After a few years, they rented out the bungalow and moved to London, where Robin’s parents became Licencees at a pub called The Monster in Pimlico. (The pub is no longer there as it was flattened during the Blitz). However Robin had a number of illnesses whilst they were in London and so they moved to Ramsgate, where Robin’s mother ran a drapers shop and his father took a job as an insurance clerk. When the War came along, Robin’s father went into the Naval Medical Service and he spent most of the War in the Naval Hospital at Durban.

Robin’s mother decided to move back to Badgers Mount with Robin as this seemed less vulnerable, but nevertheless Robin can remember seeing a lot of the Battle of Britain above them and lots of doodlebugs. In 1944, when he was 10, his mother sent him to stay with an Aunt who lived at Ramsey, in the Fens, which seemed a safer area. He spent a lot of time with his cousin who was into making model aircraft and this started Robin off in model making. There were not many kits around in those days, so many models were made from scratch.

After a while, the Germans began launching flying bombs at London from aircraft over the Wash, so Robin’s mother decided he may as well go back home to Badgers Mount. He went to Vine Road primary school at Green Street Green and got a scholarship to Bromley County Grammar School in 1945, just as the War ended. He continued with his model making, progressing from rubber powered models to diesel engined models and, when he left school, his enthusiasm for aircraft in general led him to get an engineering apprenticeship at the De Havilland Aircraft Company in 1951, which meant a lot of studying for H.N.C. and corporate membership of professional societies. He lodged at Hatfield and St Albans but travelled home at the weekends.

When Robin’s five year apprenticeship ended he became liable for National Service but, because of his occupation, he was able to get a two year deferment. He then decided to take a three year short service commission in the R.A.F. rather than do the basic two year National Service. Looking back, he says this was a very interesting three years, which stood him in good stead in later years. As an officer, he had training in personnel management which he says was better than the subsequent training he received within industry.

He met Pat Macknelly when she came straight from school to work as a technical assistant in the Wind Tunnel Department and they married in 1960. Because the R.A.F. were liable to move you around anywhere at any time, they bought a new residential caravan and lived next to the R.A.F. Station in Watton, Norfolk.

At the end of three years the R.A.F. wanted Robin to stay on and, although he was tempted, he decided to leave. In the R.A.F. he felt that he did not have the freedom to direct his own career; they told you what you were going to do, where and when. He therefore left the R.A.F. in 1962 with the princely sum of £425 gratuity payment, which was a lot of money then! Robin and Pat moved their caravan to a site on Whipsnade Downs, next to the Zoo. After much deliberation at a time when the aircraft industry was going through a depression, Robin decided to take a job at Hatfield where he previously worked and he returned to the Wind Tunnel Department of the Design Division.

One lasting memory Robin and Pat have is of the winter of 1963 - one of the coldest we have had - when the only protection they had from the elements was their caravan on the Dunstable Downs. At the height of the bad weather, only one water tap on the whole site was still unfrozen. They had a solid fuel stove inside the caravan, but there were occasions when the temperature on the ceiling was 90 F but the carpet was frozen to the floor! As if that wasn’t bad enough, Robin was commuting to Hatfield everyday on a motor bike.

They were saving hard towards buying a house but soon came to realise that house prices were beginning to rise faster than their savings and so they decided to do something about it. They very soon found out that their ideas of a nice modern bungalow in a wooded, secluded setting were way out of reach. The only way to get a big garden and something of character was to look for something old. They looked in all the local papers and spotted a cottage in Puckeridge which was worth a visit. They came to Buntingford in October 1963 to the only estate agents at that time, W.H. Lee, and saw Mrs Bailey, who was running the office on a part time basis. When they said they had come to view the Puckeridge property, she said: "I’ll give you the key, but you won’t like it." Instead, she took them round to see Pigs Nose, which she said was much more what they wanted - and of course she was right!

The house was very different then. It was habitable but the rooms were tiny and, although the back garden was overgrown, it was large and was completely safe for children and pets. Robin could see the potential. They bought it and moved in the following February. There were four rooms downstairs and two large central back-to-back fireplaces. There were two spiral staircases set inside cupboards which led to the bedrooms, and to get from one bedroom to the other you had to go down one of the staircases and up the other! Robin says the house was originally one room, dating from the second half of the sixteenth century. There was no upstairs and Robin suspects it may have started out as a small barn. Over the centuries the chimney stacks were added and the building extended. It was used as the Poor House until some time in the eighteenth century, and it then became two dwellings until some time in the 1890s, when it reverted back to being a single dwelling.

The middle part of the front garden of the house had been used by Harry and Rene Lees (who lived in No. 15 Garden Road) to grow vegetables, as they had been acting as unofficial caretakers for the property. Even though Harry was over 80 and had been told not to do anything strenuous, he asked Robin if he could continue to cultivate the front garden in return for a supply of surplus vegetables, which Robin readily agreed to. The hard work obviously did him no harm because he lived on into his nineties.

A month after Pat and Robin moved in came the Spring of 1963 and with it came the ground elder and convolvulus (bind weed), which appeared all over the whole garden. They struggled with it as best they could but could make no real impact until in 1969 their neighbour in 17 Garden Road, Fred Stoten, retired (at the age of 70!) and came as part-time gardener at 7/6d. an hour. Over the course of the next two or three years he worked hard in the garden, clearing it, digging, planting new privet (which he set as cuttings) and created the whole garden from scratch. Only a couple of the original trees are left but, where old trees were removed, new ones have been planted.

Pat and Robin had a son, Robin in 1965, and their daughter Anna was born in 1966.

Robin’s job kept him away from Buntingford during the week, and his weekends were usually spent getting the house sorted out or working in the garden so he did not have much time to get involved with village life. Not so with Pat, who seemed to know everyone!Robin recalls that for many years he was simply known to everyone as "Mr. Pat". Pat joined a young womens club which was run by the Church and for a while she helped at the Health Centre on a part time basis with baby weighing. For about 13 years she worked as a clerical assistant for Don Kingsley in the N.F.U. office and so got to know a lot of people in Buntingford. She was also a member of Aspenden Womens Institute and now Buntingford Womens Institute. Latterly she was a reading mum at Layston School.

On the weekend of the 14th-15th September 1968 there was very heavy rain. It rained continuously for 48 hours. On the Monday Robin got up to go to work as usual. When he opened the curtains, he noticed that the River had flowed over the footpath but he merely thought "Oh, that’s unusual". Half an hour later he realised the water had risen by six inches and they started to get worried. Between them, Pat and Robin got all the downstairs furniture out, took up the carpets and turned off the power just as the water started to come in through the front door at 8.30 a.m. There was nothing they could do to stop it. Three or four feet of water came in, reaching up to the level of the window sill. The children went to a neighbour, Ivy Pigg, who lived in Riverside, and Robin and Pat could only stand and watch until the water subsided about midday.

The house was uninhabitable. Pat and the children went to stay in Cornwall with Pat’s brother and Robin took a week off work to start cleaning up. He bought another caravan and moved the rest of the family back, and they stayed there for three years whilst Robin got half the house back to a habitable condition. During the floods, plaster had fallen off the wall and they realised that the house was in very poor structural condition and had no foundations. The money from the insurance claim, plus an extension to their mortgage enabled them to get the basic structural work done. After three years they were able to move back into part of the house but it was a further nine years before the rest of the work was completed.

Robin says that when his house got flooded, they didn’t think about who was to blame. He gets rather cross these days when he reads about people who get flooded and all they can think about is “compensation”. It never occurred to Robin and Pat to think that way. It happened and they just got on with clearing up the mess. There was a lot of help from the neighbours. The Reverend Ken Blythe, Vicar of St Peter’s Church, was very supportive and the Church gave everyone who was flooded £5, whether or not they were regular churchgoers. His neighbour Fred Stoten was a great help and Robin, Pat and the children became very fond of him and his wife Dorrie. Dorrie had been the Licencee of the White Hart Pub in the High Street. Dorrie and Fred "courted" for thirty years and did not marry until Dorrie’s parents died.

Robin continued to work at Hatfield until the site began to close and he took early retirement, working in the last five years as Head of Department. He now says they were probably the most satisfying five years of his working life. After he left, he spent time going around the country lecturing on wind tunnels. I asked Robin about the topiary rabbits which are a feature of the hedge around Pigs Nose. Robin says that when his children were small they had a large white rabbit called Twitcher, which lived in an enclosure on the lawn. He was a real character and was treated as one of the family. If you pushed a football to him, he would run after it and push it back to you. Robin had already set the yew hedge and and always had a yen to do some topiary. When Twitcher died he decided to commemorate the rabbit on the hedge.

In 1982/3 they were able to have a new wing built on to the house.

Now that Robin has retired, he has more time to look after his garden and indulge in his various hobbies and interests. He has always been involved in mechanical things. Every motor bike he has owned since he was 16 has been taken apart and put back together again, and the same with cars. He has a 1930 Morgan on which he built a new body, and also a Morris Minor. He is still interested in model making and has inherited a steam boat and locomotives from his friend, Maurice Adams, with whom he shared a love of steam railways. For three years he was Secretary of the Royston & District Model Engineering Society. He is also a member of the Swanage Railway, a shareholder in the Bluebell Railway, and a shareholder in a steam locomotive at Swanage. He also enjoys sailing.

Another of Robin’s interests is wind and water mills and he has been keeping an eye on the Cromer mill over the years. When he saw a notice of the Listed Building application in a local paper he contacted the mill owners and offered his services as a keen amateur to take a photographic record of the mill’s stages of restoration, which they readily agreed to. This meant that Robin spent a lot of time at the mill taking photographs as the work was going on and he now has a couple of hundred slides. He was then roped in as a Guide on the days when the mill is open to the public.

Robin was one of the original members of the Buntingford Railway and Local History Society. He got to know an enthusiast called Gordon Holland who was trying to build a model of Buntingford Station. After Robin introduced him to other fellow enthusiasts, Gordon did a full scale research exercise into Buntingford Railway and over the years accumulated a lot of material, films, etc. He widened his circle of friends and between them they started the Buntingford Railway Society, which later became the Buntingford Railway and Local History Society, with Gordon Holland as a Vice President.

Robin’s garden and hobbies keep him busy but he still finds the time to be a B.A.S.H. driver and he says he averages virtually one trip each week.

Robin and Pat’s son, Robin, lives in Buntingford with his partner, Jackie. He originally took an agricultural apprenticeship and worked at Hyde Hall Farm, but then obtained an H.G.V. Class I Licence and is a driver for Sainsburys. Anna took a management training course and is Area Manager for Financial Consultants, and lives in Hove.

There cannot be many visitors to Buntingford (or indeed residents) who have not stopped to admire Pigs Nose Cottage but I certainly did not realise that it has not always looked as picturesque as it does today. Robin is not sure of the origin of the name, but knows that it actually belongs to that section of the river, which on the 1740 Tithe Map is shown as “Pigs Snout”. The footpath at the end of the back garden, is shown on the 1740 map as Pigs Snout Lane but it later became known as Chalky Lane and originally gave access to a pair of farm cottages. At the other end of Pigs Nose cottage, where it meets Garden Road, there was a row of five cottages known as “The Steps”. Up until 1937, the front garden of Pigs Nose cottage was the back gardens of the Steps cottages and there was no vehicular access to Pigs Nose. The then owner of Pigs Nose, a Mr Bensusan, bought this piece of land when it came up for sale and so secured the present vehicular access to Pigs Nose from Garden Road.

Mr Bensusan had bought Pigs Nose in 1935 and he modernised it to the standards of the day as best he could, by putting in electricity, internal plumbing etc. He used to pick up bits and pieces from Handys Builders Yard in the High Street, and one such find is the lovely glass panel which is set in the front door of Pigs Nose. In the garden are some old cast iron boilers used as plant holders, which remain from the wash houses which were situated at the back of the Steps cottages. You can still see the brickwork from these old wash houses if you walk along the river and look at the rear of Pigs Nose, where the path leads to Garden Road.

Pigs Nose is now a credit to Robin and Pat’s dedication. I would like to thank Robin very much for talking to me. Val Hume