This article was first published in the West Sussex Gazette 4th March 1993

Last week we learned of how 'Curly' Norris first came to Tarring as a baby to the Castle Inn where his father, Alfred, became landlord, the second generation of Norris's to do so, before moving on to the George & Dragon.

In this concluding episode of 'Curly's two-part memoirs we see how his businessman father became the author of his own financial downfall.

It was 1918, the last year of the Great War, that 'Curly' went for a fortnight's holiday in South Wales, but that two weeks visit turned into some three and a half years for he stayed and worked down coal mines. But he left after witnessing an avoidable, fatal accident to a young boy at the coal face.

On his return to Worthing he went back to the farm at Littlehampton Road where he tended 100 pigs, 250 poultry, including ducks, geese and chicken, as well as two big sows.

'We entered the larger of the two in the Steyning Fat Stock Show,' he recalled, 'She could be an awkward cus and craved attention, for if you didn't go up and scratch her head or her back she would play merry hell. She was getting a bit fretty at that busy market.'

A buyer from the Co-op purchased her. 'They tried to drive the 81 stone animal on foot to the slaughterhouse at Broadwater,' said 'Curly', 'but she got in a hell of a state, and had to be picked up in a bullock cart.'

He married a May Greenyer in 1924 and set up home at one of the two farm cottages on his father's smallholding in Littlehampton Road: the first proper home life he had known. 'There was no home life in the pub. The only time that father had for us was at Christmas when he said come on down to Walter Brothers to buy presents.' (Walter Bros was a popular town centre department store)

With the demise of horse transport, 'Curly' then drove buses for Southdown, a job he retained for a full 33 years. He has most interesting memories of those early days. 'The first buses I drove were open-top double deckers on solid tyres and with no windscreen. Very often they didn't make it up Salvington Hill, the engine would boil up, and we had to stop and cool it down half way up.'

His father, Alfred, depite running a total of four businesses including the pub, was sadly heading for economic ruin.

'Father's downfall was his generosity,' said Curly, 'Whenever gypsies arrived in the parish, father always wanted to help them. They got to know this and so made a habit of always coming to him.

'When other people got into financial trouble, he would listen to their woes in his pub and help them out with some cash.'

Consequently, when Alfred died around 1935 he left behind debts, even though he had sold some farm land for a sizeable sum just two years earlier. About early twentieth century Tarringites, 'Curly' recalled, 'Tarring was more or less run by the Chipper family in those days: Frank Chipper the cakemaker; Councillor Alf Chipper the market gardener; and three other Chippers --- a tailor, a coal merchant and a cab proprietor.

'Opposite the Vine in High Street was a wheelwrights yard which later became Dominion Joinery. And then there was Sammy Clark the saddler who had begged my father unsuccessfully to put me into racing stables when I was 16.'

'Curly' recollects how an old lady in the village (name supplied) had some ideas that seemed very strange at the time. 'They used to say she was a witch. She prophesied that man would fly in the air, carts would go without horses, and blocks of iron would float.'

He was an amazingly fit man, for even at the age of 91 (in 1993), 'Curly', as he always liked to be known, still loved working on the land. He single handedly worked two 12 rod allotments! And still maintained three gardens for customers of long standing who were pensioners like himself!