Day 31: London to Hadleigh

Day 31:    London to Hadleigh,  Monday  January 10^th

From today, all our England travels will be by car, which we have picked up in Chelmsford, a major town about 40km out of London.  To get to Chelmsford, we took the train, making our last journey on the underground.   Because we have two large suitcases plus three smaller bags, we wanted to avoid peak hour – I’ll write more about peak hour later.   Therefore we left our hotel at 6am and were just arriving at Chelmsford as dawn was breaking at 8am.

From there we drove to Hadleigh, the birth place and childhood home in Suffolk of Roger’s great-grandmother,  Maryann Nunn.  We fairly easily located Duke St, which according to the 1841 census, is where the family lived.  Unfortunately no street number is listed on the census, but there are several very old Tudor style houses in the street still, so we imagined the family living in one of them. 

Hadleigh was, in past centuries, an important market town and we can see from the distance across which the old houses are spread, that it was quite a large town.  Many of the old houses remain, which gives the town a very quaint atmosphere.  It is still a  very substantial town with quite a few high quality shops behind the quaint exteriors.

We located St Mary’s church which we imagine would probably have been the Nunn family’s church. (Pictured at top of this page)    The door was open so we went in.  It’s very beautiful, with a glorious stained glass window at the front – done in the 1870s so Maryann, who arrived in Australia in 1853 wouldn’t have seen it.  It’s obviously still an active church:  there are Sunday School tables at the side and other signs of it being quite an active church still.  Of course we scoured the church graveyard for Nunn graves, especially Maryann’s father Samuel, but to no avail.  (We don’t expect her mother would have been buried here as she emigrated to America in 1854 with one of her other daughters. ) Unfortunately so many of the gravestones are unreadable, with moss and lichen having grown over them or in some cases, they are covered in ivy.  Even stones that are relatively recent – 1960s for example, have badly deteriorated, much more so than those in our cemeteries.  I guess this is a result of much harsher weather.   We looked and looked but not a Nunn grave did we see – not even a more recent Nunn.  We can only conclude that if they are there, their gravestones are some of the unreadable ones.  Unfortunately the library was closed, along with many other things, on Mondays, so we were unable to get any further information to give us clues.

There is a more general cemetery in Hadleigh also and around 3 o’clock, when it was very cold and windy, we spent half and hour or so scouring that one too, with similar result.

We had tea at one of the local pubs and are now sitting in our cosy B&B which is in a newer part of Hadleigh.  It is just delightful – a converted garage (as in the garage of a house), so is completely detached from the house.  There is a beautiful little garden just outside our door and I can see that it would be wonderful in summer.  The hosts are a very nice couple a bit younger than us and they have made it a very cosy place to spend the night.   She has just been up with a mountain of croissants for our breakfast and there is a container of cornflakes for Roger, so we are both happy.

We have a big day of travel tomorrow.  We will end up at Asfordby (Heazlewood country) but will go via Blunham in Bedfordshire which is Peck territory.   We hope to have more luck with gravestones in those villages.

Before we get too far away from London, let me comment on the Underground rail system.  Could we please take up a collection to send our new minister for transport to London so we can just have a carbon copy of their system???   It is just so user friendly,  the trains are super frequent –the longest we waited for any train was three minutes, and that was on weekend days – and everything is so well signed,  you can’t help but get it right.  The best thing is their ‘Oyster card’, the London version of Myki, but guess what?  - it works!!!   We bought one each for 5 pound, loaded them up with 25 pounds and it was so easy to just scan on at the beginning of each journey and scan off at the end.  We then just used the train and buses willy nilly for two days.  When we handed them back in thismorning, not only did the price of our cards get refunded, but also the unused credit!!

Not all is rosy on the underground however.  The squash onto the trains is unbelievable -even worse than Rome.  It was bad enough on Saturday and Sunday so what is it like on week days we wonder?  This is why we were determined not to be travelling at peak hour with our luggage thismorning.  Anyone who has experienced the squash on Melbourne trains in the last couple of years – these are only baby squashes!!