Clarissa et al.

Mr. D. (the buildings inspector from the estate) called round yesterday and is very pleased with everything done so far. Almost his first words on entering the house were 'You'll want to be rid of that fireplace' - so that's all right and Joe spent a happy afternoon knocking it down.

The one I bought on spec for 99p is a perfect fit, and the painter and his son will do the plastering - so all we need are some masonry screws, some fire cement and a bit of nice board for the surround and the mantelpiece.

The bathroom will also be done at a future date so that it is combined with the (handbasinless) loo to open from the hall instead of opening off the kitchen - which will be a big improvement.

Mr. D. also said that he had no idea that the garden was so big as he had never seen it so clear and neat before. Joe's ideas for that (decking, gazebo, rose garden) are still rather larger than both his budget and his abilities allow, but everything is coming together.

He is spending the day with his great-aunt near Boston and has been promised a load of stuff to bring back to help him set up home.

I have been having fun on eBay, but have been outbid on my last two bargain items, so I have put a watch on several similar to try and make a last ditch swoop.

Later

Joe brought home some very posh curtains from his great-aunt, and a huge mixing bowl among other things.

I have just spent a terrible evening!

At about nine o'clock Sid, who is staying with us (see Liz's blog http://trickymum.blog.co.uk ) decided she would take a constitutional in the garden. After spending the first week of her stay indoors, she has been going out during the day, but this was her first evening outing - so I told her not to be long and to come in before it was dark. As I have mentioned previously, the road past our house is not busy, but it can be quite fast and on Friday and Saturday nights is frequently used by drivers hoping to avoid the police and their breathalysers. Sid may be a city cat, and the road where she lives may have a lot of cars down it but they are either very slowly trying to find a parking space or are actually parked, so she may not be as road savvy as one would hope.

At half-past-nine I went to call her in, and at quarter-to-ten, and ten o'clock, and quarter-past-ten, and half-past-ten, and quarter-to-eleven, and eleven o'clock. With my trusty torch I quartered every inch of our half-acre, and the neighbouring garden, and into the fields, and along the grass verges, and under the hedges - I even looked with great trepidation into the swimming pool and down the well. But no Sid!

Father got out his car and drove slowly to the village scanning the roadside, then up the road to Helen's, and along the lane to the other farm - half a mile in each direction. But still no Sid!

Father went to bed.

Midnight - another circuit of the garden, more rattling of her food bowl, more shouts and cajoling.

Quarter-past, half-past, quarter-to . . . I am beginning to wonder whether she has decided that she has had enough of country life and has started to walk home - after all it is 'only' 200 miles and cats do make these prodigious journeys.

"The catering here is fine, the accomodation is comfortable with plenty of sunny sleeping places, and the resident staff are well behaved and friendly, but there are young humans - mainly male - who erupt suddenly and noisily into the house, bringing with them equally sudden dogs who disturb my sleep and scare me silly with their noise. The resident cat has made some friendly advances, but the whole I prefer to be the sole feline with the absolute fealty of those humans who serve me. So on the whole, I think it is time for me to go home."

2.45 The Wanderer Returns!

I was making yet another circuit of the garden, and there she was, curled up and asleep in her favourite daytime outside place on one of the garden chairs looking as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth!

I have been to hell and back wondering how I was going to tell my best friends that, while they have been in America celebrating their son's big fat Greek wedding, I had allowed their precious cat to vanish . . . get squashed on the road . . . drown in the well . . . get eaten by foxes . . .

Here she is by the well in the garden:

and here she is asking to go out again!

The answer is NO!

Joe has been working really well helping the decorator, although today he has rather blotted his copybook by a precipitate tearing out of the stair carpet - admittedly hideous, but relatively new and better left until he can afford a replacement. He and Kenny (who will be back at 8.30 tomorrow morning) have also left rather a mess this evening, much to father's disapproval.

Much of the mess is Joe's stripping the wallpaper in the sitting room - he has taken off the anaglypta to reveal this

On the other hand, much of the house is now in tasteful neutrals - white ceiling, white woodwork and creamy walls - although the sitting room keeps coming through yellow from the ingrained nicotine everywhere. The bedroom fireplace now looks like this.

Anyone with ideas about the floors? Joe doesn't want and can't afford carpet, and a proper job with sanding and polishing isn't really on within the time scale and bearing in mind the bog standard floor boards. Current thinking is painting the upstairs floors and buying rugs when he can afford them.

What is it with men?

I say, "Dinner's nearly ready" and father goes up to the bathroom for half-an-hour while Joe poddles off next door to sort out something or other.

In the meantime the chicken pie is getting distinctly brown, and the vegetables are getting as over-cooked as a school dinner.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining: the blackcurrant pudding will be properly chilled rather than barely cool.

I shall now sit here and play computer patience!

As somebody not much inclined to break things, I am not particularly sympathetic when things get damaged through carelessness, but even I acknowledge that, however careful we are, accidents will occasionally happen. I am always very careful about telling people about any damage I happen to do, and replacing what I can.

It is therefore very annoying when the village hall committee keeps 'discovering' damages supposedly done to things by members of the PCC. The trouble is that they are either sitting on the knowledge of these damages for a long time or they are discovering them long after they happened when anyone of several dozen people could have inflicted the damage.

A couple of years ago we had a starvation supper for Ash Wednesday. The following June I received a letter complaining about the mess we had left the kitchen in. Not only had Stuart (a man so fussy he could make Liz's mum look like a slob) been in charge of the clearing up, but the accusation that we had left the dishwasher full of dirty water was ridiculous as we hadn't used the dishwasher.

Now there is an accusation that the kettle borrowed in May for the Open Churches weekend and returned the same week has been damaged. Has nobody made tea in the village hall between May and July? Moreover we have today been asked to pay for two glasses broken and a plate which was chipped supposedly at last year's Harvest Supper.

If someone rents a hall and equipment it should be made clear of what fair wear and tear consists, all equipment should be examined on return, and a receipt signed on its return. The moment a there is time lapse between return and inspection an element of doubt creeps in, and in the cases I have mentioned with periods of between two and ten months between the return of the equipment and the complaint during which any number of people could have used it, moved it, dropped it, the whole thing becomes ludicrous!

Do you ever watch Homes Under the Hammer?

On it properties are sold at auction and the purchaser is interviewed telling what s/he plans to do with the property, and the programme returns after an agreed number of months to see what has been done. All too frequently the answer is 'nowt' - not even a basic clearing of the rubbish.

Joe got the keys on Friday evening. The painter gave an estimate on Saturday. The house was cleared yesterday. The painter starts work at 4 o'clock this afternoon.

Sadly Joe didn't take any 'before' pictures, and nothing can give a real flavour of the smell of old carpet, damp, disuse and stale cigarettes, but here are a few taken early in the process

Take note of the lovely '60s wallpaper in the kitchen, and the slightly earlier and badly cracked fireplace in the sitting room, not to mention the delightful shade of sticky nicotine on the walls.

To clear this mess take one octogenarian granddad who spent most of Sunday getting rid of the numerous layers in the kitchen including some very firmly stuck laminate.

Add to this two enthusiastic teenagers with boundless energy and a ruthless streak about throwing away,

(Tilly just came to look round afterwards)
and two brothers with a truck and a fondness for lighting fires,

and you will soon find yourself going into a house clear of rubbish

(everything worth keeping is now stored in just one room)

and ready for any ornament with which you care to adorn it.

Pa worked a full 12 hour day from eight till eight, while Joe didn't join him until after church, and the others after stables (and seeing to all the other livestock) and riding.

And what did Lissa do while all this was going on? Well, having been to church she stayed at home and made sure that everyone had a proper sit down Sunday lunch of roast lamb with all the trimmings followed by strawberrries and cream.

By chance I came across a copy of the Cleethorpes Chronicle for July 10th from which I learned that the infant school I attended is closing and that a teacher there - Mrs. Bembridge - was asking for memories.

I'm not sure that memories of what was for me a predominantly unhappy experience are precisely what she was wanting, but here they are:-

THRUNSCOE INFANT SCHOOL

Thrunscoe Infant School opened in the year that I was born, and I entered the reception class in the last September of the 1950s.

A few weeks earlier I had been taken by my parents to visit the school and be enrolled. Both of them knew Miss Nocton, the headmistress, as she had taught both of them at Bursar Street School when they were infants – and thereby hangs a mystery: why on earth did they choose a school run by a woman whom as children neither had liked? My mother remembered her time in Miss Nocton’s class as one of misery sitting next to Harold who pinched her black and blue completely unnoticed by the teacher. When you add to this the fact that they were friendly with both Eric Boncey (head of St. Peter’s) and Ron Rudd (head of Bursar) the choice of school becomes even more mysterious.

Of course it isn’t as mysterious as all that. This is the time of the baby boomers – classes were huge and crowded – and here was a lovely new little school built in attractive grounds (an old orchard) with spacious, airy classrooms containing activity areas and with new indoor lavatories next to them – so much nicer than the old buildings of the alternatives with their cramped schoolyards and primitive outdoor sanitation.

I remember these lavatories (I had not yet learned that ‘toilet’ was the accepted word in a school context) from that initial visit. My sister and I were allowed a little limited exploration while my parents were talking to Miss Nocton, and, observing that of the two lavatories opening off that cloakroom corridor one had a row of cubicles and the other a single one, I told Helen that the one was for the little ones who couldn’t wait while the other was for bigger children who could. Logical, but wrong. I also remember that, looking out of the classroom window, I could see big girls in the remains of the orchard which divided Little Thrunscoe from Big Thrunscoe.

I was really looking forward to starting school and saw great vistas of learning opening up before me. How disappointing was the reality.

FIRST DAY

On my first day I woke up really early, dressed myself in my new blue blouse and my grey pleated skirt with shoulder straps, my white ankle socks and brown leather sandels. And underneath I had on my ‘Cherub’ vest and my new grey gym knickers. I went downstairs and laid the table for breakfast, and was joined by Mummy and Baby. We had breakfast very slowly because what I didn’t know was that the new children were timed to filter into school throughout the morning and that the Ts’ entry wasn’t scheduled until after 10 o’clock.

It was however still very early when we set out to walk to school – before eight at a guess because I can remember how the dew shone upon the spiders’ webs on the privet hedges at the corner of Cromwell Road and the Kingsway. Hang on! That’s the opposite direction from our house at 75 Kingsway and the school! Well, it was a very circuitous route my mother chose to walk me to school on that first day – nearly two hours to go less than half-a-mile, collecting the shopping along the way.

Somewhere in Highgate we met with another mother and child on the same mission and thus Pamela became my first school friend. That is we walked into school together that first day, and promptly each made new friends as we were placed on different tables.

My first disappointment on arriving in school was my hook in the cloakroom: it didn’t have my name on it and I was invited to choose from a sheet of colourful stickers (sadly depleted so late in the alphabet) to identify my peg – I chose a giraffe (wholly inappropriate as these animals are tall and silent). I think that it was at this point we were measured against a rule on the wall next to the classroom door, and it was certainly then that we were asked various questions about whether we could read, write, count etc. Of course I could! I was four-an-a-half years old! Even Baby, two years younger, could count and read and write her name and a few other words.

We were then placed according to our achievements, and I was put on the top table with the others who were both literate and numerate next to Elizabeth. It was all a bit unnerving when the other children seemed so comfortably settled - after all, some had been school children for a full two hours longer than I. There was a second table for those whose literacy and numeracy was less advanced and a further two or three tables of other children.

Despite this hierarchical system, which we all understood within a few days, the official line in those days was that the teaching of reading and writing was properly the business of the school and that parents who taught their children to read and write were somehow doing it all wrong and shouldn’t do it at all. In my case – as I am sure it was for many others – as well tell me to stop breathing as tell me to stop reading. I can remember the day when I realised that I could read the printed notices outside Bacon’s Dairy, but not the ones chalked in Mr. Bacon’s elegant copperplate: I was two years old. By three-and-a-half I was fluent, by four I was reading proper books, and when I was five I wrote my first book of poetry and stories called 'An Ouncey Book of Fairy Tales'. It was going to be called 'Once Upon a Time' but my father spotted the obvious spelling mistake as I was designing the cover, so (ever resourceful) I wrote a poem to start the book. This opus is now lost, but I recall that it began
"An ounce of sugar
An ounce of tea.
We went to the shops
Baby and me."
Not deathless verse (nor very accurate on the quantities to be bought), but not bad for five.

EARLY IMPRESSIONS

The reception class teacher, Miss Cowton, was very young and enthusiastic and looked just like Miss Honey in the film of "Matilda". I later learned that she had earned a place at university, but (in the days when graduates were considered too academic to teach infants!) had opted for the then two year teacher training course, and that this was her probationary year. Probationer or not, she was head and shoulders the best teacher of my infant years, and managed forty four and five year olds without ever needing to raise her voice and – as far as I recall – never so much as having to threaten punishment beyond moving a troublesome child to another seat.

One of my early impressions was of a girl called Dianne who was not quite as clean as the rest of us and had blackened front teeth. I think I recognised neglect even at that early stage and I remember thinking that her parents must really hate her to call her ‘Die Anne’.

Another even more unpleasing discovery to my fastidious young sensibilities was the day one of the children wet herself on the classroom floor. Not only did I find it quite unbelievable that a ‘big’ girl of four years old should be unable to contain herself, but the worse discovery was that the teachers actually expected such babyish behaviour and had a drawer full of spare knickers against such an eventuality!

FRIENDS

I was briefly best friends with Elizabeth who sat next to me, but she was soon whisked away when her parents moved house.

Pat Leesing shared my birthday (February 16th) and on this basis we knew that we ought to be friends, and remained so throughout our infant years and on into the juniors though the quality of this friendship steadily deteriorated the older we got and the less we had in common. Her other best friend and near neighbour was Julie Heaton. At first Julie wasn’t particularly my friend, but we were put to sit next to each other when we were in Miss Thompson’s class (year 1) and continued to share a desk until we left the juniors six year later, and again in the fourth and fifth forms at the grammar school. Friendship with Julie was easy and undramatic, and lasted comfortably in some degree throughout our time at school.

Lynn Dickinson and Jane Casujuana were the class stars – apart from anything else they could both sing in tune from this very early age and were given solos at Christmas. They were both regulars at my birthday parties and I at theirs, but when we left Thrunscoe I went to St. Peter’s and they to Bursar so that was that. I fully expected to see them again when I went to the Girls’ Grammar School, but both mysteriously had managed to fail the 11+. This was clearly a miscarriage of justice and one of the reasons I am so set against selective schooling today as Lynn went on to be head girl at Beacon Hill Seconday Modern and Jane joined us in the sixth form from the same school and is now head teacher at Signhills Infant School.

The other friend in the same class was Helen Toole whose mother had, I think, been at school with my mother – anyway, it was one of those friendships which was parent led, and ended when they moved away towards the end of our infant school years. Two more friends also moved away: Elaine (Clarke?) whose house backed onto the same eight-foot as ours and with whom I sometimes walked to school, and Peter Manton who was my best boy friend.

SCHOOL READING

Those of us who could already read were not rewarded with interesting books, but were made to crawl through all the school readers from the first Janet and John reader Here We Go (“Look, John, look” “Come, John, come” “See my aeroplane fly”) all the way through to Once Upon A Time with its retold fairy tales and pink cover with two black mice on it, and effectively punished for being able to read fluently before we started school. Thrunscoe had a policy of adding in more of the small consolidation readers for those who got through the main books too fast just to keep the whole class somewhere near level, when, of course, it was the slow readers who needed the consolidation. I also remember that Jane managed to get ahead of me on the reading books because of Miss Robinson's custom of hearing the children read in alphabetical order, boys then girls, which meant that on some days she would never reach T for Turner although that never stopped her going back to the beginning of the alphabet the next day. In order to get through all forty - which quite often she didn't - she only ever let you read one page.

It was wonderful when I got to St Peters where Mrs. Tuplin etc. just spot checked our progress and let us crawl or gallop through the Wide Range readers so that Liz and I, and Stephen, David, James and Richard all finished the lot of them in record time, and every other book in the school's less than extensive class libraries. I will never forget "Tales of Greece and Rome" or "The Radium Woman"? I seem to remember that in the last term in Mr. Crossley's, having finished everything on the top readers' shelf, Liz and I alternated having 'The Secret Garden' as the only thing available which was good enough for constant rereading.

The free readers were equally disappointing at Thrunscoe in that there were hardly any proper books. There was a book corner (a hinged display rack) in each class with some skinny little apologies for books – the ones I remember best were those of Aesop’s fables – but nothing approaching the sort of books I read at home. At five I had already read - or rather had read to me - Little Women, What Katy Did, Five Children and It, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden (which I had already seen on television) and The Hobbit for the first time. By the time I was seven I had reread them all for myself - the first two only after my grandmother had exchanged her own nineteenth century copies with their tiny print and huge margins for modern (but still unabridged) reprints which wouldn't strain my baby eyes. My personal reading at five was 'The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes', 'Fun in the Frozen North', the 'Animal Shelf' books,'Cubbin's Farm', 'Jane's First Term' and 'Brian's Goodnight Book' - most of them not deathless literature, but a good deal more entertaining and demanding that Janet and John and Dick and Dora which we had at school.

On one occasion I remember watching with interest the slow dawn of realisation in a lady who came in to listen to reading when she had to deal with half-a-dozen of the best readers who had finished their written work first instead of her usual slow readers.

CLASSES AND ORGANISATION

For some reason the classes as Thrunscoe were numbers from six to one so that six was the reception class. As I have already said, Miss Cowton was in charge of this.

I think it must have been Easter with the arrival of the new intake when we were moved up into Mrs. Kilvington’s class. I know that some children were held back in Miss Cowton’s, but seem to recall most of us moved on.

I don’t know quite how they played the numbers game, although I do remember that, when we were in the top class, a table of eight children from the next year down was moved to join us after Easter, as a year earlier one table had been moved from our class a term in advance to be rejoined by the rest of us in September.

However it worked, there were six classes – ostensibly two each for reception, year one and year two. In class 3 we had Miss Thompson and I cannot remember the name of the woman who taught the younger half of the year in class 4. Class 1 had Miss Robinson and class 2 had Miss Milligan. These classes were arranged in pairs with a cloakroom outside them and boys’ lavatories at one end of the cloakroom and girls’ at the other.

In the classroom we sat arranged in five tables of either 6 or 8 which were composed of three or four double desk/tables pushed together. Each desk had a shelf under it in which we had a cardboard box containing our books and pencils. Part of the classroom was given over to art, craft, sand trays etc. In Miss Cowton’s there were two or three steps dividing the two sections together with a bank of drawers including the one which contained the despised knickers. In the corner of each classroom was a store cupboard with a counter in front of it which was generally used as a make-believe shop where we exchanged cardboard coins for empty packets and were supposed to learn how to count in shillings and pence. (I knew – I had been counting out change on my granddad’s fish stall on Market Rasen market - and sometimes also at Brigg and in the Cleethorpes shop - for two years before I started school.)

PLAYTIME and PE

There were two playgrounds – the baby playground which was embraced by two arms of the building which had a climbing-frame-cum-slide - I can remember Jane (now, I am told by some teachers at her school, seriously windy about health and safety) hanging upside down over the concrete playground from it - and the big playground behind the school. There was a semicircular wall behind the school (like those on the promenade) with steps going down on either side to the playground proper. The semicircle was the exclusive property of girls in the top class – no boys and no babies allowed! There was a winding (well, very slightly bendy) path leading through the fruit trees between the playground and the playing field to the swings. These were always under control of two or three ‘big’ girls who counted out each child’s twenty swings before the next child went on. At the top end of the path was a wooden climbing frame. I liked going right to the top and once got a splinter in my hand from it.

Sometimes we were in small groups playing mothers and fathers, hospitals, schools, ponies and all the other games little girls play (and occasionally let the boys join in) and the boys were cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and pirates – often monopolising the climbing frame and never letting the girls join in. At other times there were games like Grandmother’s Footsteps, What Time is it Mr. Wolf? and Nuts in May which seemingly involved the entire school.

If there was 100% attendance for a whole week that class would have extra playtime on Friday afternoon. I remember one occasion when I had been off with chicken pox and we were given the extra playtime anyway because I had come back on the Tuesday or Wednesday as soon as the doctor said I was out of quarantine instead of waiting till the next Monday.

While I was in the top class a climbing net was added to the attractions in the playground (actually on the playing field) and it is my proud boast that I was the very first child over the top. Since this is my one claim to athletic prowess I remember it particularly well. I was tiny and an agile climber, but somewhat uncoordinated and slow: I could neither skip nor catch a ball nor throw a beanbag with any accuracy and the best place I have ever achieved in any running race is last.

In PE I quite liked apparatus work although landing on those coir mats and doing a forward roll bare-footed and bare-backed was distinctly painful. I mentioned the gym knickers earlier – these were all we girls wore fore PE in the hall, and I think the boys just wore their ordinary grey flannel shorts. Better than either indoor PE or outdoor games was Music and Movement where we danced and mimed along with thousands of other children all over the country to music played by the friendly instructors on the wireless.

SCHOOL DINNERS

My mother was an excellent cook, and – as well as traditional English fare – we were eating proper curries and spaghetti at a time when for most people the former was still foreign muck and the latter something that came out of a tin. School dinners, however good, could not compete, and I did not stay for them very often. My particular bete noir was beetroot salad: I loved salad: quartered tomatoes, sliced cucumber, lettuce leaves, lumps of cheese and whole carrots, but the in the school salad everything was chopped up small, mixed together and dyed an unattractive pink by the inclusion of beetroot!

On one occasion we were served mince in runny gravy, not with mashed potato as we were accustomed, but with quarter slices of white bread. Not one of us knew what to do – some scooped up the soupy stuff with their bread while others (including myself) broke the bread up and sprinkled it like croutons. All were told off the former group for bad manners and the latter for babyishness! A couple of years later my great-uncle Frank taught me how to deal with a bread bun and soup in adult society, but it did require a spoon, while I have still to figure out how five year olds supposed to manage soup with a knife and fork!

To begin with I always went home for lunch, and quite often my granddad would collect me in the car to take me home. One day he forgot me, and I remember waiting all on my own outside the school gates for ages before I plucked up the courage to go back into the school and tell Miss Nocton that nobody had picked me up. She phoned granddad and it was soon sorted out, but imagine a time when four year olds were sent out to the school gate unaccompanied and nobody noticed that one has not been collected, and imagine what could have happened – a year or so earlier a child had been murdered in Weelsby Woods, and it was not so long before the horror that was the Moors Murders, not to mention (even with the ligher traffic of 1959) the dangers of a child so young deciding to walk home alone.

SELECTED AT SIX

Miss Nocton was not, as I have already remarked regarding my mother’s experience of her, a perceptive woman, but she was very firmly convinced of her own rightness and she (aided and abetted by Miss Robinson and some of the other teachers) had the future grammar school pupils selected by the time they were six. I don’t know why she was so confident of her judgement and I can only speak of those children in my class, but her predictions in this case were far from accurate.

By Miss Robinson’s class I was on the third or middle table (so was Julie) mainly on account of my untidy and uncoordinated handwriting, and the fact that Miss Thompson had firmly established favourites of which I was not one. My year in her class had reduced me to biting my nails and developing strange little illnesses which would last from getting up to about 9.30 in the morning. She had black hair and was, I suspect, rather beautiful, but she seemed to me like a cross between the wicked queen in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Cruella de Vil. After the lovely Miss Cowton and pleasant Mrs. Kilvington my second year of infant school was a cruel let-down and I was absolutely miserable for most of it. Nor was my final year there any better.

There were no SATs in those days, but we did some sort of test before we were sent on to the wider world of junior schools. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies! When it came to taking those tests the questions were read out and we had to write the answers down, and the level of the questions was graduated. After the first few sections the children were sent out to play table by table as the questions reached the level Miss Robinson predicted that table should reach. I think that some of us on table three actually put our hands up to ask if we could stay in to do the rest of the test, but we were told not to be cheeky and were sent out regardless.

The 11+ is and always was a poor and inaccurate system, but its failings are as nothing compared to this. Suffice to say that of the eight children on table 1 who were confidently predicted to pass the 11+ only one girl and two boys ended up at the grammar schools, and not a one from table 2, while virtually everyone on table three went on to grammar school and – mostly – on to higher education.

NAMES

These are the children I can remember from infant school, although John Grant, Richard Spicker or David Stagg may have been at St. Peter's Infants. Ellen Rimmer and Carol Whotton were in the other class in my year, and I think that Linda Hall may have been a year older, as Lorraine Cust certainly was.

Helen Bulman (died several years ago)
Annette??? (Helen B’s friend)
Jane Casujuana (Head of Signhills Infant School)
Elaine (Clarke?) (left area)
Paula Collinson
Lorraine Cust (Left Area)
Lynne Dickens(on)
Linda Hall (in my year?)
Kim Hall
Julie Heaton (still in the area)
Patricia Leesing (still in the area)
Elaine Maw(son)
Barbara Nurse
Ellen Rimmer (was manageress at Smiths Bakers, moved abroad)
Dawn Showler
Elizabeth (Stevens?)
Helen Toole
Carol Whotton
Diane???
Pamela???
Yvonne???

Simon Adams
Charles Brown
Jack (Bulman?)
Christopher Curtis
John England
Stephen Farrier
John Grant
Peter Manton (left area)
Peter Quarmby
James Peters
Richard Spicker
David Stagg
Geoffrey???
Hugh???
Martin???

For me the last day of term was yesterday with a half day in the Victorian Laundry with a group of KS1 children (including my brother-in-law's great-nephew) from two tiny village schools. They were all very good, but I find that William responds to the noise of dolly-stick thumping against dolly-tub in precisely the same way he does to fireworks.

Jess is off school for two days because of the Unison strike, and has suggested that she and Joel would appreciate a day out tomorrow.

I have just spent the day first picking raspberries and then planting all the lovely cheap plants I have bought at the last three weekends' summer fetes.

While in the garden I saw a young woman cantering by on the tarmac road (so already bad for the horse's legs), bare-headed and holding a mobile phone to her ear as she chatted away. The road which runs beside our house is not normally a busy one, but it is frequently a fast one. It is used as a rat run by people taking a shortcut between the two A roads and for diverted traffic when there is an accident on either of the main roads, as well as by those who have had rather more to drink than they would want the police to know about.

Suppose the horse was startled by traffic or by low flying aircraft (not unknown over Lincolnshire) or by dogs (lots of those about) or by farm machinery, and the rider is thrown, it isn't just the injuries to (or even death of) the rider, but the guilt that puts upon some innocent person who was doing no more than driving by, walking his dog or doing his job.

After Mr. Parker died and Mrs. Parker moved to live with their daughter, the cottage next to us became vacant. The agreement for Joe to rent it still hasn't been signed (which is why this is posted for friends only), but things are just beginning to move and permission has been granted to start work on the garden.

The boys have sprayed off Mr. Parker's nettle bed vegetable patch and spread on a lot of new topsoil to bring it level with the lawn. What Joe does next is up to him: Pa suggests a smoothly sloping lawn which is easy to mow, but Joe has more ambitious plans.

They have also moved the rubbish from all around the shed and put anything possibly salvageable into the little yard behind the house. The house itself is also full of rubbish.

At some point somebody has got in and ransacked the place so that beds, which I am sure the Parker family left neatly, have been turned over as though someone was hunting for money or jewels! Somebody has even stolen the coal!

There are some bits of furniture - wardrobes, sideboard, dressing table, windsor chairs - that Joe intends to keep. Father thinks that he should also keep the carpets and just paint over the wallpaper, but both are filthy and the place stinks of tobacco so Joe is minded to do a proper job. And - not unaturally - Joe doesn't want the beds.

Another thing Joe doesn't want to keep is the sitting room fireplace. The two larger bedrooms have rather nice cast iron fireplaces, but soemone replaced the one in the sitting room with a grey shiny tiled job sometime in the 1950s. It is somewhat damaged so it shouldn't be difficult to get permission to to change it. Yesterday Liz brought down (along with the cat) a fireplace I spotted on ebay and bought for £1 which she collected for me. (Actually she also paid cash for it and I forgot to give her the money yesterday.) The grate is missing, but by good fortune one which fits (and may even be original to the house) was lurking in the shed. Joe has cleaned that up and has started work on the fireplace itself.


Monday, July 21st
Now everything is signed, I have derestricted this blog.

The rain held off and people attended the fete in reasonable numbers.

My 'Lucky Bags' was based on the premise that Father Christmas's elves need to clear out last year's presents to make room in the workshop for this year's. The have put them in bags, but nothing has a label on it so when you pay your 20p you don't know whether you are buying a sweetie or something much nicer and more expensive. All the 'expensive' items were donated (mainly from the bring and buy stalls from the last two weekends' fetes), while the sweets came from Lidl. As a money-spinner you are not going to get rich on this, but the children had fun. One little girl obviously had x-ray eyes, and managed to pick nearly all the good toys and ornaments. (Apart from putting a few obviously girly things into pink bags, the size and shape of the bags gave no indication of the contents and all were padded out with tissue paper.)

Do you remember what Steve Redgrave said about him and boats after his last gold medal? Well, I feel the same about fetes. I am all feted out!

I arrived home to find Liz and Sid talking to Pa in the library. Sid has made herself at home, but she and Albert are keeping apart. They are both on the same brand of catfood this week (Tesco Premium cuts in jelly) and seem to prefer each other's bowls. Will this prove to be the feline equivalent of the annexation of Poland, or merely an spot of minor border reiving?

It has been a very busy week for education at Normanby Hall with lots of schools saving their trip until the end of term.

Whatever people say about children nowadays, we find that the badly behaved children are very much in the minority, and that the vast majority of schools bring groups of two to three dozen polite, friendly, well-behaved and interested children - and this applies equally to schools from rural Lincolnshire and inner-city Hull.

This week has been mostly KS1 and Foundation groups, so these little ones are very excited. They are especially thrilled by the peacocks which are in their full feathered glory at the moment, and the country children as much as the town ones love to pick up fircones, feathers, leaves etc. to fill their pockets and take home with them.

Although the ages have been the same I have done a different workshop each day which is much nicer than doing the same one over and over again - although no two ever run exactly the same as we have to adjust to the particular group. This is particularaly true of the Trug to Table workshop which has science, maths, history and nature study elements/variants within the broad outline - we touch on everything, but slant it according to what the teacher tells us and according to the weather, with the history getting a bigger slice of the time when it's wet so that we can stay indoors longer.

I have been very lucky: there have been days when I have driven in through rain and driven home through rain, but the rain has held off during all my outdoor workshops, if sometimes only just and on one Trug to Table the heavens opened each time I led the children into the various garden buildings to tell them about the work of the gardeners a century ago, leaving the remaining children and their supervising adults to rush for shelter in the glasshouses rather than wander leisurely around the kitchen garden.

Yesterday we were doing the Domestic Staff Required in the hall. There were some real characters including Marcus whom I cast as Mr. Marrows, the butler. He bowed with great style, held open doors, and remained in character throughout, even if he was a bit sudden when pushing in chairs for 'Sir Robert' and 'Lady Laura' to sit on at table.

This brings me to something I have noticed - children in the country have completely different names from children in the town: this school had George, Henry, Marcus, Emma, Maria and Lucy while town schools have Chardonnay, Chelsey, Shannon, Cody, Leyton and Romeo. I remember reading a children's future fiction novel called The Guardians by John Christopher many years ago in which society was clearly divided into urban and rural classes divided by a wall and kept apart by the eponymous Guardians: in some ways it is getting closer and closer to the truth.

Today in is the village's (as opposed to the group of parish's) summer garden party. I have a stall in aid of the church which is essentially a lucky dip. The forecast is rain - let's see if my luck holds, although I am scheduled to be indoors.

I also have a house guest arriving today - her name is Sid, and she is black, furry, beautiful and feline.

I don't often comment on the news, but as a regular church-going Anglican I do feel that perhaps the General Synod is something that I ought to express my views about.

Issue 1 - The Consecration of Women Bishops

I'm all in favour of women priests, although I do allow that anyone who believes that the apostolic succession must be male and only male is entitled to that point of view, and is allowed to say "I personally am unwilling to receive the sacrament from a woman", and to choose which church to attend on this basis. I don't agree with them, but as long as holders of neither point of view make themselves objectionable to the the other then I think it should be possible to rub along together.

However, as far as the General Synod is concerned, the issue of women priests is no longer an issue - they have allowed women to be ordained for many years now. Therefore it must follow that if women priests are acceptable then so are women bishops. You would not have a rule which allowed women to train as doctors, but said that registrar was as high as they could climb. (Yes, I know that this was how it remained in practice for many years for the majority of women doctors, but surely nobody holds that up as a model of how things should be?) The question of women bishops should not be a question, and there should be nothing to debate.

Issue 2 - Gay Priests

Me, I'm pretty hot of sexual morality, and it is a source of irritation to me that friends who slept with their future husbands (and possibly a few others) before they were married are still happily married, while those who held out until the (first) wedding night are now on husband number 2 or even 3. Actually, I have put that wrong because it doesn't irritate me at all that any of my friends are happily married after 20, 30 or more years: it delights me.

Now, it seems to me that if I allow - albeit with a certain reluctance - that people can and do have sexual relations with a heterosexual partner outside the bonds of holy matrimony without incurring the wrath of God, it is unreasonable to deny homosexual men and women the same freedom.

Moreover it is undoubtedly true that a man or woman who commits adultery is hurting far more people than a man or woman in a loving relationship with somebody of the same sex, and is moreover breaking one of God's commandments. Although Judaic law does include injunctions against 'a man lying with another man as with a woman', it also includes a great many laws regarding the uncleanliness of women, what people should eat and not eat, what they should wear and not wear etc. - all of which Christians have happily ignored for two thousand years. Nor does such a law appear either in the ten commandments (which we believe were given directly by God) or in the teachings of Jesus. We also have to acknowledge that if God made us all, He made the gay as well as the straight.

So, while personally I would rather all people adhered to the precept of fidelity in marriage and celibacy outside marriage, those gay men and women who live in a faithful and loving relationship are doing nobody any harm - and surely it is the harm done by the betrayal of innocence or trust which is the real sin? I can therefore logically see no reason to object to gay Christians fulfilling their vocation within the priesthood and at the same time having a fulfilling relationship with the partner of their choice.

It doesn't altogether please me that I reach this conclusion. I may be old-fashioned, but my gut reaction remains that the sex act is primarily for the creation of babies, and that therefore sex - all sex - outside marriage should be resisted, but equally it seems to me that such matters are for the individual conscience rather than for hard and fast rules set down by other human beings who may well have no personal knowledge of the emotions involved.

Conclusion

I am not saying that either of these issues is unimportant, but we are living in the twenty-first century and there are far greater matters for the church to debate than these purely domestic issues.

Yesterday Joe and I visited another of those occasionally open country houses, Hovingham Hall north of York.

We drove up by-passing Beverley and through Malton arriving just as it was about to open, but we did not go in straight away as we had arranged to meet my cousin Susan who lives in York; she was working in the morning and didn't arrive for about half-an-hour. While we were waiting we ate our picnic in the car park - which is not as sad as it sounds since the car park was a rather nice green space in the middle of the village. Here is a picture showing the entrance to the house from the car park.

After Susan arrived and we had established that she didn't want to eat, we went in. It is the most extraordinary entrance as you go in from the village through what looks like a gatehouse, but it takes you not to a drive or into a courtyard, but into a huge covered riding school two storeys high and looking as though it had escaped from Vienna. Here Sue paid her entrance and Joe and I flashed our HHA cards. It was by now about ten-to-two and the next tour began at 2.15 so we went out into the grounds for a quarter-of-an-hour to catch up on a bit of family news and ask after everyone's health.

The lady who did the guided tour was very thorough and friendly, but she was not really a natural for the job. She was good on the pictures (some of which are excellent), but warned us at the beginning that the family had no consistent records of the furniture. The builder of the house (one of many Thomas Worsleys) was both his own architect and a horse fanatic. he built a house which in its original form was said to be 'impossible in which to live', having been build around the stables and the riding school with the human accomodation being both less grand and of secondary importance. His grandson and subsequent generations did to an extent sort out this problem, but it is still a distinctly odd design.

After the guided tour we went out for a walk around the garden which takes second place to the cricket pitch. Here is the house viewed from the road across the cricket pitch.

The herbaceous borders, which I somehow neglected to photograph, were very pretty and the old roses were at their best and most fragrant.

We then went to the bakery in the village where we had a very nice afternoon tea sitting by the beck until - to use a cricketing term - rain stopped play with a storm that threatened more than it delivered, but sent us skittering into the church both from interest and as a place to shelter from the rain which was quite heavy for about half-an-hour.

Driving home we took a somewhat circuitous but beautiful route through Thixendale and avoiding Malton which at certain times of day grinds to a halt with a continuous traffic jam through its centre, and called in at Thompson's in Wetwang for some of their excellent chips which in Joe's case were covered in a curry sauce which I am told by conisseurs of such things is the best anywhere (and believe me, my brother-in-law and nephews have sampled a lot of curry sauces over the years).

Today my father's cousin Bill called in. I found myself thinking back to a day about fifteen years ago when Susan and her older children were here, together with Bill's two and, of course, Helen's boys. Then they raced round the garden, splashed in the pool, climbed the trees and swung from the swing. Now James (the greater) is well on his way, via Durham University and graduate recruitment, to being a captain of industry; Joe is busy getting ready to move into a house of his own, Adam is in a similar case to James (the greater) by the same route although a couple of years behind being that much younger; Jacob is running his own business, and James (the less) is at Cambridge, while Charlotte, the only girl among those over school age, is working as an occupational therapist at Grimsby Hospital. It doesn't take many years to make so much difference.

I'm not complaining, but there were over 300 children in schools parties at Normanby Park today - most of them KS1, plus a couple of groups of older children and young adults from special schools!

They were very good, and the teachers were very well organised, but even so the various groups kept getting in each others' way (lots of polite 'excuse mes' and standings aside), and there were long, long queues for the loos!

I had to deal with just shy of 60 of them (29 year 1 in the morning and 28 year 2 in the afternoon) as we did the Trug to Table workshop in the walled garden. Hilary and Sarah had year one and two groups in the laundry and the hall respectively in the morning, and then the schools had self guides in the afternoon, as my groups had back to back, and the other schools were all on self guides.

Fortunately for everyone's sanity the three infant schools had different coloured uniforms so that the school near Lincoln was in green, the Hull school was in red, and the ones from the school near Driffied were in blue. Unfortunately (for this reason only) it was a lovely warm day and most of the children had taken off their distinctive sweatshirts and left them in the lunch rooms; for all other reasons I am very happy that the rain held off and it only started spitting around 3.30ish after the children had all gone.

I wonder, if the Museum Education Service was allowed to give small discounts for parties booking (and paying) well in advance for 'off peak' weeks, would we still get as many flocking in at the end of the summer term?

Swallow Bookworms' cloice for June was Light on Snow by Anita Shreve, and it was much better appreciated than some of our recent choices, although it is worth noting that none of the men had managed to finish it.

Told from the point of view of twelve year old Nicky it deals both with her growing up, and both her and her father's coming to terms with tragedies - their own and other people's. It had some interesting stuff to say about the nature of grief, and - despite my dislike of narratives written in the present tense (almost stream of consciousness) - I found it a good, quick read, a level or so more thought provoking than the standard aga-saga of light reading. Which view was largely echoed by the rest of the group.

(By the way - note to the paperback publishers: we all hated the cover design, not least because the child in the picture is wearing a machine knitted hat when great stress is laid in the novel of her enjoyment of hand-knitting.)