“Percy Bennett” I replied. His face lit up and a smile from ear to ear appeared. “So you must be Jack Bennett’s son?”
“That’s right” I said, where upon he raised his voice to a shout and said to everyone “Hey everybody! This is Percy Bennett’s grandson!”
A moments silence then all hell broke loose. I shook more hands in that 10 minutes than in all of my previous life. It was almost as if I was Percy! I was deluged with stories about Percy and also about my father who had visited from time to time as a child when Percy was a London Metropolitan policeman for 25 years before retiring in 1935. One of these stories involved myself as a very young child, perhaps about 2 years old, that I had no recollection myself but had been told later by my mother and father. Apparently I had visited Walkern during the blitz with my mother and my grandfather , on several occasions as a welcome break from bombs and sirens of London. It was during one of these visits, I was told , I fell into a weir and had to be rescued by my long suffering grandfather who had to jump into waist deep water fully clothed to rescue me.
During a visit to the United Kingdom in 2008, my wife and I drove our rental car to Walkern and stayed in ‘The White Lion’ hotel as The Yew Tree Inn was now a Chinese restaurant and we walked and drove around the district for several days. I asked locals if there was a weir somewhere but no one seemed to know until I visited the church to see if there were any headstones relevant to my family and spoke to a man tending the grounds of the church.
He suggested that there was a weir behind a thick hedge opposite the church. Leaving my wife in the churchyard, I collected my camera from our car and dived into the thick greenery. There did not appear to be any kind of path so it was just like back home in New Zealand, “bush bashing’! After about 50 metres I suddenly came upon a green encrusted concrete spillway with water pouring over it.
My immediate reaction was to pull back with great trepidation! It was all I could do to take a photo! I have spent most of my life frolicking in water . I revel in it but I was very frightened at the sight of what I knew had to be the weir mentioned by my parents. It made me wonder just how far back the subconscious goes!
