Crockham Hill September 2023 Newsletter - Flipbook - Page 7
of the Royal Oak into the celebration bonfire, emerging rapidly, singed
but sober.
My father, REME, was in India, my mother a Red Cross ambulance
driver and my sister and I in Scotland. We were called into assembly,
told 'the Allies have landed in Normandy' and sent back to the
classroom without so much as a half holiday.
Reprinted from my 50th Anniversary report in the Church Newsletter
The Old Youth Hostel
Paul Cosh
I appreciate you have been able
to read about Squerryes Court
and Trevereux in recent issues
of this Newsletter but Crockham
Hill House also has some tales to
tell. As most of you know,
Crockham Hill House had been
owned by the YHA since the
war, I don’t think it recovered
from the Canadian soldiers
barracked there. It became
known as the Youth Hostel and
when that closed it became The
Old Youth Hostel and that is still
the easiest way to get a delivery
or to describe it to a taxi driver.
When we first arrived in January
1993, we found a little old man
huddled up in one of the
downstairs rooms. He was tearing up the herring bone patterned
floor tiles one at a time to fuel the only fire in the house. Our local
“knight who writes” suggested that perhaps the poor man was
feeling a bit parquet. The poor chap seemed to have been forgotten
by the YHA and we helped him find a nursing home in Eastbourne.
The relocation trip was very moving with the old man in a very 50s
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