Interviewer
Now, Station Road in Marsham; is this near the actual station?
David Stretton
Yes it is. That’s now called Rowlesbury Road (?),
and the gentleman you see there standing against the wall is near Mr. Tungen’s (?) shop,
and the horse and cart is going towards the railway station.
And the station closed in 1959, and what I can remember of that, the station master Mr. Temple let us all go down there when the last train come through,
put us all a ha’penny on the railway line, and the last train went over it, they have flares, quite a big occasion for the village.
John Bradfield
I started to grow mushrooms, and they got bigger and bigger sort of thing,
but we used to send them out to all sorts of markets across the country,
but at that time we had a railway line that went through Martham. And you’d have a train every lunch time, with a different truck for every market there was. London, Covent Garden, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow as well. So in those days you used to put the produce on when the train came through, about 1 o clock, and that used to go round North Orford all the way through to King’s Lynn, through to all the major cities in the country. Of course, that was very nice when we had a railway!
But when that closed we had to take them all by road.
Interviewer
Can you tell me a little bit about the gatehouse and what your parents did?
Zena Welton
Well, my dad was a platelayer, so he worked on the railway, and mum looked after the gates to open it for the traffic. Not the trains, she opened it for the traffic.
And it was a wooden bungalow, but we didn’t have any electricity, we didn’t have water laid on, no gas or anything like that. But it was a very warm little place, and we had plenty of lovely cool fires. And so I lived there until I was 24.
This is a picture of my mum and dad, and they are walking beside the line, picking up little tiny pieces of coal. Mum’s got a handful there, what’s dropped off the engine.
This is dad with the men, working beside the railway, and that’s us sitting on the gate. This is where mum used to hang her washing, by the railway.
Interviewer
Right next to the railway?
Zena Welton
Yes, you used to get soot…she’s hanging her washing right by the railway, near the house.
When the herring season was on, you know, there were thousands, not just hundreds, there were thousands of Scotch girls, would come all the way down to Yarmouth.
There seemed to be one train after another, full of these girls. And you could see, there was hardly any room for them, they had to sit on their cases in the corridors.
There was one night when mum and dad were on holiday, and we had another friend stay with us, and we heard *beep beep beep!*, looked out of the bedroom window—this was about half past eleven at night—and there was an engine, we called them rogue engines, when they were on their own; they would come down from King’s Lynn or wherever they came from, and they had to come back to Yarmouth, and nobody knew they were coming. So of course all the gates were closed against them. So the engine was right up against the gates, y’see. So we went out in our nightdresses and our coats, and we opened the gates for them. They went *woop woop!* and away they went *laughs*.
Interviewer
So the train called you to open the gates?
Zena Welton
Yes!
Freda Bradfield
There was a lovely convenient train, everybody went on that, the five to five, til Yarmouth, to go to the pictures or whatever. In the summer, there was seven live shows on in Yarmouth, all the theatres had live shows; and the favourite thing was catch the five to five, and go for a walk along the front, and then go to one of the shows at one of the piers, and then catch the eleven o clock train back home.
And in the summer we had the Tantivvy,
which stopped at all the beach haunts, so you could take your picnic, and get off at Scrappy Beach and Cayster Beach and California…
Zena Welton
Well it was a good train that, because it came just from Yarmouth to Potter Heigham And that would stop at the holes, and that was purposely for the camps. So you’ve got Cayster Camp, Scrappy Camp, California Camp, Hemsey Camp, and there were thousands that came on that little Tantivvy, see. They went to Potter Heigham, they went there for the boats, I suppose, people used to go there. Yes, that’s as far as I think that used to go. We came once, because we’d been to the Regatta at Potter Heigham. And we knew the guard on it you see, and we came home late at night, about ten o clock, and they gave us, we got off at our bungalow, and we thought it was wonderful, wonderful that we could get off there…
