My association with the Labour Party severed my relations with the village gentry with whom, when I first came to the village, I had been on friendly terms. My mother had been to the trouble of calling on the rector when she viewed the property. I had even been asked by the rector to speak from the chancel steps of the village church at a war memorial service. He suggested that I should read poems about the war. Instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems of Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying of gas-poisoning and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. And I suggested that the men who had fallen, destroyed as it were by the fall of the Tower of Siloam, had not been particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God that they were alive and do their best to avoid wars in the future. The church-party, with the exception of the rector, an intelligent man, was scandalized. But the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return and it pleased them to be reminded that they were on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that though obeying the King’s desire to wear their campaigning medals, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats. The leading Labour man of the village was William Beckley, senior. He had an inherited title dating from the time of Cromwell: he was known as ‘Fisher’ Beckley. A direct ancestor had been fishing on the Cherwell during the siege of Oxford, and had ferried Cromwell himself and a body of Parliamentary troops over the river. In return Cromwell had given him perpetual fishing-rights from Islip to the stretch of river where the Cherwell Hotel now stands. The cavalry skirmish at Islip bridge still remained in local tradition, and a cottager at the top of the hill showed me a small stone cannon-ball, fired on that occasion, that he had found sticking in his chimney-stack. But even Cromwell came late in the history of the Beckley family; the Beckleys were watermen on the river long before the seventeenth century. Indeed Fisher Beckley knew, by family tradition, the exact spot where a barge was sunk conveying stone for the building of Westminster Abbey. Islip was the birthplace of Edward the Confessor, and the Islip lands had been given by him to the Abbey; it was still Abbey property after a thousand years. The Abbey stone had been quarried from the side of the hill close to the river; our cottage was on the old slip-way down which the stone-barges had been launched. Some time in the ’seventies American weed was introduced into the river and made netting difficult; fishing finally became unprofitable. Fisher Beckley had been for many years now an agricultural labourer. His socialist views prevented him from getting employment in the village, so he had to trudge to work to a farm some miles out. But he was still Fisher Beckley and, among us