Side of the house showing the start of the vegetable garden, the shed Dad built, and one of the cats.
I think that was Tinkerbell. We always had cats as long as I remember. Usually they came to us. We had a black and brown tortoise shell cat, Tamba (For tan and black). One year we went away on holidays, and when we came back, she had kittens in the cement factory behind the house. We brought them in, and the poor things were covered with cement dust. One of them didn’t make it, but three, Patches, Tinkerbell and Porky did and we kept them as well. There was another stray who attached himself to us, we called him Mr. Tramp. He was a little more stand offish.
The garden, looking from the tennis court over the croquet lawn to the shed and wall separating the vegetable garden.
They started vegetables early in a cold frame Dad made. I remember Mom carefully transplanting tiny seedlings in the house from a wheelbarrow, watching play off matches.
As I said before, Dad did not do anything by halves. He loved marmalade made from Seville oranges. Mom was going to make some and asked him to buy some oranges. He bought a huge wooden crate full. There were way too many for marmalade, so he decided to make wine with the remainder. The wine had to ferment in big bottles for a few weeks, and the bottles had to be vented. So for this purpose he taught himself to blow glass, and make hollow glass balls and twist the tubes. I remember many of these large bottles exploding rather spectacularly. That was the only time he tried making wine.
Dad loved asparagus, and wanted very badly to grow it. It takes many years to develop an asparagus bed. He worked so carefully preparing the bed, raking and seeding and caring for the plants. Finally the year came when he would be able to harvest his first picking in the Spring. That was the year we left England in January.
The house had been built when every house of this size would have had several servants. There was a mud room with a door and chute to the coal cellar, kitchen, scullery, pantry and butler’s pantry. All were very small and dark rooms with thick stone walls between. Dad knocked the walls down with a great deal of noise and dust, bricked in one of the side doors, and made a large and bright kitchen, and a back entryway with a large workshop. He designed and built a fridge and a freezer for the vegetables they grew, and a metal lathe. Adjoining the kitchen there was a breakfast room, which would have been the room where the servants gathered. One wall of this was covered with bells, with wire cords, which led to the main rooms of the house, where they would have been rung by the home owners to summon the servants. We enjoyed playing with these bells, until they were taken down. Not sure if Mom and Dad enjoyed them so much, they were rather noisy.
The new kitchen
Dad hired a fellow named Hugh McGrory to help him with the renovations. This man became a friend of the family, much to the shock and horror of Mom and Dad’s class conscious friends. One day, we were sitting down to lunch, Hugh McGrory joined us, and a colleague of Dad’s dropped by. This man was horrified to see the “hired man” sitting at the table with the family. As mentioned earlier, Mom and Dad had little use for snobbery. When we left England, Hugh McGrory took one of the cats, the ginger fellow we named Porky.
Side of the house. The door leads into the mud room, formerly the scullery. One of the windows would be the kitchen door Dad bricked in.
Mom did not have as much faith in Dad’s handyman abilities as he would have liked her to have, though. Once he was doing some plumbing, and turned the water off. When he was ready to turn it back on again Mom had all the kids go and get raincoats and umbrellas.
Mom took care of the house with the assistance of a daily woman. For years this was Mrs. Wilson. She helped with the housework, and also cared for the children once a week when Mom went shopping. They also had the assistance of an older gentleman who came in once a week to help in the garden.
Side of the house from the master bedroom. Seen is the driveway, bottom of the tennis court, garage and rose garden.
Each room in 283 Eastfield Road had its own fireplace, some of which had been converted to gas, but most of which were still functioning. This is how the house was heated as there was no central heating. There was a dining room, which we used for weekend and special meals, a “little lounge”, which we used as the front room, and a big lounge, which we used for storage and ping pong (on the ping pong table Dad built). This was a huge room, with dry rot in one corner over an old well. The people that had lived there before us had a grand piano in the bay window. It had an Adams fireplace. The little lounge also had a bay window where Dad used to bring a 12 foot Christmas tree; and a large curving staircase where Mom hung holly bunches at Christmas. Every year she cut the holly from bushes in the garden and put them together, cursing at the prickles and her poor bleeding fingers the whole time, but it did look lovely.
Holly
There were 5 bedrooms upstairs, and one bathroom. On the top floor of the house were four attic bedrooms and a large storage room which was filled with bookshelves. The attic garret rooms would have been the servants’ bedrooms. We did not have servants of course, so the attics became playrooms and one was storage. John had one, in which he had a huge train set, set up on a large platform that Dad strung from the ceiling with pulleys. We enjoyed this train set and setting up imaginary towns and villages with my farm set pieces. There was a long bench in this room, which Dad used for making things and his hobbies. These included a working steam engine he and John made for a science project, and building radios and a TV.
Dad never liked buying anything if he thought he could learn to make it himself, so when TV came in the 1950’s, he decided to build one rather than buy it. He was successful, but rather a perfectionist, so it never seemed to fail that whenever we started to watch anything, he would declare the picture not quite right and turn the thing on its side to adjust it. We got used to watching TV sideways. There was only one channel, and it was on for a few hours a day. The rest of the time there was a “test pattern”, which was a design of concentric circles and shades of grey and black and white (colour TV did not come until the 70’s). We called the test pattern “Dad’s favourite TV program”. Dad also built radios and record players.
He loved classical music and built himself a stereo “hi fi” set to play his records. He would play music late at night, after he was finished his renovating for the day; so we went to sleep at first with the sound of saws and hammers and drills, then beautiful classical music would take over. I am sure that is where I got my love of classical music, but I never learned the name of the pieces. Now I hear them, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelsohn were some of his favourites; and I recognize them but can’t remember the names.
One of Mom’s first gifts to him was a set of 78 rpm records on which was recorded Mendelsohn’s violin concerto, one of his favourite pieces. After Mom died he could never listen to that piece, or Sibelius violin concerto, Mom’s favourite, without breaking down.
Yehudi Menuin
Dad knew violinist Yehudi Menuhin and went to hear him play many times. He said they were students together in England.
Dad was very proud of the stereo he built, and used St Seans organ concerto to show it off very loudly. The huge organ sound rumbled through the whole house.
One of the attic rooms was my playroom, and also Dad’s photography darkroom. He built himself an enlarger and developed his own negatives and pictures. I took an interest in this and he taught me how to do it. He would work away at it late at night and we would get up in the morning to find the bathtub full of pictures he had developed and put there to wash and rinse.
Back of the house. Behind the chimney is the attic window
My playroom had a window which opened and we could climb out and access the roof, three steep stories from the ground. One day we were in the garden and looked up and there was Kathryn as a toddler, climbing out the window and up onto the roof. Dad raced up those stairs and out onto that roof more quickly than I thought he could move. Kathryn was always into something. I remember her getting into the fridge one day and dropping a dozen eggs, one by one onto the floor.
Susan and Graham in the paddling pool in the garden
Susan and Graham were only 18 months apart in age. As toddlers they were frequently into mischief. Mom always used to say when the were very quiet they were up to something. Once they climbed into the cabinet where she kept her best crystal glasses that she treasured. They were throwing them all out of the cabinet going "ooh...ooh" as they broke into tiny pieces. Another time they got into her sewing basket and unwound all the spools of thread and tossed everything all over the place.
We ate most of our meals in the renovated Breakfast room, which was also the family room, where we spent most of our time. Dad built an eating area with bench seating and a table. He also built an ironing table for the large iron Mom used to iron sheets. Nowadays ironing sheets is pretty much unthinkable, but then everyone did. Dad built this thing so Mom could sit and iron.
In England, the main meal was eaten in the middle of the day. After school there would be “tea”, which for us was tea and sandwiches, or toasted crumpets, something light, with usually a sweet treat such as cake. Sometimes in the Winter around Christmas time Dad would roast chestnuts in the fireplace in the dining room on a shovel.
We were particularly fond of a chocolate fudge cake that Mom used to buy. One day, I was saving my piece instead of eating it right away. When I went to eat it, it was gone. Dad had eaten it. I was very upset. For years afterwards it was the standard refrain whenever I wanted to get back at him “You ate my cake”.
Roast Beef and Yorkshire, a favourite
Weekend and special occasion meals were in the dining room, a large room off the breakfast room. We loved these special meals. Mom would usually cook a joint (roast), and we would have wine with the meal. We children drank wine from an early age on special occasions. We learned which wine went with which meat. We often had a liqueur afterwards. Dad’s favourite was Drambui, Mom liked Orange Curacao, and my favourite was a licorice flavoured liqueur named Kummel. Once I remember going out to a restaurant as a family. We were, as I said, a large family by British standards, and people stared as we entered the restaurant. John particularly was very embarrassed. The waiter came by for the wine order, and since we were ordering beef, I ordered “Nuits St George” a red wine we were fond of. The wine waiter was a bit shocked, as I was probably 7 or 8 years old, but brought the wine, and I had a glass.
Mom never did learn to drive while we lived in England. There was a good bus system, and stores close by, so she didn’t really have to, and Mom was always nervous around machinery. I remember once though Dad trying to teach her to drive. They packed us all into the car and we went to a deserted airstrip. Mom tried hard, but I remember her grinding the gears, and the car lurching forward and stalling many times.
Their First Car
Mom was always a nervous passenger in the car (and later the plane). We used to tease her about her “brake”, an imaginary brake pedal she had on her side of the car. Whenever she thought the driver was too close to something she would suck in her breath, wince, and grab the dashboard; even if the other car, pedestrian or cyclist was half a block away.
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