Great Hockham

The novelist Christopher Bush was born in Great Hockham in 1885. He was educated at Thetford Grammar and at King's College London and fought in both world wars.

He wrote over 50 detective novels using his real name - but also wrote nine novels about Breckland life using his pen-name Michael Home. The first of these was entitled God and the Rabbit and was published in 1934 and concerned the adventures of a local boy called Harry Francis. In the novel Bush transforms Great Hockham into the fictional village of 'Heathley' - portraying the isolation and poverty of rural life at the turn of the century.

He also wrote 3 other autobiographical novels entitled: Autumn Fields, Spring Sowing and Winter Harvest.

Great Hockham Cottages

Great Hockham Village SIgn

Here is an extract from Spring Sowing (1946) which perfectly captures the spirit of the Brecklands:

'I wish, too, that I could convey to you the incredible beauty of that vast and lonely country. For all its quietude there was in it nothing forbidding. It had space and freedom and the friendliness of growing things. The heaths and brecks had their gentle undulations so that in lanes and tracks one never saw too far ahead. And then again there would be great sweeps of open country. And even there the miles of bracken or heather would have no monotony for they would be broken by ancient woods or clusters of gnarled pines, and mossy pools with their silver branches, or the oases of silver sand which were the burrows of the teeming rabbits. Above would be the open sky, and across the clear stretches it would be hard to tell where the faint blue of the horizon ended and the sky began. Then there were the meres, as varying as the heath itself.'

Christopher Bush died in 1973.

Links:

Great Hockham Website

Holy Trinity Church

Wayland Website

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