('Dad Charlie' Costar was visited by Mais while he was working on his book
'Our Village Today' (Werner Laurie) in 1956. Coastar was then living at 'The
Closes' in Leys Lane)
'I was taken down the main street, a group of thatched stone cottages of great beauty, some in decay, to see the Grand Old Man of Cumnor, Charles Costar.
He lives with his daughter in a thatched cottage at the end of a watery lane. He has the face of a statesman and the forthrightness of a Churchill.
'I was born, he said, 'on 15 October, 1867. That makes me on the way to eighty-eight. A contented mind is the secret of long life and happiness. I've always had a contented mind.
I started work when I was eight years old at one shilling and sixpence a week bird-minding and leading a horse. In 1881 I was hired at four shillings and sixpence a week.'
Here curiously enough he paused and put a hand to his head. 'I won't tell 'ee a lie if I can help it,' he said.
'If 1 was looking back seventy-four years I doubt whether I could remember the truth,' I said.
'I remember all right,' he said, 'going down to Bablock Hythe at four o'clock every morning for the milking. Then my dad and me went haymaking as far away as Northolt and Warwickshire where we met Joe Arch.'
My ears pricked up at this. Fancy meeting anyone who remembered the first
agricultural labourer to become an M.P., the founder of the Farm-labourers'
Union. I was listening to a piece of English rural social history at first hand.
He spoke well and he spoke fast, so fast that when he said, 'I wasn't much use
at fagging,' he didn't give me a chance to ask him whether that meant cutting
faggots.
'Then we came back to start a small holding and on 19 February, 189o 1
founded the Cumnor Lodge of Oddfellows.'
What a memory.
'I was on the Parish Council for fifteen years and I worked up at the Chawley brick works for fifty-two years. And now? Well, I got no pension for my work there, and now I does a bit of gardening, and when I can get over them dratted tall stiles I cross the fields to the "Bear and Ragged Staff" for a pint or two.'
Here he chuckled and became deliciously Rabelaisian. 'You can't put that down
on paper,'hesaid. 'But you can say
that I've done a tidy bit of well-digging in my time.'
Everybody I met had told me that Charlie Costar was a great character, but I was surprised to fmd how great a character he is. Men of his stamp, burly, aggressive, outspoken, humorous and tremendously vital, are becoming very rare indeed.