There's very little I can tell you about Hyde House because I can't remember our daily activities aside from learning to swim in the River Piddle, which flowed past the rear of the big house. I also learned to ride horses because there was a donkey (Jane) Puff, and Muffin: more correctly, they were ponies. I was only at Hyde House for one term, and then we moved to Mersham-le-Hatch. Miss Helen's reading to us at night in an attic-like room at the top of the house created an interest in literature that primed me for life. Hyde House had school rooms set up, but I can't remember where they were located.
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Something I look back on with considerable good humour is when in 1937, George Tanner and I went AWOL from Hyde House, boarded a train surreptitiously at nearby Wool station and exited at Waterloo Station in London. We walked miles to Camberwell Green in the cold night air and surrendered to a local Police Station. We avoided the ticket collector by hiding in the toilets. I can't remember who came up from Mersham to collect us but Madame Rendel was not impressed, but most of the boys said it was the best recorded stunt ever in the history of Caldecott Community. George Tanner's father said it was an excellent example of initiative and reliability for two ten year olds.
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[In response to a question:]
I need to set the record straight on the Hyde House AWOL escapade in 1947. George Tanner and I decided to take the day off of classes and hike to Wareham, the local metropolis, to visit a WWII relic of a boat moored in the estuary of the River Frome, a vessel that we'd visited on a class hike a few weeks earlier. We followed the River Piddle SE to where it hooks up with the main Wareham-Dorchester highway. When the tide is low, it's possible to board the boat and tinker with the kind of stuff that fascinates 10-year-olds like me. Somehow or another, we took the Dorchester road to return to Hyde House instead of the Bere Regis turnoff and wound up in Wool. There was a train standing in the station, so we jumped board. I don't remember any of this, but we finished up at Waterloo station in London. When the ticket collector made his rounds, we hid in the bathroom until all was clear. The next thing I remember is Camberwell Green about five miles from Waterloo station. I believe it began to rain at night, so we went into a police station and surrendered. They gave us food and warm blankets while they got in touch with Hyde House telling us that someone would be here tomorrow to pick you up. I don't remember who came to get us or remember the journey back. George Tanner's father apparently told George when he heard about the escapade, that it was "a good example of initiative and reliability." That, I might add, is not how members of Hyde House viewed our AWOL trip to London. Just as well the ticket collector didn't catch us because he'd have ejected us at one of the stops along the way, where we'd have been charged by the Southern Railway in the local juvenile court. I always look back on that experience with a great deal of humour. So you see, we didn't go to Hyde House on the AWOL trip, but moved there at the same time as everybody else.
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We swam, in shorts, to the top right of the picture, while the senior boys would "shoot the rapids" over the weir in an aircraft type exterior thin metal fuel tank cut in half. You can see the footpath from the rear of the house, and we would start out hiking along that trail adjacent to the River Piddle. There were some tributary feeder streams along the way that contained trout observed in very clear, shallow water.
When we moved to Mersham-le-Hatch Miss Travers, the boys' custodian, told us that the house burned to the ground, but questions on this matter failed to confirm her claim.
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Although I was only at the Dorset location for a few months, the bucolic Dorset ambiance of Hyde House has stayed with me for over 70 years. I much preferred Hyde House to Mersham-le-Hatch. Those country walks with the ponies through unpopulated Dorset countryside and lonely trout streams after the bombing of London and its suburbs were a great tonic for the soul. I was dismayed when we moved to Mersham-le-Hatch because at Hyde House we had a weirpool in our back yard and I'd just learned to swim: and that makes all the difference. There was a boating pond at Mersham-le-Hatch a few hundred yards from the rear entrance, but it was a lake filled with weed. Nobody even tried to swim in the lake, so we hiked to the Kentish Stour and swam there. One of the positives of Caldecott at the time was our sporting acclivities such as cross country running, the high jump, etc. and horse riding in gymkhanas. Hyde House and its environs, it seems, found a way into my DNA.
The only person I can remember fishing in the boating lake was Roy Dick (Allen). I saw the fish he caught and now believe it was a carp of about 6 pounds.