Mr Crook's van.
Click to hear sound clip of Mr Crooks (b.1915) recorded in 1986. Ref: 939, LO/294/245
Interviewer: Can you remember moving?
Mr Crooks: Yes, I can remember coming on one of these old lorries. We rode here with the furniture, and we got here and, well, we didn’t know where we’d come to. We’d come out in the wilds a bit. We’d left the town – we had electric, we had everything in the town – we came out here and there was no lights, so we had to buy a, lighting a paraffin lamp for the first light, and we’ve still got that, same as the day it was bought.
Interviewer: What about water?
Mr Crooks: We’d got water because Quorn Hunt kennels was, came in 1905 up the road, and they had water laid on, and this farm was built in 1906, so we’d got water and that’s all we had got.
Interviewer: Did that actually come into the kitchen?
Mr Crooks: Yes, we’d just got one tap in the kitchen, and then the first bathroom we fitted that up ourselves.
Interviewer: When was that?
Mr Crooks: That was in bedroom, but we fitted that up from the old copper in the kitchen that we used to boil the water in, and then we had a pump upstairs, and we used to go up there and then, oh, about 19… it’d be 1930 somewhere there, we had a bathroom fitted properly with a plumber. There was nothing, a very small village when we came here.
Interviewer: Barrow?
Mr Crooks: Barrow on Soar. Everyone knowed everyone, ‘cos we used to have to go down for threshing men, threshing days. Used to go down and get some help two or three days threshing. Wanted 12 men when you were threshing, day’s threshing there’d be 12 of us.
Interviewer: Did you find that you fitted into the village alright straight away?
Mr Crooks: Well, they did accept us at the finish. They always thought, they still think I’m a Barrow lad, but I’m not a Barrow lad, I’m a Loughborough lad.
©EMOHA
