Patrick Hogan
Arriving at the Hawthorns, Whittington 1939

Driving down a lane between high hedges, we entered the village which was soon to be our home and turned left at a crossroads opposite to what I saw was a school.  The houses were mostly red brick, some having gardens at the front.  Two hundred yards up a little hill, we pulled to a halt on the right of the road outside a large red brick house with a long conservatory in front.  We were there.

On the facade of the conservatory, high above the pavement was set a stone plaque with two initials, R.D. carved into it. These were the initials of Richard Dyott of Freeford Hall who had had the Hawthorns built as a farm for himself all those years ago.  High on the front of the house, above the conservatory, another stone plaque proclaimed that it had been built in1858, eighty one years before we arrived.

There was a thick heavy green wooden door already open to the pavement.  We gathered our coats and went inside then climbed up grey stone steps under a very high glass conservatory roof. It all looked immense to me and the steps were a bit high for a tired seven year old.  After the top step was a longish flat floor section through the main part of the conservatory.  At the main door into the house from the conservatory, we were met by a motherly lady who welcomed us with cups of tea and sandwiches and fussed until she was satisfied that there was nothing else she could do for us.  This was Mrs Pearce, a lady who proved for the next 19 years that she was always ready to help.

Mr Percy Pearce had leased the Hawthorns from the Dyott estate some years before and previous to us had sublet the front of the house to a Captain Bird. They lived in the rear as it was more convenient for the building business Mr Pearce had built up.  The Hawthorns had been converted into two dwellings by installing a wooden separating wall upstairs towards the rear of the upper corridor. On the ground floor there was already an easy solution and separation was already there in the form of what we called the “dairy door” through which each family could access the other should it prove necessary. There was a lock in the door but we never used it.  To prevent the door banging in draughts, Mrs Pearce had a tiny brass bolt on her side.   A few knocks sufficed to bring either family to the door.

Before bed that night, as an excited little boy I went time and again into every room in our new home. I looked through every window and must have galloped up and down the front and back stairs a dozen times.  The rooms were large, in some cases very large, with lofty windows, some with folding internal wooden shutters. Feeling rather like Jack in the Beanstalk coming into the Giants Den, I saw there were possibilities for fun and mischief in this great barn of a house. 

We were now in what was to be our home in wartime and peacetime, in happy times and yes, in tragic times too, for the next nineteen years.  I came to love the house, the village of Whittington and the people who lived there.   Because we came to Whittington, lived in the Hawthorns for nineteen years and because of the friends I made there, I write what I remember.

Patrick Hogan, 6th February 2009

It is interesting and sometimes great fun to think myself back to October 1939 when I first came to Whittington and remember what I felt as a little boy.  Arriving just after my seventh birthday, it was clear after the long car journey from the South that we were now somewhere in the middle of our country.   I had swapped a rather dull town for some glorious agricultural countryside and the pleasure this gave me was enhanced by a passing glimpse of Whittington Barracks on the hill - a friendly little relative of the vast military barracks complexes I had seen in the south.  The nearest shop to our suburban house in Aldershot had been half a mile away but apart from that and the one field we could play in, there was nothing near our home but more houses and not too much to interest a growing boy.

My first walk around the village amazed me by what was on offer:  St Giles’s Church, perhaps six shops, a post office, pubs, a blacksmith’s forge, a school and even a Police Station, all within a hundred yards or so from where I lived.  In addition, there was a working building firm behind the house and in every direction there were fields and farms. For the seven year old me, this village of Whittington was heaven. I couldn’t believe my luck at being able to live here.  I must have walked around with a permanent smile on my face!  Never tiring of investigating the village, I imprinted upon myself the faces of the people and their rather different country dialect, the roads, the lanes, the farms, the bridges, the village houses so different from town houses, the fields, the trees, the canal, brooks, ponds, hedges, gates and stiles. The list of wonders to learn about was endless and I drank in the atmosphere, the sounds and the smells of the rich Staffordshire countryside.

Gradually from conversation and later through visits, the names of the neighbouring hamlets, villages and towns became familiar.  The beautiful city of Lichfield to which we owed our allegiance, was everything I thought a town should be. As soon as I saw it I loved this venerable place, beautiful in its ancient ecclesiastical gentleness.
Small enough for a little boy to comprehend, it had a graceful Cathedral carrying not one, not two but, like no other in England, three magnificent spires, which proudly wore the title “Ladies of the Vale”.  Lichfield was blessed with two other churches with lofty spires as well, St Mary’s by the market square, and St Michael’s, as well as the little gem of ancient St Chad’s church, all within an area of half a square mile.
With tranquil Minster Pool and Stowe Pool, the peaceful Cathedral close, Bird Street and Beacon Street meeting each other west of the Close, Dam Street, the Market Square with its cobbles and statues, Dr Johnson’s House, the Friary, the Alms Houses almost opposite the old Grammar School and lovely Borrowcop Hill with its brick viewing shelter, the picture was complete - a little Midland masterpiece which took my heart seventy years ago and holds it still.

 Patrick Hogan, 28th Nov 2009

“Waking up in our new home opened up a whole new world to me.”

St Giles’s Church, Church Cottages, Whittington Court and the Hawthorns all sit on top of the only real hill in Whittington.  Church Street runs west from the village crossroads, past all these and lastly past Church Farm which Sidney Baxter farmed.  It then branches into three lanes – which we in our house in the War, lacking village memory and street signs, called “Freeford Lane”, “Darnford Lane” and “Cappers Lane”.  All these led eventually to the beautiful Cathedral city of Lichfield, three miles away to the west of Whittington.  Waking in the Hawthorns on 31st October 1939 at the age of just seven years, I found a wonderland. 

The front of the Hawthorns faced south over Church Street.  In 1939, all three of us boys slept in the largest bedroom of all, which had two windows facing west.  Being the largest room in the house, it had been curiously provided with the smallest fireplace, the fire basket of which was not more than five inches wide. The chimney was also very narrow and didn’t draw properly, so skill and constant attention were needed to light a fire at all and then to stop it going out again. I think the whole object must have been to save coal.  Only in the bitterest winter weather when the ice was an inch thick on the inside of the windows, did we think it worth while to bother and certainly we got more warmth from the dizzying exercise of blowing reluctant coals than we ever did from the fire itself.  Mostly after an hour we just gave up and got another hot water bottle instead. But the fireplace looked charming enough and in summer my mother would put a pot of flowers in the basket.  Our bedroom had good views to the west over the Pearces’ workshops especially to Cappers Lane and its hill. The last rays of the setting sun going down behind Cappers Hill would turn the long red brick walls of the house on the facing side a bright orange and bathe the inside of our bedroom in golden light.

Then there was the “Beam”.   In the bedroom, stretching from one side of the ceiling to the other and ending exactly between the two windows was this goodly beam, wider than it was high and painted cream.  From the beginning I could never work out what its purpose was, but there it hung and it gave a little extra mystery and romance to the great room. Often I stood upon a chair and knocked with my little knuckles on the side of the beam hoping perhaps to get an answer.   But it never came; and the ‘Riddle of the Beam’ like the ‘Riddle of the Sphinx’ was never unravelled.

The Bathroom was super and my second favourite room of the house. It had been built exactly the same size as the kitchen below and was the only room on the upper floor which was deliciously warm in the bitterest winter weather.  It was large, spacious and had a cast iron white enamelled bath on claw legs.  In the corner was a roomy airing cupboard with a meter-cubed hot water tank and a similarly sized cold water tank above it.  The hot water tank easily provided enough hot water for two full baths of piping hot water.  There was a good sized window.

The upstairs corridor had “back stairs” at the rear and “main stairs” leading down to the front of the house. In the middle of this corridor was a door opening to yet more stairs going upwards to another floor where three attic rooms and access to the roof waited to provide mystery and discovery.  A spacious landing separated the two front bedrooms.

On the ground floor was a somewhat wider corridor accessing the drawing room, dining room, a door down to the wine cellar, another almost opposite down to a pantry and at the very end, the kitchen (which had originally been a scullery).

As soon as I saw it, the Kitchen became my favourite room. Everything about it was right, it was warm, solid, reassuring and practical.  To start with, the wooden door from the corridor was wider than normal and it didn’t have a door handle, it had an iron latch with a big metal tongue to put your thumb on and press down to open the door - very satisfactory for a small boy. Such practicality – far and away better than turning a handle – and it clattered loudly when it was used so everyone knew you had arrived.  The kitchen had a floor of grey stone slabs.  The deep, thick, glazed earthenware sink was immediately on the left with two large brass taps. Directly above the sink was a wooden sash window through which, if I stood on a chair, I could see the eastern wall of the Pearce’s back portion of the house and Mrs Pearce’s chicken run with Rhode Island Red and Black Leghorn hens pecking about – and the strutting cockerel which would later fly at me when I wandered too near to his domain.  On the right of the kitchen was a wooden cupboard from floor to ceiling filled with food, crockery, pots and pans. An electric stove stood ready, not new for sure, but very strong and not liable to break down or get broken.  An outside door led into the garden and through another window I could see the garden and the hens without needing a chair.  And lastly and the most precious of all the good things in that room, or even the house, right at the end of the kitchen against the wall, stood a squat, round black, “Ideal”  burn-anything stove with a 4inch wide stove pipe going up, then through the wall.

Mere words cannot do justice to the excellence of that little pot stove which proved day after day that it was the finest of its class in the world.  There are no “ifs” and no “buts” in this matter - this was most definitely it – the best.  It is seldom in life that one meets up with something so perfect and seeing it was a thunderclap of Damascus proportions. It sat there confident, aware of its strength and ability and inviting any test.  This paragon of stoves heated all running water as well as boiling kettles, making toast and heating the kitchen itself and through the ceiling, the bathroom as well.  It was strong, solid, child proof, and it was impossible to do it any harm.  It sat low enough on the ground that a small boy could feed it easily.  On the top it had a thick round-top lid with a recess into which I could insert its bar and lift the lid right off  - and put it back again without incinerating my hand. That was a big plus.  The front of the stove had a strong heavy iron flap which could be left closed while it was burning or opened down to show the raging fires within and form a little iron table to make the best toast and roast chestnuts I have ever eaten.  Thick 1½  inch pipes brought cold water in and carried boiling water out and up to the tank in the bathroom airing cupboard above.  It must have had a powerfully drawing chimney for it lighted quickly and burned beautifully, pumping out heat and hot water, regardless of what inferior fuel we were forced to feed it.   When snow lay deep outside and icicles hung long and hard from the eaves, our stove would be humming and crackling away creating an atmosphere of warmth and wellbeing that the great Kellogg himself would instantly have recognized.   It was the very heart and soul of our home.

By day, apart from some light coming in through the coloured glass panels of the front door and a little more filtering down from the upper landing, the downstairs corridor was rather gloomy.  At night the corridor was totally dark because of “Blackout precautions”.

Coming into the house from the outside after dark was not a problem.  Firstly, because the corridor was completely dark, the front door could be opened without the risk of showing any light.  Once in, with the front door closed with its black out curtain, it was merely a question of feeling our way to the drawing room to see if anyone was there or along the length of the pitch black corridor to the kitchen.  I learned in a very short time to know exactly where I was in that long corridor and indeed up either set of stairs into the corridor above.  I was soon able to walk confidently down the corridor in stygian darkness with my right arm raised and know exactly when my hand would touch the kitchen door latch.   I think I could do it now.  Once there, press the latch and open the door whilst closing both eyes to avoid being blinded by the light which would flood out into the blackness of the corridor.  Close the door and then relax slowly into the warmth, welcome and safety of the kitchen.    Feelings like that cannot be bought today.

Patrick Hogan 9 Feb 2009