All my life I have kept stock on the hill, as my father did before me. Before the war, when the quarries were still in operation, our sheep used to lie down on the railway tracks and they were quite often killed or injured.
If we found one injured, we’d carry it home to get it better. Father had two poles, wooden ones, with some sacking in the middle to make a bed. And he and Mum would carry the sheep down, and I used to trot along by them, just a little girl. We’d carry the injured sheep down the rides that Lord Boyne, the landowner, used to drive his carriages round.
When the quarries finished in the 1930s and 40s, we had to look out for the great pools of black tar that they just left up there. When it was hot weather we used to throw sticks down to stop the sheep running on it, because the tar would melt. We had a pony in it once and quite a few times we’d find sheep stuck in it, and they’d be dead.
Most of the war we didn’t have too much bother, although there were many planes that came down on the hill. Once a Lancaster bomber crashed up on the top of Abdon Burf. That night I’d gone down to a dance in the village. When we were told there was a plane that had come down, I rushed off on my pony and met some police looking for the spot. They followed me but not carefully enough because one of them – a sergeant – slipped into one of the old mine-pits at the top of the hill, right into the water. Up there it was terrible, there was this blazing plane, and all of the crew lost their lives.
But there was another time – in November 1944 – when I helped rescue somebody. I was 22. It was a foggy, rainy day, and I was gathering up ponies from
the hill. I couldn’t get them to go their normal way home, over Hay Meadows, and it was nearly dark when I got home. When I arrived, Father said, ‘There’s supposed to be an airplane come down up there, you have to go back’. I was exhausted, and the horse too. Even so I went back up, but I couldn’t find the plane. We rang the Home Guard, but they said it would be hopeless to come at that time of night.
So I went up again at daybreak, and there it was, the crashed Wellington bomber, still smouldering on the Hay Meadows. It had trailed along the Common and left two dead bodies. I looked under a wing and there was a man there still alive. He’d got broken legs, a damaged side and his face was charred. I went and called my father who was looking out for me half way down the hill, and he quickly went to fetch a flask and a little whisky which we took back up the hill. Then Father went to summon the police, and the airforce came and carried the man down in a Landrover.
I had a lovely time growing up on the hill. Best of all I liked riding horses, breaking them in – I used to love the rough work even when they were a bit naughty. I started riding when I was about two, with Dad up on the hill fetching sheep, sitting in front of him. And then he’d just leave me on the horse coming down the hill, with the stirrups dangling and the straps rolled up so you could get your feet in them. Dad would walk down the slope behind, following the sheep.
Going up on the common now that all the quarries are deserted doesn’t feel different but you sort of feel older, because looking back you think: that was a while ago.