Fasten Your Seatbelts – The World of Farnham" is a new, regular column that will give you an insight into Farnham's unique and diverse history. It will be about the history of the area, the people who made that history and the links between the two, including Farnham's most famous resident. I will share personal memories, background information and information about the wonderful photographs that appear in my books. But there is one warning. There are chapters of "Farnham – The World of Farnham" that I really don't want to see disappear, so I'll be including them here. The chapters are written by well-known authors but I have added new chapters, too, that I've written to expand on the information and provide extra links. For example, you'll read about the Victorian Farnham Bandstand, one of its most popular bands and my personal memories of Farnham Bandstand, even though I was too young to go myself. You'll read the story of the first two public lavatories in Farnham, and meet a fascinating character called Annie Robinson, who was just one of many women who operated the Farnham public lavatories in the 19th and 20th centuries. We'll look at a Victorian water reservoir near my parents' house that's now in the middle of Farnham's main square. That reservoir was originally situated where the old town hall is now and it was used as a water supply for Farnham well into the 20th century. It's hoped that you will enjoy this new Farnham column and come back again and again. If I know anything about writing it's that a regular and ongoing audience is very welcome and, I believe, is also important for authors. So let's begin this fascinating history of Farnham and see where we'll go from there. Welcome to Farnham Welcome to Farnham. I've not been back here for many years but I can remember growing up in the house at the top of Farnham's only public street, Station Road, looking out across Farnham's main square and having my first view of the old town hall. My mother used to say that people came here from all over the world to find a home in this lovely village and that our lives were blessed because of it. Although that's not quite how I remember it. The older my sisters and I became, the more we would think about the time we spent living in this amazing house but for different reasons. As children it would be so much fun playing in the garden. When I was very young I was quite small and was fascinated by the tiny fish that were living in the ponds on the edge of the flower beds. They would jump around in the water in front of me and I would try to catch them in a jam jar. Although, as they grew bigger, so did the fish and I would be left waiting to catch one, which only excited them more. I loved the animals, too; it didn't matter whether they were small and cute, such as goldfish and turtles, or larger, such as donkeys. I've always loved animals but I wasn't a fan of the insects – spiders and grasshoppers especially. As I've mentioned already, we had a wonderful vegetable garden in the back yard of our house in Farnham. My favourite tree was an apple tree. When the apple crop was ready we would be down on our hands and knees, using small rakes to collect the apples from the lowest branches. We would use these to make jelly and also to fill our fruit trough with punnets for jam-making. It's amazing what we could make with apples. We also made all sorts of preserves in these old preserving pans that were hung on the kitchen wall. That makes me feel old, too, but I remember enjoying making pickles and other things. I liked to do it the old-fashioned way and not use a food mixer or anything like that. We'd cook all sorts of things in the kitchen, including steak and kidney pudding – delicious – and Yorkshire pudding, of course. All of this happened in a garden. We played down there, climbed the apple tree and played football – lots of football. Although we didn't have a football pitch we would play football with pieces of coal, which was all part of the fun. My sisters were both tomboys and I guess I was the one who was always trying to impress them. One of the best moments in the garden, I think, was when Dad took us out to celebrate the end of the war. He bought some special flags, which we displayed on flagpoles. The local shop sold flags that had big black lettering on them that read "Victory for the British". We found this hilarious. Even though it was a sad moment in our lives – the war was almost over – we just loved the idea of a shop selling flags with "Victory for the British" written on them. There was no greater war than this one, but I guess for young children there are always wars going on. The whole country had to be involved and this was just one country fighting another, but it really hurt. It's incredible that all those people lost their lives in such a terrible way. Although, as a child, I didn't really understand that much about war or politics, I do think that the generation that came afterwards was lucky. When they were children, they had to experience the Second World War, but our children had the benefits of peace. War had no impact on my generation's lives but it did on my younger brothers', even though they were just babies when the war began. We would sometimes have visits from my grandparents and aunts and uncles. My grandmother and grandfather lived a few doors away, but not in this house. My grandparents rented a house in the back lane behind the houses that were fronted by Station Road. I can remember visiting them and looking at the flowers in their garden. I can also remember that there was a huge, old-fashioned water wheel in the garden. We used to wonder why it was there. I did like our garden because we had so many flowers, too. We didn't have any lawn to cut and Dad never mowed the grass so it was left to grow as wild and long as it wanted to. As well as having our own house and garden, my family had two or three other houses in Farnham. My mother always wanted to have a vegetable garden and so we spent a lot of time in the back garden of our house in Farnham looking at all of the flowers, vegetables and fruit growing there, especially the apples. I loved the apples in the garden so much that we used to try to catch them. In our garden in Farnham we had four apple trees and we did catch apples from them all, but we never got any that were red and we only once picked a Red Delicious, which were my favourite apple. I'm not very good at growing vegetables. If it wasn't for my mother I probably wouldn't have known how to plant them. She taught me all about the process of growing them and I grew the usual vegetables: carrots, swedes, cabbages, potatoes, onions and so on. It never seemed to bother my mother that I didn't take much of an interest in growing vegetables, although when I became an adult I did understand her enthusiasm for it. Vegetables are one of the things that make me happy. I'd much rather eat them than cakes and puddings and other foods that can make people ill. I could never be the sort of farmer my grandparents were, but that's no reason not to grow my own. All you need to plant are vegetables. I've still got my grandfather's book. He wrote it in the early 1970s and he describes how he grew vegetables and how to do things. I'm sure the book explains how to grow all sorts of different vegetables, so it would be worth having a look at if you are interested. I grew cabbages, too, because that was the vegetable my mother used to grow. My great-grandfather, John Bingham, who lived across the road from us, was a keen gardener and he had the biggest vegetable garden. His grandad had lived in Farnham and it was something that was handed down through the family. All of my uncles and my father's brothers had gardens and I imagine they used to help my great-grandfather with his garden. His vegetable garden was always so amazing – a real picture of a well-kept garden – with vegetables planted so neatly and well that they looked almost as if they'd been painted on. We never ate anything grown in our own garden because we didn't need it all. There were always people knocking on the door in Farnham, asking if they could take some vegetables. Dad always said yes to anyone who was interested in what we had growing in the garden. We were very generous that way and probably went a bit soft on our neighbours. I've heard people saying that's not very likely in these times and I agree, but our neighbour would have been just about the last person in the whole of Farnham who would have used drugs, so I think it's fair to assume that he wouldn't have been the sort of person who would have taken our plants. It's quite hard to imagine that anyone in Farnham would want to do that, but it's possible, of course. There are a lot of trees in Farnham and as I've already mentioned they all had to be cut down and trimmed – or maybe