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April 2024, on Local Deliveries

TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

These days you can’t walk the dog without stepping aside every few minutes for a delivery van; however, if you look back, you’ll remember that we always had food deliveries, but with a notable difference: our bread, meat and milk were brought fresh to the house in person by the baker, the butcher and the farmer. We knew them all.

Mr Fosbury baked in the stone oven over in Combe and delivered the loaves and lardy cakes himself. A TV personality bought that house – if he isn’t a celebrity chef, we’ll get no more bread from that oven.

Our butcher, Peter Kail, used to deliver meat to all the surrounding villages from his shop in Whitchurch. He combined this with writing books for children and the script for the annual Whitchurch pantomime, enlivening the show with merciless jokes about his own sausages. In fact, his sausages were rather good. He retired early from butchering to become an ambulance man.

Then there was J McConnachie, the butcher in Hurstbourne Tarrant. As with Kail’s, the meat was invariably excellent. If you had guests, you never had to worry about the meal: guests would only remember the meat. McConnachie said he always bought animals on the hoof. Of course, in those days he could. There were over 600 local livestock markets in the country, including one in Newbury (now just a block of flats on Market Street). He could buy animals reared close to home. Now there are fewer than 140 markets, and the numbers are falling.

For milk we had Jack Greenaway’s cows in Crux Easton, just yards from their pasture to a bottle on the doorstep. You couldn’t get closer than that. Ashmansworth, too, was a parish flowing with milk, and still is.

In passing, let’s also remember FW Burch from Thatcham. He brought round our newspapers every day for decades, collecting them from that brick shed at Newbury station, until the day he died.

Life has changed. Even in the 1960s, Philip Larkin gave the game away in his letter to Barbara Pym, saying that food in Ashmansworth comes mostly from the deep freeze. By the 1960s, we’d long abandoned those allotments shown on the 1905 map.

For the moment at least, we’ve lost all personal touch with the things we eat.

Agricola, April 2024