'A charming village'

The novelist Ruby Ferguson was best known for her series of books about Jill Crewe and her ponies.

Ruby was born Ruby Constance Annie Ashby in 1899. Her father David Ashby was a Methodist minister. During Ruby’s childhood, before the First World War, he was a chaplain to the army at Woolwich. In later life Ruby wrote what has been described as a 'fictionalised memoir' about this time, which was published posthumously as Children at the Shop, ‘the Shop’ being the colloquial name for the Military Academy at Woolwich. 

Young Ruby and her brother Paul explored the country around Woolwich on their bicycles. On one expedition, 

We had to dismount and push the bikes up the almost precipitous slope of Eglinton Road, and so at last to fields and open country and Shooters Hill.

All beyond was rural England. The ancient county of Kent lay in front of us, plough and pasture, woods and lanes, orchards and hopfields, farms and oast houses, and drowsy little villages lying warm and hazy in the sun.

They called it the Garden of England and as you rode slowly along the winding lanes you knew why. It smelled like a vast garden that went on for ever. The grass verges were thick with meadowsweet and the hedges with honeysuckle, and from the fields came the scent of beanflowers or strawberries in their season, and from the orchards the scent of ripe fruit, and the copses had a deep earthy smell, and the villages smelt of wood-smoke and hops and roses. All the way through Kent you found yourself sniffing these sweet airs….

Welling was a charming village with a few cottages and a pub with a bench outside where a few old men seemed to sit all day, and always the same yellow collie dog asleep in the middle of the street….

The pub was probably either the Nag’s Head or the Rose and Crown in Welling High Street. 

The Nag's Head, c.1905. 

The Rose and Crown is a little further on, set back a little, just past the building with the white awning. The Nag's Head itself was rebuilt in the 1930s, but otherwise this stretch of the High Street remains largely unchanged. 

Ordnance Survey 25in revised 1908, published 1909
Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Scotland. 

Position of the Nag's Head indicated in red.

Ruby and Paul continued their ride:

Refreshed by our stop we remounted and idled along the lanes while the powdery dust went up in little puffs beside our wheels, and the sun shone serene in the soft blue sky, and the farmers working in the fields didn’t seem to be overdoing it….

We came to the strawberry fields. We picked the scent up half a mile away. There they were, acres of strawberry plants in level rows, and lines of women bent double picking the rich warm fruit into baskets….

When the man in charge stopped being so busy, Paul went up to him and said, “Please can we have two separate pennyworths?”

The man took two broad cabbage leaves and heaped each one with ripe beautiful strawberries, a good half pound to each. I carried the strawberries and Paul pushed both bikes. We sat down in the grass beside the lane and ate strawberries till the juice ran down our chins. They were warm from the sun and delicious….

We leaned against the bank below the hedge, crushing the pink ragged robins which grew in masses, and watched the brown butterflies dancing, attracted by our juice-daubed fingers….

None of this was forgotten. To carry through life the scent of a Kentish byway which is now a four-lane motor-road is something to be thankful about.

This would be the A2/Rochester Way.

At the start of the memoir, Ruby wrote that in later life she had started out to revisit the scenes of her childhood, but thought better of it:

Oh God, no! Supermarkets, milling mobs with hopeless faces, snack bars, snarled traffic. This was 1966.… I had done some mad things in my time but this was asking for disillusion and something more, scarcely to be borne. What has Time ever changed but for the worse?

Cuff’s department store in Woolwich, where Ruby shopped as a child, was still there, although the building was not the one Ruby knew as a child. 

Ruby would certainly have found Welling unrecognisable. In the 1920s and 1930s Welling experienced a building boom. In Welling and Bexleyheath, two building firms were each completing a hundred houses a week.

The charming village had been overwhelmed by suburbia.

Ordnance Survey 25in revised 1936-37, published 1947

Reproduced with permission of the National Library of Scotland. 

Position of the Nag's Head indicated in red.

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