Interviewed in 1994 by Ralph Thomson
You can find out more about Nita and see photographs by following this link.

Ralph:  Nita Townsend and Rhona Brown who are sisters.  When did you move to Ludham?
Rhona:  In 1918
Ralph:  Why did you come here?
Rhona:  Father came and bought the practice up here.  He was the doctor of Ludham for some time.
Nita:  When I came up, I was nine years old and we came on the first of July and I remember coming and looking at the garden and looking at the river which was in the garden – our own private river – it was so exciting to me, I thought I’d never lived before.
Rhona:  I was disgusted because I had left my lovely school, that I liked so much, Bournemouth High School – all my friends and everything!  We had to come up because of the war and they were afraid of an invasion or anything if I were left down there so they brought me up here – against my will!
Ralph: It must have been quite a contrast – you two coming up from Cranborne in Dorset to Ludham, which was a far more remote sort of village in those days.
Rhona: It is exactly the same now as it was then.
Nita: Oh it isn’t really!  It was lovely then because I was only nine and I had been rather an unhealthy child and so my father who was a doctor said, ‘she should go wild for a whole year!’ and I thought going wild on that lovely river and in that gorgeous garden.  Ooh, it was heaven!
Ralph:  The social set-up in Ludham would have been very different to what it was in Cranborne where there were so many of the aristocracy living.
Rhona:  Yes, it was!  We had lots of tennis parties and so on which we enjoyed and, of course, the river!  That was a great treat for us in various old boats that we acquired gradually and I went on the water a lot myself.  We had a lot of visitors staying with us; friends and relations.  We used to take them on the water too.  Not frightfully exciting but just nice.
Ralph:  Who was your circle of friends in the Ludham area in those days?
Rhona:  Not many!
Nita:  No, we didn’t have many, did we?
Rhona:  There were the young Boardmans – they were about our age group.
Nita:  Of course, our father was a doctor and in those days a doctor was very, very different from a doctor today.  He had to do it entirely by himself – he made up his medicines himself and he had a radius of about six miles all the way round and very little money and that was the operative word.
Rhona:  Money didn’t bother us.
Nita:  No, money didn’t bother us a hoot but it would have been nice to have had a little bit more.  We had the most terrible old boats because we couldn’t afford more.  I know we had a motor-boat which, when you wound it up with a handle, it used to back-fire and it nearly killed me once – nearly broke my wrist when I was going for a music exam the next day.  But it was just all right.  I remember that very well.  It was very painful!  You see my father, being a doctor, if we went on holiday, in those days you had to pay for the Locum and you had to pay for his board and lodging which made it damned expensive and so, what we used to do, having a house on the river, we used to let the house because we could get quite a good price for it as it was on the river, and one day, while it was let, we had some great friends – Stuart Boardman who lived in the big house up on the hill – and he was very matey with us and he would just walk in the front door – the door was always open in those days – no-one had a key for anything and he came in apparently and, in the hall, we had a gong which we used to ring before a meal.  So he came in and banged this gong, walked into the sitting-room and found some strange people sitting there.  Very odd!  Must have been quite a shock for him.  However, he and these people were mates for ever more.
Ralph:  Your father had quite an interesting old car to travel round his practice in.
Nita:  Oh yes!  He came up in an old Swift which was born in 1906 and it hadn’t got any doors and it was a two-seater – no dicky or anything like that – and if a passenger went out with him, the other person sat where the door would be in a modern car and I often used to sit there and about two years after we came, he went out one day and when he got near Potter Heigham Bridge, I think it was, suddenly the steering absolutely went!  He was left practically falling into the river – not quite, though, luckily and he always said that if I’d been sitting there on the little side bit, it would have gone over.  So it was lucky!
Ralph:  Your father had quite an interesting start to his career as a doctor because he didn’t set off with that in mind.
Rhona:  Yes, he went into an office but that didn’t last very long because he played about a bit but eventually he trained as a doctor.
Nita:  Yes, but while he was there for a very short time, he was in an office of Shipbrokers and he had to do bills of lady with diamonds on and he got a bit tired of these diamonds so he said, ‘Oh, we’ll have a few hearts or spades or something for a change,’ and ...
Rhona: ... boss had him into the office and said – the boss was actually a friend of the family - that was how he had got into the office – ‘I’m afraid, my boy, we haven’t enough scope here for you.’  So, of course, he went and eventually he got what he wanted and was allowed to train at the London Hospital as a doctor.
Nita:  He trained on about 12/6d in those days a week and he hadn’t got any money for anything except just living and he had a landlady who – he always kept a bottle of whiskey just for medicinal purposes – and the lady of the house apparently thought, this is rather nice so when he was out, she used to drink it.  So one day he put a little bit of powder in it – something that made her ‘go quickly’ and she was rather disgusted next day.  She said, ‘What have you done?’  She’d got up early to go to the loo and had stayed there all day.  Anyway, that was the end of her drinking his whiskey.
Ralph:  So from there, he moved on to a practice in Dorset?
Nita :  Well, not quite!  He went to another hospital – they had to ‘walk the wards’ or something they used to do in those days.  We are talking about the turn of the century and he went to Yarmouth Hospital to ‘walk the wards’
Rhona:  One day he wanted to go over to Catfield so he cycled but when he got as far as the First and Last pub, he came off his bike and scraped his knee very badly and so they went in there and there was an old girl in there who said, ‘Oh yes, you must have that washed up!’ and she did it for him and said, ‘I think you’d better go back to the hospital and have that seen to properly.  You go and ask for Doctor Brown!  I hear he’s a very good doctor.  My daughter’s a nurse there.’  So he said, ‘All right, I will!’
Nita:  I hope he did.
Ralph:  After his work in the Yarmouth Hospital he then found his next practice in Dorset?
Rhona:  Yes, someone told him they wanted a doctor down there very badly – they wanted, you know, a decent doctor very badly.  He had two promises of the loan of a practice – he had no money, he had to borrow – one was his brother-in-law but when he decided to marry – my mother and father were going to wait for a bit but then they decided that as he was coming out of nowhere, it would be a good thing to come as a married man and not just a bachelor.  That was the idea and this put the old boy off and he said, ‘Well, if you’re going to get married, I’m not going to... r...
Nita:  ‘... you shouldn’t marry at all at your age... ‘
Rhona:  ...and then someone else said they would and then when they met – I don’t know how they met – my father found that he was a bit batty, he didn’t know what he was doing at all.  So all that fell through and he went down and...
Nita:  They had just one hundred pounds in the bank!  Of course, one hundred pounds in 1902 was quite a lot of money.
Rhona:  My mother got her trousseau out of it, which was probably only her wedding dress or suit and they bought the linen for the house too and all that came out of it and then they sat down and waited until somebody came to see him as a patient.  One day, a Daimler car came into the village – there were no cars about at all then – it was chauffeur-driven and it had a collision with a local bicycle and so they brought the man into the surgery to see my father and apparently he wasn’t very badly hurt but the owner of the car was the Lord of the Manor – he owned most of the village too, the houses and everything like that – and that’s how he met up with Lord Salisbury and after that, he became a patient which was very good for his prestige starting in life.
Ralph:  As a result of that, he obviously met lots more well-connected people in Cranborne
Rhona:  There were an awful lot around there.
Nita:  It was full of nobility, wasn’t it?  Very snobby!
Ralph:  Why did he move from Cranborne to Ludham?
Rhona:  Well, it was a better practice.  He had a family that he was educating then, you know what I mean, and his sisters and his brother lived up here.
Nita:  His father had been the Vicar of Catfield which was only a few miles away, for years and years and years.  He was coming back to where he knew.
Rhona:  He was born in Dilham, anyway.
Ralph:  So he would have taken over the practice from Doctor Gordon, whom you probably knew quite well.
Rhona:  I didn’t take to Doctor Gordon very much.
Ralph:  He lived at Ludham Manor?
Rhona:  Yes, I haven’t get anything bad to say about him but I wouldn’t have liked him for my doctor – he took something out of someone’s eye with a penknife, I’ve been told.  He had this old boy who had something in his eye and he went to the doctor about it and he got out his pen-knife and said, ‘Oh we’ll soon put that right,’ – he was a bombastic person – and he used his penknife without any disinfectant or anything.
Ralph:  So he must have travelled about the village in a pony and trap?
Rhona:  I think he must have.  He didn’t have a car that I know of.  He couldn’t drive a car, That I do know.
Ralph:  I suppose in those days, being in a country-practice would have been very
unlike today with an up-to-date modern surgery and numerous doctors and assistants.
Rhona:  Oh Lord, yes!
Nita:  And he made up all his own medicines – all in bottles and things like that.
Rhona:  And he was frequently called out of Church.
Nita:  And at night, a terrible lot!  In those days, the doctor brought practically all the little babies into the world.  Now they go to hospital but he brought the whole of Ludham into the world in those days and they all came in the middle of the night.  Don’t ask me why but they did!
Ralph:  But then, I suppose, he travelled to other villages like Catfield and Hickling.
Nita:  Oh yes!  At Hickling he had a surgery room where he would go regularly once a week and then he went as far a Horstead – he had a patient at Horstead that he visited every day by request and eventually – she was dying of cancer – she died and he had to send the bill to the executors and he sent a bill for every day, five shillings a visit and he had to go quite a lot of miles to get there and they complained.  I’m glad to say he won.  Can you believe it?
Ralph:  Of course, in those days, there was no such thing as a surgery at your house?
Rhona:  No, people complain about it nowadays but they didn’t have the money we had or anybody else had.  I don’t know what other doctors did round about.  Much the same thing!  You see, they didn’t use the surgery an awful lot because my father went round seeing people.  There’s much more surgery now than the other way round, I think.
Ralph:  In those days, people hadn’t got the transport to get to the doctor’s if they weren’t well.
Rhona:  No, exactly!  I’ve often thought they could have made one of the garages into a surgery – put a window in and made one – I really think they could have done so, perhaps.
Nita:  Well, not in those days!
Rhona:  Well, things were so different then.
Nita:  He went on working – then the war came and he couldn’t give up then and he was getting rather old by then but he had to stay on and he eventually gave up practice in 1948, just before the National Health came in.  He was very pleased to do it.  He said, ‘National Health!  I’m not going to be looked after by the government!  I’m going to do it myself!  He was like that.  He wasn’t going to be bombarded by the National Insurance and all that tomfoolery.
Rhona:  I don’t think he’d have liked to be told what to do.
Nita:  No, he wouldn’t!  He wasn’t made that way!
Rhona:  Things are completely different now – I mean, they just are different.
Nita:  When we first came up on the 1st of July 1918, the First World War was still on and there was practically no cars or anything on the roads – I was only nine and my sister was coming up fifteen and we were allowed to go on bicycles all over the place which I don’t suppose you would be allowed now with all the traffic around.
Ralph:  No, it was an entirely different world.  You could roam freely without the concerns of being run over.
Nita:  Absolutely!  We used to go out in the boat together or separately sometimes, without anybody else.  Nobody bothered.  At the age of nine, you could sail a boat.  It was lovely on the Broads then because there were practically no boats except sailing boats – not an awful lot of them but quite a few – and you could sail with impunity.
Rhona:  We’re talking about after the war now.
Nita:  Well, just after!  Between the wars, we’re talking about - from the First World War towards the Second World War.
Ralph:  Did you know Florence Boardman well?
Rhona:  What, the old girl?  Yes, we knew them very well.  We used to go up there.  All the young people were about my age and we saw quite a lot of them.
Ralph:  What about village people?  Did you get to know village people quite well?
Rhona:  Oh yes!  I knew quite a lot of village people.  If I go up the road now, I think, they’re all in the churchyard.  I don’t know many in Ludham now – I know a lot to talk to but I don’t know who they are.
Ralph:  You knew old Sam Knights, the harness-man?
Rhona:  Oh yes, I remember him quite well.
Ralph:  And his son, Albert?
Rhona:  Certainly!  It was old Albert who apparently said to Leila Goldsmith of Potter Heigham, ‘In Doctor Brown’s time, you could have a doctor, you could have him any time but now you can’t be ill at the weekends and you can’t be ill on Sundays. No, no, you could be ill any time in his time!’  It’s semi-true but I thought it was amusing.  I mean, you do get a doctor – they’re on duty but...
Ralph:  He was very much a character of Ludham, was Albert.  Anyone else you remember from those days?
Rhona:  I remember the Powells from the shop where the butcher is now.  Mrs Powell got shot by the German bullet in the war.  She was killed.  They were having lunch, I think.  Someone said she was passing the mashed potatoes round and this plane came over and the bullet came in the window and got her right in the heart, so they say.  It nearly got her daughter as well.  The daughter had turned round to see what the noise was and so it just scraped across here, didn’t really do her much harm – just a superficial wound.
Ralph:  Did your father have to attend the pilot who crashed here during the war?
Rhona:  No, he didn’t.
Ralph:  I suppose they had a military doctor?
Rhona:  I should think so.  He was called out sometimes when the RAF doctor was off for the day or something.  Every now and again they would call him up and a WAAF would come and take him down there.  He loved that and he was taken down to the Airfield in case anything happened and one day, he had one of these Fortresses come down – a forced landing – and the poor man had both his hands blown off.  Of course, my father did them up and sent him to hospital at once but that was a terrible thing.  I don’t know if that was the pilot but it was one of the crew, anyway.
Ralph:  Do you remember the wartime in Ludham very well?
Rhona:  The Second World War?  Well, we were out of the village but we had a lot of the RAF or the army come and have a bath at our place when they liked – which they loved because they could come and go as they liked and leave their things if they wanted to, and I had a WAAF who literally made it her, you might say, home from home.  She’d leave her MUFTI there and come and go as she liked.  She had a key and I’m still friendly with her.  That was very nice and we enjoyed that.
Ralph:  That was when you were at Red-Roof Farm?  What year did you have that built?
Rhona:  Yes!  Just before the war!  We reckoned if we hadn’t had Taylor’s from Wroxham, they would have put a tarpaulin over it until after the war and wouldn’t have got it done. So we got it done just in time and it was very nice.
Ralph:  You ran a fruit-farm there for many years?
Nita:  Yes!  About twenty years I think.  There was a lovely story about my mother during the war at Riverside – she used to take in the wives and the mothers of the people in the Air force and other things on the Airfield and she had one man – he was the Padre and he used to come in and he was so used to it that he’d just walk up the back stairs and have a bath.  Well, one day – it was one of these old-fashioned baths, a bit mucky looking and she’d had it re-enamelled and it wasn’t quite dry and he walked up the back stairs and had a bath and you can imagine the rest.  We won’t go into details!
Rhona:  Well we didn’t see the rest, did we?  I had an evacuee, too – we only had three bedrooms.  My husband was the billeting officer and he said, ‘We’re going to send you mothers with their small children.’  I said,’ I’m not having a mother here with her small children.  I’ll have the small children or I’ll have the mother but I’m not going to have them together.’  So Ken said, ‘That’s not very useful to me!’  I said, ‘Well, I’m just not going to.  The dear little things can make marks on your walls and I’m not going to have them.’  We went over to Stalham to make the collection and he came out from the Hall and he said, ‘There’s one young mother there and she looks a nice girl and she has a babe in arms.  Would you mind that?’  I said, ‘No!’ and he said, ‘She’s got a nice hat, anyway!’  I always remembered that.  He never bothered about clothes a lot, did he?  So I don’t know why he thought of that but she was a very attractive girl and I said, ‘All right!  I don’t mind that.’  And we got on fine with her.  She was terribly sweet and we saw her again last year in London.  It was very nice having her – she was very helpful.  Then one day, a Naval Officer - he was very attractive too - came to the door and asked if we had room to put him up too and his wife wanted to come down.  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I think we’re full!’ but I thought he’s rather nice!  (LAUGHTER)  So, in the end I said, ‘Well, if I can get my woman to come and help a bit more, we’ll have you.  Otherwise, I don’t think we can manage it.  We’re very full-up.’  Anyway, I asked my woman – I can’t remember her name now – she always said, ‘That’s right!  That’s right!’  I asked her if she could do extra and she said she could.  When I’d fixed it all up, she came and said, ‘My husband doesn’t want me to work anymore.’  I said, ‘So you’re not coming at all?’  She said, ‘No!  Sorry!’  So I’d not only not got extra help, I’d not got her at all!’  Anyway, Thelma, the evacuee, said, ‘Well, can’t we manage between us?’ and she said she’d do a certain amount and we’d do it between us.  So that’s how we managed but sadly he got killed.
Nita:  He walked in his sleep!  He walked in his sleep and he walked to his death in his sleep.
Rhona:  We won’t dwell on that!