Two milk floats distributing the produce of Court Farm (Dairy), Tarring Neville, just north of Heighton.

On offer, eggs, butter, cream and poultry and the main product, milk. The float with the black horse is in New Road, Newhaven A26 looking south.

I would estimate the date as 1928. The driver is Fred or Frank Harvey. The boy is his son Frank who was at school with me at Newhaven and later when the new secondary school was opened at Mountfield Road, Lewes, which required a daily train journey.

Although we had been classmates for several years, it wasn't until we went to Lewes that, somehow, we got involved with Hornby trains, by which time Harvey & Wheeler were operating their dairy from upper High Street, Newhaven, living above the shop for the Harveys, which was where the little rail incident occurred.

This of course was the era of clockwork movement.

Frank had a 0-4-0 Hornby tank engine, but I had recently acquired a 4-6-0 LNER express loco named Flying Fox. What was more, mine could pull his tank – with it's brakes on – along the track.

Quite an achievement.

There was no snobbery here, at that time my family moved from Meeching
Road, up to New Jerusalem, Hillcrest Road, to immediately beyond the join with Second Avenue.

Three residences beyond us and you were in open country.

You didn't own a watch, you borrowed the family alarm clock, put it in a basket and went out picking mushrooms before going to school. It was paradise.

The road itself had yet to be made up, one was a little boy so one's eyes were not far from the virgin ground, particularly as you wandered home one frequently picked up a fossil or two.

Lewes school catered for lads whose parents were 'comfortably off' but it was not easy for Daddy to go into a shop and just buy fossils.

The lad had a barn with a layout of clock-work and steam trains. He had a air pistol which he fired at to halt them. Eight sea urchin fossils secured the Flying Fox. Despite his spoilt childhood, he developed into quite a genius in his life achievements.

The dairy was well established a few doors below now Dees the newsagents in upper High Street. Before the war it was operated by Frowds of Seaford. That war found my old friend Frank, in the Royal Navy. Sadly he was lost in the early battle of Narvik in Norway and there he is to the left of the milk churn.

It is also very difficult to realise that this is the New Road now so busy, I don't think it was even tarred before the last war, between here and now Avis Road was just meadows and water filled ditches.
Between New Road and the railway were allotments and an extensive area of shunting goods yard. New Road joined the Drove east of the level crossing. Here also was the electricity power station.

Much grazing and the occasional fair ground with those wonderful steam traction engines belt driving their glamorous dynamos to give light for the night and power for the round-a-bouts and bumper cars.

Let us conclude with George Wheeler, with his float and white horse, serving at the cottages at the top of New Road and reached via Avis Road these days.

The horse knew the stops and starts so George would just dispense the required wants of his customers from his mobile shop as he walked along. Should there be some distance between his calls, then he just hopped up into the cart and the pony enjoyed a trot for a few hundred yards.

George served in the auxiliary Fire Service in the last war, he gave some of his badges to the museum.