The Cossack
In the mid-1950s I lived a carefree existence, my world included Brogborough Estate, the playground at the bottom of our garden and from there the cornfield that led to Marson Valley Brickworks with its twenty-five smoke stack chimneys, known locally as the Yard. If anyone wants to know the origins of the crude crop circles or the mysterious tracks that appeared overnight in the cornfield, then they should talk to the kids from that time, they weren’t made by aliens, at least the ones in Brogborough weren’t.
A path paved with tarmac ran through the centre of the cornfield. Another unpaved path ran down the west side of the field from the edge of Brogborough where the B557 Bedford-Bletchley road separated the estate from the CIU Working Men’s Club. This path was unpaved with the cornfield on one side and a hedgerow bordering farmland on the other.
The two paths formed a V, with its apex on a small brick footbridge over a narrow brook, from there they became a single path. These paths were used by workers to get to the Yard, and gave residence of Brogborough access, through the Yard, to Ridgmont railway station and the Cambridge-Bletchley train line.
For us kids, well me anyway, living in an imaginary world of Camelot, knights, pirates and other villains and dangers these tracks had the devastatingly mystical names of ‘the middle path’ and ‘the side path’.
The side path was the more interesting as halfway down there were two large Elm trees before they disappeared in the early 1970s from Dutch Elm Disease. This place was unsurprisingly called ‘The Two Trees’ and was where us kids gathered to share secrets and get up to mischief.
You could, of course, take the side path to The Two Trees, that would have been easy, however, there was a more exciting way to get there. From the back gardens of Highfield Crescent, where I lived, there was a brook; actually, it was a drainage ditch. This ditch was bounded on both sides by almost impenetrable brambles and hawthorn bushes. To the casual observer, it was a single massive long hedge. However, through a hidden portal, you could enter into a dim green arched tunnel lit by beams of filtered sunlight that led down to The Two Trees. To us kids, this was a secret passage that led into a fortress or other times it was a jungle stream in Burma that we covertly passed through in our war with the Japanese. It could sometimes take half an hour to make the one hundred or so yards journey if we stopped to eat the sandwiches our mothers had made for us or listened for intelligence from the ‘enemy’ as they passed along the track above.
For me The Two Trees represented a way into the underworld, but search as I might, I could never find the doorway in their trunks. Their branches grew out over the pathway and one of the more courageous kids, probably Ray Papworth, had climbed up and tied a rope on one of the upper branches. We would climb into the lower branches and launch ourselves out into space, swing out over the path and the edge of the cornfield, and for a few seconds, we knew what it was like to fly like a bird.
One day Johnny Mac was up the tree and was given the all-clear to jump. The look-out, either through negligence or because he thought it would be quite funny, didn’t tell Johnny Mac that his grandfather, Mr Tilley, was approaching the jump-off point on his bicycle. I suppose the look-out imagined Johnny Mac first swooping in front of Mr Tilley and then, as he passed on his bicycle, swooping back behind him on his return flight to the tree. That would have been funny,
unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out that way, and the resulting collision and exchange of momentum caused the bird-man, the bicycle and the cyclist to hit the ground in a unified heap. Understandably, Mr Tilley was not happy with this Robin Hood event and accused his grandson of attempting to kill him for his inheritance. This was of course totally unjustified, although, Mr Tilley did, unusually, have a very nice old, black, Ford Model T at the time.
On another occasion, my friend Les Parker and I were laying flat on the lower branches of one of the elms. From this concealed perch, we could peer, unseen, through the leaves and watch and listen to the conversations of people as they passed underneath. To make this pass time more fun, we would drop small pebbles on the heads of passers-by, nothing injurious, just little pebbles big enough to get their attention. We would lay deadly still as they looked into the tree. Peeping through the leaves we could see them, but they couldn’t see us, it was quite an adrenaline rush. They must have thought it was caused by a bird or other small animal, no one ever realised it was us up in the tree.
That is until one day this large man in an army greatcoat and a Cossack hat, that looked like a piece of rolled-up carpet on his head, came up the path. As he passed under us, we dropped a pebble on him. The man was astute, the pebble hit his hat then his shoulder, from there he watched it fall to the floor. He bent down and picked it up, rolled it around between his thumb and index finger for a moment, then he looked straight up into the tree.
We realised our folly, he must have been over six and a half feet in height, taller than anyone else we had pestered before. If he had stretched up his arm, he could probably have pulled us out of the tree. We looked down into a rugged face that had a nasty scar running from the side of his right eye over his cheekbone to the bottom of his jaw. It looked like a sabre slash, his mouth was drawn down and seemed frozen on that side. The two of us lay petrified and silent on our respective branches. He continued staring up until; finally, his eyes narrowed, and we saw the hint of a sinister grin. He could see us. We’d never been caught like this before, it was unlikely either of us would escape if we tried to get down from the tree. He continued looking at us for a few seconds. Then slowly, he put his right hand into the pocket of his greatcoat and withdrew what appeared to be a short fat wooden stick, but we were mistaken. He hinged open the long blade of a knife which emitted a ‘click’ as the blade locked. This filled us with fear, but he wasn’t finished. He put his left hand into his pocket, we held our breath. When his left hand came back into view, we could see he was holding an apple. He cut the apple in two. What he did next was unexpected, he stretched up a hand with the two pieces of apple. Being transfixed with both fear and surprise, we did not respond. He gestured with his raised hand to take the offering. Not wanting to upset him more than we had done already, we cautiously reached down and took the pieces of apple. With sorrowful eyes, he gave us a nod and a rueful lopsided smile. He closed the knife against his hip, slipped it back into his pocket, and went on his way.
At the time, other than being very much more careful in choosing who I dropped stones onto, I didn’t think much about the event.
However, now in my later years, that man often passes from my memory into my consciousness. He must have been one of the thousands of displaced persons from Europe who washed up in or past through Brogborough and the Yard after the Second World War; Ukrainians, Slavs, Yugoslavs, Slovaks, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians and all the others including Italian and German PoWs who never went home after the war, or those who came to the Bedfordshire brickfields later looking for work, just as my parents had done from Ireland. I often think of that sad, lonely giant and his small act of kindness to two naughty boys. Where was he from, where was his family and did he ever see them again?
It makes me grateful for the blessed life I’ve had. With its sulphurous smoking chimneys, the constant day-and-night clacking of the cable trucks bringing their loads up from the clay-pits to feed the Yards brick kilns, what a magical place Brogborough was to grow up in.