Tower and Town, June 2019 (view the full edition)St Martins (part III of an oral history)In 1931 when I was four years old I moved with my parents and Jimmy the cat to 36 St Martins and still retain many memories of our time there, especially of the big garden which Jimmy and I loved. On the opposite side of the road, a few doors west of the Queen's Head pub was a small sweet shop where I used to spend my Saturday pocket money. It was run by a Mrs Wiltshire whose husband was the outrider for R Mundy and Son, the boot and shoe retailer in the High Street. Mr Wiltshire's job was to drive around the local villages with their populations of poorly paid farm labourers and collect orders for footwear which he would deliver and collect the money for; most of the items were paid for in weekly instalments by the old "shilling a week" system. Further along the road at the bottom of Blowhorn Street was a bakery belonging to a Mr and Mrs Baden and their grown-up children. My father, Arthur Victor Cobern, was a self-employed painter and decorator and sign writer, in partnership with his aunt's husband Ernest Ponting who ran the business of Ponting and Co from their home at 7 The Green. During the summer of 1932 my father was rushed to Savernake Hospital with a perforated gastric ulcer. Thanks to Dr Wheeler's skill on the operating table, his life was saved but he had to remain in hospital for six weeks after the operation. After Dr. Wheeler retired, his son Dr Bob took over the practice which later became amalgamated with the Maurice practice. Dr Bob died in 1978 from cancer. A few years before, a down-and-out called "Swannee" Norris was tramping about the country looking for work and was on his way from Bristol to Marlborough, when he collapsed in the Bath Road from sheer starvation, as he had not eaten for several days. A passing motorist picked him up and took him to Savernake Hospital where Matron Lavington nursed him back to health. When he recovered she gave him a job as handyman at the Hospital and he found lodgings on the Green with a widow whom he eventually married! He was very friendly with my father and every morning while my father was in the hospital he would call in on his way to work to see if there was anything he could take up to him. At this time I had a passion for collecting the black and orange striped caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth and one morning I was sitting on the steps leading up from the basement kitchen to the garden feeding them with groundsel, when Swannee arrived. He was wearing hob nailed boots on his rather large feet and fearful that he would squash my beloved pets I cried out "Oh, Mr Norris, mind my caterpillars". Luckily he stopped in time and with a look of complete horror on his face said "Just look at all they maggots". Muriel Cobern |