Day Trips

I went on many day trips organised by our local church, and also by the Cooperative Women’s Guild.

We visited places, mostly of historical interest, such as Christchurch; Salisbury Cathedral; Glastonbury Abbey; Arundel Castle with its great Baronial Hall; Bishop’s Waltham – a ruin; and several convents where nun’s choir at eventide was memorable

At Stratford-upon-Avon we saw Anne Hathaway’s Cottage with Shakespeare’s second best bed. I remember a moated castle, once the home of Queen Elizabeth I, mother of Anne Boleyn (1504-1536)

On a fine summer’s day we went to a doll’s museum. There I bought a book and as we waited for the coach to drive up I glanced at the foreward. It told of the author Christopher Hobhouse, a Royal Marine officer stationed in Eastney Barracks; whose pregnant wife lived on Hayling Island and he commuted by ferry. In 1940 he was killed by a bomb’s direct hit . My late husband met him when he was drafted as a Laboratory Mechanic into the Science Laboratory in Eastney Barracks (afterwards ASWE and Qinetiq). Their efforts in radar helped sink the German battleship Bismark.

Anotherbook I still treasure is a biography of Charles James Fox (1759-1806). a contemporary of Pitt the Younger (1749-1806), and a gambler par excellence.

I speak of a time when hedges were being decimated to make fields bigger, to grow more home-grown food. Speeding home, looking from the height of the coach into miles of fields, I saw the wave-like motion of that golden grain; and I remember the Irish song “The wind that shakes the barley”.

This is the title of Ken Loach’s new film that won the Palme d’Or in this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It is amusing to hear the Daily Mail’s English edition, which dismisses the film; whilst the Daily Mail Irish edition applauds it.

Rose Lynch (15-Jun-2006)

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