Reg. charity 219925 Midhurst · West Sussex Est. 1632
Testimonials
Voices from the row, from the rota, from the back of the garden.
Six contributions, each named in full with the contributor’s permission. The texts have been edited only for length, and only with each contributor’s approval.
A short rotation
In their own words.
“They paid the oil bill in February of 2024 within four days of my letter. There was no inspection. There was no form. There was a card on the mat afterwards saying it had been done.”
Margaret, 78 · Cocking · Wassail Fund recipient
“I locked my own front door for the first time in seven years. I had not realised how much I had missed the small click of a Yale.”
Eileen, 81 · Midhurst · resident since 2019
“I came in for one Sunday and stayed for fourteen years. It is the easiest commitment I have ever kept.”
Pauline, 67 · Easebourne · Sunday Doors volunteer
“The garden gives me three things I cannot get elsewhere: the smell of bruised tomato leaves, the conversation of three other men, and parsnips.”
Stephen, 72 · Stedham · garden volunteer
“We match-fund their winter appeal because they are unfailingly honest about what they can and cannot do. That kind of clarity is rarer than it should be.”
Grace Whitelaw · Sussex Community Foundation
“I had not expected to like the garden so much. I had also not expected to like the kettle being on at half past three.”
Derek, 74 · Cocking, now Midhurst · resident since 2025
Slide
In longer form
Six contributions in full.
Eileen, 81 · Midhurst · almshouse resident since 2019
“I had been in a bed-and-breakfast for eighteen months before I came here. The thing about a bed-and-breakfast is that none of the rooms are yours. The lamp is theirs. The pillows are theirs. The view out of the window is theirs. When I moved in here, in the autumn of 2019, the trustee gave me a key on the kitchen table and walked away. That was the bit I remember.”
“I still walk into Knockhundred Row for my newspaper at half past seven each morning. The man in Garlands keeps my change in a tobacco tin behind the counter. I cook for myself, I tidy for myself, I dust the longcase clock on Wednesdays and I do not do it on any other day. I take communion at half past nine on Sundays. The Sunday Doors visitor comes at three. We have, in a small and undramatic way, become friends.”
“The trustees do not interfere. They write to me with the rent quietly twice a year. If something has to be mended they come at a time I have agreed. They have not told me what to do once. I cannot, off the top of my head, remember the last time I felt as old as I am.”
“The first letter I wrote was for the oil tank in February 2022. I am not by nature someone who asks. I had spent a fortnight talking myself into it. I posted the letter on a Thursday. The trustee telephoned on the Monday, said they had read it, said the oil would be delivered on the Wednesday, and asked whether I needed anything else. I did not. I cried a small amount when the oil arrived.”
“I have applied twice more since. The hearing aid in 2023, the chimney sweep in 2024. The thing they do that I have never seen another charity do is treat me as though I am still in charge of the situation. They pay the man, not me. They write afterwards to ask whether the man was good. They have never once told me how to manage my own house.”
Pauline, 67 · Easebourne · Sunday Doors visitor since 2011
“I came in to fill a single Sunday in the rota that someone had dropped out of, in the November of 2011. Fourteen years later I have visited four older neighbours, in sequence; three of them are no longer with us, and I went to all three funerals. The one I visit now is a lady in Stedham called Beryl, who is 89 and who knits.”
“I sometimes try to describe what we do, and I find I cannot. We sit. We drink tea. We talk about the news. We talk about her children. We talk about my children. Once a year, in the week before Christmas, I take in a small box of mince pies from the bakery in Midhurst. She always offers me one back. It has been the most quietly important thing in my own week for fourteen years.”
Stephen, 72 · Stedham · kitchen-garden volunteer since 2016
“I had retired from the bank in May of 2016. By June I was unbearable. By July my wife had walked me up the lane and into the walled garden. By August I knew the names of three other men and the difference between a French breakfast radish and a black Spanish.”
“The garden has saved a number of us, I think, in different ways. We do not say so to each other. We do say, every week without fail, that the kettle is on; that the slugs are worse than they were; that the broad beans look promising; that we will need to talk about the rhubarb. It is unbelievably small. It is also, if I am honest, the thing I most look forward to every fortnight.”
Grace Whitelaw · Sussex Community Foundation, programme manager
“George Ognell’s Charity is one of about thirty small Sussex charities we match-fund each winter. They are not the largest. They are not the most photogenic. They are, year on year, the most honest. The reports they send us in March are written by the chair, on paper, with a list of every grant they have made and a note on the five they had to decline.”
“What you want from a funded partner, at our end of the work, is the sense that the money lands exactly where they said it would land. With Ognell’s we have never had to wonder. We renew them every year.”
Derek, 74 · Cocking, now Midhurst · almshouse resident since October 2025
“I had not expected to like the garden so much. I had also not expected to like the kettle being on at half past three. I had spent four years on my own in a rented flat in Cocking, and I had thought I had got used to it. I had not, of course; you do not.”
“Eileen, in the third cottage, has me for coffee on Wednesdays. Margaret across the row brings me jam. The trustees come past once a fortnight and ask about my dahlias. I cannot, six months in, find anything to complain about. That, in itself, is unusual at my age, and I am told to enjoy it.”
