First notes on Oaken Grove
September 5, 2009
My father finished his monograph on Oaken Grove in 1997. Understandably, it took him several years to organize the data he had collected over a lifetime. However, he wrote his first draft in Changi during the spring or summer of 1942. He would write several more drafts before he was released. The drafts are very similar to each other and anticipate in remarkable detail his final introduction to the monograph half a century later. I do not know what was going through his mind as he wrote them. Perhaps with a little time on his hands he thought he might as well get down to it. But as suggested in my first post on Oaken Grove, below, I can’t help thinking that there was a lot more to it than that.
The map and cross-section shown in the extract is titled: Map 1 (a) showing the chief physical & geographical features of that part of the Middle Thames area occupied by the Heronries.
Entrance to Oaken Grove
as it is today