Sue and Kevin Beal live at 1 Mungo Lodge with their children Rhys and Rhiannon, aged 6 and 4 years. They have lived here for seven years, but Kevin’s family have been in Gt. Thurlow since he was seven. He has memories of the great storm of 1987 and a winter of heavy snow, which cut the village oV so completely that the shop ran out of food and tractors had to be used to go to the wholesaler in Haverhill.

Kevin works for the estate in agricultural maintenance and Sue is an assistant in Thurlow, Bradley and District playschool. She also works for the estate. The children attend the local school and pre-school, and Sue and Kevin played a large part in establishing the successful mobile classroom for the pre-school in the village school grounds.

Sue and Kevin both enjoy the rural environment, working in the village where they live, which has the facility of a school and friendly community-spirited people. They feel it is a safe place to bring up children.

The negative aspects of living in Thurlow are the speeding traffic (Kevin had his elbow clipped by a passing vehicle), the lack of footpaths between villages (which would enable children to walk to school and reduce the school parking problem), and the fouling of pavements and the playground area by dogs.

They have seen many changes in the village, with fewer people working locally and many redundancies made on the estate. The bus service to Cambridge is also much reduced; there used to be three buses on a Saturday.