Bluntisham was my father’s home village so he was returning home when we moved there in 1947, just at the time of the floods. I was five and attended the village school, which my father and his six brothers and sisters had also attended. We had visited Bluntisham for holidays and I remember waking early, in my grandparents’ home, in Rectory Road, to the sound of the milk train.
In those days Bluntisham was a village of orchards and as teenagers my brother, Peter, and I would earn pocket money during the school holidays, picking fruit.
At the age of 11 I started at Ramsey Abbey Grammar School. We went there on the school bus, passing Cromwell’s statue every day in St Ives market Place. The Meeting House, as the chapel was called, featured largely in our lives, providing a social life as well as Sunday Services.
When I was twenty, I started at Rawdon College, near Leeds, training for the Baptist Ministry. Later I became a Minister of the United Reformed Church. My parents left in the mid-sixties and since then I’ve lived in several different places but Bluntisham has a fond place in my memory.