AS HER new memoir All In The Downs: Reflections On Life, Landscape And Song is published, folk singer SHIRLEY COLLINS allows us to print two extracts featuring Sussex

This extract tells of Shirley and her sister Dolly’s evacuation to Ore, near Hastings, in the Second World War

DURING the War, Dolly and I moved up to 27 Canute Road in Ore village to share Aunt Grace and her husband Cyril Winborn’s home, with their children Bridget and Lesley.

We weren’t free from bombing or strafing raids from German planes. Many nights we slept in the broom cupboard under the stairs on eiderdowns; three children, a baby and two adults (Uncle Cyril was in the Fire Brigade and out on duty most nights).

The front door was blown in by the blast from a bomb that landed two streets away and brought down our ceilings, covering us with plaster. Dolly and I were strafed one day as we walked down Alfred Road pushing baby Lesley in her pram.

We saw a huge grey plane coming straight up from the sea, realised as we saw the black cross on the underside of its wings that it was German, and flung ourselves, and the pram, under a hedge, and watched machine-gun bullets tear up the road.

Turning left outside Aunt Grace’s house, the road led down to Ore Village. There was a row of shops on just one side of the road: the butcher’s, with its blood-stained, sawdust-covered floor and the sweetish smell of meat heavy on the air (Dolly fainted there a couple of times), where we’d hand the butcher a shilling wrapped in a slip of paper from Grandad, not aware that it was an illegal bet on the horses; the draper’s where, at the age of 15, I purchased my first bra, which was lifted out from a glass-fronted wooden drawer behind the counter by an assistant who helpfully decided what size I needed as I had no idea, and was too embarrassed even to hazard a guess.

Across the road was the little corner shop – and it was an actual corner, a narrow triangular sweet and tobacco shop, where we’d spend the pennies we’d earned running errands on licorice dabs, gob-stoppers that changed colours in such a satisfying way as you sucked hard, licorice comfits, a packet of sweet cigarettes, or a couple of Woodbines for Aunt Grace – there was never enough money for a whole packet.

There were two pubs, a telephone box – and that was Ore village. So, not a very exciting place, except for the forge, tucked up at the end of the bank at the bottom of Harold Road. It had once been owned and worked by my Great Granny’s brother-in-law Charlie Easton, and Dolly and I were still allowed in to stand and watch a horse being shod.

We were thrilled by the whole process, the leather-aproned blacksmith, his face covered in grime and running with sweat, his bare arms pumping the heavy bellows, making the fire glow even more intensely and the flames leap into life – how did he bear that heat day after day?

Small wonder then that later one of my favourite songs would be A Blacksmith Courted Me: “I love to watch my love with his hammer swinging I love to hear it fall on the anvil ringing/The notes are loud and clear, the sparks are flying/My love is handsome then, there’s no denying.”

Here, Shirley writes about the South Downs and how Sussex history has inspired her songs

IT WASN’T until some time in the 1970s that my love affair with the Sussex Downs began.

I had loved being up there on those long stretches of Downland in such clear light, breathing air off the sea, wondering what was over the next hill brow topped by huge white clouds. I loved the feel of the springy turf beneath my feet, and the chalk and flints kicking up on the paths. And all the while, the sound of skylarks, those elusive songsters who you could hear, but rarely see, so high in the sky were they.

I felt too that those long, serene lines of the Downs were there in the songs of Sussex, whose anthemic tunes flow with such strength and grace. And the hawthorns, their bark covered in rusty lichen, blown and shaped by the prevailing south-westerly winds, were like the songs, shaped by the many voices that have sung them, changing gradually over the years.

The countryside and the songs are as one to me; the safe-guarding of them equally important, both so vulnerable. Our beautiful landscape is seen by the avaricious as something to exploit, to concrete over and spoil, to drive unnecessary roads and railways through. It’s often the same with our remarkable music, too, as people with very little understanding and knowledge of it seek to change its character.

Contained in these songs are the lives and experiences of the people who sang them in the past, dismissed as peasants, often despised and neglected. Yet those same people were the carriers, knowing, by heart, hundreds of songs and ballads that have come down through generations, through centuries, bearing our musical, literary and social history; you might call it the archaeology of music.

In a way, a line was drawn when the collectors came along in Victorian and Edwardian times, and started noting down songs from ordinary people throughout the countryside.

And of course, it didn’t end there – collecting continued right through to the 1970s with the advantage of recording machines, giving a far more complete sound and understanding of the singer and the song. Thank heavens that they did, otherwise it all might have been lost.

There appears to be no subject that isn’t sung about, and the songs themselves teem with incident of every sort. There are heroic deeds of bravery, acts of treachery, battles, sea-chases, true love so loyal it can survive incredible odds, lovers separated for seven long years (it’s always seven) finding each other again, love that even returns from the grave.

On the other hand there are careless false lovers, seductions, partings, adulteries. But the songs aren’t solely about heartbreak and retribution – there are many erotic, saucy and frivolous sexual encounters too. There are the ballads that deal with the big taboo subjects: incest, infanticide, any number of murders, even cannibalism in the British Navy.

All In The Downs: Reflections On Life, Landscape And Song is published by Strange Attractor. To order the book, visit strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/all-in-the-downs/