Keeping Sunday special

 It was when I was writing about harvesting going on into the evening until there was no more light that I remembered that Grandad never allowed harvesting on a Sunday.  No matter how things were going, Sunday was a day of rest, at least from arable work.  The animals still had to be fed, milked and cared for, of course.

On Sunday the focus was on the home.  Sunday dinner (lunch) was the culinary highlight of the week.  It was usually roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with vegetables from the garden.  Grandma made the best gravy I have ever tasted.  Even the horseradish sauce was homemade for horseradish was a rather vigorous weed.  

It would be followed by a fruit pie, apple, rhubarb or plum.  These were the fruits grown in the garden so those were the fruits we ate.  It was served with cream from the farm cows.  

For my grandparents tinned food was a rarity and grandma would open a small tin of salmon and make sandwiches for Sunday tea.  There would be home made plum bread (a Lincolnshire fruit loaf), cakes, pastries and a purchased Swiss roll, again a special pleasure for grandad.

After tea we would go to the little chapel in the village.  My grandparents were Methodists.  It was a bit of an ordeal for me as any children present were expected to sing a hymn to be listened to by the adults and I never knew the hymns chosen for us.

I was happy to go to chapel though, as I knew that after chapel we would go to Cleethorpes for a walk along the front and a local ice cream.   

Summer Holidays

 I've been thinking about those week long holidays spent at my grandparents' farm.  I know I'm looking though rose coloured spectacles but they are the only ones I've got!

Very similar to "our" farm

I used to stay with them most school holidays but summer holidays were the best.  It was extra good if I could go towards the end of the holiday when harvest would have started.

The farm was "mixed" as most were in Lincolnshire in those days.  There were cattle being fattened as beef, sheep, a few pigs and a lot of arable fields.  They grew wheat and barley as well as crops used for winter cattle fodder like mangold wurzels.  It's the wheat and the barley I remember most.

Barley is harvested before wheat and back in the fifties it was a much more labour intensive business than it is today.  My grandfather was in partnership with his brother, and their sons and grown-up grandsons (as well as the regular labourers) would do their best to be there to help get the harvest home.  I can remember the harvesting machines making sheaves which were stacked into stooks to finish drying before being taken down to the yard for threshing.  The terriers resident on the farm had a great time killing the rats which had been hiding in the crops.

Building stooks

Harvesting would go on until the light was too poor so, although the men came to the yard for lunch, a picnic tea of sandwiches, cold tea and cake had to be taken to the fields.  That was my favourite bit of the harvest!  In retrospect I think grandad probably enjoyed this break with us (one of my cousins would also be there with his dad) and our chatter was a welcome diversion.  I hope so.

When tea was finished we were allowed to cadge a lift on the next tractor going back to the yard, having had a lovely afternoon in the fields.

Being with Grandma

Summer holidays for me always included a week at my grandparents' farmhouse.  This is an update of a post I wrote in 2015.

My grandparents' farmhouse

I knew my grandparents’ house throughout my childhood until they moved when I was thirteen.  From the outside it looks a gloriously elegant dwelling.

 The interior would not strike anyone as elegant!  One came out of the yard into the back kitchen where there was a big scrubbed pine table in the middle of the room.  That was the main place for food preparation as there was a Calor gas stove for cooking and a big old fashioned Belfast sink.   Water was piped into the house when I was about eight but before that it had to be fetched from the outside scullery.   On that table grandma did her baking, prepared vegetables and once a week churned butter in the old wooden churn.  I loved helping with butter making.  My grandmother had her own unique pattern which she would stamp into each block of butter and I was usually allowed to make one pat myself with a very different pattern on it.  Making butter was physically hard work as water had to be boiled to “scald” the churn and actually standing and turning the churn handle for quite a long time certainly made one’s arms ache.

My grandparents

Above the table there were all sorts of things hanging from the beams but the thing I remember most clearly was the basket used for collecting eggs.  My grandmother had a couple of dozen hens which scratted in the yard.  They were her hens and the egg money, such as it was, was hers too.  She used to rear a few chicks which always included a few cockerels which were for the pot.

Every day the post woman, Mrs Stevenson as I remember, would cycle from the village and was a valued link with the outside world.  The farm had no telephone when I was a child so all communication was by letter.  Mrs Stevenson had to wait a while in case my grandmother wanted to write any urgent replies.  She would have a cuppa and there would be a news swap.

It’s about sixty years since our family gave up that farm and my grandparents were very old fashioned even for the fifties and sixties.  I think I am very privileged to have experienced that lifestyle.  

 

The Changing Face of Luxury

Way, way back, a couple of centuries ago, oysters were food for the poor.  I remember reading that years ago and marvelling at it - as I still do when I see the exorbitant price of those delicious shellfish.  However my forefathers and foremothers would look in astonishment at how our expectations have changed.

Take fish.  When I was a little girl we had cod and chips (home cooked!) every week but fresh salmon was a very rare luxury and indeed few of my friends had ever tasted it.  These days salmon is considerably cheaper than cod.  

A car was a rare possession for families sixty years ago and most of my friends would travel by train when they went on holiday.  These days rail travel is very rare and few families have no access to a car (although I suspect that might be different in areas where there is still a proper public transport system). 

One of my most frequent errands as a child was to post letters for my Mother.  Although my Father's job meant that we had a telephone at home, few of our relations had such a convenience, so Mother would write regularly to her brothers and sister and to my grandparents.  Every day letters popped on to the mat and so news was shared.  

But today when my own letterbox rattled I found I had received one of those great twenty first century luxuries, a handwritten letter, this time all the way from the USA.  And so I prepared another luxury, real coffee (more or less unheard of in my youth) which I will drink from my beautiful china (Grandma very rarely used the best stuff), and read a handwritten letter from a land which seemed as far away as the moon when my Father went there on business when I was just five.

  

Sheer luxury!

Ninety nine years ago

In January 1917 the armies on continental Europe were still recovering from the Battle of the Somme which had been fought from 1st July to 18th November 2016.  More men were preparing to go to France to make up for the huge numbers of men who had been lost in that terrible battle.  One of those men was waiting on a farm in a small Lincolnshire village.  Ted carried on working on the farm and being with his wife Emma who was expecting their second child.  He had been given special permission to delay his departure to join his regiment until that second child was born.

Their elder child, a son, was just two years old and all three of them were eagerly anticipating the birth of a brother or sister for him.  On 25th January Emma was safely delivered of a daughter.

The little girl's baptism was arranged very quickly.  In those days children were always baptised when they were just a few weeks old but Ted and Emma's child was even younger than most as Ted wanted to see this important ceremony for his beloved daughter.

A couple of days later he left for France, not knowing if he would ever see Emma and their children again.  He was a fine musician and so he became a bandsman (needed to keep morale up) and as was usual for bandsmen  he was also a medical orderly/stretcher bearer.  Over the next few years he doubtless saw some dreadful sights as he carried men to the casualty stations but he told Emma nothing of such terrible things.  Instead his letters were of love and enquiries about their son and daughter, the thought of whom sustained him for the next couple of years.  His son was four and his daughter was nearly two when next he saw them.

And how do I know?  That little girl, born ninety nine years ago today, was my mother.  I still miss her.

Memories of Christmas past 2

No-one who has been reading this blog for any length of time can have any doubt that my grandma was (and still is) one of my great heroines.  She was a woman who radiated goodness and common sense.  This story of her kindness was from before I was born and I was told it by the father of a friend.

This gentleman was called John Broadhurst and when he was a little boy his family lived in the same village as my grandparents.  My grandparents had a hard life but the Broadhurst family was in abject poverty.  Their father had walked out on his family of six children and their mother struggled to bring them up.  Just keeping them fed and clothed was a struggle.

One Christmas morning John was out in the village and he saw my grandmother who asked him if Father Christmas had been.  No, said John.  Father Christmas didn't come to their house.

My dear, sweet grandmother said, "Well, John,  You've just solved a mystery for me.  He came to our house and he left an extra stocking and I really didn't know who it was for.  It must have been meant for you."  So saying she went into the house and came out with a stocking containing an orange, a ball, some chocolate, a sugar mouse and a threepenny bit and John said his thank you and dashed home with his precious stocking.

None of those things was commonplace in households like my grandparents.  There would have been no extra stocking.  My grandmother looked at a small boy who had no Christmas stocking and gave him her own.

Do you remember?

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you may remember that at the end of August I had a family meal, inviting sundry cousins and my only surviving aunt to come for Sunday lunch.  I don’t do this very often as I usually work on Sundays so I am very grateful for the invitations which those same relations issue to me.

But this Sunday I have booked a day off and once again I have invited the family for a meal.  Ive started the preparations already because these days I tire easily and I want to do the minimum on Sunday so I can enjoy the day.  Tomorrow Jack is coming to help me with the heavy things like converting the sewing room back into a dining room and after that I shall be able really to look forward to Sunday.

And this Sunday will be very special for me.  You see, of the six of us who will be sitting down, three of us have vivid memories of my Grandmother’s house and the other three are very interested.  So I have printed out all the things which I wrote on this blog about that house and have given copies to my cousin and my aunt.    Everybody is looking forward to an orgy of “Do you remember?”

And nobody can be looking forward to it more than me.

Through a small door

We’ve almost finished the tour of the farmhouse for the moment but we will probably return to it some time.

Leave those elegant bedrooms and come back to the landing. There you’ll see a smaller door – open it and go through down to the back bedrooms.  The biggest of these was the “pink bedroom” which was quite a nice bedroom overlooking the courtyard.  One of my best memories of that bedroom is of various family members coming together to decorate it.  It was so damp that there was no need to soak the wallpaper: just pick off the bottom, walk backwards and it peeled off with no effort at all.  Great fun for small people!

Next to the pink bedroom was the bacon bedroom.  I don’t think it was decorated in all the years Grandma and Grandad lived in that house.  It was directly above the back kitchen and there was a trap door down to the kitchen.  The newly cured sides of bacon would be hauled up to be hung in the bedroom.  Also in that room there were long trestle tables on which apples were placed in the autumn to keep the household supplied with fruit until the rhubarb was ready the following year.  The room was divided in half and the further half was used for storing junk.  The junk included a home-made rocking horse which my cousin and I used to drag through into the pink bedroom, tether it to the rocking chair and play at chariot racing.  He rode the horse, I had the chariot.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour of the house.  It wasn’t until I started to write this series of posts that I realised just how many memories I have.  Recording them has been such joy - but maybe you guessed that!

Thank you.

Up the wooden hill

Now that you know where the necessary facilities are let’s go back into the house, back into the hall.  Just a quick look around and then we’ll go upstairs.

The telephone when it finally arrived, was put in the hall.  That was the usual place in British homes at the time.  Halls were cold, draughty places and that was the way to keep the phone bill down. 

There was one other door off the hall, but we won’t open it, thank you very much!  Directly inside the door was a steep flight of steps down to the cellar and it looked very dark and frightening.  I, for one, never ventured down those steps.  

Anyway, let’s go up the stairs.  It was made up of two flights and there was a small room at the half landing.  I’m not sure what it was for and the only thing I can ever remember being there was a rather depressed aspidistra.  At least it depresses me to remember it!  Anyway let’s go right to the top of the stairs and turn left where there were three lovely bedrooms, two double and one single, all of which overlooked the front garden.   

I’m sorry to mention “the facilities” again, but under each bed was a chamber pot.  These inevitably gathered nicknames.  Gerry.  Po.  Gazunda.  Flying saucer.  Whatever you called it, it still had to be emptied in the morning.

Those bedrooms were unbelievably cold in the winter.  I used to roll up my clothes and keep them in bed with me so that they were warm enough to put on in the morning.  I was never a child who took great pride in her appearance!

Step outside with me!

Before we go upstairs would you like to come outside again with me?   Actually, I’d never have asked that back in the days when grandma lived on the farm but today let’s go out of the side door of the house, across the courtyard, turn left straight after the arch and along the garden path.  I am inviting you to go to the privy.

Whenever a few of grandma’s descendants meet the conversation will eventually turn to that privy, or, more accurately, those privies.  You see, it was quite a friendly set up, rather like the one in the photo which is not actually of the privy I knew so well.  It was a two seater, intended for two very good friends I feel. Actually only one side was “charged” (ie in use) at a time.  It was in a small brick-built shed facing down the garden but shielded by an evergreen hedge.  I can never remember closing the door when I was in the privy but I certainly learned to sing loudly!

Each week the “dilly cart” would call at the farm to empty all the privies.  (There were four dwellings in the farmyard and a further four on the farm.)  I have not found this usage of the term outside Lincolnshire but a “dilly cart” was the local description of a night soil lorry.  We always made sure we were well out of the way for a while after it had been as the pong could be a bit powerful. 

Some comments suggest that I am giving the impression that my grandparents were quite grand.  They were not and although I loved going to visit or stay with them I would not want their house or their lifestyle for all the tea in China!

My heroines

So let’s look at the rest of the “posh” area downstairs.  Across the hallway from Mrs Beamish’s room was a very uncomfortable room known as the sitting room but hardly ever used.  Again there was a marble fireplace and a carpet square in the middle of a floor of varnished floor boards.  However, just as in Mrs Beamish’s room the fire was never lit.  The reason?  Jackdaws used to nest in the chimneys so if a fire was lit the smoke just came back into the room.  This room was just for show.  There was a huge Victorian chiffonier on which there was a hideous clock in black marble of which my grandfather was inordinately proud.  It took two good strong farm labourers to lift it.   The silver won by foxhounds was displayed there as was a large quantity of very depressing Victorian china.  These days it would be considered highly desirable but my recollection is that it couldn’t be sold when the farm was given up.  There was the most uncomfortable three piece suite covered in Rexene and a round mahogany dining table.  This room was in contrast to the shabbiness of the rest of the house and I’d be hard pressed to remember a less comfortable or more depressing room anywhere.

A couple of posts ago I mentioned that Mrs Beamish also had a pantry, what would have been the butler’s pantry.  In here Grandma kept her precious china, the things which were very rarely used.  There was a full (twelve person) tea service which had been a wedding gift from the village in which grandma was brought up.  Her mother was a widow and life had been very difficult but great granny and my grandma were highly respected in the village.  Great granny had managed to bring up her family of twelve children and she would smile at the attempts at frugality which we now read about on blogs.   She was (nominally) overseer of the poor but she was illiterate so grandma kept the accounts.  Grandma also played the organ at the Primitive Methodist Chapel as well as being what we would now call a teaching assistant.  

My grandmother and great granny would have been amazed and proud to have one of the first women priests in England as their descendant but they could not be more proud of me than I am of them.  They were truly heroic women.

Great granny with my mother.  Mother was barely 5'3" - granny was no giant physically but she was truly heroic.

(I realise that I have used a lot of terminology which may be unfamiliar to non Brits but it is unavoidable when talking about these women.)

Mrs Beamish's rooms

Today is exciting.  Today we are going through the door at the end of the passage and into the front part of the house.  You see Grandad and Grandma just lived in the back of the house not the bit where the posh people would have spent their time.  Go through the door and you enter an elegant hall with a curved staircase of shallow steps.  But we’re not going upstairs yet.  There are things to be seen still downstairs.  First a bit of background.

During the Second World War Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County because the county had so many RAF bomber stations.  About eight miles from my grandparents’ house was one such base.  One day a lady came to ask if grandma had any rooms available for rent.  Her husband was the adjutant at the station and she wanted accommodation for herself and their two sons.  She moved in and so a lifetime’s friendship was born being maintained by regular letters for well over thirty years. 

She had the use of a sitting room and what had been a butler’s pantry.  We’ll call her Mrs Beamish as I never use real names on this blog.   She was a very fine needlewoman but she was somewhat deficient in housewifely skills.  Grandma and Mrs Beamish held each other in very high regard.   Each opened new vistas for the other.  Grandma had come from a background of poverty and hard work, Mrs Beamish’s background, although not wealthy, was rather more genteel.   Her rooms I am told were always in total chaos, but the needlework she produced was exquisite. 

By the time I was born in 1951 the Beamish family had been moved out for some time but the room to the right of the front door was still known as Mrs Beamish’s room.  It was basically an elegant room with classically proportioned widows and a Victorian marble fireplace. 

But the furniture was old, shabby and uncomfortable.  There was a chaise longue which had definitely seen better days.  Nowadays there would be a queue of people wanting to restore it but Grandma had no time for such fripperies with furniture which was never used.  There was a round mahogany table and some rickety chairs.  In one corner was the very old pram which all of us had been put in when we were small.

But the enchantment for us was the toys.  Trust me no child would call them enchanting now.  There were two or three jigsaws of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  Each had at least six pieces missing but they served on a wet afternoon.  There was a magic question set in which there were quiz cards and a wizard who would “magically” find the answer.  There were playing cards both of the usual four suits and of the happy family or snap sort.  When the adults were having a snooze after Sunday lunch this was the escape for the children.

Grandma and the gym

Before we go through the door into the front of the house, let’s just nip outside.  Go back along the passage, through the back kitchen and into the yard.   Turn left and through a big door and you’ll be in the scullery.

I suppose the modern equivalent would be a utility room but there was nothing modern about the scullery.  Over in the corner was a big, built-in copper, with a fire-hole beneath it so water could be heated for the washing.  Lighting the fire under the copper was grandma’s first job on a Monday morning along with filling it with cold water carried in buckets from the sink on the other side of the room.

After breakfast grandma would go out to the scullery and fill the washing machine with buckets of hot water and set to.  I’ve never seen a washing machine like this anywhere, not even in a museum.  The paddle was attached to a handle through the machine lid so the paddle could be turned by hand.  It was heavy work!  Then the clothes were fished out of the water using wooden laundry tongs and fed through the hand cranked mangle so that the squeezed-out hot water fell back into the machine ready for the next load.  The clothes, sheets, table cloths or whatever were then carried over to the sink for rinsing.  The final rise was done in small tub with a gadget called a posher.  This is best described as an upside down colander mounted on a broom stick.  The clothes were poshed vigorously and finally put through the mangle again, this time the mangle being positioned over a drain so the cold water could run away.

Then out to the garden where there was a washing line between two trees with a home-made prop to hold the middle of the line high in the breeze.  At least it was out to the garden if the weather was dry: otherwise it was to a clothes horse around the fire with sheets and table cloths being hung over upstairs bannisters. 

Grandma never went to a gym.  She never needed to!

The view from the window

Let’s linger in the kitchen a little longer as that’s where we spent time together, time listening  and talking as well as eating

The kitchen was quite dark and the only window over looked the crew yard where the animals were over-wintered.  My grandfather kept young cattle (known in Lincolnshire as beast) for fattening.  There were just a couple of dairy cows providing milk, cream and butter for the farm.  They also kept sheep and grew wheat and barley as well as root crops for animal feed.  That sort of mixed farming has all but disappeared now. 

I'm the little girl facing the foxhound.
My sister is the middle of the three girls behind.
 The other three are cousins

Between the kitchen window and the crew was a run where the latest foxhound puppy was kept.  My grandparents didn’t own their farm.  They were tenants of the Earl of Yarborough on the Brocklesby Estate.  The Brocklesby pack of foxhounds is the oldest in the country and it was a condition of tenancy that each farmer took a puppy each year and reared it for return to Brocklesby in the late autumn.  In the spring there would be a puppy show with the previous year’s best puppies winning silver prizes for the farms which had reared them.  I still have some of the silver which my grandparents won.

Foxhounds are singularly silly dogs.  The puppies are reared to live a fairly tough, unpampered life as part of a pack so they never came into the house. However, we children were allowed to play with them and take them out with us around the farm.  When we put them back in the run before lunch they would straight away go and watch us through the window.  To this day I have a very soft spot for foxhounds.

From the album

I've been looking though my collection and have found a few pictures which I'd like to share.

This first is of my grandmother with her husband and two of her four children.  I think it must be from 1918 because my mother, the little girl in the picture was born in January 1917 but grandad was still away at the front, hence the inset photo.  The little boy was my uncle just two years older than my mother.





Moving on a few years in this photograph left to right it is my aunt (mother's younger sister), mother's aunt, her big brother (shown as a 3-4 year old in the picture above), grandma, grandad and mother's younger brother.  I just love grandad's hat!




I think this must be around 1950.  The gentleman is my grandfather.  It was taken at the front of the house I have been writing about.

Sunday lunch

All meals were eaten in this kitchen/living room using the oddest collection of cutlery and crockery.   Grandma had some lovely crockery but that was for best.  It came out very occasionally.  (I feel a little sad that she had a full tea service which she used only twice in seventy years for fear of breaking it.)  Grandma was an excellent cook but the range of meals was very limited by today’s standards.  We always had a roast on Sunday; most often it was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.  The vegetables would be from the large garden so of course we ate seasonally.  Somebody would be detailed to fetch some horseradish in.  This is very pungent and provokes far more tears than onions but it was finely grated and mixed with cream to make horseradish sauce.  Pudding was always a fruit pie and grandma had a wonderful light hand with the pastry so with rich cream from the farm it was a dish fit for a king.

The rule of the house was everyone had to have a little of everything.  That way we learned to be adventurous in our food choices and it was thought very rude to say you didn’t like something.  All adults in the family were agreed on this policy. 

One day grandma made a rhubarb pie.  Just in case any non-Brits are not familiar with rhubarb I’ll just say that it has a very “tangy” flavour or to be honest, it can be very sour so is sweetened with brown sugar in pies.  My grandfather had a very sweet tooth and didn't like rhubarb so he served everyone but not himself.  He was very much an old fashioned man, master of the house, but we children were not going to let him get away with that one.  We had all eaten swede and Brussel sprouts so as far as we were concerned he had to eat rhubarb and, despite warning noises from grandma and our parents, we told him so.  Bless his heart he thought it hilarious, cut himself a substantial slice, smothered it with cream and downed the lot. 

Into the heart of the home

Come a little further into my grandmother’s house with me and go through the door at the end of the dark passage into the kitchen.  It was always called the kitchen although no food was ever prepared there and it was really the living room.  In the middle of the room, dominating it was a mahogany table which had many leaves and could be extended to take as many people as ever came.  It was always covered with a very old chenille cloth and even when it was in use as a dining table the chenille cloth stayed in place.  At the far end of the room was an old fashioned range, (never used for cooking) with ovens which were used for drying wood. 

In front of the fire there was a rag rug, which was made many years ago by my grandparents, one working from each end.  Traditionally such rugs were made on farms at lambing time when the farmer or shepherd had to stay awake for long hours.  Apart from that the floor was covered with lino.  On either side of the fire there was a chair, a high backed Windsor wooden chair for my grandad and a fireside chair for grandma.  By modern standards it was a room lacking in comfort but it was the place where they relaxed.

On one side of the room was a piano which grandma would sometimes play while grandad sang.  They first met through their mutual love of music.  They were Methodists and the vitality of the musical tradition at chapel was something they each enjoyed to the end of their lives.

At the end of the room there was a bureau and there grandad would do the farm accounts, keeping papers in the filing cabinet to one side.   There was a bookcase too but, avid reader though I was, I can’t remember any of the books which were kept there and I don’t remember anyone ever reading them!

The other major item of furniture in this room was a Victorian cupboard on top of which stood the radio.  Until I was about eight there was no mains electricity in the house so the radio was powered by “the accumulator” a bulky battery about the size of a car battery as I remember.  Each Saturday Grandad would go into Caistor to collect a charged battery which he would swap for the one he had collected the previous week.  The radio was on very loud every morning and when staying with them I always awoke to the sound of “Farming Today”.

I’ll bring you back into this kitchen another day.

The Bells! The Bells!

I’d like to take you a little farther into my grandmother’s house so come through the kitchen with me.   Apart from the back door the only way out of the kitchen led into a very dark corridor known as the passage.  The passage was used for hanging coats but children found it to be a wonderful place, for in the passage there were the bells.  In an earlier age there would have been maids in such a large house as this, although grandma had no such help.  The bedrooms would each have had a bell pull to summon the maids and these were connected by a system of wires to the bells hanging in the passage.  We children loved to play with the bells but adults endured it for a very short time only!  Oh the temptation!

Half way along the passage there was a door off to the left which led to the pantry.  This was quite a large room and here Grandma kept not just food but crockery, cutlery and the paraphernalia of food preparation.  There was a brick gantry and on there were kept the great pansions of cream, covered with muslin and waiting for the next butter making session.  There was a small cupboard whose door was made of fine mesh wire; this was the meat safe.  Flies were always a problem and food umbrellas and muslin cloths were needed for everything.

Washing up was always done in the pantry in a bowl on a table.  One quickly learnt the best order to wash pots as there was only one bowl of water, heated on the stove and carried through for there was no tap of any kind in the pantry. 

Beyond this pantry there was another pantry (there were three pantries in all) and this one was used for storage.  The thing I remember most clearly is the great wooden trough in which bacon was cured.

I realise that I may have made life in that farmhouse sound almost idyllic but it was very hard work for my grandmother.  I was privileged to have such wonderful times there in my childhood.

Being with Grandma

Isn’t it funny how when you’ve known something for ever, you stop really looking at it?  I knew my grandparents’ house throughout my childhood until they moved when I was thirteen, but it had never really struck me what an elegant house it is/was until I read some of the comments. 

My lovely grandma

The interior would not strike anyone as elegant!  One came out of the yard into the back kitchen where there was a big scrubbed pine table in the middle of the room.  That was the main place for food preparation as there was a Calor gas stove for cooking and a big old fashioned Belfast sink.   Water was piped into the house when I was about eight but before that it had to be fetched from the outside scullery.   On that table grandma did her baking, prepared vegetables and once a week churned butter in the old wooden churn.  I loved helping with butter making.  My grandmother had her own unique pattern which she would stamp into each block of butter and I was usually allowed to make one pat myself with a very different pattern on it.  Making butter was physically hard work as water had to be boiled to “scald” the churn and actually standing and turning the churn handle for quite a long time certainly made one’s arms ache.

Above the table there were all sorts of things hanging from the beams but the thing I remember most clearly was the basket used for collecting eggs.  My grandmother had a couple of dozen hens which scratted in the yard.  They were her hens and the egg money, such as it was, was hers too.  She used to rear a few chicks which always included a few cockerels which were for the pot.

Every day the post woman, Mrs Stevenson as I remember, would cycle from the village and was a valued link with the outside world.  The farm had no telephone when I was a child so all communication was by letter.  Mrs Stevenson had to wait a while in case my grandmother wanted to write any urgent replies.  She would have a cuppa and there would be a news swap.

It’s about fifty years since our family gave up that farm and my grandparents were very old fashioned even for the fifties and sixties.  I think I am very privileged to have experienced that lifestyle.  I’ve really enjoyed writing this post.  It’s brought back so many memories.  I hope you enjoy reading it,