Danger of 20mph Zone in Liddington
There’s been talk of reducing the minimum speed through Liddington from 30mph to 20mph. Most villagers welcome it. My concern is for Kay Archer.
She’s been getting around just fine with her walking stick. But when she gets into her Suzuki Carry Van she morphs into Stirling Moss. Visualise her with racing glasses and helmet, a cool driver, taking the corner at The Village Inn on to her driveway without missing a beat. 20mph? I don’t think so.
Kay is an Essex girl. She came to Liddington when her father worked for the RAF building runways. Father built the house she lives in now. The original Bell Inn was where her garage is. Kay’s one regret is that the current pub was renamed The Village Inn. Perhaps Adam, the landlord, might change it back to The Bell.
Kay married Basil Archer from 17 The Street in 1959 and they had two sons, Ted and Adam.
She had a long career from operating a cement mixer for her father, to working in the Post Office and NHS hospital exchanges, retiring when she was 75.
Her fingerprints are on building the Village Hall and sewing the Millenium map of Liddington. And she has stories. Recently she engaged me with photo albums of village life that Basil had collected. We’ll digitise them for the village web site and hopefully record the memories of all those activists.
And Kay is still involved, one of the stalwarts for Village Hall events, welcoming villagers at the door, arm-wrestling them to buy raffle tickets, ever-so quiet, persistent, very much-admired. She is Liddington’s national institution.
This poem, published some years back, captured a moment that was a tough loss for Kay, the passing of her husband, Basil. It was a morning in 2015 on a winter shoot. A flock of swans flew over, their sad honking had an inauspicious, spine-tingling effect.
Nothing Ever Hurts You ForeverThat winter day on Way Sands the professional photographer clicked away but said nothing. A shade in our peripheral edge willed us to swivel to his eye away from the quick of partridge to a slow canal boat behind us and later again to a fast train, and later still to the wild swans with their ponderous wing-span honking a terse goodbye captured forever in a photograph taken over the ploughed ruts, over the half-leaved winter trees heading early morning into low sun around the hour that Basil died. If we’d known we would have seen them as a cortege carrying his life, doffed our hats to a happy re-birth before trying to find our own balance, feet mud-sucking the sodden earth. |
