In the 18th Century you could be hanged for being on the high road with a sooty face, or be transported for 14 years for handing out copies of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.

Nowadays, it would appear you can do serious damage to the town's amenities and almost certainly get away with it.

This was highlighted in a recent meeting, called by the cricket club, to discuss ways of protecting their Rectory Meadow home in the face of vandalism and misuse.

Earlier the same evening I had been to Jacob Ecclestone's talk about allotments – a peaceable, useful occupation of decent-minded people.

The contrast between this and what we heard from the cricket club was stark.

The mood of the meeting was generally against fencing off the meadow; but you could see the club's plight, in the face of a vicious minority who seem to exist only to harm the town.

The Rectory Meadow is an oasis in the middle of Diss.

The view as you come round by the junior school towards the Cupiss Works is one of the best and most distinctive we have.

The meadow was originally the glebe land for the old rectory.

Until halfway through the last century, Mere Manor was still known as the Old Rectory.

My Dad said that Mere Manor was a nickname given to it by billeted troops.

Many people remember the Nissen huts, on the south side, where Italian prisoners of war were interned.

The huts then became classrooms and a canteen for the Church School.

I made my stage debut, at the age of four, in one of the huts.

In 1919 the schoolchildren, including my Dad and four uncles, lined up on the meadow to pay their respects to Nurse Edith Cavell's funeral train on its way to Norwich. She was the nurse shot by the Germans for helping escapees.

In those days you could see the railway station from the school, as you could until the 1960s, before the land in between was built upon.

I remember when the meadow was still the school field, how icy cold the east wind could be at play time.

My Dad said that at one time there was a ditch across the meadow, from north to south, with a cricket pitch on one side and a football pitch on the other.

There were sand pits on the north side, for long and high jump, and a dear little hawthorn tree – now gone.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing a gymkhana on the meadow on Coronation Day as we came home in the evening up The Entry from the Picture House.

Short of re-introducing transportation, it is difficult to know what to do about the idiots who harm the meadow. But a two-metre fence all round it would change this spot irrevocably.

Basil Abbott is manager of Diss Museum. The museum is in the Market Place and is open Wednesday and Thursday 2-4pm, Friday and Saturday 10.30am-4pm and Sunday 2-4pm.

What are your memories of Rectory Meadow and the events held on it? Write to Memory Lane, Diss Express, Mere Street, Diss, Norfolk, IP22 4AE or email editorial@dissexpress.co.uk