Mythologies of Basingstoke
by Debbie Reavell
I’m an old man now, but I have never forgotten something which happened when I was just a lad. My father was a tenant farmer at Ramsdell but he and my mother wanted more for me and he sent me to school in the Queens School, as it was known, in the old Liten in Basingstoke. I walked to school on a Monday and walked home on a Saturday afternoon as I lodged with a family in Church Street during the week. At school I learned some mathematics and a little Latin from the Vicar. I could read of course; our mother had taught me.
The schoolmaster had a stout cane on the wall to keep us in line, but he was fair. We knew that another schoolmaster had beat a boy until he died and not so long ago either. Some of my fellow pupils were from richer homes than I was, but we got along pretty well, and the town boys played here with us too. The graveyard and a field nearby were our playground.
The school room was a small building tucked into the ruins of what they called the Holy Ghost Chapel. The chapel was mostly a ruin then although some remembered when there had been a roof on it.
I was 10 that year of 1674. It was very hot that July, each day hotter than the one before.
I remember the commotion. Something had happened – something very serious.
Two of the older boys had been playing close to the chapel and they had heard noises coming from under the old chapel floor. There was a vault there where the important folk were put in their coffins, not buried in the earth. Some of us boys had once been able to have a peek inside when the floor was up for a dead person to be put in. It was said to be where the grand family from The Vyne were buried. It was like a big storeroom under the floor with coffins stacked like boxes. It fair gave us the creeps to look down there.
Well, anyway, these boys told our schoolmaster that they had heard sounds coming from the vault; there had been a coffin put in just the day before, so they said.
Of course, the master didn’t believe them; in fact, he was about to beat them but they must have looked so scared that he decided to go and listen for himself. He knelt on the stones, his ear to the chapel floor. His face was frightful because, he too could hear something. We were sent away directly back into the schoolroom.
It had been a woman, they said, the wife of rich Mr Blunden who had a fine house in Oat Street. We later heard the stories people tell – that she drank too much wine or may be was unable to stop taking what the apothecary provided. The Coroner came, we were all pretending to do our schoolwork, but we could hear the commotion outside, the lifting of the coffin, the prising of the lid as the nails gave way and the horrified cries at the discovery. They said that her knuckles, hands and elbows were scraped from trying to push up the lid. She was indeed dead by then, but she had been buried alive.
Who could imagine her terror as she woke from her dead faint and how she must have struggled? They said she was ‘lamentably torn and bleeding.’ I shudder to write the words.
When I went home at the end of the week, I must say that I wept in my mother’s arms like a baby, at the horror I had imagined.
All this, some 70 years ago, but I have never forgotten that place. I have made my will and told my son that I am not to be nailed down until a few days have gone by when my time comes.
by Debbie Reavell
I’m an old man now, but I have never forgotten something which happened when I was just a lad. My father was a tenant farmer at Ramsdell but he and my mother wanted more for me and he sent me to school in the Queens School, as it was known, in the old Liten in Basingstoke. I walked to school on a Monday and walked home on a Saturday afternoon as I lodged with a family in Church Street during the week. At school I learned some mathematics and a little Latin from the Vicar. I could read of course; our mother had taught me.
The schoolmaster had a stout cane on the wall to keep us in line, but he was fair. We knew that another schoolmaster had beat a boy until he died and not so long ago either. Some of my fellow pupils were from richer homes than I was, but we got along pretty well, and the town boys played here with us too. The graveyard and a field nearby were our playground.
The school room was a small building tucked into the ruins of what they called the Holy Ghost Chapel. The chapel was mostly a ruin then although some remembered when there had been a roof on it.
I was 10 that year of 1674. It was very hot that July, each day hotter than the one before.
I remember the commotion. Something had happened – something very serious.
Two of the older boys had been playing close to the chapel and they had heard noises coming from under the old chapel floor. There was a vault there where the important folk were put in their coffins, not buried in the earth. Some of us boys had once been able to have a peek inside when the floor was up for a dead person to be put in. It was said to be where the grand family from The Vyne were buried. It was like a big storeroom under the floor with coffins stacked like boxes. It fair gave us the creeps to look down there.
Well, anyway, these boys told our schoolmaster that they had heard sounds coming from the vault; there had been a coffin put in just the day before, so they said.
Of course, the master didn’t believe them; in fact, he was about to beat them but they must have looked so scared that he decided to go and listen for himself. He knelt on the stones, his ear to the chapel floor. His face was frightful because, he too could hear something. We were sent away directly back into the schoolroom.
It had been a woman, they said, the wife of rich Mr Blunden who had a fine house in Oat Street. We later heard the stories people tell – that she drank too much wine or may be was unable to stop taking what the apothecary provided. The Coroner came, we were all pretending to do our schoolwork, but we could hear the commotion outside, the lifting of the coffin, the prising of the lid as the nails gave way and the horrified cries at the discovery. They said that her knuckles, hands and elbows were scraped from trying to push up the lid. She was indeed dead by then, but she had been buried alive.
Who could imagine her terror as she woke from her dead faint and how she must have struggled? They said she was ‘lamentably torn and bleeding.’ I shudder to write the words.
When I went home at the end of the week, I must say that I wept in my mother’s arms like a baby, at the horror I had imagined.
All this, some 70 years ago, but I have never forgotten that place. I have made my will and told my son that I am not to be nailed down until a few days have gone by when my time comes.
