'It was a year I'd remember anyway. We had a very cold winter. It was the year that Lord Henry was given the title of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, on account of all he'd done for the Forest. The commoners were pleased about that.

'It was a sign of the times, I suppose, that ordinary people were coming to retire down by the coast. We saw it all the way from Hordle along to Christchurch: little brick villas, semi-detached mostly, springing up like mushrooms. But the biggest area of building was further west, beyond Christchurch.

'When I was young, Bournemouth was just a fishing village a few miles west of Christchurch. Open heath all round it. But then it turned into a little town and by the time of these events there were already houses, hotels and boarding houses spreading right along the coast.

'The old railway line, Castleman's Corkscrew, went from Brockenhurst over to Ringwood, miles inland from the sea. So now they wanted a coastal line across to Christchurch and on to Bournemouth. A good enough idea you might think. Mr Grockleton had a new enthusiasm now: he was one of the directors of this railway line.

'Quite a few young men from the Forest had gone to work on it. The pay was quite good. But I hadn't been at all pleased when Gilbert told me he was going too. I'd been training him to be an agister.

'The trouble was, there weren't any jobs working on the Forest just then and he wanted to earn some money.

'"It'll only be for a year or two," he'd said to me. "The line will be finished then anyway."

'About a week after Gilbert signed on I had a visit from Mr Minimus Furzey. It wasn't often he came over to my house, as you can imagine.

'"Don't you let your son work on Grockleton's line," he said. "It's not safe. They're mad trying to go down there. They've only got to look at the geology."

'Well, I wasn't in much of a mood to hear anything from Furzey, after what he did to us. So I said, "I don't suppose you know more than the engineers of the London and South-Western Railway line." After all, like him or not, Mr Grockleton was a magistrate and an important man. You couldn't imagine him starting a big thing like that if he didn't understand what he was doing.

'"That's Headon clay and gravel," says Furzey. "The whole Forest is running off through it," or words to that effect. I didn't know what he was talking about, so I didn't listen. And Gilbert went off to work there.