“Do you shoot at all, Paul?”
Denis, I’ve never shot a live animal in my life.”
“Well, there’s not much bloody point shooting a dead one.”
Touché.
In the early 1980s, I taught History for four mainly blissful years at Rendcomb College, a small school in the south Cotswolds. Gloucestershire’s postcard villages – Bourton-on-the-Water and all that crush – lay some 20 miles away but from my rooms on the top floor of the old mansion which housed the school’s main building I could look across the Churn Valley, west to the village of Woodmancote, or north to Elkstone, where the poet PJ Kavanagh lived.
It was a good half-hour’s walk to The Bathurst Arms, and Cirencester was another five miles distant. There was an Irish invasion every March and the other Cheltenham Festival was an even greater delight. I was a town boy who had fetched up in the middle of the countryside. Perhaps it was not surprising that those four years changed my life.
But of course, it is people who really make the difference. For a school that had around 260 pupils and admitted girls in the sixth form Rendcomb turned out some good cricket teams. That it should have been so was partly due to facilities: “Up Top”, the playing fields, accommodated about five matches on good pitches with some ease.
Denne historien er fra July 2020-utgaven av Cotswold Life.
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Denne historien er fra July 2020-utgaven av Cotswold Life.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Gloucestershire After The War
Discovering the county’s Arts and Crafts memorials of the First World War
THE WILD SIDE OF Moreton-in-Marsh
The days are getting shorter but there’s plenty of reasons to be cheerful, says Sue Bradley, who discovers how a Cotswolds town is becoming more wildlife-friendly and pots up some bulbs for an insect-friendly spring display
Mr Ashbee would approve
In the true spirit of the Arts & Crafts Movement, creativity has kept the Chipping Campden community ticking over during lockdown
The Cotswolds at war
These might be peaceful hills and vales, but our contribution to the war effort was considerable
Trust in good, local food
‘I’ve been following The Country Food Trust’s activities with admiration since it was founded’
Why Cath is an open book
Cath Kidston has opened up almost every nook and cranny of her Cotswold idyll in a new book, A Place Called Home. Katie Jarvis spoke to Cath ahead of her appearance at this year’s Stroud Book Festival STROUD BOOK FESTIVAL – THIS YEAR FREE AND ONLINE: NOVEMBER 4-8
From the Cotswolds to the world
Most people know that the Cotswolds have featured in a fair few Hollywood movies and TV series.
The Wild Hunt
In search of the legendary King Herla in the Malvern Hills
Fighting spirit amid the flowers
Tracy Spiers visits Warwick, a beautiful town that is open for business and ready to welcome visitors
Final journey
Cheltenham author and volunteer on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Steam Railway (GWSR), Nicolas Wheatley, recounts the fascinating story of funeral trains