldn’t have.
As there was no parental transport, buses were an important part of life. The main road through the village was on the route of the 56 bus from Gloucester to Nailsworth via Stroud. These were green livery double-decker Bristol buses and frequently their radiators would boil over half way up Horsepools Hill, leading to the driver having to climb out and top up with the aid of a watering can. On rare occasions the bus would break down completely and we would have to complete the journey on foot. Going in the Gloucester direction, my pals and I learned how to ride bikes in the bus slipstream, which dragged you along without you having to make much effort by pedalling. Looking back, of course, this was fantastically dangerous and if the bus had suddenly braked we would have undoubtedly been killed, but of course we didn’t think about that at the time.
My two friends in the village were Roger and Robert, both of whom lived in much smarter houses than me but we had endless fun, mainly based around our love of bicycles and the fact that there was virtually no traffic and we could screech around the lanes at great speed with little danger of encountering anybody coming in the opposite direction. We used to do time trials starting from our house and going down Back Edge Lane to the intersection where it joins Edge Lane and then, with great difficulty, up the steep hill, past the two village greens, on to the main road and back down to our house.
On that route lay the houses of some of the “Joneses” that my parents were desperate to keep up with, some of the first wealthy people buying into the Cotswold countryside, which is now commonplace. On Edge Lane was the large mansion owned by Bernard Ashwell, who was the Gloucester Cathedral architect and drove a Bentley. He and his wife were friends of my parents and we would sometimes be invited there for sherry parties and the like. Bernard could be very bad-tempered but had a spectacularly huge and complicated model train set up in his attic, with which he would allow me to play.
His son Michael was also instrumental in getting me involved in music because he owned a record store in Stroud called the Stroud Music Centre, where I could go and listen to music in the booths for hours. Michael became a big cheese in the music industry but shocked the locals by being openly gay. He ended up being shot by his lover in London before he even reached the age of 50, which was of course seen as a scandal. Another rich family was the Hopcrafts, who owned a gorgeous house in the centre of the village on Edge Lane, where they would hold garden parties in their steeply lawned grounds. On what I called the little village green further up that road lived Reggie Cox and his wife Winnie, who were old-school proper villagers. Reggie was the most extraordinarily successful grower of soft fruit and had so much of it that he was perfectly happy to let me and my friends go into his garden daily and help ourselves to as many raspberries, strawberries and gooseberries as we could possibly consume.
Bernard Ashwell gave me my first ever part-time job as a teenager, working in the Stroud branch of his architecture firm. It was an unpleasant job, mainly involving using chemicals to make copies of plans and I got severely bullied by some of the other staff for my incompetence. A better job altogether was helping out with the delivery of post and newspapers twice a year, once at Christmas and once when the post lady Mrs Chiffney went on holiday in the summer. She would trot around the village at quite a pace with a leather bag slung around her shoulder, one compartment full of post and the other with newspapers. It was a frustrating job for me in some ways because you would have to walk long distances to remote farms in places like Harescombe, even though you were certain that the single letter you were carrying was of no importance and it was severely tempting just to chuck some of the post in the hedge. Of course I never did that.
One thing that might surprise current inhabitants was that Edge had a little shop. It was actually the Post Office and was situated at the bottom of the main village green, effectively a room in somebody’s house. It didn’t sell much but the things it did sell were of great interest to us teenagers, coming in the form of incredibly unhealthy items like gobstoppers, aniseed balls, Flying Saucers, Sherbet Dips, Refreshers and Fruit Salads. Oh my goodness they were fantastic, but of course contributed to my lifelong subsequent tooth problems.
Apart from the coal and the logs, there were certain other things that got delivered to the village regularly. Strange and Co, the grocer in Stroud, would deliver our groceries weekly and there was also a bread van and, much loved by us youngsters, a Corona van that delivered fizzy pop every two weeks. Of course there was a milk float as well and one day our Siamese cat Lucifer climbed aboard and was transported to Painswick, where the milk came from, before being delivered back to our house the following morning.
At the very bottom of the green was the Institute, as we called it, which was a fairly nondescript Village Hall. It played host mainly to the Women’s Institute, of which my mother was a prominent member. They did all the things you’d expect a WI to do, such as baking cakes, making jam and having guest speakers talking about needlework and such.
On Thursdays there was the village Youth Club, which Roger and Robert and I would attend because there was the facility to play table tennis. We were viewed, with some justification I guess, as the posh boys and the village lads would look threateningly at us, especially if we spoke to any of the local teenage girls. I was never much good at table tennis but one year I was taken along as a reserve to a game against Paganhill Youth Club because someone had dropped out. To my great pleasure, I was photographed as part of the team and featured in the Stroud News and Journal, even though I actually didn’t play a single game because I wasn’t required to. One time a dispute over something or other at the youth club escalated badly, as a local yob called Eric Wright decided to challenge me to a fight. He turned up at the Gate House with a friend and dared me to emerge on to the road to be punched. Naturally I stayed firmly behind the gate until they got bored and went away.
A more justified feature in the local paper came when they reported on what they called a “rival publication”, which was the newspaper that I created for the village, the Edge Gazette. It was handwritten and distributed round all the houses for a penny a read. I suppose, looking back on it, it was an unwittingly good ecological approach because it was effectively recycling. The money raised went to help restore the church roof and I still have copies of this remarkable publication in a drawer at home.
I suppose the vibe of the village back then was not a million miles away from that of Cider With Rosie. The village setting in the Cotswolds was remarkably similar and Edge was not unlike Slad, where the classic book is set. When we arrived there were no housing developments in the village and all around was farmland and abandoned wool mills which made thrilling places for young lads like us to explore.
The first thing that happened in the way of development was that the field opposite our house, which up until then had contained sheep, was bought and turned into a small estate with three bungalows. In one of them lived my aforementioned friend Robert. His family had moved down from the Midlands. Directly opposite us was a family called the Prettys who had a daughter called Susan who lived up to her surname. The final bungalow was occupied by a middle-aged couple, of whom the male partner was a very quiet, respectable gentleman who travelled daily, very well-dressed, into Gloucester for obviously some responsible job. Imagine our shock when one day the Gloucester Citizen had him as the main news story because he had attacked and knocked unconscious some innocent bystander in the bus station. From then on we knew him as “Basher” and I gave his house a wide berth.
Shortly after that, the large derelict army camp stretched along the main road was sold for redevelopment too. They built that strange long low dry stone wall with a concrete top that still exists today, although parts of it have crumbled slightly. It was fun and easy to run along it and we would occasionally even try and conquer it on a bike, which mainly led to falling off into nettle beds. Among the smart houses built on what we always called just “the camp” was one belonging to the Moreland family, who had two delightful daughters called Sally and Susan, whom we tried to inveigle into our gang but they didn’t show much interest, although Roger ended up going out with Sally for a couple of years.
Similarly, I had a village romance. Down at the bottom of the valley, just before the steep bit running down to the stream, were two bungalows, one of which went by the twee name The Dellkin. It’s now called something else, thankfully. Here lived Rosamund Havard, a beautiful sixties chick in the style of Marianne Faithfull, whom I admired from afar at the bus stop for many years. She would be on the other side of the road heading for Stroud, where she went to school. Eventually I plucked up courage to ask her out and we ended up in a relationship that lasted for over five years.
Some of the characters I remember from Edge included a very old lady called Mrs Kolisko, who lived in a red brick house almost opposite us, which has now been developed into a futuristic, very swish-looking building. Up on the main road adjacent to the church lived another lady whose name escapes me but who sadly was in the early stages of dementia, which we didn’t recognize and just thought she was mad. She used to complain about people who lived behind the walls of her house and were arguing in the night. This was suitably scary so we didn’t visit that often.
The Reverend Dicky Bird was the vicar and although my mother wasn’t religious, she did think it was the correct thing to do to attend services once a week. After I was confirmed there was a brief period when I would accompany her and take communion from Dicky Bird. I must say the wine was quite likely responsible for my lifelong interest in alcohol. Dicky would intone the words of the Communion process in a very strange accent which I can’t communicate in print very well: “Dew thissss, in remembraaaaance orf meeee”.
In a shed attached to the Rectory, old newspapers were collected to be recycled in aid of the church roof restoration fund. Some villager had a penchant for girly mags with names like Parade and Revue, so I would particularly enjoy delivering our newspapers up there and spending a few extra minutes thumbing through the mags.
Roger’s father was a property developer and stood out in Edge because he owned an Aston Martin in which he would zoom around noisily, occasionally giving us a lift if we missed the bus. Susan Boyle was a local lady who lived alone and had a whiff of scandal about her that I can’t remember the details of. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the hill on the other side of the main road. Here also was a fantastic steep hill which we could use for rather dangerous and thrilling sledging. During one big freeze, snow drifts were several feet deep and indeed on our lane the snow reached the tops of the hedges and we couldn’t even open the front door to get out of the house. We enjoyed a few blissful days off school as no public transport could get up the hill.
Further up the road towards Haresfield Beacon was what we called The Common, the National Trust protected area which featured a disused quarry, another good area for adventures. In 1963 my parents led a campaign to try and prevent it being reopened, which would have desecrated the countryside. My father was on battle stations against the local Lord Of The Manor, a toff called Jonathan Blow, who my father disliked intensely. For a series of weekends groups of villagers, including me, staged protests waving banners saying “Hands Off Rudge Common”. It was one of the many contradictions in my father’s character that, despite him being intensely conservative, he could throw himself behind causes and get things done, especially in the field of conservation. Not only did we defeat the Rudge Common vandals but Father famously almost single-handedly rescued the Dutch Water Gardens in Westbury on Severn.
For us teenagers, the Common had a couple of other useful purposes (as well as for courting, of course). We found a stash of car tyres that had been dumped there in the bushes and discovered that, if we set them off rolling down the hill, they would gather their own momentum and roll all the way down to the main road at the bottom, and indeed across it. Once again, this was an extraordinarily stupid and dangerous thing to do, as if any cars were coming we could have caused a serious accident. Luckily, as I said before, there was very little traffic. Just on the edge of the village at the bottom of that very same hill was Edge’s only pub, which was called the Halfway House. When we were still well under 18, we would nonetheless get sold cider as an off-sale through a little hatch off the public bar. We would then go up to the Common, drink a few flagons of this highly potent beverage and then roly-poly down the hill in a competition to who could roll to the bottom fastest. The resulting dizziness was a combo of the roly-poly and the alcohol and invariably resulted in lengthy puking sessions in the bathroom on returning home.
Edge is an unusual name for a village, and has no connection with Wotton-under-Edge, which is miles away. Father was a stickler for correctness and insisted that the village should be called The Edge, because it was the edge of the Cotswold escarpment. All map references and signposts said Edge but he was insistent, and knowing his depth of historical knowledge, probably was justified.
Thank you for the indulgence. Whenever I return to Edge, I reflect that, while physically surprisingly little has changed, our lifestyles most certainly have.
