Life At Home- Part 1

 I was thinking about when I was younger and living at home with my parents. I must have mentioned before on this blog that I lived on a farm in Cardington. Malting Farm, to be exact. We were tenants of the Whitbread Estate. Malting Farmhouse was a large Georgian house, built in 1764. It is red brick, with windows that have diamond panes. Some of the windows had been bricked up back in the 18th century, or thereabouts, probably because of the window tax, which was introduced during that period. I think the more windows you had, the more tax you had to pay, so people blocked up windows to avoid paying more tax. There was no double glazing or central heating. In the winter, when you got up in the morning, you would invariably find thick ice on the inside of the windows. The upstairs rooms were connected to one another, so you had to go through one room to get to another. My bedroom, which I shared with my younger brother, had three doors, so it wasn't exactly private. A corridor was added, both upstairs and downstairs, at a much later date. To get dressed in the morning to go to school, we had to run along the corridor to the bathroom and turn on the electric wall heater. This was the only source of heating in the winter in that room. Downstairs in the kitchen, there was an Aga, which was fired with a coal-like substance, which came in sort of nut-shaped lozenges. This Aga had to be kept alight, as it not only heated the water (although there was an immersion tank in the bathroom) but was used for cooking. There was a coal/wood-burning stove in the dining room, which was actually used as the main room where we used to watch television and as a family centre. There were other fireplaces in the other rooms, but they were rarely used. 

Thinking about it, we had all we needed in some respects. Being a farm, we had milking cows, providing milk, potatoes, grown to be sold at Covent Garden Market, Brussels sprouts, similarly grown for sale, and in garden of Malting Farm, a whole range of fruit and vegetables, apples, plums, pears, gooseberries, raspberries, strawberries as well as lettuce, onions and in season, celery and rhubarb. My mum did shop for other household items, at a grocer's in Bedford called West's and later, at a store off Cardington Road, called D and A (that may be wrong.) This was well before supermarkets, such as Tesco or Sainsbury's, but she also went into Bedford centre and went to International Stores in the High Street as well as Saxby's, which did pork pies and sausages.

 Dad was friends with a man who was a butcher, Dick Woods. He had greyhounds, similar to Dad. They used to take their greyhounds coursing, and one of  Dad's won a race at White City. Dick Woods owned and ran a butcher's shop in Harrowden Road, and we bought our meat from him. Often it would be delivered by van, and often he would drop in for coffee or around 4 o'clock when we had tea and at times bring sausages which he made himself. It rather makes me think of Jones the butcher in Dad's Army, who was renowned for giving extra bits of meat or sausages to his regular customers, which was actually probably illegal and against the wartime rationing regulations.

Teatime was, as I have said, around 4 o'clock and my mother produced her best cakes, especially her speciality, shortbread. I think it was passed down to her from my father's side of the family. I believe it is a Scottish tradition, which would be right, because my father's family came from Scotland. It was at this time that there were visitors who just happened to call in at the right time, to be invited for a cup of tea, a piece of cake and a chat. Many of those who came to tea would be reps for the various companies that did business with the farm. 

Earlier in the day, around 11 o'clock, would be coffee time. My mother had a coffee percolator, which sat on the fridge. I don't think you can buy these gadgets today. It was probably made by Russell Hobbs. You put ground coffee into a metal sieve-like container within the percolator and filled the thing with water, and as it boiled, the water came up through a pipe and percolated through the coffee grounds, and the hot coffee was contained in a separate compartment. The outer body was made of ceramic, and it had a clear glass lid through which you could see the coffee percolating. I probably took about 15 minutes to brew a cup of coffee.

My Mum and Dad- Part 1

I have mentioned both my parents in earlier posts. There was around 20 years age difference between my mother and father. My mother was around 21 when they married in 1945. My father would have been in his early 40s. Our lives revolved around dogs, horses and boats. The dogs were greyhounds. My father was a farmer first and foremost but he was also a registered trainer of greyhounds. We were very much into bloodsports. I know that now such things as fox hunting and hare coursing are not exactly 'politically correct' and have been banned in this country for several years, but as a farming family you do anything that protects your livestock against predators such as foxes. I'm not sure where I stand in the debate regarding this activity. I suppose when you are bought up with it as being 'the norm' you tend to accept it without thinking about it, but I suppose I would say I come down on the side of the antis to a certain extent as we are supposed to be a modern and forward-thinking society and such things as bloodsports (although I don't like the term) shouldn't be practiced. I don't actually believe that they are a particularly effective way to control foxes or hares, but neither do I believe that shooting is very effective, as you would need to be a very good shot to be able to hit either a hare or a fox and particularly those animals which know the layout of the countryside and are able to avoid being shot. Then, when we drive out through the countryside on our frequent journeys to National Trust properties or wherever we happen to be going in our car, we very often seen dead foxes at the side of the road, along with a wide range of other wildlife such as rabbits and badgers, which have been killed by traffic, there isn't much difference surely in them dyeing under the wheel of a speeding car or H.G.V. and from the barrel of a shotgun. Both my parents used to go coursing during the winter months. It would be cold and frosty and would usually go off to somewhere her Cambridge. I wonder what they would have to say about there being a ban on this activity. Probably total disbelief. My mother died in 1981 and my father in 1993. 

I have mentioned that we had a hut on the River Ouse near Cardington Mill. My father owned several sailing boats over the years. One was a wooden, clinker-built boat called Amaranda and it was sailed on the Ouse at Cardington. He also had a small motorboat whose name I forget. He used to steer this up and down the river on Saturday afternoons during the long hot summers of my childhood. My mother would, as ever, be in charge of vast amounts of food, packed up in the back of whatever car we had at the time and then drive to this hut, gaining entrance to the site through a gate in Cardington Road and across a meadow and over a rather rickety bridge across a stream. The hut was painted bright green and was locked up for most of the time and contained such things as deck-chairs and Calor gas, which was used to boil the kettle for tea. 

Later on my father bought another boat, made of fibre glass and about the same size as Amaranda and he had membership of the sailing club at Grafham Water, a reservoir near Huntingdon. It is around a 25-30 mile drive there. I never took to sailing. Probably because my father had very little patience with us children and would not understand my lack of enthusiasm for sailing because he would bellow at me to move quicker about the boat when the boom moved across in a strong wind and it would hit you hard on the head if you didn't get out of it's way fast enough. Also, I never could fathom out which rope to haul on at the appropriate time and to me it was far to complicated. I would rather go and visit somewhere in the boat without all the hassle of hauling on 'sheets' (the correct term for a rope on a yacht. Don't ask me why!) Or forget which is 'port' or 'starboard.'

These boats were taken with us when we went on holiday to Frinton-On-Sea on the Essex coast (see earlier post for more details.) The clinker-built yacht was built by James and Co boat-builders in Brightlingsea, which is further down the coast and on the Colne Estuary, around 15-20 miles from Frinton. We did spend a certain amount of time at Brightlingsea, but there wasn't an awful lot there to keep children occupied. Even later still my father bought a much larger boat called Flashpoint which had a cabin on it with galley and we sometime went down to Brighlingsea and stayed on this boat, but I found it very cramped and it was moored off Mersea Island and you had to get out to it in a little rubber boat and to be honest I'm not a very good sailor. But it did mean that we had somewhere to go for a few day's holiday. At some point or other I do remember going to stay in a rather nice pub somewhere on the Hard at Brightlingsea, the name of which I forget. There again, it meant my mother got a break where she didn't have to cook food and organise things as she had to when we went on holiday to Frinton (usually for two week at the beginning of September, at around the time of the harvest. I imagine I must have had time off school but again I don't remember exactly.) We went to a rented house, so my mother would have to cook and prepare meals and it can't have been much of a holiday for her. (I mention more of this in an earlier post on here.)

Boats, Dogs and Horses

Family life when I was growing up always seemed to revolve around either boats or horses, and, thinking about it, dogs also. Living on  farm as we did meant we had plenty of room to keep horses. I seem to remember the arrival of the first pony, called Meg. My brother Robert was, and still is, horse-mad. My younger brothers Sandy and Andrew were involved to some extent, but not to the same level as Robert. Gymkhanas were (and possibly still are) held in and around the county of Bedfordshire and into the neighbouring counties.

I wasn't overly keen myself, as I was never liked all the associated activities which went with horse-ownership, such as mucking out, tack-cleaning and so on. I was put off by horses when I was bitten by one. I was sitting on  fence near the stables at the rear of Malting Farm. There was a field of cattle to one side and horses in an adjacent meadow and between was a drinking trough used by both horses and cattle. A cow mooed and one of the horses decided to nip me on the fleshy part of my upper arm. And before you ask, yes, i really hurt. On another occasion one of the ponies I occasionally rode bolted with me on it and I  nearly landed up going through a five-bar gate at the end of the field. Not really something which was ever likely increase my love of equestrianism as you might well imagine! I did occasionally venture out on horsey rides around Cardington, but nothing very adventurous. I would put the horse I was riding into occasional 'top gear' as you might say and go for invigorating gallops across fields of stubble during the harvest period, but that was about all. During that time of the year you could go for miles across country when the corn was newly cut. Robert was the one of my brothers who did show jumping but I can honestly say that I was never brave enough.

My parents got into horse breeding and used to show mares and foals at agricultural shows such as the  Bedfordshire Agricultural Show and later the East of England Show which was the merging of several county shows which included Bedfordshire and held near Peterborough. The Bedfordshire show was on fields where now Tesco and the beach pool (The Oasis) were built in the 1990's.

We had a sort of riverside 'hide-away' near the River Ouse near Cardington Mill, a sort of beach hut where my parents sailed a boat. Infact they had several boats, one being a motor boat. Summer weekends were spent at this hut and the usual gang of friends and relatives with descend, expecting to be both entertained and fed. My mother provided her usual fantastic teas. The hut contained all that one would hope to have for picnics, including deck chairs and tables as well as having a Calor gas ring for boiling the kettle. Several years ago  I walked along the opposite bank where this hut used to stand, round about where the canoe slalom is today, there seemed to be absolutely no sign of either the hut of the actual site of where it stood. I think there's a sort of sluce there which is in case the river floods, which it has done in recent years. We used to get in through a gate in Cardington Road, which is the road into the centre of Bedford and near where The Barns Hotel is today, (about two miles from Tesco's) and drive across a grass meadow to get to the hut and there was a somewhat precarious wooden bridge across a stream in order to reach the riverside site.

My great aunt Liz used to visit us at weekends.  A maiden aunt, I might mention, who had a certain sort of aura about her. She always seemed to get her own way. Much in the mold of the character Lady Bracknall in the play "The Importance of Being Ernest." She possessed the larges nose of anyone I can think of, and I'm only too relieved to think that I did not inherit this nose . It was very large. My father used to go and pick her up from her home in Philpots Avenue in Bedford and she would come for tea and then be taken home in the evening. In the summer she would come to the riverside hut and join in with tea, but she was as deaf as a post and probably as blind as a bat, so I don't think she could possibly have joined in with much of the conversations. I remember she wore a hearing aid, not one of the modern sort that you get today, which, when worn, are barely detectable,  but one which was extremely visable with a seperate microphone arrangement which was connected to the ear-piece with a piece of wire. I recall having to shout quite loud to get her to hear, even with this hearing-aid, which seemed to make the awful howling sound which seem to go with all hearing aids.
My brother James had a black Labrador dog called Flon. He used her for retrieving when he went shooting. I'm not sure how reliable she was as regarding retrieving. Anyway, this dog used to go with us to the river, and was very water-orientated, as are most retrievers, Labrador or otherwise. She would head straight for the water whenever we got to the hut. Keeping her out of the river was something of a problem. One afternoon, when Aunt Liz was in attendance, I think she probably spent most of the time asleep in a deckchair (well, she would have been in her late 80's  at the time so she was pretty ancient. I think she was 95 or thereabouts when she died in 1965.) Anyway, the dog, Flon, had been for a swim and came out onto the bank, and did what all dogs do  when they've been in water, she shook herself vigorously and unfortunately near the sleeping Great Aunt Liz. She became quite annoyed, as you can imagine and so it was decided from then on to keep the dog away from her. On another occasion the dog went for a ride in the motor boat along the river with my father in command and the dog sitting in the seat next to him. It was a bright and sunny day and the fish were leaping and things were drowsy. My mother was about to pour the tea. The sandwiches were made. The Victoria sponge taking pride of place in the centre of the table and no doubt another load of friends or relatives were about to arrive or perhaps they had just arrived. My mother waited for my father to return in the boat and looked along the river and into the sun, so couldn't see clearly. She said that Aunt Liz was in the boat which she could just see coming round a bend in the river. But she wasn't IN the boat at the time. She thought the DOG was my great aunt, who certainly sat in a somewhat imperious fashion when in the boat and thinking about it now, the dog did look rather like her,  although from a distance, I must stress!

Family Summer Holidays- Part 3

As I have mention in the earlier post, my father's yacht was the central reason for the holiday in Frinton-On-Sea. I think the sailing must have been particularly good along that stretch of the Essex coast. The boat he had which was called 'Amaranda' was a Jewel class yacht. It was clinker built, meaning it was made of overlapping lengths of timber made in the traditional manner. He had another yacht built of fibreglass of about the same size and later still a far larger yacht called 'Flashpoint' which was moored in the estuary at Brightlingsea and which was fitted out with a galley and sleeping accommodation , although it was quite cramped. I wasn't so keen on sleeping in that tiny space afore, as I got seasick with the motion of the boat and also some amount of claustrophobia in such a tiny space. This had a tender, a small rowing boat attached which was used to ferry us out to the mooring.  I remember that my Uncle Michael (my mother's brother, now, alas, dead.) was a very good sailor and would take command of "Flashpoint" because I think as Dad got older he found it quite difficult to manage. Dad had bought a small wooden rowing boat from somewhere in Colchester I seem to remember and took some duty as tender and was called 'Midge.' This was quite a basic sailing boat and could be sailed quite well by one person. Mum was good at sailing that alone and I think my brother James sailed that a few times. This was also sailed on the River Ouse near Cardington Mill, as we had a hut there which was used as a base for sailing and summer picnics, but, unfortunately, all of that had been swept aside when the business park was built.

The yacht would be taken down to be parked at the beach on arrival in Frinton. We had to go to the estate agent to get the keys for the house we had rented as well as the beach hut. I know that now it's quite fashionable to rent or own a beach hut at places such as Southwold, Frinton, Bournemouth and other seaside resorts, but when we went it made a very good base on the sea front. Frinton has an excellent beach, very fine sand between breakwaters or 'groynes' and the sea comes in right up to the level of the promenade and so washes the sand clean and makes an  excellent safe place for families with young children to have a holiday. Inside the hut (we had a different one each year, but I believe that they are all basically the same inside) there is an inner and outer area, the back area being lockable with double doors and which makes a good place to change when you go swimming. In that part of the hut there would be a Calor gas ring for boiling water for tea, a set of around six deckchairs, a picnic table and probably one or two other tables. In the front section of the hut there would be a benched area, so you could set up your table here and sit for meals or set up on the promenade at the front of the hut. 

There was a parking space on what was called the Greensward, a long stretch of grass which runs the whole length of the Frinton seafront. There is a slipway which runs down to the promenade and a further one which allows boats to be manhandled onto the beach and then launched. It was quite a strenuous task to haul the boat up and down these slipways, but I think at one point the car was used for this purpose.
As I said in the earlier post, it can't have been much of a holiday for my mother, because we stayed in a rented house in Frinton and this would mean there would still be meals to cook and we children would need to be looked after. Also, my mother and father sailed most days and knowing my father, who wasn't the most patient of men, it must have been quite stressful being a crew member for him. I can remember on several occasions being on board one of his yachts on the River Ouse and he wasn't patient, particularly if you hauled on the wrong sheet (rope) or moved at the wrong moment, as you had to if the boat was tacking into the wind, for example. If you didn't move fast enough you were very likely to be hit on the head very hard by the boom, the wooden 'stay' which kept the bottom of the mainsail fixed to the mast and moved about quite freely if not taken under control with whatever rope you happened to have in your hand and if not you'd get a lot of abuse from my father such as 'get out of the way, you idiot!' or words to that effect.
Quite a few family friends would congregate at the beach hut at Frinton. Not just my uncle Michael and his wife Gemma, but also a couple called Tim and Betty Smith.  They were a really nice couple, but they would argue with one another and would sit and bicker endlessly.  Can't have been much fun for my mother, inviting someone to tea and have to listen to them constantly bickering.
My brother Andrew appeared in 1961. I think after four boys my mother was keen to have a daughter. So it was a bit of a surprise when child number five was yet another boy. The Smiths, on the other hand, had been married for years and no baby appeared, but around a year after Andrew was born their one and only child appeared, called Ian. Funny little kid, bald, not very good looking, to say the least. In fact, possibly the inspiration for Yoda in the 'Star Wars' movies! I shouldn't make such comment, but never mind. Then there were the Boddy family, Ashely and Alison. Again, lovely people, but very noisy. I think Ashley bought my father's first boat, 'Amaranda.' He was another very good sailor. But as I say, whenever this family visited you needed to keep at arms length or wear earplugs as Ashley had/has a very loud laugh and the whole family makes a great deal of noise.
My Great Aunt Liz stayed at the Grand Hotel  which is on the seafront at Frinton and quite an imposing building.  She was one of my father's Scottish relatives, never married and was ancient even when I was a teenager.  She died at the grand old age of 95, in 1965, so almost 50 years ago. She makes me think of Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Ernest." Blind as a bat and just as deaf and with a huge nose, which, thank goodness, I didn't inherit. Imperious, to say the least, and although she wore a hearing aid she never seemed to have it tuned properly so it made that unfortunate whistling noise that hearing aids are prone to. You would find yourself repeating things endlessly if you had a conversation with her, which could make life very difficult. Anyway, she would come down to the beach several afternoons when we were there, but it would mean her being ferried around in cars and taken down to the beach as she couldn't walk far.
Andrew, as I've said, was the youngest of my parent's children. I can't imagine what looking after no less than five children would be like, not just feeding, clothing, birthdays, Christmas and so on. So it's no wonder that my mother needed some sort of help. So Andrew had someone to look after him when he was a baby up until be was around 9-10 I suppose. This lady was Miss Fuller. To this very day I'm not sure of her Christian name. It's odd, but it's true. She had been a seamstress and very good too, and had gone to our neighbour's at Cardington, the Porter's and used to do mending. Somehow or other she was sort of 'head-hunted' by my mother and came to work for us., doing virtually the same thing. I know, it's odd to us today, but people did mend clothes. It's not something that is done now, I should imagine, even with the 'recycling' generation and the need to be 'environmentally friendly.' I imagine this would be a left-over from the days of the Second World War and what followed with Austerity. Anyway, she had one afternoon of mending socks, darning etc and then when Andrew was born she used to take him for walks in his pram. Eventually she came more or less permanently as a sort of nanny, but I don't suppose she would have wanted to be called that. So she came with us when we went on holiday to Frinton. I don't know what the arrangement as regards payment. I suppose she was given something, but I don't know. But I suppose she was getting, in effect, a free holiday. At least it meant my mother got some sort of time to herself as Miss Fuller took virtually complete control of son number five. Things went very well with this arrangement until my grandmother  Ferriman came to Frinton. I'm not sure for certain whether she came for a day or two or whether she stayed with us, but she was another body for my mother to look after.
One afternoon there was something of a cat-fight between Miss Fuller and my grandmother. Don't ask me what it was about. It was in front of everyone on the promenade near the beach hut. My grandmother was going on  about something like who was looking after my brother, and Miss Fuller, who was an extremely strongwilled lady, put her foot down and said that SHE was looking after him. It was like something out of one of those comedies, almost fists flying, fur and feather. 'He's my grandson and I'm in charge of him!' from granny Ferriman and then 'He's my responsibility' from Miss Fuller (or words to that effect.) I'm not sure how it ended, but it must have been very embarassing for my mother. I think it may have been about who could take him for a walk along the promenade or something equally trivial. I know it must have caused no end of entertainment for all and sundry!