Post-war
For a generation or more, a knock at the door and the sight of a hot meal arriving meant more to some Leigh households than simply lunch. The village ran its own Meals on Wheels service for somewhere between thirty and forty years, a period that may reach back as far as the 1940s. What is certain is that the scheme was up and running by the 1950s, and it continued until the mid-1980s, when it was finally dropped and replaced with other arrangements.
Like most voluntary efforts of this kind, the Leigh scheme depended on a small number of determined organisers, and the earliest of them stands out clearly in local memory. Mrs Bridget Williams, who lived at Upper Kennards, was the driving force in the early days, and one volunteer paid her the ultimate tribute of village affection by calling her 'The Queen Bee'. Later the reins passed to Mrs Bill Collins, whose home was near Moon's Garage on Penshurst Road. It was Mrs Collins who spotted Diana Wood at the Old Bakery and recruited her, and in the 1970s Diana took over as organiser. She lived right in the middle of the village, which was a handy base for someone coordinating deliveries across a wide area.
And the area was wide. Although the scheme was Leigh's own, its customers stretched well beyond the centre of the village. Meals went to Garden Cottages and The Green, and further out to Bough Beech, Chiddingstone Causeway, Charcott, Moorden and the Powder Mills. Reaching such scattered addresses required wheels of the volunteers' own: every one of them had a car. At least thirty Leigh people are known to have helped over the years, and they were virtually all ladies, though a few men lent a hand from time to time – Paul Vernet among the occasional male helpers. Children often came along too, riding shotgun with their mothers during the school holidays and getting an early lesson in what looking after your neighbours actually meant.
The meals themselves had a slightly industrial backbone to them. Food was usually cooked in school kitchens, and the finest fare of all, by common consent, came out of the Glaxo canteen – considered the most superior cooking available to the scheme. Volunteers also collected tins of food in front of Leigh School, adding to the supplies. The actual delivery round was helped by a driver from the WRVS, who brought the food out in a large metal box. Anna Rowley remembered that this box had a charcoal burner to keep the contents warm, and that the freshly cleaned box from the previous day was handed back in exchange. Alison Cook, for her part, recalled that cleaning out that box was the worst part of the whole job – a reminder that volunteer work is not all warm glows and grateful smiles.
The recipients were mostly elderly people who were no longer good at looking after themselves, and the volunteers quickly learned that the job involved far more than carrying a meal to the door. Monica Cecil made a first visit to an old man who lived down a long track, where the grass stood two foot high and the house was surrounded by rubbish, cats and hens. When the moment came to serve his dinner, he handed over the cat's bowl to be used as a plate. Companionship, it turned out, was as much a part of the service as the food, and volunteers kept an eye out for hazards in their clients' homes – loose carpet holes and similar dangers that might easily cause a fall.
The end came in the mid-1980s, and the reasons lay largely above the village level. The scheme was overseen and paid for by KCC, the county council, which across Kent as a whole was finding it increasingly hard to recruit volunteers and to secure cooking facilities. There were worries, too, about hygiene standards for meals delivered on long rounds, and about food that was kept for eating later rather than eaten straight away. Once the local scheme was dropped, a professional firm was employed to do the work instead. It is fair to say the change was not entirely a loss of warmth: some of the professional drivers did interact with their clients, keeping something of the old personal touch alive.
The scheme was written up in two Parish Magazine articles in July and August 2015. Every recollection adds another name or detail to a story that served the village quietly for decades.