Jean Dodwell, nee Claxton, Was born in Santon Downham in 1921, moving to Brandon a few years later when her father ran the Fox and Hounds pub on Thetford Road. Jean now lives in Bournemouth, and has been sharing her memories of her time in Brandon before WW2 …
“When we lived at the pub, father kept pigs at the back. Mr Boughen would come along and slaughter them for dad. It was not nice as you could hear the pigs scream when he did it. Mr Boughen would pat me on the head which would make me shiver because I used to think he was a terrible man for slaughtering the pigs. Me and my friend, Joyce, who we called “Tupenny”, were once out the back making mud ‘pies’. Joyce unfortunately slipped into mud and was covered. We then realised the mud had been caused by the blood of the slaughtered pig draining into the soil!
After we left the Fox and Hounds we moved to Broom House, at Wangford. Here father taught me how to skin a rabbit. First you would “pull the arms out of the coat”, then cut the head off – the eyeballs were loved by the cats; then father would say “right this is the brain, here are the lungs, the heart, etc.” I really learned a lot!
I realise now that father was bad tempered at times, but he never laid a hand on me or my sister. Back then there was no such thing as a ‘teenager’. No, you were either a child or an adult. One memory I have is from when we lived at Broom House, Wangford. We had an old copper, which would have a fire lit under it, to boil water. I was very excited because I had been asked to go to the Lakenheath Maypole celebrations. The condition was you had to wear a white dress. I didn’t have one. What I did have was a dress with a pattern on it, but it did have a white background. So I boiled the copper with this dress in it, attempting to remove the pattern and make it a white dress. It didn’t’ work, so I continued to boil the dress, and when it didn’t work then I would do it again. Then one day I received a parcel. Do you know what was in it? A plain white dress! I could go to Lakenheath. I wasn’t told who sent it to me. Father? Anyway I was so happy I danced all th eway down the main road into Lakenheath and felt like a princess.”