New look to Village Hall
You'll find the inside of the Village Hall is looking a lot brighter now. All the curtains are being replaced and those in the main hall are now a bright blue. Work has also started on the curtains in the memorial hall and the main stage curtains have now got brand new fire-resistant material being installed on improved tracking.
Our viewing figures
This blog stated in 2008 and has now had 160,000 total visitors according to the software measuring these figures (not really very big at all). These visitors come from all over the world and top readers have been roughly 85% UK, 6% USA and 1% Germany. But about three months ago there was lots more activity from both the USA (12%) and Germany (4%).
Perhaps this blog has been 'scraped' to help train all those AI sites in the future?
What were your items worth?
In praise of John Loveday
This has been written for the blog and Old Buckenham newsletter by Tom Walshe
Although John hadn’t lived in the village since the 1940s, it remained a very special place to him, one full of memories and family links going back to times most of us could only imagine.
John, though, really brought our imagination to life with his remarkable book, The Boy From Rod Alley, recounting great stories and recalling wonderful characters from his 1930s childhood. I learned things about my own family from John as, I’m sure, did others in the village. What made the book even more remarkable was that he started writing it when well into his 80s and published it aged 93.
His memory of people and events was amazing. Above all, he wanted his book to be true to life, and it certainly was that. "I was determined to get the child's experiences through the senses, rather than the usual self-congratulation of memoir," he said in an interview with the Eastern Daily Press when the book came out. "I think one of my aims was to make a truthful record of 'how it was' and celebrate lives, but quickly it also became an interest in a way of writing.”
John was born on the same day as Queen Elizabeth, April 21st 1926 at No. 4 Rod Alley Row. I learned only recently from his daughter Sharon that, 80 years later, he and his wife Evelyn were among those invited to join Her Majesty at a birthday celebration lunch in Buckingham Palace.
Back in the period between the wars, however, Old Buckenham was a very different place from how it is today. Its residents included those who had survived war or lost loved ones and endured financial hardship brought about both by the brutal 1914-18 conflict and the economic upheavals that followed.
To an inquisitive boy like John, though, many of them were characters who made a lasting impression – and had the nicknames to prove it, like Manny Bush, Naff Etteridge, Sudden Rudd, Stoot Loveday, Cuckoo Loveday, Podger Fisk, Tip Self, Fiddler Wright, Pippin Elvin, Wiggy Westfield… And among his like-minded contemporaries, none was more important to John than his best friend Neville Petley whose sudden death from meningitis left him bereft and confused about life’s meaning and purpose.
Attending the village school, latterly the Church Rooms, now a welcoming bookshop and cafe, also made a deep impression on John, and particularly the two principal teachers in the village, Mr and Mrs Hart. John disliked Len Hart intensely for his aggressive strictness bordering on cruelty, but had a lot of time for his more considerate and approachable wife who looked after the infants. John’s experiences of the Harts shaped his own views on teaching when he became a schoolmaster himself after the war, and he determined to be everything that Len Hart was not.
Yes, above all John Loveday was a kind and perceptive man. His love for Old Buckenham and the strong family ties that the Lovedays have had with the village down the years remained as strong as ever right up to the time of his passing. And he enjoyed nothing more than hearing and talking about the places and the people that were so special to him. John’s daughter Sharon and his brother-in-law John Houchin will be coming to the village at the end of April for a visit planned before John’s passing. It will be a poignant time for them but I’m sure the village they themselves have got to know and love will give them a warm welcome in loving memory of the Boy from Rod Alley.
