Part 1
  The Early Days   

This extract is published by kind permission of his children:
Norma Howells and Norman Kerry

My name is Percy Kerry. My age when writing this is 90 years old.

I was born in Brundish, Suffolk on 1st Jan 1911. My parents moved to Occold when I were about three years old. We moved to a cottage up Bulls Hall Road. When I was seven years old we moved to Benningham Green when my father went to work at Benningham Hall. 

Please remember the very old people I mixed with as a lad. they were born around 1850-1860. Most of those people saw very few changes take place. Some never saw the first car or tractor come into the village. Most of the men worked on the same farm all of their life, died there and had never seen the sea. 

Things started to change just after the First World War but very slowly on the farms. During and after the Second World War things moved for the better on the land. 

Tilling and harvesting with the modern machinery made great changes for both men and horses, modern machinery did away with most of the labour.

Benningham Hall in 1956 had 22 on the pay list; some were part time workers on poultry and in the incubator home. Before modem machinery it was reckoned to have four men and four horses to every hundred acres on heavy land.

Light land could do with one horse and one man less.

In my early school days there were no buses coming into the village, should we want to go to Norwich lpswich or Yarmouth we had to go by train from Mellis or Diss, and this was not very often. 

There were very few cycles. The first cycle l had was second hand, I think it cost my father half a crown. I know my father said I had to look after it as it had cost him a days pay, a new Hercules cycle cost £4.19s.6d. when they first came onto the market.

As soon as I was able to ride I was volunteering to do errands just as an excuse to have a ride. Some nights when my father was working late I would cycle to the village pub to get my father one pint of mild beer, one ounce of Churchman's County Shag tobacco costing one shilling. Beer four old pence, tobacco eight old pence. 

The first great journey I did with some more boys was cycle to Pulham to see the airship. The airships were known to us as the Pulham pigs. The day I went the R101 was hanging on the mast.