Daphne Allen

I was born in Hainford on the 27th of March 1930. This was where my grandparents also lived, my grandfather Tom Royal had a wood yard and their house was surrounded by meadows with cattle on. A number of my relations lived in the village, some of these were uncle Victor and aunt Lily who lived next door to my mum and dad, my uncle Bert and aunt Bessie who lived up Stratton Road, my uncle Leslie and Aunt Doris who lived up School Road, my uncle George also lived there with aunt Evelyn, but I mean they were brother and sister, it was when he got an old man.

Behind my Grandparents house at Hainford there were big bushes of red current, white current and black current. One year my grand parents invited lots of kids to a Christmas party, there was the sitting room and the parlour full of people. Grandma sat in the corner in her armchair by the open fire, this was when I was about 5 or 6 years old.

In 1935 I started at Hainford School, the main building used to be like 2 class rooms. It used to go right through. The new bit that has been built on is where there used to be hand basins and of course the toilets were down the play ground. We had to go to Hellesdon Secondary school when we got to the age of 11 because I suppose Hainford School weren’t big enough and they’d built that school, mind you they’ve built another one at the top of Drayton Road now. I stayed there until I was 14 years old. One day we were coming home from school and had nearly got to the bottom of School Road, that was when the war had just started I suppose and there was thick fog. All of a sudden you could hear the drone of this plane and someone shouted “that’s a Gerry” and we all kids got shoved in the hedge out of the way. That’s a memory, you can’t remember anything bar the drone of this plane. They always said they knew a German plane from an English one.
There used to be 2 pubs in Hainford, the Chequers and the Wheat sheaf. There also used to be a shop down past the school that the Edwards family used to have.

I married my husband Alec Allen on the 1st of July 1950, when we got married we first lived in a council house on Carlton Road, Attleborough. This house was very modern for the time as it had running water.
We then moved to St James in Coltishall in 1951, six weeks before my daughter Alex was born. This house had 2 windows at the front, but the back was sloping so although you could use the bedroom, it went right down so you could only get a single bed in. it was classed as a 4 bed roomed house and there were 2 sitting rooms and a dairy with a kitchen at the back. The dairy was very cold. I would always find my daughter playing in the ditches or up the trees

We moved to the square in Postwick in 1954 and then to Swanton Road, Bawdeswell in 1958. After living in Bawdeswell for nearly a year we moved to The Marsh at Post wick in 1959 and then we then moved to Hall Farm Postwick during the winter of 1963. When we lived at Postwick my daughter used to buy chewy fruit salad sweets by the paper bag full for an old hapenny from a little shop in the village.

We then moved to Glandford when my husband Alec got a job working at Bayfield Hall in Glandford. The reason Alec didn’t stop is because there was a foreman and his brother, the brother had no jurisdiction on who do what, but he used to poke his noise in and say you do this and Alec would say I’ve been told to do this and he’d be told you can’t do that, you’ve got to do this.

Most of the time we were at Glanford, I worked at Blakeney hotel. I was only a maid’s maid, well a staff maid actually. They were nearly all Portuguese people who worked there in them days. They used to come over at the beginning of the season and work there the whole season. They used to say to me “you mind the chef, he shout”. You know that’s the first time I had duck l’orange. I went back one night to help because they’d got a big do or something on and they asked if I’d go back and help in the kitchens.
We used to go down to Blakeney on our days off to catch Dabs, this was done with a long rail which had hooks attached to it. We would drag this rail through the mud catching the Dabs on the hooks as we went along.

In the early 1960’s we moved to Manor Cottage, Tunstead but we had to move out of there due to the house being full of wood worm, this meant yet another move but this time it was only to Rose Cottage at the other end of Tunstead next door to the Dixon family who’s son Roger later married my daughter Alex. We would hear them many nights talking to each other leaning out of their bedroom windows.
Then came our last move as a couple to a new bungalow at 4 Granary way, Tunstead. This move was done with the Morris Traveller we had at the time and my grandson Karl’s pram. We would fill the pram up with boxes and Karl would be peering out from among the stuff.