Chartridge Memories

More Memories of Chartridge

by Dawn Lewcock (nee de Fraine)

The building to the left of the air-raid shelter was the barn at the end of the stables at Chartridge House (see photograph right). The garden and the yard at the top with its buildings, which my father (Thomas Leigh de Fraine) took over for his haulage business, were all part of the Chartridge Farm yard before the First World War.

My grandfather (Thomas Turner de Fraine) had a mixed farm, with some arable he kept cows and sheep and bred shire horses. He started the Bucks Game Farm sometime in the early 1900s I think and after he died in 1928 my uncle, John de Fraine carried it on until the outbreak of war when he went in the RAF. He used to ride with the Berkeley drag hunt and I once saw them following the drag scent down the side of the field opposite, along the hedge beside Buslins Lane. He kept his horse in one stable but used the barn and other stables to brood the pheasant eggs in an incubator and then rear the pheasant chicks. When I was small we used to go to see the tiny young poults before they were old enough to be taken out to live in the woods. When there were too many to rear we used to have pheasant eggs for breakfast sometimes. They were prettier and smaller than hen's eggs and we could have more than one each. Not all the chicks were kept on the farm and once the poults were old enough to fend outside most were sold to estates that did not rear their own birds. After the war my father used the barn for battery hens for a time, when they first came in.

Another memory is of seeing an old fashioned threshing machine at work in the yard outside the stables. It was a great wooden contraption with enormous belts driving the machinery, the corn sheaves were thrown in one end and the grain came out into sacks at the back, where they were tied up and lifted on to a trailer to go to the corn merchant. The noise and dust was indescribable. After the war some of the local farmers rented the land and my father had a corn drier fitted into the big shed in his yard, and dried the grain. He was fascinated by steam engines and there were usually one or two up in yard, as well as his fleet of lorries and the tractors he had in for repair. There was often a pig in a makeshift sty as well as chickens, and latterly, in the 1970s he kept a pet vixen found as an orphan cub. I vaguely remember there was one kept in a sort of den by the gate into Chartridge House garden when I was very small. They have an extremely strong smell.

In 1935 the village celebrated George V's Silver Jubilee in the field on the right at the end of Cogdells Lane beside the Reading Room and I can remember walking back clutching my mug, which I still have. From Old Sax Lane there were very few houses and we walked between high hedges. Nor were there many houses then from the end of Berkley Avenue to Old Cottage. Where the Warren is were only a pair of bungalows built for the families of the mechanics who worked with my father, the Wells and the Wrights. My sister and I used to play with the children. While on the other side of the road was the YHA Hostel. We once had to walk back from Readings, the shop at the Chesham end of the Avenue, (the one and only shop in the village), with my youngest sister in a push chair, in a thunderstorm and no where to take shelter from the driving rain. In the big snow of 1947 we had to walk down to the shop with the snow as high as the hedges, and, most unfairly, were told off for not going to school at Amersham when we went back.

From about 1943, after my parent's divorce, we three girls lived with our mother at Beeches, a bungalow just below Old Sax Lane, which had been built by my grandfather for his workers. We kept chickens and rabbits and for a time we had three bad tempered geese. My father and his second family moved back into Old Cottage after the Army left and - the necessary repairs were completed. My father died there in 1978 and it was sold. We left Beeches in 1952. It was demolished in the 1960s I believe, and there are houses on the site now. On VE Day night we had a bonfire in the field below Beeches, everyone round about came and contributed something, someone brought a wind up gramophone and we had a bit of a party, dancing on the grass. I believe there was a bigger one at the top of the village near the pubs which several of the men walked to later.

Dawn Lewcock (nee de Fraine), April 2007

Photograph courtesy of Dawn Lewcock