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Barbara Murfin nee Sarney born 1940s
If you wanted plums, Victorias, then the farm off Chapel Road to the right from the Chapel, was the place to go. As big as hens eggs, no kidding, I’ve picked and eaten enough of them. It was sensible I thought to eat the huge over-ripe ones, huge, warm, gold and red. They would never keep or travel anyway, would they?
‘Uncle’ Frank Townsend the butcher from Jennings Bros stores married the widow of the man who had owned the orchard. (Uncle Frank had married a lady who was soon an invalid. He cared for her for many long hard years, it was so lovely to see him so happy with his new wife.) At the back of the house was a ramshackle old shed, with an open veranda at the side. There would be a table, a set of balance scales, paper bags hung on a string, and the wonderful smell of ripe plums. At plum time there would be a regular stream of people buying plums. Lots were bottled as there were no freezers then. Big, golden, juicy ripe Victoria Plums, there is nothing else like biting into one.
Stan (Dixie) Smith’s cherry orchard by Diary Cottage was the only one that I remember. A cherry ladder is quite unique. The bottom of the ladder has a splay of 3–3˝ feet. The top only about 9 inches. They were just one piece, no extending lengths. The large splay gave stability to the narrow top, easer to get it into the heart of the tree.
Cherry pickers would go as high as possible and lean out further than was sensible to pick the cherries. Cherries must be picked not milked. Cherries with stalks would be picked and put into a basket on a sling hanging from the pickers shoulder. To pull just the fruit from the stalks, ‘milking’, was greatly frowned on. Cherries keep better with their stalks on, the milked ones would be damaged by the removal of the stalks and start to bleed and rot, so were not good "keepers" and could not be sold away from the farm. Also, if you think about it, cherries and stalks weigh more than just cherries, so the farmer would get more pence per pound. Cherries were loaded into round, perhaps a foot deep, baskets and sent on to London for sale.
When there were many orchards in the village, cherry blossom Sunday was a special day. People would come from miles away, most on foot, to see the blossom. Not in my time. Cherry trees were few and far between in the 1950s.
Also when the cherries were ready to harvest boys with catapults would be 'employed' as bird scarers to keep birds off the fruit. Cherry picking was highly skilled and a good picker was well paid. He could have any type of job for the rest of the year, but cherry fortnight he was King. Bing cherries were Frackle cherries, small very black cooking cherries. A Flackwell Heath cherry pie was a bit like a Cornish pasty in shape. The idea was you bit off the end, held the pie at a high angle and all the cherry juice in the pie would run into your mouth for drinking. Depending on who made the pie if the cherry pits were removed or not.
Our BEST conker tree stood at the corner of Green Dragon Lane and Chapman Lane, cut down to make the corner better for the expected volume of traffic for the new playing field. No doubt relieved from its once a year barrage of bricks, stones and branches thrown into its canopy to encourage conkers to fall.
Our best blackberry field in the village was taken over by the new builds of the Orchard, Cherry Rise group of houses.
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