Between 1944 and 1947 I went to school at The Spinney in Bookham. At first I was collected and returned in one of the mistresses’ cars. From the age of 6, however, I would walk down the street and catch the bus from St. Lawrence Primary School. I was sent away to boarding school at the age of 7 for the next 11 years, of which the less said the better. But the holidays on the farm were a delight, especially the summer ones. I could wander over the farm and fields wherever I wanted. I would camp out in the orchard, cook my meals over an open fire and sleep in a tent. Beyond the orchard was a large old chalk pit, now in-filled. The slopes were overgrown with elder and old man’s beard. In the middle of the pit was a murky pond, with a diverse ecosystem sufficiently large  to provide a home for a pair of moorhens. On summer evenings I would punt myself around the pond in the lid of an old tin cabin trunk while bats swooped overhead. Happy days! As I grew older I began to work on the farm. I can recall long hot August days following the mower and “stooking” sheaves of oats in the far fields. The sheaves would then be put into thatched ricks. In winter a thrashing machine powered by a steam engine would be hired, along with a gang of gypsies, and the grain separated from the chaff and straw, which would be baled for bedding. Now combine harvesters to do it all in one go.

We farmed some of the fields up Beech Avenue, and I can recall leading cows over Ranmore Common to be sold in Dorking Market. Around 1948-49 my aunt and her husband moved from Middle Farm with part of the herd, to a farm in Devon. In 1953 my brother John made tape-recorded interviews of my grandfather Charles John Curtis, great-uncle William Thomas Curtis and some of the farm workers. This is an invaluable record of life on a Surrey farm in the middle of the last century. My grandfather spoke with a south London accent, having run the dairy at Balham. My great-uncle spoke with a Surrey dialect and the cowman, who had spent some years in Australia, spoke “strine”.

The centre of the village in those days was Church Street. On the corner of the road leading down the hill to the Home Farm there was a general store (Stanton’s), then the post office, the smithy and the snob (a snob is a cobbler and leather worker – snobs were often to be found adjacent to smithies so that horse harnesses could be repaired while their wearers were shod).

In  1955 my grandfather and great-uncle (then aged 76 and 75 respectively) decided that it was time to sell the Home Farm. This was a great sadness for me as I would have loved to have carried on the  family business. Aged only 15 I was obviously too young. The farm was sold to Cow and Gate Ltd (later Unigate). Our family had to move out of the Home Farm. My great-uncle sold us a plot of land next to Glen Lynn (later Haverthorn) that he had bought at the same time as Glen Lynn and used as an orchard and tennis court. On it was built a bungalow called Thornet Wood. Subsequently the Home Farm was gradually run down. One by one the Curtis’s died or moved away from the village. In 1999 the death of Dorothy Joan Foreman (neé Curtis, sometime Selley) marked the extinction of the Curtis family in Effingham, after 64 years residence in Effingham. The bungalow at Thornet Wood was demolished and replaced with a smart executive house.