Cedric and I met Elsie Garratt and her daughter Lucy Viner at Penhurst Care Home two days after her 100th birthday, in early March. It’s a rare privilege to meet someone of such advanced years. Elsie had been asked: “What’s it like to be 100?” – her response “I don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, but I’ve still got all my faculties!” The staff have let her have an extra hour in bed in the mornings since her birthday, which is greatly appreciated. With Lucy joining in the remembering of family stories, Elsie gave a lively account of her earlier years.

Born in the West Midlands, she came to Filkins in 1949 as a Women’s Land Army volunteer, on Sir Stafford Cripps’s estate. She and other Land Girls shared a room in Sir Stafford’s house. Elsie enjoyed ploughing with horses. Potato picking was hard work. One winter’s evening they all had a horrible scare when a beam over the open fireplace smouldered, then caught alight after they’d all gone to bed. Elsie, Mavis and Mary all managed to escape from their attic bedroom dormer window – Elsie fell into deep snow by the moat around the house and rolled over, unconscious, saved from drowning only because the moat was frozen solid. She did end up with a broken pelvis.

Her friend Mavis invited Elsie along on a night out – for Elsie it was a blind date. The two pairs married – Mavis and Jim Lazenby, and Elsie and Mervyn Garrett (in 1951 in Burford), and began a long history of friendship and work together. Jim’s parents had the New Inn (now the Inn for All Seasons) at Little Barrington and had developed the adjacent filling station. Jim’s father brought the two young couples in to run the Inn, beginning Elsie’s association with the licensed trade.

At Little Barrington, Mervyn was a part-time game keeper for Colonel Mills, then went to work for the Wills family at Northleach. Col Mills invited Elsie and Mervyn back with the offer of a tied cottage for a combination of game-keeping and playing the organ in the parish churches of Little and Great Barrington; Elsie used to go along to pump the bellows (in the days before electric motors did that job). Elsie used to cycle from their cottage on the estate to The Grove, where Col Mills lived, to clean, with Lucy sitting in her bicycle basket. She remembers cleaning an unused room with floor to ceiling curtains, going in to find the curtains covered in horseflies – it made her feel quite sick. Lucy remembers the smell of “proper coffee” (they had Camp Coffee at home) – a smell she later associated with Hambidges Grocers (where Walkers’ stove shop is now on the High Street). At that tied cottage, the toilet was a privy at the bottom of the garden, there was no piped water and buckets of water were fetched from the stream or the village pump. Baths were taken in a tin bath in front of the fire.

The family, including by then three children, moved to Burford some 60 years ago. This was so exciting. Their beautiful council house, 44 Oxford Road, had a downstairs toilet, an upstairs toilet and bathroom, running hot and cold water, and a long garden running down to what’s now Cole’s Field, big enough for Mervyn to have a substantial vegetable garden. Elsie continued to do cleaning jobs – one client brought her home once in his Rolls Royce and Elsie had him drive twice round the estate so that everyone saw! They were the first people on Oxford Road to have a telephone – Col Mills had it installed so that he could call Mervyn should there be a need for his help on the estate.

After the Land Girl years Elsie honed all sorts of “people skills” working at the Cotswold Gateway (chambermaid), the Lamb with Mrs North-Lewis (waitress), the Bull and the Highway (then a temperance hotel), with a spell at a wet fish shop. Her parents by then were living at Windrush Camp, where they had a Nissen hut previously occupied by the “head of the council”, who had managed to have it “all poshed up” – it was lovely. A great cyclist, Elsie mostly cycled into Burford, but, for instance, the North-Lewises paid for Elsie to lodge with Miss Pittaway on The Hill. She also rode a delivery bike, then drove the delivery van (having learned to drive in the Land Army) for Hambidges, out to remote villages and hamlets around Burford.

About 55 years ago the family moved to take on the White Horse pub, on the Witney side of the High Street, towards the crest of the hill. The name is captured now in the name “White Horse Mews”. Pubs were different then; women were not welcome in “proper pubs” such as the White Horse. The pub had darts and Aunt Sally teams – local patronage was strong. The only food Elsie served for many years was pork pie, pickled eggs and crisps – other choices crept in later. The pub was largely run by Elsie, as Mervyn worked at Smith’s Industries in Witney. They left in 1985, and it closed only a couple of years later. 

Mervyn, a great cricketer, mustered his own cricket XI – Lucy and Elsie remember happy afternoons watching the game, with Elsie preparing cricket teas, and then sitting by the Windrush at the Fox at Little Barrington afterwards. Lucy remembers shimmying along the great big pipe which crosses the river by the bridge – it’s all fenced off now.

Elsie is proud of her four-generation family. We were given a glimpse of how traits can be passed down. As a child living in Wednesbury, Elsie was part of an entertainment troupe of youngsters, tap dancing and singing around the working men’s clubs and town halls of the area. Skip a couple of generations, and grandson Jack Garratt is a singer-songwriter with the 2016 Brit Award Critics’ Choice Award to his name. Lucy’s two daughters Tracy and Julie can tap-dance courtesy of grandma’s teaching.

There was so much more, but space is limited. What a rich life!

 

Ruth Reavley