Melford Memories (50th Anniversary Edition)

Book excerpt: A classic East Anglian memoir describing a vanished world of rural customs and culture with wit, intelligence and freshness of observation, now in a 50th anniversary edition with a new foreword by Ashley Cooper. Born a stone's throw from the church and educated at the village school, Ernest Ambrose was brought up to respect God, his parents, Long Melford's two local squires and the rector. That didn't mean rural Suffolk life in the nineteenth century was quiet. Poaching was rife, the excesses of the Whitsun fair were an annual highlight, and young Ernie's friends risked their necks to master the new-fangled 'high bikes', or penny farthings. He witnessed the legendary street-battle when factory workers from neighbouring Glemsford stormed the village, the violence only quelled by a bayoneted militia. With the rest of his generation, he went off to war in Flanders. And, as the church organist in another nearby village, he heard at first hand the accounts of the hauntings that would make Borley Rectory a nationwide media sensation. Looking back in his tenth decade, he describes a vanished world of rural customs and culture with wit, intelligence and a freshness of observation that have made Melford Memories – now reissued on the 50th anniversary of its first publication – a much-loved Suffolk classic.