OLD HAUNTS...

I guess it`s what happens to other people too but, as I get older, I find I look back on things, events and places I experienced years ago and one of the many things I enjoy is to revisit those places, revive the memories and see what changes the years may have brought.

It was well over 40 years ago, when times were hard and we were bringing up three children, that I took on the part time job as Clerk to the West Peckham Parish Council. The money wasn`t great - £10 a year if I recall correctly - but it represented a kind of Christmas bonus which came in handy at that time of the year. I inherited the job from a colleague who had been doing it for years and was nearing retirement. He told me how much I would enjoy it because there were good people in West Peckham and it was a nice village to be associated with.

He was dead right. The heart of the village is at the end of a semi-gated cul-de-sac, off a beaten track, and there you will find the village green (pictured,) the village pub (The Swan) and the church of St. Dunstan, which has stood for over 900 years. The whole parish has a population no more than 300 at most and is mainly farm land, with orchards, woods and rolling fields. Archetypal English village scenes - almost a throwback to another age. Not much happened to disturb the peace of the Parish Council all those years ago and so my tenure as their Parish Clerk was trouble free but somehow richly rewarding. I`m not talking about the £10 a year but more about the place and the people. The chairman of the Parish Council was a gentleman farmer, who I got to know, like and respect, not least because his roots - like many of my own family - were in the Hamshire/Berkshire borderland.

This morning, I put Barney in the car and drove the few miles back to West Peckham. Armed with the Ordnance Survey map, we headed off down part of the Wealdway, the long distance path that runs from Gravesend to the Sussex coast near Eastbourne, across a field and into a wood before emerging back on the village green where, on this quiet October Sunday morning, the sweetest sound of silence was broken only by the breeze and the birds. How it should be.

On the way back to the car I paused outside the smart new looking village hall (40 years ago it was a corrugated iron job) and read the events recorded on the agenda for an upcoming Parish Council meeting. I noticed that the chairman bore the same surname as the gentleman farmer who chaired proceedings all those years ago, which seemed to confirm that very little had changed in all that time. And for West Peckham and all the other timeless villages which enrich our sceptred isle, I hope it never does.