Our
year spent there was not a particularly happy one. The owner of our
semi-detached rented house lived next door and mother found him a
difficult landlord. I cant remember the details of why that was.
I was sent to a little day school nearby called ‘Miss Treglone's'.
Betty joined me there later. It was large enough to have a netball
team; also to send some of us to a 'scarf' dance at Birmingham Town
Hall on one occasion. Hugh and Barbara were too young at first to go to
school.
When Betty came home from hospital she and I shared a bedroom and we
used to make up lovely stories between us at night when we lay in bed.
On Sunday afternoons we were sent up to our bedroom to learn our
catechism. After learning the first paragraph we rolled up lengths of
paper and lit them at the gas fire and tried to smoke. All the lighting
in the house was by gas. Little special mantles, very delicate objects,
were hung under the jets on the wall and they always seemed to be
getting broken and had to be replaced.
When cousin Eileen came to us for the holidays she and I shared a bed
and she used to sing all the songs she had learnt at the Nursery at St
Michael's. I got the impression that she was very happy there. That was
probably because, as parents did in those days, she had been left there
all alone at a very young age, three, and had therefore become
something of a teachers' pet. Her parents, Auntie Gracie and Uncle
Alfred, looked after us for a short time one holiday. Uncle Alfred was
an Irishman and full of fun and amusing stories.
Mummy took a lot of trouble over my hair during that period. Strips of
tape were dampened and my hair curled up with them at night into small
spirals so that the next morning my hair fell down into ringlets. I
enjoyed playing with them with my fingers. Thank goodness I had grown
out of the button boots I had had to wear at Derby; also the Sunday
starched white fancy pinafore which had to be kept spotlessly clean -
not do duty as a pinafore at all!
We had an older girl who came in every day as a maid/mother's help. She
taught us all the popular songs of the day: 'Have you ever seen a
straight banana?' and 'Oh! Horsey, Keep your tail up. Keep the sun out
of my eyes'. One of her duties was to take us for walks. These were
very dull affairs - in dreary parks, along formal paths, with no trees
to climb. We disliked them very much.
Out for a stroll
One of our occupations was helping the 'poor heathen' by tearing up old
sheets into bandage-sized strips and rolling them up tightly by means
of a special hand-operated frame clamped to the table. I can’t imagine
where mummy got the old sheets from. Ours couldn't have worn out so
soon. We certainly made many, many bandages.
Birmingham was an exciting place to be at Christmas. The trams were
decked with rows of lights and the large stores were just like fairy
land. One in particular, I remember, which had its toy department
bathed in pale blue light to imitate an underwater world of mermaids,
colourful fish, shells and seaweed.
We were taken on the occasional outing. One was to Malvern where the
great aunts lived and we had a lovely walk on the Malvern Hills.
Another was to the Lickey Hills for a picnic. That was good too but the
flies were troublesome.
Malvern Hills - AMW with Doris, Hugh and Barbara
Most exciting of all was a whole week at Criccieth in a Guest House.
What amazement when the train went backwards out of one of the stations
yet still got to its destination. Unfortunately it was an extremely wet
week. Hugh found an old saucepan in the grass on one of the hills
nearby and, with a stick, made a mixture in it of black slugs and
blackberries. Ugh! A CSSM Mission was being run at the time on the
beach by a well-known evangelist called Mr. Pope. Mummy won the slow
bicycle race on Sports Day. Mr Pope was helped by theological students
in training. One of them, John Carpenter, became very friendly with our
family. He was at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, so that when we moved to
Shudy Camps, fifteen miles away, he used to cycle over and visit us and
eventually became David's godfather.
CSSM at Criccieth - an object service by Hudson Pope (1), feeding each other treacle (2), and 'the bros' in 1924 (3)
1. 2. 3.
Kind friends of our parents used to give us parties: the Miss Kingdons
who lived at Selly Oak; another lady whose name I have forgotten gave
us a wonderful Christmas Day party.
It was while we lived in Birmingham that Gordon's sleepy sickness
illness first became apparent. On Sundays we were made to sit round the
table and paint Bible texts and he would fall asleep in the middle of
it. We were told that he had picked up the infection as a small boy in
Africa but it was only when he was about 12 that it began to affect
him. It was very sad because Mr. Summerhayes, the head master at
Limpsfield, said he had been such a bright boy until then.