THERE’S NO PLACE
LIKE HOME Many people find their forever home, or the place they most want to live, relatively early in life, but Rooftop tenant Lee Barnett holds the record for being our customer for the longest. This May he turns 92 years young, and Ashton Under Hill has been home for all of those years. You may see him out and about on his bicycle or carrying his shopping home in his rucksack as he gets off the bus.
He was born in 1927 in a house on Elmley Road. He has a rent book that showed the house cost 12 shillings a week. Then in 1975 he moved to the bungalows just down the road, that Rooftop inherited from the local authority. He is the youngest of nine children; all five of his older brothers went to fight in WWII and happily all returned safely. His father was a carter, in charge of a team of horses and Lee remembers they had big gardens where they grew a lot of their own vegetables, which were a god send during the war. He remembers with little fondness the whale meat sausages that were part of the ration pack. Thankfully the odd rabbit they were able to catch satisfied their need for protein. Ashton Under Hill was quite a different place when he was a child. The railway still stopped in the village and the surrounding land was a centre for market gardening. Lee went to the village school, then to Bredon Senior Hancocks School. He left when he was 14 and worked for the grower, Archer. He used to know everybody in Ashton Under Hill and says they were all hard workers but also tried to squeeze in a bit
Lee on his bicycle 16
SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOP
