Page 48 - ALG Issue 2 2015

Northern
Roddymoor Community Allotment Story – Part Six
With the community garden in place, we contacted Peases West Primary School and after detailed discussions, the school agreed to incorporate weekly visits to the allotment. They decided to bring a class of children down for an hour’s lesson every Friday. The school took over four
of the raised beds and over a period of weeks, were taught how to plant and nurture seeds and plants. The children really took to this type of hands-on lesson and the teachers informed us they really looked forward to every Friday. On June 6th the children came and planted up 21 sunflowers in memory of the fallen on the D-Day landings. Each plant had a name tag on it so the children could identify their own flower and drew up a graph to track its growth. The sun was shining and the Press came; it was a wonderful day and a great experience for everyone.
One of our staunchest supporters, an elder of the village called Ronnie Jarvis (pictured), also came up to enjoy the day with his faithful little terrier Alfie. Ronnie was 85 years old and was getting frail and a little unsteady on his feet, but he still wanted
to make the effort to come
up and see the children.
They made such a fuss of
him and little Alfie; he really
enjoyed the day. Sadly, only
a few short weeks later,
Ronnie passed away. Ron
was one of the inspirations
behind our project. It was
for him and others like him
in the village that we wanted
to build this facility so they
would have somewhere to go locally and spend a little time in each other’s company. Ron would visit us just about every day to see how things were progressing. It’s very sad that he didn’t see it completed.
In the meantime, things were progressing on the community room. As the building was now watertight, the committee set to boarding it out. Over a period of days this was completed and local plastering firm, M.T. Plastering, came in and plastered the whole building out for free. The generosity of some people is overwhelming at times! Things seemed to be gathering pace a
little bit now. The toilet area was fitted out and local housing association, Dale and Valley homes, sent us up a complete set of kitchen units for free as a gesture of goodwill to our project and retired joiner Fred Bilton put one day aside for us and fitted them for nothing.
Community spirit isn’t dead, it’s just sleeping. Give it a nudge and people
are very willing to help out. Another local building firm, Pinkney Construction helped us out with a septic tank. Owner, Joe Pinkney, bought us the tank and gave it
at cost price without VAT and fitted it on
Ron would visit us just about every day to see how things were progressing
48
site for free. We had just about everything in place now. We were only waiting to
hear from County Durham Community Foundation about the tarmac application we had submitted. Eventually a letter arrived on Secretary Colin’s doormat but it was not good news. C.D.C.F had awarded us only £1500, which coupled with the £1400 that local councillor John Hart had set aside, left us well short of the £7200 we needed for the tarmac. We contacted John and he said he would see if he could help. A couple of weeks later, he contacted us to say another local councillor, Eddie Tomlinson, was willing to fill the breach in funding from his community fund. A lot
of people run local councillors down but they do a great deal of unseen good work that people should know about. Without their help and all of the other community gestures we have received, we wouldn’t have been able to do half of what we’ve done. I contacted our contractor and he said he would try to fit us in at the earliest opportunity.
We’re getting close now.
Colin Helmingway