HALF AN ORANGE WITH WILLIE

HALF AN ORANGE WITH WILLIE

These are the memoirs of our grandmother Joan Ferris Jones (née Farmer), made at the request of my father Anthony. The original document is typewritten (granny was a school secretary and we had a huge old typewriter) and dated August 1989, when she was in her eighties. I have not corrected her terminology (sometimes delightfully of her time and very "granny"), and occasional typos. Joan and her mother Helen (Nellie) lived with us, and some of these memories seem to be hers. When we were little, Joan was known as "other granny" to differentiate her from my mother's mother, London granny, and Nellie was "old granny".

1. In the beginning

The first thing I remember is being taken into the cellar to be put into my pram. I was a little afraid of the dark steps and always surprised when the garden door opened and the daylight came in. The house was built on a steep slope so the cellar opened into the garden - really more of a basement than a cellar.

I was at this time about eighteen months old. When I once asked my mother why I was taken into the cellar to be put into my pram, she said, "How did you know that?" I answered "I remember it". She said "But you can't possibly remember it, you were not two years old". I told her "I do remember it, and I remember where we went for our walk - we went past a school where children were shouting, and we met Granny who came walking towards us". Well, it was perfectly true. My grandmother was on the Board of Governors of Hucknall Road Board School, and we met her as she came away from a meeting.

Before enlarging on my own memories I will sketch in the background of family history leading up to it. Ferris, Swain, Farmer, Place - it all comes flooding back into my mind, more than eighty years since that walk up Hucknall Road - so many memories, so many stories, it is going to be difficult to sort them out into any sort of order. So here goes - and let us begin with Ten Boys Ferris.

2. Ten Boys Ferris

In January 1871/2 the Rev. Thomas Boys Barraclough Ferris was married to Maria Theresa Swain of York - I expect in York Minster. Tom Ferris, at the time of his marriage held the post of Housemaster at St. Peter’s School, York (a school that still exists by the way). Their backgrounds were rather different. He came originally, I believe, from Somersetshire, of a farming family - gentleman farmers, in those days, of course! Why they left Somersetshire or when I don’t know, but as I never heard of any relations in that part of the world I think it must have been several generations back.

Maria Theresa was of the professional class. Her father was a doctor who practised in York, his wife was a Miss Schwabe, daughter (or maybe granddaughter) of a German doctor who, I have heard, came to England with the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria's mother.

She had connections with the army too, her brother Ned was Colonel Thomas Edward Swain of the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and her cousin was Lt. Gen. Sir Leopold Swain who fought with Sir Garnett Wolseley at Khartoum.

Tom and his wife settled down at St. Peter’s School and she - known to her husband as Tempy - started upon the life style of so many women of her time - unremitting childbearing. Her eldest, Tom, was born in the following December, Willie, the second, in October the following year. Her thirteen children entered the world at much the same rate, until after sixteen years, the babies suddenly stopped. I have often wondered why! Did Tom realise that enough was enough or did Tempy simply come to the end of her capacity to produce.

I am not certain how long they stayed in York, but I know that Tommy and Willie started school there. Then Tom was offered the living of Saint Matthews Church in Talbot Street, Nottingham and the family settled down in the Vicarage there.

It was a large rambling house, rather dark, which may have accounted for the story that it was haunted - at all events the Black Lady of Saint Matthews became well known; Tom firmly believed in her, and his stories of her appearance grew apace - Tom dearly loved a good story! The children were, of course, frightened by all this, and it did not do their nerves any good. They were all inclined to “nerves” and rather afraid of their father who had been a schoolmaster in the days when the cane ruled the classroom and to some extent the nursery as well. Tom was a good father according to his lights, but had little conception of, or sympathy with a child’s fears and fancies.

Godfrey followed Willie. He was an odd boy, slightly mis-shapen and lacking a thumb on one hand. A queer little fellow, affectionately called “Thack” by his brothers. Mabel came next - the poor little girl died in early childhood of a serious illness - possibly meningitis. Three more boys followed, Arthur, Cecil and Wilfred, then another girl, Dora. Four more boys and another girl rounded off the family - Andrew, Noel, Hugh, Herman and Ernestine. They were unlucky with their girls, for Ernestine developed a middle ear infection when a very small girl. Treatment in those days was almost in the dark ages, and poor little Ernestine came through the severe ordeal of this treatment almost completely deaf in the affected ear.

Life in the Vicarage was not easy for with so many mouths to feed money was very tight. Tempy was an active Vicar’s wife - Sunday schools were held in the house, and Sewing Circles, as well as weekly “At Homes”, when the good ladies of the parish called and drank tea. Servants were drawn from the local orphanage, together with a succession of elderly women as Cook, whose indifferent cooking did not make the best of the food so dearly bought. There was an old Nurse, as in so many families of those days who lived with the family for years and was finally pensioned off into an Almshouse. I remember Nurse Cotton, a kind old lady with a moustache.

In due course the family got sorted out. Tom, the eldest, went into the Church, as did Herman. Willie who was clever with his pencil went into a lace factory as a lace designer. Arthur and Wilfred went to sea - poor lads, they neither of them survived their first voyage, for Arthur’s ship sailed away into oblivion, as ships did in the days before wireless, and was never heard of again. Wilfred fell from the rigging and broke his neck.

Cecil was shipped off to Australia as a sheep farmer - a tragic mistake, for Cecil had scholarly leanings and ought to have gone to University. After knocking about Australia for some time he became a schoolmaster of sorts, though his educational background must have been very lacking. He came back to England with the Aussies during the First World War, and used to spend his leaves with us in Bournemouth. He was a likeable man - we got very fond of him, but found him a bit of a bore! To round off the story he later became attached to a Mission School in Fiji, and died and was buried there. He never married.

Andrew also went to the Colonies — in his case Canada. He also returned with the Forces in 1914, and quickly fell out with his father who enquired too closely into the antecedents of the girl Andrew was engaged to! He also turned up in Bournemouth, and spent his leaves with us. After the War he returned to Winnipeg and married his girl, and they produced a son. Andrew died rather young and his wife married again, so contact has been lost - but there is another Tom Ferris somewhere in Canada.

Noel was the only member of the family to be at all musical. He went to the U.S.A. and eventually became organist at a church in Washington. He died of Alzheimer’s Disease. Godfrey, poor “Thack” also went to Washington to a job in the British Embassy, living near Noel. Thack married a woman years older than himself, and he died in the U.S.A. as did his wife.

0f the remaining two boys, Hugh and Herman, they remained in England, Herman in the Church. He married twice, and there was a daughter by his first wife, Muriel Ferris. I do not know where she lives. Hugh did not marry, he served in the Forces during the First World War, and when demobbed lived for the most part in London. He was a secretive man, who lived rather a rackety life. I have memories of him and his kindness to me in the early days of my widowhood when I tried a job in London, rather a fiasco, and he helped me with sympathy and advice, and also a little money when I was broke. He died in London when in his early seventies.

Dora was a nice, good, down-to-earth person, who duly married and produced four very pretty daughters. She was rather plain herself, her husband Cyril Bearder very much so, and the pretty daughters were something of a surprise. Her marriage was a happy one.

Ernestine was the only one who remained at home and she lived and died single but perfectly happy. Her deafness was a drawback and made the household a noisy one, as everyone shouted to enable her to hear - no hearing aids in her day.

But to return to Saint Matthews Vicarage, when they were all at home. Life there was not all ghosts and canings; it had a lighter side, and the large lively family managed to have a lot of fun. They always had dogs, badly trained but much beloved. The girls had a governess, Miss Ryder, rather unfortunately she was a great supporter of the Black Lady story, reputedly seeing the spectre! I also remember a curate, a gangling young man, ragged in a friendly way by the boys. Tom himself was something of a character, who enjoyed his joke. On one occasion he went into the room where Tempy was holding a sewing meeting, busy with garments for the poor. He slyly asked them what they were making, and when they tried to hide the unmentionables he recited a limerick made on the spur of the moment:

There was a young lady of Nottingham

Who made some new knickers and got in ‘em,

Her friends said “They’re too tight!”

She replied “They’re all right!”

But they split when she started to trot in ‘em

The old aunts must not be forgotten. The favourite was Aunt Nina, Tempy’s sister. Miss Swain was a dear old lady as I remember her, and from the first entered fully into the lives of her nephews and nieces. She it was who inaugurated the “Excursion in a Small Way” - little outings to local parks or places of interest, with or without a picnic, an always remembered with pleasure by the little boys and girls as they grew up. These excursions became known in the Family as E.S.W.s.

It was Aunt Nina who was responsible for the famous remark “Half an orange with Willie”, made when offered fruit after dinner, putting poor Willie, who wanted a whole orange, in a sad dilemma! Dear Aunt Nina, with her gentle kindness and perfect manners, the very embodiment of the English lady — I just remember her in the vicarage days, though I knew her in the Gonalston era when she was getting a little vague and confused. Then there was Tom’s sister Elizabeth, Mrs Watkins, married to a parson, with her two children, Oscar and Dorothy. Oscar had no leanings to the church, but Dorothy entered an Order of Anglican Nuns at Ascot Priory and presumably lived and died there; as it was an enclosed order it meant a complete break with her life in the world. Tom’s other sister, Cordie, Mrs South, a women of considerable character whose husband was not a very providing man, and who took upon herself the role of family provider. Being a trained nurse she became chief masseuse at St. Thomas’ Hospital, a position she held for years. She lived to be 104.

Aunt Lou, one of the Schwabes was Tempy’s aunt, she lived at York and lived to a great age.

When I was about three or four Tom got the living of Gonalston. This is a small village, at the time ruled with considerable severity by the Squire, Mr. Francklin. He used to waylay the early motorists who began to appear on the roads, if it happened to be a Sunday, asking them why they were not at Church.

The Gonalston era lasted very happily for about twenty years until Tom’s retirement, and brings my account to an end. I have tried to picture the family as they were, but it cannot portray their liveliness and charm - for charm they had in full measure, although sometimes appearing a little bit insincere. But the insincerity did not go deep, and they were truly good, generous-minded people, trying at all times to live up to their principles. They had many friends and when they left Saint Matthews they were long remembered in Nottingham.

3. The Farmers - 40 years on

During the late summer of 1865 a small private wedding took place, in Nottingham, when William Hutchinson Farmer married Jane Place. They both lived in Nottingham; William was in the lace trade, and so was Jane's father, but while Mr. Place was an established business man, William had only just started his own company. The Midland Lace Company, which was far from established. In fact, he was struggling; and Jane's father had forbidden her to see him.

He first met her when she was sixteen, and he in his early twenties. During their long engagement Jane never faltered in her love for him and he worked hard against the day of her twenty-first birthday when they were to marry.

Her father, who had other plans for his daughter, remained adamant, and their plans had to be made in secret. Jane coloured some envelopes brick red and used to let her letters down by a string for her lover to collect. They married, if not on her birthday, at least not many days after it, but the ceremony had to be kept very private. Mrs Place's old cook was in the secret, and she made them a cake - but it had to be done while her mistress was out lest the smell of baking cake betray them. This old cook gave Jane the little metal spice box I still use, for a wedding present. [This is still in the family.]

Mr. Place threw off his daughter and refused to recognise her even when they met in the street. It was much later that he relented, and owned that he had been mistaken in William. Meantime, the Midland Lace Company flourished and they became well off after the very poor start to their marriage.

Jane had several sisters, Helen, Mrs Sulley, who later emigrated with her husband to Canada, where they did extremely well in the lumber industry in Vancouver. There was Lucy, Aunt Frost, and Sarah, who was not quite all there, as they say, though her ability to play on the piano any tune she heard, without knowing anything of music, was quite extraordinary. Apart from that she could just read and was a clever needlewoman, but that ended it. She used to walk in her sleep and terrified everyone by climbing on the roof in her sleep and parading up and down.

One more sister was Mrs. Buttram, the wife of an auctioneer, rather a rough brutal man with whom she was very unhappy. One of their sons was shipped off to Australia as a bad hat, and married the daughter of a stockholder; the story runs that he got lost in the bush and that she rode out to find him, and saved his life. Their son returned to England and married the daughter of a Boston fisherman.

The Places lived in Lenton Priory for a time and also in a house behind the Drill Hall on Derby Road - I can't give any more detail on this.

The Farmers were a very different family. Old John Farmer, William's grandfather, was known locally as "Old Jack", and as a musical enthusiast. He kept the "Old Crown and Cushion" in Nottingham for a while, a public house run principally as a music club. One of his daughters married William Wallet, a clown and comedian, who had once entertained Queen Victoria, who was so "amused" that she bestowed the title of the Queen's Jester on him.

Old Jack's son John was William's father. His wife was a business woman, rare in those days, who neglected her house and children for her business life. She ran a very successful bonnet factory - they made "bonnet shapes", the wire foundation on which poke bonnets were mounted. Their children were William, John, Celia, Kate and Mary.

William and John were sent to school to Coburg where a Professor Schindhelm and his wife had just opened a school for boys. These two excellent people made the rather forlorn little boys very happy and this began a connection with Coburg that lasted ´till after the Second World War. John refused to go into business as his father wished, and started a career in music in Germany, where he met Wagner who interested himself in the gifted young man. For some years he lived by teaching and playing in the orchestra of the Coburg Opera House. He married a Swiss wife and returned to England to the post of music master at Harrow, then became organist at Balliol College, Oxford, living in Beaumont Street, hard by the College. He it was, of course, who composed the famous Harrow School Song, "Forty Years On".

William's two sisters Celia, Mrs Stevenson, and Kate, Mrs Hancock, lived, the one in Nottingham the other in Oxford. Celia had four daughters who in their day were militant suffragettes. Kate's husband was a parson, and their son Aidan, also a parson, was a great character. When rude little boys called "´ere's the 'Oly Ghost" after him, he flapped his wide black cloak and chased them, and meeting an unruly group of protesting local dustmen, he joined them and beat their drum. His son, another Aidan, was for a long time one of the Bush Brothers in Australia.

Mary, Mrs Bowman-Hart, was the other sister, and was married twice, first to Bowman then to Hart. Both marriages were unhappy, and when she set up a music school in Nottingham was highly thought of and flourished for many years.

William and Jane had six children - Willie, Charles, Walter, Jane, Nellie and Florence. They eventually went to live at Fernleigh, Alexandra Park (now used as a Hostel) but this was only after William had made his fortune, as he did by hard work and ability. It appears to have been a very happy home, and the children ran wild in the big garden which extended right over the site now filled by flats. William was a great Liberal supporter during the Gladstone administration, and took a great interest in local politics, being in demand as a speaker at parliamentary elections. Home Rule for Ireland was another of his enthusiasms, and he flew an Irish flag at the election in which this was an issue - rather a dangerous thing to do when feelings ran high. He had an outstanding personality and made himself known wherever he went - his ability to talk an unruly political meeting into good humour was often called upon. He was a man of strong passions, and there were several scandals; but Jane weathered them all in her quiet way.

So things went on 'till 1891 - I don't know just what went wrong; my mother told me that father backed bills for a worthless scamp of a relative - but whatever the cause, he was faced with ruin. Scanning his very high life insurance policy he found that there was no suicide clause. The rest followed, and on the night of 9th December, 1891 Jane and her daughters waited in vain for his return. Nellie, my mother, only sixteen, never completely recovered from the shock. She re-lived this night on the last night of her own life, many years later.

So ended the life of William. Jane lived for another twenty years - I have written about her life in those years in another place.

4. Willie and Nellie

Willie Ferris and Nellie Farmer were married in Filey on 18th May, 1901. The married life of my parents was not a happy one. I think no two people could ever have been so unsuited. He was the product of a Tory, Church of England Vicarage, she the daughter of the radical atheist. Enough of their backgrounds had rubbed off on them to ensure that they saw pretty nearly everything from an opposite angle.

They met through Nellie's aunt, Mrs Bowman-Hart. Jennie Farmer was employed in the famous Music School; she taught Noel Ferris to play the piano, and Mrs Bowman-Hart took a fancy to Willie, and frankly pulled strings to bring about his engagement to her niece, Nellie. Unfortunately for them both, she succeeded. They became engaged, in spite of the opposition of his father and mother, who were somewhat appalled at the background of such a daughter-in-law. Tom Ferris refused to marry them, so they went to Filey and got married there. I want to put it on record that Tom Ferris and his wife were unfailingly kind to their son's wife and made her welcome at all times.

Willie and Nellie were unhappy from the first, he because her indifference made her somewhat cold and distant, and her critical attitude towards his views and feelings gave him an inferiority complex. In those days marriages did not break up - divorce was socially unacceptable, and the alternative was to grin and bear it, so an unhappy marriage was just endured, and the children suffered. For children are acutely aware of a failure in family love, even if the parents individually love them. Nellie concentrated all her affection and devotion on her children - too much so; and unhappily let them see too plainly that she had no affection for their father. He was a good father wasted; he loved his two little girls but had no armour against his wife's critical attitude and the puzzling withdrawals of his children, and became irritable. Had Nellie been able to forget herself a little and make the best of a weak and not very clever man, what a happy home it might have been.

Their marriage did end in divorce at last - but not 'till twenty-five years later.

5. I remember......

I was born in April, 1902 in a small house in Gregory Boulevard. My father worked at the nearby factory of John and William Player, a couple of clever and ambitious tobacconists who had branched out on their own, and whose "Navy Cut" tobacco soon caught on in a big way.

At this time the various tobacco firms merged into the Imperial Tobacco Company formed in competition with the British American Company which threatened to sweep small firms off the board. The Players named their company John Player & Son, together with W.D.& H.O.Wills of Bristol and other small companies.

Before I was a year old my father was moved to Bristol, to Wills' Headquarters. Why he was moved to Bristol I don't know, but the tobacco trade was in the melting pot, and in the throes of these big mergers he became redundant, and he and my mother returned to Nottingham, he out of work and with a wife and baby to support.

They went temporarily to my grandmother Farmer, who lived with her family of two sons and two daughters at 27 Magdala Road - this was the house with the cellar in which my pram was kept.

My father was not the man to live on his mother-in-law, and he was not long unemployed. He became area manager for the Nottingham branch of Gallaher Limited, an Irish tobacco firm with headquarters in Belfast. Tom Gallaher, son of an Irish peasant, by his business genius built up a firm which kept afloat and independent of the big combines. He grew his own tobacco in his plantations in Virginia with Irish overseers in charge. I remember Willie and Johnnie Michaels - (Willie married Tom Gallaher's daughter); and when the Liverpool to Belfast steamship company objected to the firm's use of the line, Tom bought up the line - another source of profit for this hard-headed, far-seeing man. He was capable of extremes of generosity and equal extremes of parsimony. His factory was full of aged employees he would not sack, but the wages he paid were poor. My father worked for Gallaher's for ten years at a salary of £3. per week, with one rise of 10/- per week.

My father and mother were often almost on the bread line. In those days a "gentleman" had to dress decently, and his wife expected to keep a little maid. On their £ 3. per week they rented a tiny house, 494 Mansfield Road, Sherwood and kept a little girl from an orphanage as maid. This poor child had never lived in a family home, and she quickly adored my mother. She had a kind mistress, a bedroom to herself (an unheard of luxury) and was well fed; she thought herself in Paradise.

How my parents kept body and soul together Heaven knows. But they managed it somehow, and four years later my sister Mary was born. For that event, which always took place at home, a private nurse had to be hired and the doctor paid. But they saved for it, and the bills were paid.

My memories of this time are less clear than those earlier flashes. Just after we left Magdala Road my grandmother had a minor operation - for sebaceous cysts, an affliction rife in our family - and the wounds became infected. She developed erysipelas, and this quickly spread to general septicaemia. This, in those days, was a killer indeed - there was not treatment known for it - you either loved or died, according to the strength of your constitution. My grandmother lived - but at the cost of a leg, for the infection localised in her knee joint. Amputation above the knee on a patient weakened by months of severe illness was a major operation of a desperate kind. She survived. My mother used to push me in my pram up to the nursing home every day - oddly I have no recollection of those walks! After a long convalescence my grandmother came home to life in a wheelchair before she was sixty.

I'm not sure why we moved so often in those early days. I must have been about six when we left Mansfield Road - I expect we needed an extra bedroom as Mary grew into childhood; we went to 16 Osborne Avenue, Sherwood, and lived there for six months when the landlord, who owned the house next door as well, suggested we move there for his convenience, and so the boys from Daddy's office came over on a Saturday afternoon and moved us over the wall.

When I was seven I started school - a private one, of course, "Board Schools" were not for the "Gentry". I went to Mountford House, a prep school kept by a Miss Keating with her sister Emma. It was a good little school, in fact it is still there in the same house. There we met Rex Keep, later to be my brother-in-law; another pupil was one of the Shipstones, whose brewery was in those early days behind the family house on Mansfield Road - number 393.

Every year we managed a fortnight at Sutton-on-Sea. My grandmother had a cook, Louisa Holmes, whose father was a Lincolnshire fisherman, and he and his wife lived in a small tarred house in the village of Sutton. He and his sons went out with a horse and cart to lay lobster pots and to trawl for crabs and shrimps at low tide. Mrs Holmes was a good manager and in time they saved enough to build a brick house in front of their cottage - "Providence Cottage" they called it. It is still there. Mrs Holmes let Providence Cottage to summer visitors, and she cooked dinner for them on a big old iron range in the tarred cottage behind. Wonderful meals - local chickens, pies with rich cream - eggs for tea - cocoa and biscuits at bedtime. The outside loo was an earth closet with a double seat - a big hole and a small one, just right for mother and daughter; pages of newspaper hanging on the wall. As we were still living on £3. per week it has always puzzled me how my parents managed this holiday. Actually I think my grandmother and uncles must sometimes have helped out. Halcyon days they were; I wore white drawers and short skirt and jersey, bare legs and sandshoes. Sometimes they launched the lifeboat which lived in the hut by the pullover - a big mast stood on the beach and from it a line could be fired to a ship in distress. Mr. Holmes and his sons were lifeboat men and had to turn out in storms.

When we first went there I must have been about three or four - it was before Mary was born - and every morning a little boy used to bring up a donkey with a little chair on its back in which I travelled in state down to the beach. The donkey's name was Bluebell. Once they brought another donkey, rather a frisky one, and it trotted off with me and terrified me - so I was always most particular to make sure that it really was Bluebell.

The Pierrots were a great attraction, though frowned on by my mother who considered them vulgar. They wore white pierrot suits for the first part, and then flannels and blazer and a "Straw yard". I can remember the songs they sang "Watching the Trains Go Out", and "Moonlight in Jungle Land" were two of them.

When I was about five or six my grandmother had moved from Magdala Road to No. 581 Mansfield Road, Sherwood. It was a good, commodious old-fashioned house, semi-detached, with a good garden behind. Granny was very helpless - artificial limbs were very crude things in those day, and she had put on a lot of weight. She was quite dependent on her daughter, Florence, who cared for her devotedly and managed the house. Jane, or Jennie, the eldest daughter was a cornery, difficult woman, who taught music and managed the garden. Later she bought an adjoining plot of land, containing fruit trees, and used to grow vegetables. There was a summer house there in which we used to have tea when we visited Granny, and also an old-fashioned iron garden seat.

581 Mansfield Road, Sherwood?

Is this the summerhouse?

Joan and Mary

My Uncle Willie had been a buyer for a lace firm, but he had felt a call to the church and had become curate in a London parish, later vicar of a country parish in Hertfordshire. My uncles Charles and Walter both lived with their mother, and both were in the lace trade. Charles married Annie Wilkinson, heiress of Weldon & Wilkinson, dyers and finishers, and a very wealthy woman. They set up house in Private Road and had no children, though Annie had a miscarriage which was a great disappointment to them. Walter bought a derelict cottage in Car Colston and lived there with a man to "do" for him, and the two of them reconstituted the cottage, making a wonderful job of it.

When I was ten my grandmother died very suddenly while she was on her annual seaside holiday at Hastings. She had an inoperable cancer which had not manifested itself at all 'till she was beyond help.

This left Jennie and Florence alone, and it was at last decided that we should join them, leaving our small house and sharing with the aunts. It was not a success. My father and Jennie simply could not shake down together and the whole arrangement turned out to be a fiasco. Then life changed suddenly; my Aunt Florence announced her engagement to Willie Schumberger, a German who had been in love with her for years, and my father, tired of slaving for Gallahers at £3. 1ps 0d per week found a promising opening with Players, but on the South Coast. I remember we had our last holiday at Sutton just as these changes were emerging - great changes, as it turned out, for this was 1913, on the eve of War.

So 581 Mansfield Road was given up, and the Schumbergers with Jennie, set up housekeeping at "Coburg", Villiers Road, had they been able to see into the future, what tragedy they would have seen. On the outbreak of war, in 1914, on the crest of the wave of spy fever that hit the country, Willie Schumberger was arrested and sent to an internment camp at Wakefield where poor conditions and poorer food undermined his health, 'till in 1917 he was sent back to Germany via Holland, where his wife was eventually allowed to join him.

My parents went to Bournemouth, where they had decided to live. They went ahead to get a house for us to live in, and finally decided on 72, Belle Vue Road, Southbourne, in those days a delightful suburb of Bournemouth. Mother was to fetch us, but a couple of friends who were coming down to Bournemouth for a holiday offered to bring Mary and me, saving our mother an expensive journey to fetch us. I remember being taken to Victoria Station to be handed over to Mr. & Mrs Hulme on board the through train to Bournemouth. We cried at leaving our aunts, and our kind friends comforted us very sympathetically, and treated us to the unheard of luxury of lunch in the luncheon car of the train, which was such a novelty that our tears dried up as if by magic.

My mother never settled in Southbourne. She still missed her own mother and her sisters, and was never one to make friends easily. I remember neighbours coming to "call" with visiting cards, but though my mother returned the calls punctiliously the only person she got to know intimately was our next door neighbour, Mrs Cameron who, with her husband was home on leave from India. They had three boys of eleven, nine and seven and we children became inseparable. The boys went to school in Southbourne - they were boarders when their parents were in India but lived at home when they were on leave. For a whole long lovely summer we ran wild, bathing and paddling on the beach or picnicking in St. Catherine's woods, or having tea at "The Black House" at Mudeford, a fisherman's cottage rather like the one at Sutton, where we had fresh caught shrimps for tea, and soda cake. On Sunday we went to Church at Christchurch Priory; to get there we walked down the main road, turned into a country lane, then crossed the river on the ferry and walked up into town - quite a journey. I remember the ladies in their best dresses with their prayer books sitting in the old-fashioned punt that was poled across the river.

In September my parents decided that we must get some education, and a governess was engaged to come every morning to give us lessons. Miss Harris was a great success, she knew her job inside out, and, though she was prim and proper we liked her. This lasted for about a year, after which it was decided that we ought to go to school. So I went to the Convent of the Cross in Boscombe Park (rather to the horror of my grandfather Ferris!). I rode to and from the school on my bicycle, my first, for which I saved in a Post Office account. It cost fifty shillings. Mary went to a school nearer home.

Mary, about this time, developed a rheumatic tendency, and had to spend long periods in bed with a kind of incipient rheumatic fever. It interfered a great deal with her education and left her with a slight heart condition.

We went to Southbourne early in1914 and were there for the whole of the war. Bournemouth was called a "funk-hole" and quickly filled up with what might be called refugees - the monied ones who could afford to pay for safety. Later the real refugees turned up, Belgians who had been caught up in the German invasion of their country.

"Kitchener's Army" soon made its appearance as the war got under way, and all the residents were asked to take one or men under the Billeting Scheme. I remember the "Loyal North Lancashires" being marched up the street - poor bewildered mill hands from Bolton and Wigan, who had never been further afield then Blackpool. As they came from house to house names were called out and a man ordered to fall out. Ours came in clutching his rifle, his overcoat in rags, and he said to my father "I'm afraid I ain't clean sir - not fit for a gentlemans's house" - and, sure enough he was crawling. Daddy took him to the bathroom, drew a hot bath and told him to strip and put all his clothes in a bucket, then superintended a hot carbolic scrub! When he was clean he dressed into a full set of my father's underwear - I suppose his uniform was disinfected in some way. Our maid took his ragged overcoat, tore it into bits and told him to take it to his H.Q. and draw a new one. It worked!

The war left us untouched. Three of my father's brothers survived, unwounded, two of them coming over with the Colonial troops, Andrew from Canada, Cecil from Australia. The worst hardship we suffered was "rationing", but it was not so well organised as in 1939. It was largely a matter of first come, first served. Things like butter, bacon and cheese, none of them rationed, were in very short supply. But my father got a lot of perks from the shops he visited, most of whom stocked "fags". Margarine came into being during the war, it was horrible stuff and made a lot of people ill.

We were much better off now - money began to come in as the war made the huge fortunes of Players and Wills. All the soldiers smoked Players, Daddy did not have to sell them - they sold themselves. The firm ploughed profits back into the business, wages rocketed, and "rises" of £100. a year were coming in. Even so, looking back, I marvel at the austere life we took for granted. No wireless or television of course; movies were beginning to boom, the silent variety of course; telephones were not used as they are today - it was years before we had one. We had electric light for the first time at Southbourne, one unshaded bulb in each room, no power points. Water heated in the old-fashioned fired range that cooked all our meals and our bread, no central heating. Hot bath-water but none laid on in the bedrooms, and we cracked the ice on our bedroom jugs in winter. In spite of his much improved financial position my father worked three counties by train and bicycle - very few people had cars. When we went out we walked or cycled. Electric trams ran up our road - the famous "topless trams" of Bournemouth, horrid on wet days and crowded to choking point with tourists in summer.

For entertainment, apart from the "pictures", we went to the Theatre Royal in Bournemouth (now alas pulled down). We went on the tram but were too late for the last one home, so we walked - four miles. I remember those walks along the silent roads, eating biscuits and discussing the play we had seen - wonderful plays of those days, Jose Collins in "Maid of the Mountains", Lilly Elsie in "The Merry Widow", George Robey and Violet Lorraine of "Bing boys" fame, Gilbert and Sullivan in its heyday, Fred Terry, Martin Harvey and of course Fred Benson's famous Shakespearean company, the training school of so many later Stratford stars.

I spent three very happy years at my convent school, though school life then was so very different from these later days. We had no games, no cookery, no outings; we worked hard, and I cycled to and from school every day. I went home to dinner and I spent the afternoon doing "prep" in my bedroom, by special permission, for the school knew that I had a long ride to and fro, and that my prep would be properly done at home. In my last year I sometimes stayed to dinner at school, rather horrible meals, greasy soup, watery stews, sloppy milk puddings served with a ladle from a large pan - but it was war time and no one thought of grumbling.

Mary's rheumatism became so much worse that she was taken up to London to consult a specialist. He said that the sea did not suit her and advised a move inland. So in 1921 we moved to the New Forest. We took rooms for the summer with a couple who had been in service with a titled family, and prided themselves on correct service. We had two double bedrooms and a private sitting room, and the Martins certainly fed and housed us impeccably. The year 1921 was a phenomenally hot summer, with temperatures into the 90's in the afternoon one just had to stay in the house. By September a house had been found in Brockenhurst. "Brookside" had a big garden, it was detached with half-an-acre of garden and to reach it you had to cross a bridge over a stream. We had never lived in such a house, and my mother and father revelled in it. But still life was spartan by today's standards. Brookside was unheated and had no electricity - we used oil lamps and candles, and had big fires in the living rooms, but no heat in the bedrooms. We rented the house, and as a matter of interest we paid £80. per year for it. Daddy was a bit of a bug hunter, and soon scraped acquaintance with some of the entomologists who came down for the summer insects in the forest. One of these was Hugh Jones, the son of a retired solicitor from Cambridge, who had moved his family to Lymington. Charles Jones had a tiresome habit of moving about for a whim - he would buy a house and tell his wife they were moving next week! When we knew them first they lived in a nice old house in Lymington, but it did not take Charles long to decide to be a boarding house keeper, and he told his wife that he had bought "The Briars" a guest house in Brockenhurst. This did not last long, however, for Ada Jones was no housekeeper, and they quickly lost money. In a fit of economy Charles bought a poor class house in Southampton, and his wife and daughter, Lily, went there protesting; even Charles admitted that this experience was a mistake, and they moved back to Lymington, setting up house in a new bungalow on the Milford Road. Charles decided to practice law again, and was so successful that he eventually became Town Clerk.

In the summer of 1922 - a wet one - I became engaged to Hugh Jones, and as he had no regular job at that time my father helped him to a position as assistant to the Curator of the Natural History Museum in Nottingham. This Museum temporarily housed in the University College buildings in Shakespeare Street, later transferred to permanent quarters in Wollaton Hall.

This brings my early recollections to a suitable ending place, providing an actual account of my life; but I should like to add a sketch of the surroundings in the first two decades of this century.

Sherwood was the district of Nottingham in which I lived for my first ten years, so I will begin there at the terminus of the electric trams, just beyond the end of Winchester Street. Here the shops started, for beyond that point, towards Daybrook, Mansfield Road was almost a country road. Woodthorpe Park was then in private hands, the house lived in by Alderman Small, and Edwards Lane was a quiet country lane between high sandstone banks on one side and woods and fields on the other. We used to go down this lane to pick harebells which grew in profusion between cracks in the sandstone, and we took our tea as far as the little wooded stream, known locally as Spinney Dyke. From Edwards Lane down to Sherwood there were large houses in big walled gardens, all lived in by local residents.

The trams started from the Post Office, a few yards from their terminus, and ran down to Trent Bridge. We will go down with one, but first let me recall the shops I used to know so well. There was a fried fish shop, very smelly in the evenings, and next to it was the sweet shop of Mr. and Mrs Brocklesby. Mrs B. wore a brown satin blouse with a high lace neck, and had her hair done in one of those elaborate "Whipped cream Walnuts" ladies wore in those days. Her husband was extremely bald, and they had a dog, a fat terrier that sat on the counter. It was strangely like them both! I used to be sent across the road from my granny's house opposite to get sixpennyworth of ice cream for tea as a treat. A little further down was the Post Office, and so we come to Mr. Meakins's chemist shop. Mr. Meakin was a famous local character, consulted by everyone who had medical problems; he was, in fact, the local unqualified doctor and a very good one at that. I was taken to him when I scalded my foot, playing with a kettle, and he soon cured the nasty burn. He drew teeth also.

On the other side of the road, after my grandmother's house was a laundry, then a small, haberdasher's shop. They sold trinkets and odds and ends, very fascinating to a small girl with a penny to spend. I bought a Coronation Mug there at the Coronation of King George VI! I wish I still had it. Talking of the Coronation, I remember being allowed to stay up late to see the decorated tram that came up the road that night.

After this shop came two small houses and the corner shop and bakery of Mr. & Mrs Proctor. Mrs P. sold pear drops, acid drops and peppermint bullseyes in halfpenny bags, and the most delicious home-made ice cream in cornets, also at one halfpenny. Such cornets today are about £1. But oh! so different in flavour.

The tram sheds came next, still there and used for buses, and then another row of small shops - another haberdashery, but one that sold china and everything else you could imagine, kept by two spinster ladies, Miss Alexander and her friend, and they were completely ruled by their cat, a huge tabby Tom which slept in the easiest chair behind the shop, and had a cod steak and a rice pudding cooked for him every day. Two doors below that came the source of the cod steak, Mrs Isitt's fish shop. The less said about this lady the better, she was of very easy virtue indeed, and a loud-mouthed, good hearted woman.

We are now on the right hand side of the road going towards Nottingham and on another corner was another bakery, where the baker, covered in flour, came out of his kitchen to sell his hand-made bread. Beyond again is Haydn Road, with a wood yard at the corner. I remember its catching fire one night, and the fire engine dashing up, its black horses at the gallop, its brass helmeted crew beating a bell to clear the road. Then we come to a row of small houses. In two of them lived a plumber, Mr. Bellamy and a painter and decorator, Mr. Birch. I mention them because they were very well known locally, and seemed always busy, but sadly, later, both committed suicide.

Crossing the road we see a butcher's shop with a slaughter house behind it, as was common in those days. It was a horrid place, the haunt of local boys, and because of the herds of terrified sheep that used to be driven up for slaughter. Beyond that came a row of really magnificent stocking frame cottages. These today would be carefully put in order and be a wonderful show place - but the authorities of those days were not aware of the value of our heritage, and ruthlessly pulled them down. Next is the livery stable of one Baguley, formerly head groom to Sir John Turney of Alexander Park. He also ran a small undertaker's business, later sold to the Co-op, and now one of Nottingham's biggest Undertakers.

Beyond that again is the small house 494 Mansfield Road where we had our home, and where Mary was born. It is still there, but has been turned into a furniture shop.

A little further up the hill we come to Private Road, and here we can board the tram coming from Sherwood. From there to Carrington Church there has been very little change. Behind that the little district of Carrington with its street Market used to flourish, with still quite the suggestion of the village it used to be. There are some quite good shops in the Market Place, among them a pastry cook's where they sold those delicious diamond shaped buns called Adelaides.

From the Church on everything is different. The large houses standing in their gardens have gone, except for Mountford House School, which still stands where it did, as I remember it with "Keating's Powder" chalked on its fence by rude little boys. Beyond Mountford House there were several small shops and a row of small houses, beyond which was Hucknall Road with its Board School on the corner, and the White Horse standing on its archway, just as it does today. I used to believe that it came down at midnight and galloped round the square.

At the corner of Gregory Boulevard, not the maelstrom of traffic it is now, was the station of the local railway that used to run right round the town - you can still trace a bit of it in Woodthorpe Park. I have been on that train, when my mother went out to any outlying part to interview a prospective maid.

Up past the forest and the Cemetery it is much as it was, but from there down to Victoria Station it is very different. The junction of Woodborough Road was a small quiet affair, and the Station itself was a delightful place to children who connected it with holidays by the sea. Attentive porters stood waiting for the cars and carriages, ready to dart forward to collect luggage which they loaded on to their big trolleys. You tipped a porter perhaps tuppence, threepence was considered adequate, while sixpence was quite generous!

It was a penny ride from Sherwood to the station, and another halfpenny on to the Market Square. The tram then ran on to Trent Bridge via Arkwright Street now swept away. But we will stay in the Market Place a huge cobbled area, covered on Market Day with stalls selling a lot of things, but very largely garden and dairy produce. Here the country women brought their butter, eggs, chickens and cheese for sale, coming in from their villages in covered carrier's carts with their big market baskets. You could buy curds for curd cheesecakes, sticks of yellow butter wrapped in butter muslin, and the famous local soft cheese from Colwick, dripping slices set out on straws to carry off the whey. There was a fish market, very smelly, and at the far end stood Queen Victoria in blackened stone, presiding over the Pot Market! The little old Town Hall stood there 'till the early twenties, when it was replaced by the present rather pretentious building, and the market was swept away to another home under permanent cover, and the Market Square became the grandiose erection it is to-day, deservedly dubbed Slab Square.

One of the last old ladies to bring her goods to market was Sarah Dabell from Gotham. She was an old retainer of my grandmother Farmer; she married one of the Dabells of the village of Gotham - there are still Dabells there, prosperous farmers, though Ted, Sarah's husband was not a very good one. After the market Sarah, in her black skirt and blouse with a white apron and a black shawl, and a small black straw hat pinned over her grey hair with black headed pins, would board the tram and come up to Sherwood to eat her dinner at my Grandmother's after delivering the weekly order of butter and eggs. She sat in the kitchen, usually on the corner of the old dresser that we still have, and often shed a few tears over her troubles with the feckless Ted!

My pictures of all this time are so clear that it is hard to realise that it is all more than eighty years ago.

August 1989