I have spent most of my life enjoying the River Orwell and the woods around the east bank of it. Unfortunately these woods have now been manicured and have fences and gates around them and are now called Orwell Country Park or Ravenswood housing estate and even Braziers Wood housing estate. The airport has gone and the caravan site and the old Priory now have gates and fences too and of course the A14 has been built right through the middle of it all. I hope to use this blog to encourage better use of the places my mates, I and my children and their mates all grew up using and I hope other will contribute to this as well by adding their memories and idea too. I remember being taken there by my mother just after the war with my brother. We would usually get there via the Lairs and only went as far as Mambrook which was a nice grassy area on the river bank. Mum would sit on the bank chatting to the other women there who were mostly also waiting for there husbands to return from the war. My brother and I with all the other kids would be allowed to paddle in the river even though it was full of sewage. The main sewer outlet discharged straight into the river near what is now Cliff Quay but nobody took any notice of it. Motor barges with sails assisting them would be on the river and some smoky old steamers would pass by. It was a totally tranquil place and ideal for us kids. As we grew older and started to roam and investigate without parents around we would go right along the river bank sometimes as far as Levington Creek where an old barge was slowly rotting away. All the land was our playground and even the odd problem with game keepers or landowners caused no restriction on our movements. The airport had a couple of big black shed on the Maryon Road side where at least one Auster was kept and I believe that belonged to a local doctor and he would fly it regularly. The main hanger was still being used by the RAF who stayed there until about 1958 and when we crossed the airport we just checked to make sure nothing was landing. Joe Wiggins had a few horses that he would rent out by the hour and they would be ridden down to the river and back usually by lads with no riding gear. Joe would sometimes ride too but he always dressed for the occasion and he always looked magnificent as he rode. Later in life I would hire a horse together with my mates and we would ride along the shore and everytime Joe would be angry because we had galloped the horses and made them sweat. Many of us joined the scouts as we saw that as a way of escaping our parents control and we often stayed at Hallowtree for days at a time. We would cycle down to my grandmothers newsagents in Duke Street and do a paper round in the morning and another at night and in general we ran wild most of the time. I joined the 21st sea scouts as did my mates while the 18th landscouts used to use Hallowtree too but not as often as we did as we had our own hut complete with heater and galley and we had a boat, the Typhoon which we would row across the river sometimes to Pin Mill.
Peter Turtill