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February 2003
It's Friday 31st January and I got the day off! At 6.45 this morning my Headteacher called to say that school would be closed because of the snow. Yes, I said snow. After some months of bemoaning the awful winter weather we got some of the proper white stuff. Of course a few inches overnight will be nothing to some of you but in the UK everything comes to a standstill because, in all honesty, it isn't worth gearing up for a rare event, so you might as well stay in and be safe and warm. I hope none of you got caught in the awful traffic chaos that the snow caused. If the snow's still here on Sunday then I'll be very surprised. My wife took the opportunity to partake in an extra early morning walk with some of her friends whilst I had another cup of tea and watched the news on the TV! She kindly agreed to take the camera and, when the film comes back from the developers I'll put some 'Feltwell in the snow pictures on the website'. The village and surrounding fields really are beautiful when cloaked in white. Whilst I'm talking about the British obsession I can't help thinking about our Australian members; how is the drought, have the rains arrived, did the fires pass you by?
On a more international note and following some strange logic via the word conflagration, I have to say that the preparations concerning Iraq are becoming more and more obvious in this area. Security on all RAF bases is very high. Which reminds me, I think I'll order some heating oil before the price goes up! I must say that I am undecided on the issue of Saddam but, if he were a persistent behaviour problem at school, he would have been out some time ago.
Turning to more parochial matters I did my annual turn at the A&H January meeting. Despite having to use the backup copies of the websites as I couldn't get Internet access through the local school system (they never left me a password) the night was a great success and everyone had a good time. Using a new, brighter, sharper data projector certainly helped improve the quality of the presented images. I surprised myself when I did a page and image count beforehand:-
Millennium website - 87 pages, 370 images,
Conducted Tour website - 65 pages, 731 images
Times Remembered website - 291 pages, 591 images
Even halving the number of images to remove the thumbnails gives a grand total of 443 pages and 845 images if my maths is correct. No wonder I get lost in the thing when I'm doing large-scale changes! And pictures still keep coming in, albeit at a slower rate, for example, there are only two new pictures this month. Even Chris Cock, who has been collecting postcard images of the village for many years, is finding the supply drying up. My supply is now largely from family photo albums, as witnessed by this month's additions.
I said in a previous newsletter that as the website work declines I would turn my attention to producing a 'Historical Walk Around Feltwell Village', a Guidebook if you will, and at the January meeting mentioned above I presented the Chairman with the first three pages of such a Guide for his comment. If enough of you are interested in following the development of this project then let me know and I'll put the pages on the Internet for you to view as they develop.
It is now Sunday and I am surprised, because the snow is still here! Only because it hasn't warmed up enough to melt. The reason that this newsletter has now taken two days to write is because I had one of those crazy ideas of mine just after I'd finished writing the second paragraph and I just had to act on it. It occurred to me that these newsletters are, in themselves, historical documents because they chronicle not only changes in Feltwell but also the development of the website so I started to compile a Word document containing every newsletter ever sent out. Now this is clearly an anorak-type activity and I need to see someone about it, but I just couldn't stop myself switching on all the old computers and searching their hard drives for saved copies of previous newsletters. Fortunately all the family had gone out so Dad's madness could not be seen! Anyway, the point of this rambling is to make a desperate plea. In my searching I discovered that I have holes in my newsletter archive and in the desperate hope that one or two of you have, for reasons best known to yourselves, kept past copies, I am asking you to, please, send the following missing months to be sent back to me - anything pre-March 00 (including the whole of 1999), April 00, May 00, July 00, September 00-January 01 and March 01. You may have them in your Outlook archive. I would be eternally grateful.
You may have already concluded from this rather Paul-centric newsletter (sorry) that very little happened in the village in January and you would be correct. However, Feltwell did make the Daily Telegraph newspaper and I hope they will not mind me sending to you all this copy of a letter that they published. So here it is:-
SIR — I believe I had the only snowman to be "killed" by hostile fire during the Second World War.
At the time, November 1941, my father, Flying Officer Clifford Morgan, was stationed at RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.
He and some of his RAF friends were building a snowman for me (I was four) near the aerodrome’s control tower when a lone German raider swooped down and machine-gunned the airfield.
My father whisked me to safety in a nearby shelter but the snowman was demolished in the attack. Over the years I have been nagged by the thought that my snowman deserved recognition — such as the DSM, The Distinguished Snowman’s Medal.
David Morgan. Morchard Bishop, Devon.
