Memories of a Warwickshire Orchard

I grew up in a Warwickshire village, a few miles outside Stratford-upon-Avon. My parents kept the local pub, which was a large, rambling building with several outbuildings and quite a lot of land including a field with a disused stone quarry, several vegetable gardens, a bowling green and an orchard. I was recently reminded of the orchard whilst watching a TV programme about fruit growing and how it changed in the second half of the 20th Century.
The orchard had -"had" because I believe the trees have all but disappeared now - a variety of apple, pear and plum trees, something quite magic to a young lad who had been brought up in the town and suddenly found himself in the countryside. There were several varieties of apple - at least two cooking apple trees, one of which must have been a Bramley as I remember enormous green apples which my mother used to make apple pies. There was another cooker too - it grew by the edge of the bowling green, and had grown at quite an angle as I could easily walk up the trunk and into the tree where I had a sort of perch on a convenient branch. I used to spend hours up there, but of course the apples were too bitter to eat without cooking. Our old dog used to get angry when I went up as she couldn't climb the damned tree ! Then there was my favourite apple - a Blenheim ! The tree was huge, must have been fifty feet, or is this memory making things seem bigger ? Anyway it was too high for us to put a ladder up and pick them, so we had to throw sticks at them or wait for windfalls, which were inevitably bruised - but we found the bruised parts were always sweeter than the rest. These apples were much sought after by the pub's customers as they had such a delicious flavour, so we kids used to collect as many as we could before the pub opened !
There were two pear trees, and these were most unusual in that they each bore two distinct varieties of pear - presumably some clever horticulturalist had somehow grafted them. One was a very tall tree which had small, sweet pears on one side, and lovely, large yellow fruit on the other. We used to collect the little pears and sell them to the customers, although the regulars just used to help themselves. The other pear tree had one variety which were medium sized and like bullets, so we used to throw them at each other until my mother found they stewed well and made us collect them instead. The second variety on this tree were medium sized and took a long time to ripen, so although they were worth the wait, we had already gnawed at most of them before they had the chance !
And then the plums. As far as I can remember there was one Victoria plum which never bore much fruit in the 18 years I was there, and also several smaller trees which had delicious, yellow plums. The trouble with these trees was that by the time the plums were ripe most of them had grubs in them, so we had to eat them carefully. But they were good, wish I could get them now !
It's so sad that so many of these old varieties have all but disappeared. They all had so much more flavour than the commercially successful fruit available today.
Oh there was one other delight in the pub grounds - a huge old walnut tree, now long since gone, which only ever produced one crop of walnuts in all my time there. The nuts would often drop off in their green casings and were delicious pickled, when they turned black.