Liz was born in 1932 and had a long career as a nurse and matron in the army, rising to the rank of Major. She wrote this shortly before her death in July 2024. The (undated) photo was taken around 2014.
I arrived in Eynsham in the 1980s. The buildings and the platform on one side of the station remained and one of these was used by The Oxford Playhouse for costume storage. The land on the station road side was derelict and ill-used apart from the arrival every morning of a pony, donkey and goat which belonged to a poacher turned gamekeeper named Joe. He occupied a sort of outhouse in the grounds of the house just behind the bus stop opposite the Swan.
Every morning Joe would harness the pony to a sort of trap and tie the donkey and goat up behind and they would all proceed down Station Rd (with his little Jack Russell sitting beside him) and he was permitted to leave the animals on the land. They were a lovely eccentric sight.
I eventually contributed more eccentricity to the village as I acquired (against my plans) a stray emaciated cat who flourished under my nursing care. He insisted on going for a walk down to the fishponds every day. So, as I was going one way with a cat prancing beside me, old Joe would pass by with his menagerie. Eventually I acquired the mother cat of Catastrophe (the first arrival) and another of her many off-spring, and after a year or so the father cat –old and decrepit, crept into my flat also.
I think old Joe had gone by the time I ended up with Catastrophe, his mother and her other off-spring all joining me on the walk down to the fishponds. What a sight! The schoolchildren called me ‘The Cat Lady’.
Well - villages had to have their eccentricities in those days. Now all is changed but it is still a nice place to live (although I arrived here after leaving the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army nursing Corps and was very unsettled and out of place).
Sorry to be so verbose- old age must be blamed.