The Story Of Newton Longville (17 June 1978)

I have just spent an enjoyable evening reading “Upon This Clay,” the book about Newton Longville written by the late Mrs. Catherine Skinner, of Yew Tree Farm, and published just recently.  I have a kind of personal interest in the book.  Mrs. Skinner wrote a weekly column about women’s topics in general for the former North Bucks Times (The Gazette’s companion paper) during a short period when there was no suitable staff woman to write one. The normal village news was always written by Mrs D Crawley, for both papers.

One of my regular jobs was to “sub” that column, whether it was written “by Cathy” or by anyone else.  Sometimes I even wrote it myself, masquerading under a feminine pseudonym, but I was always glad when the actual Miss or Mrs returned, for a handbag didn’t suit me very well, even in imagination.

Memories of those days came back on reading Cathy’s posthumous work.  The same mannerisms and the same enthusiasms are all here.  But here also is a talent which I did not know or had forgotten she possessed, namely, some excellent line-drawing, with which the text is liberally illustrated.  Especially interesting are drawings made in the 1920’s and 30’s of old Newton buildings, many of which no longer exist.

Personally, I find that line drawings of such subjects, when at all competently executed, bring out main features much more clearly than photography.

One example.  It is generally accepted that the oldest or most primitive form of timber-frame building is by cruck construction.  In this, twin curved timbers rise from a foundation and meet more or less at the top to form a gable and support the roof.  Very few of these are now left throughout the country.  Yet Cathy has three drawings of Newton cottages, all of which clearly have this feature.

One is described as being at Little Barrel Field and “now demolished”.  Another is The Homestead, “demolished in 1965”.  And the other is Jasmine Cottage, mercifully described as “recently restored” – I hope it still is, for in these times you never know what might have happened to centuries old property from one year to the next.

As for the text, the more I look at the book, the more I realise how Cathy it is.  Its Canadian typesetters must have had a whale of a time setting it as writ.  Punctuation marks are scattered around ad lib, as also are reference brackets. Often it seems as if a paragraph is not a finalised script, but a set of notes towards one.  No wonder I remember her.

Yet the strange thing is that the gold shines through all the stronger for its somewhat quixotic presentation.

The early pages are the only weak ones in content.  But then, it takes at least a Sir Frank Markham properly to collage and render a fairly coherent account of such scraps of information as are still available about the early years of most English villages.  And I doubt that she could have read his few sentences about Newton Priory at the time she herself was writing about it.

In any case, she does not describe her book as “The history of Newton Longville”, but as “The story of Newton Longville”, meaning something less definitive than a history.

But when she has finally wriggled through to the past 125 years or so – which she does quite quickly – a dramatic change comes over the book.  She is now in her element. She herself lived many years in the village and loved it.  And almost from the start she was jogging the memories of 80 and 90 year olds about the happenings of their young days.  The result is a treasury of village life and love, the like of which I have not previously read anywhere.

Here I am again reminded of Sir Frank Markham.  After one sternly critical session with him about one section of his then-forthcoming “History of Milton Keynes and District,” I mollified him by saying how greatly I had enjoyed the section on the domestic scene at the turn of this century and thought it the best part of the whole work.  He then told me it was the section which had given him most pleasure to write, because he could remember so much of it himself.

And so it seems to have been with Cathy.  She was a farmer’s wife, that essential prop of every rural community and repository of knowledge of every craft and custom both inside the house and out in the fields.  She presents Newton as a place which not very long ago was almost sufficient unto itself.  She informs us of the sites of the former stocks, the parish pump, the smithy and so forth.

But especially fascinating are her pages on building, thatching, hedging, shoe making and similar activities.  These she enlivens with stories about the actual people concerned and I can end this appreciation no better than by quoting one from her account of thatching and thatchers, as follows:-

“The last thatcher in Newton Longville was Arthur Perry and he was quite a character.  On one occasion while was working he had been given some home brewed beer which he drank with relish.  On the following Sunday he had been to a Band of Hope meeting where he no doubt had heard much about the crime of drinking intoxicating liquor.

After the service he called on the farmer who had provided the beer and with a solemn face he said ‘were that drink you gin me intoxicating.  I do `ope it weren’t.  I wudna a drunk it if I’d a knowed.’  `Oh, it was only homemade herbal beer, replied the farmer’s wife.

`Thas oright’ he answered `but I do have a drop o stout wot my boy gits me but thut be only for a tonic’.  Poor old Dibber, as he was called, has gone to his maker none the worse for liking his tonic.

On another occasion he was full of woe.  He told his wife to pick some greens for his dinner.  When he arrived home she had pulled up all his cabbage plants and cooked them.

When one of the new brickworks chimneys was built he climbed to the top and played `nearer my God to thee’ on his tin whistle.  The local lads were amused and told him, `thas the nearest yell ever git.’  He only smiled and took it in a good part.