Reminiscing

 Sweet Williams, one of my favourite flowers.  Glorious colouring, and a scent which reminds me of my childhood.

Most people have conventional upbringings within a normal family, I did not but that is not to say I didn't enjoy being a child.  Holidays, my brother and I were sent away, a couple of summer holidays to Bournemouth Chines, where we swam on our own and I almost drowned, luckily someone rescued me and I am here to tell the tale.  But we wandered everywhere. 

There is one memory from Bournemouth, not as frightening as the one where my brother and I skidded over the rocks trying to beat an incoming tide but the two square scotty dogs that joined us on our wandering.

A holiday on a Welsh farm near Pumpsaint, where we fished for trout with a rather large pig in tow and then there was Cannock Chase with my friend and our horses. 

And then my brother had gone to live with his mother and I think that was when I broke my heart losing not only my brother but the house and garden we had lived in. We all ended up in boarding school, my cousin included, and though the convent was a good place, though freezing cold, the break from one life to another and a very bad illness at the convent needing several months convalescence coincided with teenage years.

The house was  in the centre of Willenhall, which had a triangular area of Victorian houses called the Manor I think, many large and ugly, this was our playground.  We could cut through the industrial waste land to the park and we had freedom.  I still have the scars of gravel in my knees from falling off my bike, and a silver plate connecting my elbow bones, when I crashed into the tennis hut on a sledge, tobogganing down a slippery slope.

My grandfather was chief engineer at a big firm called Villiers, he worked long hours and we had Louisa, who was Italian to look after us, because he was always busy and marital affairs between him and his son were always difficult.

But it was the garden that I loved, a good acre of large old fruit trees fitted into a neat pattern of path ways and lawns.  The house itself fronted onto the street, with a lawn beside it and a row of poplar trees, in which an owl resided, but my grandfather said that he would shoot it for hooting all night - I am not sure that he did though.  There was a small formal rose garden to the left of it and a rockery enclosing this area.

Another lawn went horizontal across in front of the path but it was always dark from the trees that had become overgrown but to the side amongst the lillies of the valley and our small graveyard of birds etc,* was an octagonal wooden hut which was our den.  It had a great hole in the middle of the floor but we could just about have meetings inside.

Tiger Lilly or Turks Cap

There was a vegetable patch and then you came upon the large central flower bed, neatly ringed by lawn.  I have forgotten our gardener, Gerry for it was he that actually looked after the garden and planted this vivid array of summer plants in a wild colour scheme.  Nemesis plants edged the border along with the blue and white of alyssums.  Yellow marigolds, dahlias in their season, and  exotic Tiger lillys bounced their turk caps in the massed ranks.  At the end of this flower bed was our sand pit, a square area built with bricks, at one end great orange gladiolas would greet you. Across on the bed by the wall that surrounded the whole garden would be irises.  

It wasn't quite the end of the garden, for there was a shrubbery and the last path would lead you past small apple trees, when I grew older I  realized they must have been quinces.  Remnants perhaps of Victorian planting.  It was here that Gerry in a corner of the walls meeting that he put all the cut grass.  It was an enormous heap and very soft to walk on.

 *I always loved animals, so the greenhouse often lodged frogs, toads, sick birds and my tortoise in winter, not forgetting the sticklebacks we would bring back from the park.

I am not sure what brought these thoughts on, a realisation that there are thing left uncharted, people long gone but also a surge of happiness that flowers have accompanied me all through life.

24th June also to remember.  My daughter went to Switzerland and is now stuck there because of the Manchester airport power outage.  Her aunt unfortunately fell yesterday and has a fractured hip which is not good news.