Tom’s Tale
Tom Jones regularly walks down Domas Lane and stops for a chat as he did today – 27th June 2005. He has his own characteristic way of waving with his arm raised and with two or three fingers up above his head.
Tom is now eighty and came to live in Harley with his parents and family in 1935 when he was ten years old. He attended the Village School. The Headmistress/Head Teacher was Miss Lee.
There were two teachers and two classes divided by a screen. The screen was still in the Village Hall in 1974/5 but was later taken to Blists Hill Victorian Museum where presumably it can still be seen.
Tom married Barbara, he told me, in 1967, when he was 42. ‘She has looked after me well’ he said matter of factly.
Tom remembered Betty Blake and said that there was a German POW buried in the churchyard, ‘behind the Divas house in the corner’. He was only 24 and had died in Harley. He didn’t say how.
He also remembered well, two other German POWs who had worked at Rowley’s Farm. One had lived in one of the cottages at the end of the lane.
When a lamb died and had to be buried one of the Germans used to say a prayer, ‘hands together, eyes closed’ over the lamb’s grave. Another German (or was it the same one?) would share his cigarette ration with Tom. ‘I used to smoke then’ he said. He, the German, would take his daily five rationed cigarettes, give Tom two, and break a third into two, so as to share them equally. ‘Not all Germans were bad,’ Tom said. When they brewed tea though, English Tom would always make sure he got the first cup.
German POWs were banned by the Army from using the local pubs, but Herman the German (Tom couldn’t remember his real name) was found one day leaning on the bar in the Eagles in Cressage. The next day a British officer appeared in the field where they were all working and took the offending POW back to camp to cool his heels for a couple of days.
Tom said the Percy Marston was the farmer at Rowley’s Farm and that William Robinson farmed Domas. There were also POWs at New Hall Farm.