Recollections of Jill Hills
This section describes some recollections of Jill Hills, who lived at Rails Farm as a young girl during WW2.
The old farm house was very cold in winter. More frost on the inside than outside. We only had paraffin for lighting & cooking. Mum cooked mostly on a four-burner paraffin stove and sometimes on the black range. Rabbit stew was often on the menu and lots of veg, as Dad was a good gardener and grew all our veg. It was hard for Mum with five children. No mod cons. Bath was once a week in the tin bath in front of the range.
School was Knaphill for me and Pirbright for my sisters. I remember meeting my friends at Longhouses, Arthur Norman, David Townsend, Iris Vickery and Jean and John Street. We cycled or walked down to the Green and picked up the Conway coach, which picked up children from Fox Corner, then us and then on to West Heath and Gole Road and then on to Knaphill.
If you were kept in after school it was a long walk home, then it was helping Dad on the farm. He tried to teach me to milk, but I was too slow. The cows were lovely & gentle. Dad loved all his animals.
We had so much freedom and we wandered all over the woods. The old coach road to Mytchett Lake was one of our favourite walks, also Henley Park Lake when the ice was thick. We would also get on the pond in Mill Lane on the ice. It used to crack a bit and we would get off pretty quick. Hasle Acre was good fun in the winter when we had snow. Any old tin tray made a good sledge and went down the hill pretty fast. It was great fun, and kept us nice and warm.
Children from London camped in General Smith’s grounds under canvas and we used to have a game of cricket on the green outside Longhouses with them.
German prisoners worked in the woods. I think they were digging out the fire breaks. They tried to talk with us, but we couldn’t understand them. Most of them were so young. They were in a camp at Chobham, I think.
When we moved to Brookwood it was really nice to have electric light and a flush toilet!
A few further observations from conversations with Jill:
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Jill’s father worked as a cowman for Horace Cherryman of Bullhousen Farm, Bisley and her family were living in a cottage next to the farmhouse. Horace took on Railes Farm in the mid-1940s and asked her father to man it. Her mother didn’t like Railes because it was it was so remote and old-fashioned and couldn’t wait to move.
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Jill’s bedroom was the top left one looking from the track. There was an outside loo with a tiled roof on the right hand corner facing the track.
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The woods to the south were called “A-J woods”, after Mr Armstrong-Jones, the owner.
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Jill spent hours at Henley Park lake. She used to ride her bike in pitch dark through the woods; just a small light front and back. It wasn’t very nice, but that’s how it was. Not a light until she got home.
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Dad’s highlight of the week was his game of cricket on a Saturday. He loved his cricket.
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When she went to school, Fat Fan & Thin Min (landladies of The White Hart) let her leave her bicycle in the garage at Brook Cottage.
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Sometimes, when Jill came home from school, her mother would ask her to cycle all the way back to the village when she had run out of something. Quite a distance!
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A dentist from Guildford used to come to The Old House on Little Green in the evening. The living room was the waiting room. Jill had a tooth out there.
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Prisoners of war were motored from Chobham. Some of them mended shoes. The Italians went hedging and ditching on the farm.
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Joan Harreiter had a bad time to start with from village people for marrying a German. She and Ludwig both worked very hard.
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Gerald Storr’s dad used to supply Jill’s parents with a home-produced chicken for Christmas dinner. Mr Storr had a shoe repair shop next to Fulks in Brookwood.
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Old Mrs Tuddenham lived next door to the family in Brookwood. One day the milk wasn’t taken in, so Jim cycled to the Research Institute, found Elsie and got her back, but found the old lady dead.
We imagine that winters at Rails Farm would have been pretty dismal. The area can get very wet, and it would have been lonely, with very little passing traffic. Wartime restrictions on the MOD land would have curtailed peoples’ ability to enter the woods.