Gerald Ponting. DA6180P3Author tells Lesley Bates about growing up in a rural idyll

ABOOK about growing up on the edge of the New Forest was launched at Breamore House's countryside museum on Monday.

Its author, Gerald Ponting, remembers taking his first photograph on a trip to Tilly Whim caves, near Swanage, in 1948, when his mother thrust her Folding Autographic Brownie into his eight-year-old hands and asked him to take a picture of her.

The camera was second-hand, given to his mother by one of her employers during her days as a lady's maid.

But the photographs he took with it as his interest in photography grew have stood the test of time, and feature in the book Scenes From A Hampshire Childhood, which charts his childhood years in Breamore.

Mr Ponting (65) was christened the day war broke out in 1939 and his earliest memories are immediately post-war, when signposts were reintroduced and beaches were still blocked by barbed wire.

He and his family lived in Virginia Cottage, opposite the Bat and Ball pub and adjacent to the smallholding where the Ponting family kept cows and pigs and grew vegetables and crops.

Grandfather Percy and, later, father Ernest ran a dairy herd that provided the village with its milk until Ernest retired in 1973.

"Between them, my father and grandfather did the milk round for 60 years, first with a pony and cart and then on a butcher's bike," says Mr Ponting, who would help out during his holidays.

Many of the photographs in the book were taken by either Mr Ponting or his father and provide an unusual pictorial record of growing up in rural Hampshire in the 1940s and '50s.

"The photographs were one of the inspirations for writing the book," he says.

"The other came from talking to my grandchildren about how different life in the '40s and '50s was.

"I wanted to get across to them that you didn't miss the computer and the television then.

"You had the freedom to roam over the watermeadows, bathe in the river, fish for minnows and make dens in the middle of overgrown hedges.

"There was a whole gang of boys of a similar age and a hawthorn hedge with a hollow inside where we plotted raids."

Mr Ponting's grandchildren were with him on Monday at the launch and he was able to show them some of the milking machinery, given to the museum when it was no longer needed, that their grandfather and great-grandfather had used.

The former Burgate School teacher attended the village school as a boy and then Bishop Wordsworth's School, where William Golding was briefly his form teacher, before going on to university.

As well as a career in teaching, Mr Ponting is the author (many with Anthony Light) of a number of books on the history of Fordingbridge and other towns and villages in the area.

Most recently, the pair co-authored a guide to the Saxon church of St Mary's in Breamore.

"Breamore has changed far less than most villages, but there has been a huge change in the population mix," says Mr Ponting.

"Then, most people worked on the Breamore estate, but now, most have no connection with the land."

Scenes From A Hampshire Childhood is published by Miller Dale Publications, price £6.95, and is available from Cross Keys Bookshop, Salisbury.