Up The Lane

The lane leading up to Feckenham Road was unadopted, which  broadly meant that nobody wanted the expense of taking it over and having it properly surfaced. Either side was overgrown hawthorn hedges, broken only by the occasional rickety wooden gate. The lane had evolved from a deep rutted carter's track, to become an even deeper rutted cart track. The only rolling it had was when the big Midland Shires Farmers two cylinder two stroke Commer Diesel drove down to deliver a load of feed. Occasionally, Henry would drive up and down on ’Spade Lugs’ when the other Fordson wouldn’t start. This had the effect of scuffling up the cobbles in the bottom of the ruts, so that the winter storms gouged them even deeper. The residents of Marlpit Lane did their best by slinging rubbish and ashes into the ruts, but it was like trying to fill a lake with a teaspoon! The milk float being of narrow gauge, either balanced on top of the middle mound, or struggled up whichever rut it had slid into. The metal crates jangled and jingled as the bottles danced around.

Jean Smith helped on the milk round, as well as doing cleaning, for Mrs H. Every evening the milk float was driven into the garage for its nightly charge. The following morning it was brought down the slope from the garage to be filled up with yesterdays milk from the dairy, (and this mornings if you were lucky). On this particular morning Jean being off sick, I volunteered to bring the float round to the front. In those days instruction was usually by trial and error, and what you picked up on the way. Now for the uninitiated as I was prior to this time, the controls of these infernal contraptions were pretty basic. A sort of handle bar lever operated the Bowden cable which drove the thing forwards or backwards. Gingerly edging the half loaded truck down the steep incline from the garage, it suddenly gained speed as I froze! How I managed to keep the thing upright was a miracle to this day. There was a braking system which was engaged by bearing down on the steering handle, but of course no-one had bothered to tell me this. From that day onwards, I steered clear of the thing altogether. The excess milk from the farm would be collected in churns and taken away by the local dairy for processing or whatever.

Later Jean would deliver the milk on the electric float whilst Raymond used the newly acquired Bedford van, a product of the fifties with useful sliding side doors ideal for the task in hand. Shame it always stank of stale milk!. The weekend milk was later delivered by Philip Fenemore in the Bedford van. Alan Clifford later took on the Bedford van round leaving Raymond to work alongside Jean.

Every day at around six in the morning at the top of the lane, the still of the early morning was broken as Quinney's lorry dropped off crates of pasteurised and full cream milk enabling Raymond to offer a choice to his customers. The crashing and banging of the crates and churns was horrendous.

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