Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1936

Memoirs of J.A.Heath-Caldwell

Now having completed his training he got he was sent to a parish in the Salisbury Diocese, and there he became Rector and stayed in that position for 12 years

And then my father took over this rectory in South Wiltshire in the Salisbury Diocese and he became rector there, it was a small village and there were three other villages that were in his parish, one of them had been a separate parish in the years before, it had a huge rectory in it, and that was empty when he went there in 1936. 

And there when they actually moved into the Rectory at Brixton Deverill, away from Fareham in Hampshire I was sent for six weeks to the daughter of the previous rector who had died whose name was Richardson, I think, and there she had a riding school at a place called Crocherton, which is near the Bath estate, Longleat estate, and there I spent six weeks with her. I remember her teaching me English through the prayer book, she was of course a vicar’s daughter and I think she had horses at the rectory whilst her father was the previous rector to mine. And she had a riding school when he died, which had to move out, and that was she lived I suppose, and there she taught me to read the common prayer book and I was also had six weeks to learn to ride a horse with her which was rather nice and then having done that my parents had settled into the rectory I was then sent to the Parish school in Kingston Deverill, that was about the age of six and there I stayed for two years.

The parish school run by the church with government fed in as well, it was not entirely financed by the church. There I can remember I used to ride to school on a bicycle, and it was about two miles away, and there I had a bicycle and I learnt to ride it in Fareham.

My father’s Rectory was at Brixton Deverill in the Deverill Valley, so called because the river Ryl went underground in the drier months just like the wadi’s do in Northern Africa. And my father had this walled garden in his Rectory which was just like a farm house complete with farm cottage, pig sties, barn, a shed part for the milking cows, a carriage room, and stable for about 8 horses.

And in 1938 we had a horse or two in the stables, coal in an old loose box and a gardener from the Manor farm who had been a groom. But the coming of the motor car had made him redundant at the Manor farm and out of a sense of charity my father put him and his wife in the Rectory Cottage semi-detached from the tythe barn. 

And all was pretty well for a time. Bill Ladd was good at hoeing the Rectory garden paths and the drive way. He understood it but he was not a gardener.

And then my father found amongst his parishioners and living in Monckton Deverill a middle aged, red haired lady who was not unattractive and she was a skilled gardener. So Bill Ladd was swiftly evicted by Solicitor’s letter and he and his wife went to live in Sutton Very with his daughter-in-law.

And Kit Proctor Simms (Tatham-Warter) was put into the Rectory Cottage. This allowed my father to see to his four bee hives, look after his two goats, a Nanny and a Billy who were Platonic friends and never produced, luckily because I can’t imagine my father ever milking a goat. And there really wasn’t room for a kid. 

My father’s neighbours, Mabel and Walter did not live in Holy Matrimony but cohabited next door and they had two mentally incapacitated offspring, Percy and his sister. And she died and was buried in the churchyard and Percy pumped the organ when my sister Pat played, or learnt to play the organ. And Mabel came across from next door where she milked about three cows on fifteen acres cross leased from the Manor farm. And they had an Earth Closet and the compost was dug into Mabel’s vege garden just the other side of the Rectory Tennis Court. And when a tame rabbit or two produced by Flotsam and Jetsam was required for the Rectory table, Mabel obliged by ringing their necks. 

And in Deverill Valley in Hill Deverill Jack Houghton-Brown had his big manor farm. And I, on occasion, watched shearing of his sheep going on in the big barn. And Jack’s wife, and she may have been called Monica, had sugar diabetes I suppose. And it affected her mentally and Jack divorced her and he and my father crossed swords over that matter because he thought Jack was wrong to do that. 

And the Allards were farmers in Brixton Deverill and they lived up Allard’s Lane and the house was situated by an old cross roads and it was on an old Roman Road above the marshes in the valley, and there were the ruins of a fairly big house and the gypsies lived in these lanes and gathered nuts which grew on many trees besides the lanes and they were overgrown and my father tethered his goats there to eat the black berries and general undergrowth.

And Mr Bourne farmed a small farm near the Allards and he employed Gregory and his family lived in a thatched cottage between Mabel’s few acres on a bend in the road which skirted the water meadows. And in Bourne’s small farm was a very big rabbit ware and I think rabbits were trapped there by trappers who made quite sure that they did not kill all the rabbits to eradicate them. And you saw bundles of dead rabbits on railway station platforms. Maybe they were being ‘exported’ to London, 140 miles away by the Great Western Railway Company.

And further up the Valley, just under cold Kitch (Kitchen?) Hill was another longish farm and they farmed the hills and there were more rabbit warers. And at the top of Cold Kitch Hill round barrows from the Celtic times and the hills were escarpmented into the original Celtic field  system pre-dating the Roman Occupation of England from AD55 to AD 480 (was it) with the fall of Rome to the Vandels and Germanic Tribes and the Romans became Italians – great engineering and road builders generally.

The school was about 100 yards from the old abandoned rectory and there was school teacher there, one school teacher, a lady, who taught us, and I can remember such things as on Empire Day we all dressed up in the various dresses of various parts of the British Empire, and they sent me to school as an Eskimo.

And I remember another time an aeroplane flying overhead and its engines stopped. I heard it when I was biking to school and this aeroplane came down in a corn field about quarter of a mile from the road that I was bicycling on and I remember playing truant for a bit to run off and have a look at it. The pilot of it, the Swordfish, the aircraft did a complete somersault when it hit soft ploughed land and it came to rest up side down and the pilot released his parachute harness and had a bit of a sore neck after that because he fell on his head, and that was all the damage that he did to himself, and it was an interesting thing as it was the first plane that I ever saw crash.

And the great thing about a bicycle is you are truly independent, your parents can’t be overseeing what you do. Now I stayed in that school, Miss Hawley was the principal of that school and I stayed there about two years. Kingston Deverill Parish School was situated over a lane separating it from the “Old Vicarage,” a very big mansion which the Army took over at the outbreak of WWII. And all was well until 1,000 G.I.’s were stationed at the Rectory prior to “D” Day, 6th June 1944. Then Miss Hawley was ‘in love’ with a G.I. and as she was “properly brought up” she knew nothing about the Birds and Bees (nor did her pupils) and may have believed we came alive in a cabbage patch. Whatever, she became pregnant to a G.I. 

I suppose I should describe the rectory. The rectory had three storeys, ground floor, the main floor and then up in the attic were two rooms just under the roof, and one room was used for my sisters, and there were five other rooms, one in the second floor, and my sisters, there were room for them, and there were two bathrooms, my father put in a second bathroom. My three sisters went to a boarding school and come 1938 (I went to this school that my father had been to forty years before I had 1938, and two years later WWII started) My sisters were all in their teens at that age, they had been to boarding school. My eldest sister went into the ATS, my middle sister went into the WAAFS, and my youngest went sister, when she was old enough, about 17 or 18 joined the WRENS. 

My father’s first job, was rector of this parish. Now the church was an old church built around about the 1500s 1600s and leaning against the front door of the church was what I suppose or have since found out must have been an ossuary. It was a large bit of stone which had a recess carved in it which could have been for the body of a person and the round bit at the end could have been for the end where the skull of the person could have laid.

This was hit by a farmer whilst he was ploughing over some ancient Celtic barrows on the hills on both sides of the parish, the valley in which the parish was. This sort of intrigued me, they did not know quite what to do with the object and they thought it had to do with dead people and funerals and so they took it down to the parish church and leaned it up against the front bell tower side. The Ossuary was put in a recess in the wall, it was 6 feet high and I often stood in it for fun and God knows how many time a Chiefly Celtic cadaver had been put in it to rot so that after some months when the ants, worms, etc had had a good feed nothing remained except the white skeleton and the Celtic people believed the skeletons had more lasting substance than the body’s they had originally been inside, so they were treated as sacred. And this happened in the cave systems we were shown in Malta too when we visited in the Training Cruiser Devonshire when I was a Sea Going Cadet. 

Another thing that happened in this parish was that one day my mother, who must have been getting on in her years, we all went up for a walk on the downs above the valley to look for artifacts, We were wondering if we could not in fact find some bits of pottery and things which there were very much evidence of on top of the downs. The Celtic people who once lived there lived on top of the downs whilst the valleys below them while the parish below them was probably all marsh at that time.

And the only ground that could be lived on was the top of the hill, and we walked up on top of the hill, which was about half an hours walk and my mother stood in the middle and she was a bit puffed and tired and said well you spread out and have a look around here and see if you can find any bits of pottery or anything interesting, and we sort of walked up and down and around and there was some patches of earth that looked as if there had been many fires lit on them at one time and lots of broken pottery was on the ground and the grass did not grow and we spent a bit of time there and none of us found anything worthwhile picking up, and then my mother looked down between her feet and saw something bluey greenish. So she picked up this little thing and when we rubbed it we saw that it was actually a Roman coin made of bronze and it had a picture on one side of the Emperor Claudius and on the other side a picture of depiction of the god Aries, we found that out later when it was checked over by the local museum in Warminster.

So that was really quite an excitement that was, and it gave me more things to think about. That obviously the Romans had been there or had traded with those people and that roman coin had obviously been dropped, possibly 2000 years earlier, and it had just stayed on that piece of land on top of the downs until my mother picked it up. And that was the last time that she had a really good walk. 

The next thing that happened was that I went to school at the age of eight, having spent a period of about one year in the local parish school at Kingston Deverill. During the war the old rectory situated in Kingston Deverill had been occupied by soldiers. Finally, in about 1942/43 the Americans occupied it, and it was a large rectory surplus to the Church’s requirements but it did very well as an army camp. It happened that the school lady who taught the children lived in the parish school about 50 yards below the rectory, I was on my holidays, my father said to me when he was opening his mail at breakfast one morning, “this is interesting,’ he said, “I’ve got a poison pen letter here” and the letter said  that the school lady who was in charge of the parish school  was pregnant, and my father thought it was just a poison pen letter and that is all it was.

However, as the months went by it became obvious that the news in that letter was a one hundred percent correct. And the school lady had to leave and another lady took her place. So I saw the result of possibly soldiers child causing a big change to the life of a women who I had great respect for. It taught me a lesson not to do what some American soldier had done. Nobody admitted to writing the letter. It was anonymous. 


We left Fareham and I went with my family to inhabit the rectory in South Wiltshire. It was a very peaceful place to be in the war later on. But my parents had arrived there with two cars. My mother had a car and my father had a car and they told me at the time it gave the impression to other people that we were quite well off, but in fact we were not all that well off and he told me, he said ‘In those council houses down the road the combined wages coming into a council house is probably greater than what I can provide for my own family in the church.”

My first introduction to the church was being looked after for three weeks by the daughter of the previous clergyman who had been the previous rector in the parish. Miss Richardson was her name and she was a spinster and she managed and had a riding school with ponies. I think she had also had used the stables at the rectory when she was there and had her riding school. The Richardsons were farming families, all related. When her father died, he had moved to Crockerton, a place near Lord Bath’s Longleat estate. She taught me to read the Lord’s prayer in the C.of E. book of Prayer. And I learnt to ride horses there as well and we rode in the woods of the Longleat estate which was a very nice part of the country to be in.

There was a lake there. Later on I was to visit that lake, first of all before the war, and anybody was allowed to bath in this lake provided they were clear of it at 9 o’clock in the morning. Early morning bathers were acceptable but after 9 o’clock nobody was allowed to bathe in the lake at Longleat. But later when the Americans came they were given an open sesame to swimming in the lake and they spent some of their recreation time there. It was very crowded during the war years when the Americans were stationed nearby.