Post one

I must have been a fairly healthy and happy baby for I remember my parents telling me how my uncles, and I had plenty of them, used to toss me up to the ceiling and catch me  much to my delight. It was a good thing I was so because my older sister, Eleanor, was  what is now called a “Blue Baby”, so my mother had plenty of caring for her. Consequently, I was happy enough to be in my cradle without much notice except for the  routine care of a baby.

As I grew older the walks with my father I remember most – on Sundays he used to take us up Sugarwell Hill – I think that was the name, but I don’t quite remember. It was a lovely walk-through fields of wheat with corn flowers and poppies abounding in them.  Years later, I found a piece of Liberty Lawn (cotton material) with corn flowers and poppies and I bought it for a dress. I always loved that dress.

We were living in Leeds at the time. My father being general manager of the Patent Woolen Felt Co. We lived in a house on a private road with gates that were shut at night. A lovely garden was in front, and I remember my father having his table set up for chess with a friend of his.

Meanwhile, we children, I had another sister, Edna, younger than I was, we used to play shuttlecock in the spacious hall. Nearby lived a little boy named Charlie, who lived with his aunts. I don’t remember whether he was an orphan, or his parents were in India, as many people were then, but his aunts were very strict with him and it was a record of our being properly brought up that he was allowed to play with us. At home, he had to do 
things that to us seemed incredible for a boy who, to us, should be playing cricket etc, that he had to learn to crochet. One day he brought me a necklace he had crocheted. I wore it for quite a time.

While we lived in Lancashire, we went to Kent’s Bank for our summer holiday. It was a lovely place near Grange with only three or four houses. The one my father rented for us was a sort of farm near the sea and surrounded by a plantation. The woman of the house took care of us and made us delicious meals, particularly scones, which were so big and fat that we called them “Fat Rascals” — full of currants, they were. I remember that later when we were home again and going to church, how we used to laugh and giggle in  our high walled pew, because we called our thick prayer book a “fat rascal”. It was at  Kent’s Bank that Edna asked the farmer which cow gave the buttermilk? It was always a source of amusement to us.

One day while at Kent’s Bank, we decided to have a millinery shop and collected rhubarb leaves and dock leaves and I trimmed them with flowers, and I picked some beautiful flowers that I had never seen before, and made a lovely hat. Later in the day, the farmer came into the house and asked who had picked the blossoms of his melons. How ashamed I was to have robbed him of his melons, and with what chagrin I thought of my creation with his flowers.

My brother, Oliver, went to the Middle Class School in Leeds. This was a private school, and my father was very particular that Oliver should come home promptly. We were all to be at home when he arrived for dinner. One day Oliver did not come in time

for dinner, and he didn’t come until we could see the rage building up in my father’s face.  It was very dark when he arrived, and my father was ready with his cane and gave him such a trouncing that we girls went into the closet where we couldn’t hear Oliver cry. But, of course, he didn’t cry. It was dreadful when we went to bed crying and feeling sorry. Then Oliver came upstairs and got ready for bed – but before he went, he came to my room and asked me to see his back, if there were any cuts on it. There were many dark red welts, oh, how sorry I was. But the next day, my father told my mother that if there was to be any more whippings, she would have to do it because he couldn’t.