1900s-1945
When the Juggins family came to Leigh in 1935, Joyce was four years old. Her father, whose full name was Arthur Gilbert Juggins, had been offered work at the village bakery, and so the household settled at Elvanin on Lower Green. Their arrival followed a period of sorrow: Joyce's mother had died two years earlier, in 1933, and her father had since remarried. The family therefore began their Leigh years as a father, a stepmother and a small daughter, all of them newcomers to a place that would shape Joyce's memories for the rest of her life.
Baking was at the heart of the household's rhythm. Mr Juggins worked as a baker's journeyman, employed by a baker named Mr Lakeman, who took the habit of calling his new man 'The Lad'. The nickname stuck, and it tells us something of the easy familiarity of a village bakery in those years. The working day began early, with Mr Juggins rising at around five in the morning to prepare the dough. Sundays were different: no baking was done at all on the Sabbath, and the ovens stood cold for the day of rest.
The bread itself was of a kind now largely forgotten. Ordinary loaves were large cottage loaves, each marked with a dimple on top. Joyce, as a small child in the bakery, made her own contribution: from dough left over after the day's proper work, she shaped miniature loaves of her own. It was a child's game, but one learned at the elbow of a working baker, and it must have given her an early feel for the craft.
The bakery was a busy place in other ways too. Flour was hauled up to the first floor by a pulley, and villagers made the most of the oven's heat by bringing along their puddings and roasts to be baked alongside the bread. Joyce would use the baker's paddle to take the cooked dishes out of the oven, handing them back to their owners. The family's front garden had its own small fame: a syringa grew in one corner, and people asked for cuttings or blooms from it for their weddings, so that the Juggins household contributed, in its quiet way, to village celebrations.
The war years brought harder times. Rationing made the baker's job a test of ingenuity, and Mr Juggins experimented with fruitless cakes, finding ways to produce something festive without the ingredients that could no longer be spared. His skill was still equal to grand occasions, however. He made a five-tiered wedding cake for Lord Hollenden's younger daughter, and such were the constraints of the day that the cake contained grated carrot and apple among its ingredients. Lady Hollenden was delighted with the result, which must have given the village baker considerable pride.
Mr Juggins did his bit for the war effort at home. He served as an air-raid warden, though he had hoped to serve in uniform: the army rejected him on account of his short-sightedness. It fell to him, as to many men of his age and situation, to do what he could from within the village itself.
Joyce's schooldays began as soon as the family arrived, when she was enrolled at the Village School. There she came under the care of Miss Ellis, whom Joyce remembered with huge affection for the rest of her life. Miss Ellis kept a jar of sweets in the classroom, handed out as rewards for good work, a small kindness that outlasted the decades in a child's memory. From the Village School, Joyce won a place at Tonbridge School for Girls, travelling there each day from Leigh Halt. Her school uniform was navy blue and claret-red, worn with a straw hat. Her daily travelling companion was Margaret Wells, and the two girls made the journey together.
The expense of secondary schooling was not trivial for a baker's family, but Mr Juggins insisted that his daughter attend, whatever the cost. It was a decision that opened doors for Joyce, though her home life was not always easy. She hated the nickname 'Poor little Joycy Juggins', which followed her around, and her stepmother could be harsh: when Joyce's chores were done imperfectly, food was withheld from her. These were the shadows behind an otherwise busy and, in many ways, affectionate childhood.
The war touched Joyce's school world too. A prisoner of war camp sat below the school hill, a strange and constant presence in the landscape of her teenage years. The school's playing fields were ploughed up for vegetables, as so much grassland was in those years, so that games gave way to growing food.
Chapel-going was the other great thread of Joyce's Leigh childhood. Mr Juggins played the organ in the Chapel, and the family's religious life centred there. The Chapel had no permanent pastor or vicar; instead, an elder with long whiskers administered communion. The bread for communion was baked by Mr Juggins himself, so that the baker's craft followed him even into worship. There was a quiet irony in the Chapel's arrangements: although its teachings were against alcohol, the communion wine was alcoholic all the same. The village had its lighter pleasures too. The Fleur was the village pub, a name that belongs to Leigh's social history as surely as the bakery does. One thing Joyce never did, in all her years in the village, was set foot inside St Mary's; the Chapel claimed her Sundays entirely.
Joyce left Leigh as a young woman and stayed away for fifty years. In the summer at the end of that long absence, she came back to see the village again. The memories she carried — of the bakery at dawn, of Miss Ellis's jar of sweets, of the organ in the Chapel and the syringa in the garden corner — are the record we preserve here, in her own words and for the village's own history.