The day arrived. After school I bought my bus ticket to College Road and watched as we passed the end of Billesley Lane. 2 stops later I got off and walked down Wake Green Road, past the Grammar School, and turned into the curving drive up to our front door. I had a new home.
The header photo is the Front of the Leasowes with mother’s first Morris Minor parked outside; the registration was OOF 968.The ground floor windows to the right of the door are the cloakroom, toilet, pantry and, last, breakfast / my room.
It was an eccentric flat, not least because it was on 4 levels and the grand living room contrasted with cramped servants quarters. The grounds were also odd. The plan below is from an old map and by the time we moved in the Lodge was a separate house with a small garden, the red area, and a new house had been built on the tennis court, the green area. The previous owner of the house retained area at the bottom of the plot, which was wild and totally overgrown, coloured blue on the plan. He was obviously a wheeler dealer because there were dumps of all sorts of things, mostly army surplus.
We always had breakfast in the maid’s sitting room, just off the kitchen. For the rest of the day it was my room where I kept and played with my toys. There was also a small desk where I could do my homework. The huge living room off the hall was a combined dining and sitting room where we would eat dinner and sit in the evenings, often playing cards, usually Bezique. Both rooms had fires in the winter and I was responsible for the logs for the living room fire. My bedroom was tiny, my mother’s and the spare room were both reasonably sized.
I was 9 or 10 when we moved. My love of reading continued and of course I played with the Trix railway frequently. The other toy that I really like was Minibrix, a precursor of Lego. You could construct houses and other buildings with small rubber bricks, either to their designs or creates new ones. I also started constructing Airfix planes. These were plastic kits, which were glued together and then painted. We still have the display cabinet in which I kept the finished models. I also did a small amount of marquetry; the image at th3 ens od this post is my one complete work from a kit. Jig Saws were a combined activity with Mother.
At around this time I started stamp collecting, an interest that continued through most of secondary school. I was given some stamps but most came from a postal bag which came roughly monthly. We traded stamps at school and I occasionally bought some from a shop in town. Soon I began to specialise in the Commonwealth, particularly Australia.
These were all solitary activities. There were no children of my age in the locality so, as an only child, I became very self-sufficient. Of course friends from school would sometimes come round, particularly Wattie, photo above taken when he visited Rhosneigr. Our top favourite activities were climbing trees and war games; the nearest tree was a Horse Chestnut opposite our front door. Needless to say we didn’t respect any of the boundaries and the wild area at the bottom of the lawn was counted as our territory where there was another massive Horse Chestnut tree.
The war games involved small vehicles and guns which fired matches. Finally when various of these lead toys got broken I decided to melt them down and do some casting into sand. I got a really good fire going on some land at the back of the house, selected one of Mother’s saucepans, put in the scrap lead which melted nicely. My casting was not very impressive and Mother was distinctly unimpressed with the state of her saucepan.
Around this time I was given a Tri-Tactics, a 2 person board war game with pieces that moved around like chessmen. It became a great favourite and I played it whenever I could find an opponent. I wrote this post just after Christmas just after returning from playing 3 different games with Abi, Caoimhe and Maebh, and last Sunday we had a 3 man games evening..
Shortly after moving Mother asked me to sit down next to her in the sitting room and said that she had something to tell me. It was the information that my father was living near to Leicester and that he would like to meet me. Since being told that he had gone to South Africa I had never thought about him; as far was I was concerned he didn’t exist. However I accepted this new information and arrangements for the first meeting were made.
We met on neutral ground at the Leofric Hotel in Coventry for a meal. I enjoyed the food but can’t remember the conversation. I think it was mainly about my life and I certainly didn’t learn very much about my father and his current life.
gerrard1813 