Wintertide and Waxwings

 We are back home from a couple of days away visting relatives, old haunts, churchyards and cemeteries.

I managed to find suitable holly wreaths on a stall at Bolsover market.  So many memories of living close to the little town as a child and teenager came back to me.  It is much changed (lots of new housing and big new supermarkets) but somehow exactly the same too.  Bolsover Castle was closed so before we started for home we visited nearby Hardwick Hall.  I grew up in a small village close to both these wonderful buildings so they are part of my childhood memories.

A saying I remember from childhood is 'Hardwick Hall more glass than wall.' Hardwick Hall is run by the National Trust whilst nearby Hardwick Old Hall is cared for by English Heritage, it was closed the day we visited.

The old hall is just over the garden wall from the newer hall.  Hardwick Old Hall was built between 1587 and 1596 by Bess of Hardwick but in 1590 before the old hall was completed Bess began to have built the new hall using noted architect of the time Robert Smythson.  Apparently the two halls were used together for quite a time to complement each other.  The old hall was partially dismantled in the 1750s as by then the Cavendish family preferred living at the family seat at Chatsworth.

Inside Wintertide was being celebrated lead by the Lord of Misrule.  We collected our lanterns and proceeded up the stairs.  I'd forgotten those wide stone stairs leading up to the grand appartments above.  It's a place of many stone staircases and walls hung with beautiful tapestries.

In the long gallery the Lord of Misrule bade us to linger and explore in the shadows.  There were areas where you could write down your thoughts as you were asked to remember happy festive times, the people who had been part of those times, to be grateful for joys and happiness experienced and hope for kindness in the future.  There was a shadow puppet theatre at the end of the gallery.

One of the areas used to sit and reflect, to write down thoughts.  The whole display was about shadows, light and reflections. 

 Back outside in the South Gazebo we found traditional Tudor decoratations.

The Kissing Bough, the precursor of mistletoe, was made with twigs and evergreen foliage and sometimes fruit and cones.  The bough was hung over doorways to welcome visitors to the house.

 

Orange and clove pomanders decorated the window sill below garlands of leaves.

An unexpected 'decoration' were hundreds of dormant Ladybirds high on the ceiling above the door.

Before I go in my last post I promised photos of Waxwings.  These wonderful birds have spent over two weeks feasting on the many berry trees in our little part of the city.  They've been there through wind, rain and snow.  We've wandered down to the local park two or three times in the hope of seeing them.  It was a case of third time lucky last Sunday.  We saw them straight away.  

Waxwings are winter visitors to the UK coming from Scandinavia to feast on seasonal berry trees.  They are such beautiful birds.  I've seen some wonderful photos of them across the various local bird forums and websites and it seems that it is a particularly good winter for them.

  Photos of the Waxwings and internal shots in Hardwick Hall were taken by Paul as my little camera wasn't up to the job.  

 

Right it's time to go and think about decorating the Christmas tree.

All for now. Take care.

Painting Memories for Paint Monthly

Childhood Memories

I was thinking the other day about paintings (or rather prints or copies of them) that I remember from my childhood and early years.

One of my earliest memories is of a copy of The Laughing Cavalier by Franz Hals which used to hang over a fireplace in one of the classrooms at the village school I attended.  There were three classrooms in the school.  Baby class was where we had our nature table and did dance and mime from children's radio programmes, there was also a sandpit and Wendy house in this room. Middle class was the largest and was in the main hall of the school, warmed by a huge boiler, it had the alphabet and times tables around the walls under the large windows, the dining tables were in here too and the stage was always fixed at one end of the hall for plays and concerts and also where we learned to play music on tambourines, bells, cymbals and castanets.  The top class was in a room on the back of the school near the kitchens.  This was where we used nib pens and inkwells, learned what we called 'real writing' and studied for the 11 plus.  I was 10 and three quarters when I took the eleven plus, passed and went to Grammar School, I was like a fish out of water there as I was a lot younger than the other pupils, that is another story but my abiding memory is of The Laughing Cavalier looking down on us as we struggled with inky fingers to write in a cursive, joined up writing, whatever the teacher had written on the board.

The original of this painting can be seen in The Wallace Collection

When I was six years old we moved from the large Midlands city of Leicester where I was born, to a small village in North East Derbyshire.  I remember a painting which used to be on the wall at the top of the stairs in our new home.  After my father died my Mum had married again (an old teenage sweetheart) and we moved to his home.   The painting, well copy or print of a painting, was The Boyhood of Raleigh by Sir John Everett Millais.  Over the years it faded but I remember it always there when I went up to bed on cold winter nights, reluctant to leave the roaring coal fire downstairs, clutching a hot water bottle.  The arm in the painting almost pointing the way to my little bedroom where it took ages to get warm and where sometimes, in the depths of winter,  I woke to frost on the inside of the windows.

The original of this painting can be seen in the Tate Gallery.

  

A few years later my mother wanted new carpet and a new sofa for what we called the front room.  This was a room we rarely used until we put a television in there.  There was a piano in this room and I was sent with my friend Wendy for piano lessons given by a music teacher who lived down in the centre of the village opposite the parish church.  When Mum got her new carpet and sofa the room had been decorated too and she bought a print of a painting she'd always liked for the back wall behind the sofa, it was The Haywain by John Constable.  This was another painting which became so familiar to me.  Many years later I did an 'A' level evening class in Art History at the Art College in the nearby town where I worked.  One of the questions in the exam just happened to be about Constable's paintings of The Haywain and Flatford Mill.

The original of this painting can be seen in the National Gallery


Of course non of the above paintings would be chosen as my favourite paintings but I do have an affection for them as they hold so many memories.   Joining in with Barbara at Coastal Ripples for Paint Monthly

On National Poetry Day

Stuffed Birds at the Blackburn Museum
by Kevin Bamford

While mother was off shopping
at the co-op and the market hall
I studied birds,
birds in glass cases,
motionless.

I tried
to keep their shapes and markings
in my mind,
hoping I could name them
if I saw them in the wild.

It would be years
before I saw a buzzard
or a wren.
And to this day
I haven't seen
what I most wanted then.

Standing before the glass case as a child
I longed to see an eagle in the wild

I saw this poem a few years ago in the Rowley's House Museum in Shrewsbury, pinned to a display case.   I liked it as it reminded me of something from my childhood that I'd all but forgotten.

I was almost six and staying with my grandma whilst my mum was on honeymoon with my new step-father.  I was an unhappy child.  My father had died over a year ago and now my mum had been taken away by a stranger. When she came back we were to move to another house where I was going to have a new, almost grown up sister and loads of new aunts and uncles.  I think I was quite scared of this.   My grandma must have found me a handful at times, she was after all in her early seventies,  and so her neighbour, Mrs Brown, took me out for the day.  I remember Mrs Brown, a plump, jolly lady with dark hair, I remember her big-skirted floral frock, her summer hat, her little gloves and necklace of white plastic popper beads.  She took me to paddle in the  pool at the local town's park.  We had a picnic;  but mostly I remember where we had gone before that.  She took me to the local museum to see its collection of stuffed birds.   Little did I know as I was walking round gazing into the cases that eighteen years later I would go to work in that museum.  Of course, the birds were still there!

Here is a link to the poet's website   -  Kevin Bamford

and here is a link to the National Poetry Day website  -  National Poetry Day

 

 

A Few Memories

Below is St Leonard's Church in the village of Scarcliffe in Derbyshire.  It was very, very cold in the churchyard yesterday as we placed a holly wreath on Mum and Dad's grave.  Paul and I were married at this church as were my sister and brother-in-law.  Just a week before our wedding in April there was snow on the ground but it had cleared away and as we stood in church the sun came out and filtered through the leaded windows.

This is a view of the village from Foxes Hill - completely surrounded by snow.  We experienced many cold winters here in the 1950s and 1960s.  I remember waking up to frost and ice on the inside of the bedroom windows; the way we all gathered around an open fire at night not wanting to face the cold bedrooms upstairs even though hot water bottles had been placed in the beds an hour before.  I remember cold waits for buses that never got through into the village.  In the bad winter of 1962/63 the bus did get through to take us to school but it came off the road and  ended up on a slope.  We all had to clamber out of the emergency door at the back and the head girl at the time, who lived in the village, marched us all to school in twos through the cold and snowy lanes.

On Sunday we finally got the Christmas decoration up.  The tree below is in the conservatory

I love opening up the boxes of decorations and remembering what we have and sorting out which items will go on which tree.  I do like colours to match so we have a red and green theme above and a gold and green one on the tree below which is in the sitting room.

I was reading somewhere the other day about the most unusual Christmas present you had ever received.  Well, it wasn't particularly unusual but my Aunt Millicent Mabel, known as Auntie Millie, always gave me and my mother a hand made apron and a huge bar of chocolate.  One year we went to visit and take our cards and present to her and she handed ours to us with the words -'here's your presents - I haven't been feeling well so you'll have to sew up the aprons yourselves'.  When we opened them up on Christmas Day there was the chocolate and the cut out pieces of the apron all ready to sew together.   I remember waking one Christmas to find my pillow case of presents and sitting on top was a blue and white panda.  I still have the panda, although it is more grey and grey nowadays, in a box with two other bears that I can't bear to part with.  I remember receiving things like pens and pencils, colouring and puzzle books,  a selection box,  Secret Seven or Famous Five books, a board game, Mr potato head and a favourite of mine - a fuzzy felt circus!   What childhood presents do you remember?

Just popping to the Shop

I was writing out my shopping list this morning and got to thinking about how we used to shop when I was a child. No popping down the road to the huge supermarket where everything is under one roof like we do now. The nearest small town to our village was Bolsover three miles away; the larger ones were about six or seven miles with a bus once an hour to Mansfield and every two hours to Chesterfield.

We had a village shop in the heart of the village near the church and school where we children would call to buy aniseed balls and banana flavoured gob-stoppers on the way home. This shop was also a post office which sadly closed about five or six years ago and is now a private house.



I remember that across the road from our house lived a little white haired lady called Mrs Frost and her home was called The White House. She kept chickens and my Mum would send me across the road which wasn't anywhere near as busy then as it is now. I used to take a bowl with me and stand in Mrs Frost's huge farmhouse kitchen. When I think back her scrubbed topped table seemed enormous but then I was only small. She would fill the bowl with eggs and I would walk back clutching the bowl tightly. They would be put on the stone in the pantry next to the meat safe and the bucket of cold water where the milk bottles were kept.


We used to have a milk delivery every day to the doorstep. Once a week the grocer from the nearby town would come with my Mum's order. She had two books she filled out for our requirements one was returned with the order the other taken away for the next. It was a lengthy process as the grocer was a friend of Dad's and he would sit and have a cuppa and chat as the items were checked and paid for. We also used to have 'pop' delivered by the Corona man three bottles I remember Dandelion and Burdock, Cream of Soda and Lime and Lemon.



The pub nearby also sold sweets. The landlady sold them from her kitchen - big boxes of liquorish sticks, penny chews and sherbert dabs. We used to knock at the door during the school holidays clutching our pocket money and she would let us in to choose what we wanted.

I also remember the 'fish man' coming in his van and having to run outside when he 'pipped' to buy fish for tea - we always had fish on Fridays. Last, but not least was Cherry's Ice Cream van oh the joy on a summer evening to have a cornet with raspberry sauce or a milk 'lolly'. Mum and dad always had a wafer; ice-cream sandwiched between two thin wafer biscuits and wrapped around by a thin piece of white greaseproof paper.


Saturday was big town shopping day! We would be off on the bus so Dad could watch his sport on television. In the big town there was a British Home Stores, Marks and Spencer and a Woolworth. A bakers shop and a butchers shop called Birds where Mum would queue to buy cold sliced meat like ham and tongue for tea. There was also the market where we could buy fruit. Dad used to grow most of our vegetables in strict rows in the garden. We also had raspberry canes, rhubarb and gooseberry bushes. I remember sitting on the back steps with my friend with a stick of rhubarb and some sugar in a cup in which we dipped the rhubarb stick before eating it. I remember collecting apples from the orchard at Auntie Ruth's house on the edge of the village; I loved their sharp, green taste. You had to watch out for earwigs though especially in the windfalls. We also had a market garden or two - one specialised in tomatoes the other in strawberries. I can't describe the wonderful taste of both of these fruits - they were famous locally and the markets in the big towns would have them marked as Scarcliffe tomatoes or strawberries. We were lucky to live nearby and with just a knock at the door you could buy a bag of tomatoes or a punnet of strawberries.

Things began to change in the late 50s early 60s when we got a fridge and then a small car and when supermarkets started to appear gradually replacing the local Co-op, Melias or Home and Colonial shops.

Well I think that is enough reminiscing for one day - I'm off to the supermarket with that list!

Granny's Mirror

Over the last few evenings our local BBC news programme, Midlands Today, has been including a feature on how people are coping with the "credit crunch". Last night's item was about buying meat and how people are turning to less costly cuts and old style recipes. It featured some catering college students who were learning to cook with things like mutton, offal and pigs trotters. The presenter also interviewed a local butcher about what kinds of meat he was selling and his customers about what they would be prepared to buy, cook and eat. Most drew the line at pig's trotters. Where is this leading you ask? Well, it was the mention of pig's trotters that sent my mind whirling back to my early childhood and my visits to granny's house. Granny Rose was my paternal grandmother, as opposed to Grandma Florence who was my mother's mother, and she was a sprightly, twinkly, button of a character. Small and neat with little round glasses and a bun full of hair pins. She used to struggle along on her bowed legs - something that, had she been born later, could have been easily corrected in childhood. She would always wear a black dress covered with a wrap around pinafore to protect it against the dust and dirt caused by everday cleaning, cooking and polishing.

I loved Granny's house just as much as I loved Grandma's house. In her parlour or living room she had a huge table, usually set ready for tea when we arrived with her pretty china tea service kept for special occasions. I used to play on the rug in front of the fire whilst she and Mum would chatter and natter. On the back wall were two painted mirrors, her pride and joy apparently, as they were the first things she bought after she was married. One I recall had a piled up bowl of fruit on it the other flowers and a bird. I liked the mirrors but best of all I loved to get into Granny's front or best room with its chandelier dangling in the centre. In the window was a huge table full of family photos and on the opposite wall an upright piano, its top also covered in photos. In the middle of the table was a huge display of waxed flowers under a glass dome. I was always rather fearful of this as it reminded me of a similar dome of flowers that she had pointed out to me once when she took me to the local cemetery to put flowers on grandad's grave. She would always stop at a very small grave halfway up the path and say to me 'That's little Emily, she died young'.

What about the pig's trotters I hear you ask? Well, they were one of Granny's favourite foods and so she always put them on the tea table, along with lots of other food like sliced ham, haslet or tongue, bread and butter, tomatoes, beetroot and celery, tinned fruit in small bowls and little cakes on a stand. My Mum, in her usual fastidious way used to say to me very quietly, 'Don't eat the pig's trotters'. Not that I ever would have done, I thought they looked rather gruesome. One day I asked her why and she said she didn't trust them not to make us ill as Granny 'kept them for too long'.

Granny died at the age of 84 in the early 1960s, not I hasten to add anything to do with the consumption of elderly pig's trotters. As she lay dying her beloved Salvation Army came and played hymns on her front lawn under her bedroom window. After her funeral Mum came to me and said that Granny had left to me and my cousin £50 a piece and we were each to have one of the mirrors; I was to have first choice. I chose the mirror with the bird on it and I still have it even now.

It seems strange to be talking about having meat on the table as we haven't actually eaten it for over twenty years; we don't call ourselves vegetarians, though, as we do eat fish occasionally. I honestly can't remember the last time we ate meat or how we used to cook it but I remember my visits to Granny's house like they were yesterday.

Dock and Burdock

Below is a photo of some burdock. To add to my post on Dandelions and also to that on Superb Combinations, I thought I would include the burdock because one of the things I remember about my childhood is the bottles of Dandelion and Burdock.

They were delivered every week by the Corona Man and we would have a bottle of Dandelion and Burdock as well as a bottle of Lime and Lemon and I think something called Cream of Soda. My memory here is hazy because we also used to have a weekly delivery from the grocery shop in the nearest small town to our village. The owner, Sid, was a friend of my Dad's and he used to call by and sit and have a cup of tea and chat as well as making his delivery, collecting his payment and writing the next week's order in his book. I have been searching in some of my cookery books for a recipe for Dandelion and Burdock but could find nothing. I eventually found a recipe on a super blog called The Wild Drink Blog - it was interesting to read how to make it but I think this may be a step too far for me so we have been lazy and bought a bottle from the supermarket to see if it still tastes the same as I remember.

It doesn't seem that different but I guess it probably has far more additives and preservatives than the stuff we used to drink. Still it was nice to bring back memories for a while.

Another combination of plants I remember from childhood are nettles and dock. The leaves of the dock plant were very handy if you had been stung by nettles which I seem to remember happened quite often. As children we used to play in the fields and around the woods without a care in the world and I have memories of sitting by paths rubbing my legs with a dock leaf to relieve the stinging feeling on the skin.

Those were, of course, the days of endless sunshine, of playing in each others gardens, with mother's clothes horse up-ended and covered in a blanket to make a tent; of making mud pies and baking them in the sun and 'pretending' to sell them to each other as bread and cakes. Dad would come out into the garden with the watering hose and we would don our swimming costumes and jump and play in the spray of water from the hose and scream and giggle with joy whilst Mum waited on the side lines with towels and a cooling drink. Days never to be seen again, I think.

Remembering......

In my post of April 17th about the cuckoo I was remembering the nature walks we took as children from our school in a small Derbyshire village. I thought that today I would introduce you to that village. On our way to meet up with an old friend we popped into Scarcliffe to take flowers to the churchyard and I decided, as it was such a pleasant day, to take some photographs. Lots of things have changed since I was a child and teenager here but surprisingly many of the houses are still as I remember them. Below is the Parish Church of St Leonard, when I was a child, there were small cottages where the grass and access road are now. I don't know if I am remembering correctly but I'm sure they had gardens to the front and on the backs, off the track up to the church, they had stable type doors and steps down into the rooms beyond. Behind them at the side of the church were farm buildings and a farm house.

Below is the view up the main street towards the top of the village. You can see The Horse and Groom Public House, known in the village as 'top pub', at the end of the street. This is the street we children would walk down to get to school each morning. Generally calling for each other and walking down in little groups sometimes eager and sometimes not, to get to school.

There were two farms in the village with their farmhouses off this road, the one below is Manor Farm.

Further down the main street, beyond the church, on the way to the school was the village shop and post office. The red brick building to the left of the photo below used to house both the shop and post office, now sadly closed and the house refurbished and called 'The Old Post Office'. The windows on either side of the front door have been cleverly matched so that, other than the name, a visitor would never know that there had ever been a shop there. At the end of the street you can see The Elm Tree Inn, or 'bottom pub' as it was known then. The road to the right of the Elm tree led eventually to the old station, once such a busy bustling place, but closed by the time my mother and I moved into the village.

We used to turn left at the bottom of the street and walk up to the school. It now has an extension on the front in what was our large playground. When I went to school here there were just three class rooms, 'Baby class', where we had our 'nature table' and 'art table' and danced to music from the radio; I think we had sand pits and a Wendy house in there too. The 'middle class' was in the main hall of the school which housed the boiler that heated the whole building and also doubled as a dining room, stage and auditorium for things like school plays and concerts as well as a venue for WI meetings, church Christmas bazaars and beetle drives. Whilst I was there it always had times tables around the walls which we had to learn by heart and be tested on regularly. 'Top class' was where you ended up to take your eleven plus exams to see if you were to go to the Grammar School or the Secondary Modern school. I remember we sat at desks with ink wells and had pens with scratchy nibs. There was a fireplace in this room with a picture of 'The Laughing Cavalier' by Frans Hals over the mantle. I passed my eleven plus and duly went to Grammar school but the shift from a small village school with only about 35 children in the whole school to a large school where each class held about 30 pupils was quite a culture shock to me and it took some time to adjust and I never really enjoyed it.

One of the joys of living in this village was the fact that we lived in such a rural landscape and we could walk out of our back gates and in just a few minutes be in the woods just at the edge of the village.

We had the freedom and security to do that then and we would disappear for hours on end, into the woods by the ruins of the old gamekeeper's cottage,along Vicarage Lane to the sheep dip or up Wood lane to the bridge over the brook. We hadn't a care in the world.

After our quick visit to Scarcliffe we set off to meet up with an old friend from those school days and lots more reminiscing about the old days as well as catching up with more recent news. What a lovely day it was, too.

Cuckoo

I've been dipping into my copy of 'A Countrywoman's Journal' first mentioned in this post last year. I thought I would see what the author and illustrator Margaret Shaw was finding in her garden at this time of year. Her entry for April 17th 1928 is about the cuckoo.

She writes:- 'Heard the cuckoo before 6a.m. got up and saw him sitting in a tree opposite my window. His tail goes up and his head down each time he cuckoos, a very wooden looking bird.'

Reading about the cuckoo brought back childhood memories of the small Derbyshire village we lived in when I was a child. I too remember waking up and hearing the cuckoo's call in the early mornings. I associate that call with the arrival of Spring, the growing warmth of the sun, the greening of the trees and the promise of the glories of late Spring and early Summer to come. That wonderful time when everything is lush, fresh and sparkling in the sunshine. The cow parsley swaying on the roadside, the hawthorne hedges in blossom and the horse chestnut trees bedecked with their elegant white flowers. It reminds me of our school 'nature walks' into the woods close by. Led by the teacher we would snake off, two by two, down the lane near the school, over the stone stile, across the field to the wooden bridge over the brook and into the woods. We would come back clutching our specimens to be displayed, usually in water filled jam jars or milk bottles, which would be labeled by the teacher and placed on the 'nature table' in our class room.

The cuckoo may be a wooden looking bird and certainly the only one I hear nowadays is a wooden one; when I'm out in the garden and my neighbours have their front window open I hear their cuckoo clock on the hour chiming in it's quaint, mechanical way but it doesn't have that magical lingering call of the real bird, heard in the mists of early morning offering promise for the new day. The cuckoo is now listed as an endangered species so maybe sometime in the future perhaps the only cuckoo any of us will hear will be the mechanical call of the cuckoo clock; I really hope not.

What did you Say?

We were talking the other day about 'sayings' not just the proverb ones like 'too many cooks spoil the broth.' 'a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush' and 'a stitch in time saves nine' but ones we remembered from childhood. The mother of one of my friends always used to say 'hmm - when Nelson gets his eye back' for something that would never happen and 'it's not a prizewinner but..' for something she wasn't too proud of. Grandma used to say 'she's no better than she ought to be' and 'he's his father's son alright' - maybe this one is in the same vein as 'a chip off the old block'. I remember things like 'well I'll go to the foot of our stairs' - used when people were surprised by something and 'Do you live in a barn?' - if you didn't shut the door behind you. The last one could become really localised and changed to 'Do you come from Warsop?' a place not too far from where we lived. It is said to come from the fact that many of the cottages in Warsop had 'stable' type doors which opened at the top or the bottom and that many of the folk left the top ones open. Others I remember are 'it's brass monkey weather' and 'do you want a picture?' - used if someone thought another person was staring at them. I think that perhaps some of these 'sayings' come from the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire areas we were brought up in but many were probably more widespread.

There are others too that people say like 'a leopard never changes its spots,' 'elephants never forget,' 'a little bird told me'. and 'out of the mouths of babes.' Also things like 'you can't have your cake and eat it' and 'as cool as a cucumber.' There are absolutely loads of these.

I heard one the other day that I hadn't heard for ages 'Piffy on a rock bun' as in 'they left me standing there like Piffy on a rock bun.' Now this one got me thinking that I hadn't made rock buns for ages so today I got out the trusty Be-Ro recipe book and made some.

Mmm - very tasty and they used up the last bits of mixed dried fruit and mixed peel left over from Christmas cake making. Tomorrow is Shrove Tuesday and therefore Pancake Day. I remember coming home from school on Pancake Day and finding Mum in the kitchen making piles of pancakes which we ate with sprinkled sugar and juice from freshly squeezed oranges which we used to eat afterwards tearing the flesh from the skins and pith with our teeth. I think we will try some tomorrow omitting the sugar, of course.

In the meantime does anyone else have sayings they remember from their childhood?

Rain Drenched Peonies

I just thought you would like to see this photo. I went out yesterday into the damp, misty and rain filled garden and found them. I always forget how beautiful they are and what memories they evoke. I see the peonies and am instantly transported back to my childhood and I'm playing on our front lawn with my friends. We have mother's clothes horse covered with a blanket and it is our tent. We have a small mat and some cushions inside and our dolls lined up against the inside wall. We are playing 'house'. Outside in the late spring sunshine the grass is a rich green, the heavily laden lilac tree casts its heady scent over our playground and in the bed near the front window of the house are the blowsy, deep rich ruby-red peonies.