SEWELL & BRERETON have received instructions from Mrs. T. Wyndham Cremer to Sell by Auction at the Royal Hotel, Norwich on Saturday July 8, 1905 At 3.30 in the Afternoon precisely, all that very desirable

FREEHOLD PROPERTY

Madge Ward was born in Upton in 1920. She lived in a cottage next to the mill until she was about 14 with her two older brothers, Herbert and Maurice. Her father ran and maintained Oby drainage pump and managed the marshes that surrounded it, only really accessible by river.

The first of the many memories Madge told me was about her current 'plant pot' formerly used at the mill to filter dyke water, to provide drinking water.

'Surrounded by marshes with no roads, if you dug down you'd get water, so you couldn't have a well; it was our only means of fresh water.

Made in London, the pot used to have charcoal and a sponge in it to clean the water for our drinking water. The water came straight from the dyke. The sponge needed to be cleaned, as the water used to just drip through. It was our drinking water! The dyke water was clear and you could see the bottom of the dyke in those days. You could see all the fish, all the spiders and pike swimming, things have changed so much!

Originally there was a lid on the pot and it stood on a stool. My Mother remarried and everything was sold at auction but luckily my husband bought it amongst other a lot of other things. In those days everything was put outside for auctions and unfortunately the lid got broken in the move.'

'My father Harry Davey and my grandfather before him, ran the mill and was probably born at the mill, I'm not sure. My Mother, Violet was brought up as a farmer's daughter on Church farm at Stockton near Beccles. She didn't want to go down the mill, she promised her mother she would only live at the mill for 2 years and then they would move but that became 45 years!

She used to row a rowing boat that my father had built up the river from Oby mill, up Upton dyke, with a bike on the back and bike to Norwich get her groceries, bike home again, put the bike on the back and row home. She was a tiny lady not as big as me and she lived to be 93! So hard work will never kill you . it's worry! She was a tough lady, my mother, making butter, keeping ducks, all sorts of things. We had chickens and turkeys at one time; father had cows and we had calves, kept mostly for food but if there were extra eggs we'd take them to the village to be sold and butter. A shop in Acle Street used to buy the butter from Mother. We used to have a dairy and I used to take over the churning of the butter whilst mother got the tea on when I came home from school - Oh that used to make my arms ache!

There was a big shed outside that was a carpenters and blacksmiths workshop. My father and his brother Alfred were trained at Erpingham to be a carpenter and a wheelwright so they both had a trade behind them besides running the mill. They were the first in Upton to have bikes and they'd bike to Erpingham on Monday morning and come back on Friday. My father's brother became the builder; he made all the coffins. He built up Upton church tower. It was a ruin, ruined for hundreds of years Money was raised in the village and they built the church tower up as it is now.

My grandfather was very thrifty, he owned a lot of houses in Upton, a row of thatched cottages and he built a bungalow on the end for him and my grandmother to live in when they retired. A relation of mine, a young lad has just moved in the bungalow so that's still in the family but the thatched cottages were pulled down, as they were condemned.

I was born in Upton because the doctor, Dr Mckelvie from Blofield was frightened of water and he wouldn't go across to the mill for my mother to have me. She had to come up to a cousin in the village, for me to be born. My two brothers were born at Oby mill. An old man came across from Acle backs. He used to come across the marshes in a horse and fly or one of those lovely cart things to my mother when she had my brothers.

I went to school at Upton. It took ¾ hour to walk there in all weathers. When the wind was easterly, the river was rough we used to walk near the dykes because it was sheltered, it used to be bitter coming across those marshes. The marshes would flood in those days and the geese would come in and you'd hear them in the mist.

A typical day, when I was a child would start with mother or father getting up first and light the fires. We had to cook with a cooking range in the kitchen, and a wall oven. Father would go out and milk the cows. Mother would get us ready for school. We'd put across the river by boat then walk to school, come back again teatime. And then we would chop sticks, get bits and pieces in, feed the chickens; we always had something to do. You played but your play was work. We had a copper house outside where mother did the washing, she had to light the fire. It was hard work for the five of us.

We were in and out of the mill all the while. I can hear in my ear now, the sound of that mill working!

When the sails were going round, we'd catch hold of the bottom of the sails, dropping off the other side, then running round the mill and having another ride, until my eldest brother got too brave and got hit on the head with a sail. Maurice and I put him on the bench in the engine house. We daren't go and tell mother till she came up and found us!

When I was about 10, my brother and I were sitting on the mill hill, watching the boats go by. The mill was working, the sails were turning and a vane came out of the sail and landed about 2ft away from where we were sitting. The vanes were metal and quite big and the speed it was going - it was frightening and potentially very dangerous, we were very lucky it was not worse.

It was a hard life, bringing children up, ever so hard but we were self-sufficient. We had flour, 10st at a time, chicken food; everything by big sacks came by wherry - and coal because the mill was a steam engine in those days. There was a quay heading but the wherries couldn't get very close and used a ladder or steps to take the things across, because the side of river was shallow and if they came very close the wherries would get stuck on the mud.

Everything was brought in either, by wherry, or by my mother or father rowing a boat. We used to leave a lot of things at the staithe house, we knew the people there very well. People would drop things off there for us, we would collect them and put them in the boat and row it home. We never had an engine of any sort.

I used to fish with a bent pin on the end of a piece of string to try to be like my brothers who had proper fishing rods. I never caught anything!

Father used to set the eel traps so we used to have big eels occasionally that mother used to skin and lay in salty water for a long while to take away the 'dykey' taste and cook them and we used to eat them. They were lovely if they were well cooked soaked but we never used to eat any of the fresh water fish.

We had a marsh and a hay field so we always had a horse and cart come from the farm and cut the hay and stack it up ready for the winter. We also had rabbits to eat. We used to keep apples up on the first floor of the mill; we had apple trees in the garden and had all vegetables we needed.

When I was 10, I had a mastoid. I had terrible earache. Mother rowed me to Acle Bridge and went on the bus to Blofield and saw Dr Mckelvie. He said I was seriously ill and I'd got to go straight to hospital. Dr Mckelvie gave mother the money to pay for the bus fare and I went into hospital and I had an operation that afternoon otherwise I'd have died. I was put in the children's block and was in there for three weeks, no children were allowed to see their parents. My cousin Julia waved through the top of the door - she wasn't supposed to.

My cousin and I had our tonsils out in Upton in my cousin Julia's front bedroom. My cousin Julia and my mother scrubbed the boards that my uncle had for laying forth the people who died. It was placed in front of the window and covered with a sheet. Two doctors and a nurse took the tonsils out. We had chloroform. I remember sitting up in bed and having this calves foot jelly to soothe the throat. Oh I did hate it!

My brothers used to do a lot of sailing. They used to make boats in the workshop, and go sailing in the dingy they'd made themselves. They used to do Meccano and fretwork and make things. They used to walk on stilts. I always remember Father made some for me. I wanted to be just like them.

One of my brothers can just remember my father putting a flag on the middle sail when the First World War was over.

The vicar used to come and see us once a year he used to bring a lovely calendar. The nearest church was at Thurne. My parents used to sing and they belonged to the Upton choral society. They were educated people

I was happy there, I didn't know any different, my brothers, Herbert and Maurice were nine and six years older than me, Herbert was the eldest. They were protective over me. When they left school at 14-15 they were apprenticed to Woods boat builders at Potter Heigham. They would bike backwards and forwards to Potter Heigham every day.

On our mill hill we had a water gauge and that used to have something to do with the Ports and Haven people in Yarmouth. Father had to put a graph sheet around its' cylinder and there'd be a little needle with special ink in and as the tides went up and down that would mark a graph. He would set it up and it would run for a month, I think, so they could tell how the tides went in the River Bure at the Mill. There was a fair bit of tidal movement and it could be rough, very rough in bad weather - big billows. Father would put us across the river rather than row. Of course it used to get frozen over in those days. Father would break a wide piece across the river to get the boat across, every morning he'd go out and every night before we went to bed, when it was freezing, breaking it up and putting the ice on the river so we had a way of getting a boat backwards and forwards to get to Upton.

The mill dyke had big planks of wood across, and then he'd take two of these planks up and there was a big iron door where he could shut the salt water off from going into the mill dyke and onto the marshes. He used to stand on there and push it open with his legs. Then when the salt water went down again and it was fresh water, he would open it up again and fresh water would go on the banks again. It didn't happen often. It came in more when it the new Acle Bridge was built. The first bridge, when I was a child, had three arches the new one, which was one big arch, somehow it released more of the salt water, so it would reach us. We'd always know because the fish would die and lay on the side of the river, they were fresh water fish there and they couldn't tolerate the salt.

Father used to manage the marsh, the dykes and the drains. He use to hire men to do what they called bottifing, it took the whole lot of reeds out of the base of the dykes till they were clear again. He used to look after, count the cattle and feed them on the neighbouring marshes.

He also used to do things in the workshop, he used to make wheels, wagon wheels, he was a wheelwright and Uncle Alfred would come down put all the shavings around the wheel and set fire to it, that'd lock the metal around the wheels. He was a man of many trades he used to do bit of thatching, even sheds were thatched, he'd cut the reeds from around the dykes where ever there was a lot of reeds because you could in those days.

Father used to catch moles. He'd set traps in the runs to catch the moles. He'd take them home, skin them and pin them out on a board to dry. When he got an accumulation of moleskins, they would be sent to a place in Wisbech and sold. The money he got from selling them bought his Sunday suit. We also had a little dog that'd catch moles. She would pin them. If it was a surface run, she watch them working and then take them and kill them.

My father used to paint the sails, scale up the mill and paint them himself but the millwrights used to come out from Ludham.

The mill would make a clanking noise when it was working. If the wind got up too strong while father was out working, he'd have to rush back to open the vanes up if the mill was working to stop it blowing over. It was a constant worry, that and the steam engine that was used to pump the water up. He'd be up all night stoking it up. I can picture now his lamp light going up the path to the mill to the engine house to see that it was alright because they were a bit dicey, these steam engines. Then they decided to have diesel engine. He went to Peterborough with Mr Wiseman. It was a long way to go and they bought a new engine, which ran for a number years. Years later Maurice and I went to Fleggburgh Bygones Village and there was the same diesel engine all done up and working.

The mill was then powered by diesel and eventually electricity but there wasn't much to do then. My father left just before the war. I was 14 when I moved away from the mill. My father bought a house opposite the chapel and an acre of land, which he gave £100 for. I was thrilled to bits, when I got my bike out of the gate and I could ride it straight away it was marvellous, after having to put it on the boat and row it up the river!'

Taken from a conversation between Anne Grand and Madge Ward on 1st February 2008.

Anne Grand

Copyright © Jonathan Neville 2006