Sandy becomes part of our lives.

 When I met my husband, his parents had a black and white collie/retriever type dog and he had such a kind gentle nature.  He found a sunny spot in our living room when he came and would lie down for a good sleep, we just had to be careful to walk round him!!!  On one visit our little toddler of about 14/15 months lay back against him and he didn’t move, just stayed snoozing in the sun.  Daughter also succumbed to the sun and had her afternoon nap leaning against him.  Occasionally Ricky would open an eye, close it again and then waited patiently for her to wake up and move away.  He was up like a shot and rushed to the back door to be let out in the garden.  Poor old chap was desperate to relieve himself, which he suitably did, but had waited rather than disturb our toddler.

The next dog that was part of our married life was Sandy, our golden cocker puppy who we had from when he was allowed to leave the litter.  We had waited to have our own dogs until our youngest was walking and so less likely to do unexpected things to a puppy.  His new experiences and his antics never stopped as he grew and I have many memories of him lolloping across the lino in the kitchen with ears flapping up and down with the speed and his surprise when he went sliding and then came to a full stop at the transition of the lino to the carpet in the living room.  I can’t forget the snowy memories either; to start with he didn’t know what to do with it  ….. try to catch the snowflakes with his tongue or eat it from the ground.  As for throwing balls for him, why do that when you can throw a snowball for him?  As usual he went bounding through the snow, turned round to wait for it to reach him and then totally surprise that the snowball didn’t continue rolling towards him.  Having long hairy legs and feet of course meant the snow stuck to them and turned into ice balls and when he bounded into the kitchen again it sounded like he was tap-dancing as the ice bounced off the lino.  We had to make him stand on an old towel and rub the ice until it was all melted and his legs and feet were warmer.  

He was enthusiastic over everything, even to the point when he would go blue in the tongue from pulling too hard on the lead.  Despite his puppy training he did not respond to tapping on the nose with a roll of newspaper if he pulled away from heel when being walked.  It also didn’t seem to make any difference what type of lead we used either; a leather one or a choke chain.  Harnesses didn’t seem to be around then or we would have tried one of those.  The only way was for us to stop until his tongue turned to a normal colour before we could resume our walk.

Like Ricky, my husband’s parent’s dog, he too found the sunny patch in the living room and didn’t like the children to go near him and then it progressed to anyone to go near him by growling at them.  At the same time, he started getting possessive of my lap; he would come running, jump on my lap, circle round and round and settle down, not to be disturbed.  If I tried to move, he would growl although he did finally jump off if I started to rise from the seat.  It then reached the point when he would start growling and snarling, followed by an attempt to bite.  I am afraid at this point we were unhappy with him as a dog with children as we wouldn’t be able to leave him out of our sight when the children were up and awake and it was time for us to find him a new home.  Not the nicest of decisions to take.

It wasn’t long before we had another dog, more of that in the next instalment.

Dogs

My sister was given a black miniature poodle for her 8th birthday as Mum and Dad then thought she was old enough to be responsible to look after it and take it for walks with one of them.  She was a lovely little dog and my sister called her Candy.  We were living in Watford at the time and I have already told the story that it was Candy that didn't get on with our cat Sooty and so Sooty went to live with my grandparents in the country.

I really wanted a puppy for myself but I was too young; isn't it frustrating that at whatever stage you are in life you are either too young, too old or "don't worry, it is your age"!!!

Three years later, when we were living in Whitstable, my parents decided that it was time to allow Candy to have a litter of puppies.  I didn't really understand anything about dogs giving birth to puppies but I soon learned.  Mum had created a nice cosy corner in the kitchen under the kitchen table in the corner.  There was a large cardboard box with a cut out in the front and sheets of newspaper and an old blanket inside to make it comfy.  The box and surrounding floor was covered in newspaper to try and keep the floor a bit cleaner.  One morning I went downstairs to find 3 of the puppies had been born and Candy was in the process of giving birth to the fourth.  I actually saw the puppy being born which must have been an eyeopener!  All of the puppies were males which was disappointing as Mum and Dad had hoped one would be a bitch and she would have become my 8th birthday present.  Mum and Dad had been savvy though and arranged with the stud dug's owner that if there no bitches they would be able to exchange one for a bitch that they had from other litters.  I think another of our puppies was the fee for Candy being put to the stud dog.  In due course we received the promised little bitch puppy which was given to me and I called her Suki.  I am sure the name must have meant something to me at the time but I have no recollection of it.

We had such fun with our dogs and they were very good natured; Suki even let me dress her up with a bonnet to help keep the sun from her eyes and also take her for walks in my dolls pram.  I must try and find the photo that was taken like Suki in the pram in the back garden in our house in Upminster.

Poodles, of course, have wool and not hair.  It grows quite quickly and is curly.  Mum and Dad use to have them cut with a "lamb's cut" so that the dogs didn't have those pom poms on their legs but they did have pom pom tails which back in that time were legal to dock.  One lasting memory is the smell of singed wool.  We had a little electric two bar radiant heater in the downstairs room and the dogs would snuggle up close and had been known, in fact many a time, to turn round and round before lying down and toasting themselves in front of it.  The trouble was the tails with their fluffy pom poms often touched the electric bar and singed .....phew, what a whiff!!

Another memory from Upminster was when we had set the table for tea in the dining room......cutlery, crockery, cake, bread, jams and the butter in the butter dish and then the doorbell rang!  Without thinking my Mum quickly pushed the dogs into the dining room so they didn't escape and dealt with the caller at the front door.  She let the dogs out again when she had closed the front door but oh dear.....Candy, or was it Suki, had jumped on the table and knocked the butter dish to floor and they both had butter round their mouths where they were busy licking it.

Dad loved to tease the dogs, not mercilessly, just gentle fun for them and us and never taken to extreme.  One day he recorded their bark and his voice talking to them.  He then put the recorder on the floor behind a mirror he balanced against a dining chair at the side of the dining room.  The dogs rushed to the mirror at the sound, saw themselves in the mirror and started barking back.  They ran to each side, couldn't see a dog and ran to the front again ... the dogs were there again...they just couldn't understand why they couldn't find them round the back!!  This was after we had moved back to Hertfordshire and living in Radlett.  Poodles are prone to blindness and unfortunately Suki's eyes slowly misted over and she relied on furniture staying in the same place or following Candy around as her guide dog.  Otherwise she lived a normal healthy life.  Candy developed a tumor which in time meant she had to be put to sleep and put out of her discomfort.  Suki was lost, she had lost her guide dog, she had lost the dog she had known all her life and had treated as her mother.  We all know how hard it is to lose a loved one, don't we.  After a while and a few injuries from knocking in to things, there was only one thing to do to be kind and so we became a dogless family again.

9

The number 9 features quite a lot on my maternal side and in particular to my maternal grandmother of whom I have many memories.  I have spoken about her before in blog posts.  Spot the 9's.

She was born in the 1890's and married in 1920, just two years before she moved into the new house, in 1922, where I visted her as a young child.    She had a very comfy figure; there was no way that I could put my arms around her but she remained agile enough to clamber on a chair at the big kitchen table so that she could plug her iron into the light fitting above the hanging ceiling light.  The kitchen table was also her ironing board and the centre of family life in the house.  

Family and people from the village used the kitchen door as the front door by walking round the house to the back paved are where the kitchen was on one side and the front parlour on the other.  The other two sides were the vegeatbale garden and access into a big back area of the garage where grandad had a bench and tools for mending shoes and all sorts of hand and garden tools. That paved area was a safe  playground to me and my sister and our cousins; well away from the road out the front.  We used to play ball games, skipping, hop scotch and ninesies.... Do you remember the game ninesies?

Dad would drive us for about 2 hours to get to the village where she and other members of the family lived.  We did this several times a year from Hertfordshire to Sussex.  As I grew older she seemed shorter, not surprisingly.  She never seemed less comfy though, no matter how old she was.

She stayed living in that house until the early 1970's when she could no longer manage the house and garden.  She moved to a lovely little bungalow up the road and that was closer to my aunt who used to visit everyday as she helped care for her. My husband and I visited with our family but it was a long way from Gloucestershire to Sussex for young children.  When Nan was in her mid 90's she moved into a care home down in the valley the other side of the railway line.  It was in a rural area on the outskirts of the village and there were many of her friends from the village living there too.  We visited her there and a couple of times my children took their violins and played to her which she enjoyed.  

When she was 99 she had an unfortunate tumble and she then looked much more frail and never recovered from that.  She sat in her chair with a sipping cup in front of her but drank very little.  She told us we were selfish as we all wanted her to be a hundred but she didn't want to as all her friends of her age in the home had died.  We had been so looking forward to celebrating her one hundreth birth that we hadn't stopped to think that she might not want to.  She was right, how selfish we were.

She died aged 99, just 8 months before her one hundredth birthday.

Rain

Rather an obvious writing prompt because if you live in England you expect rain but maybe we don't always realise the devastating effect that rain and a combination of other circumstances can cause.

In October 2000 we had a lot of rain on already saturated land and that combined with strong winds pushing the river upstream and a high tide caused the River Ouse to overflow at Lewes, where I worked in an old building on the wharf, Chandlers Wharf.

I had set off as usual for getting in to work by car, travelling along the by-roads from Haywards Heath to Lewes, via Chailey Common, Chailey and Cooksbridge where I then took the Offham Road passing the Landport Estate, passing The Needlemakers at the top of School Hill and then down to the Town Centre and finally Chandler's Wharf where I could park outside the building.  This particular day though, I got as far as Beveridge Farm between Chailey and Cooksbridge and then found the River Ouse tributary had flooded over the road and it wasn't safe for my small car to go through the water.  Thank goodness I didn't.

I returned home and rang my boss who was working from home in Bexhill and explained and he said to work from home as well.  I didn't have a lot I could do as I seemed to have lost the connection through to work and not surprising.

The centre of Lewes flooded as the river overflowed the banks and the low lying part of Lewes where I worked was under feet of water.  Beer barrels frim Harvey's brewery were floating on the River Ouse, homes were under feet of water and people struggled to get away from their home.  The flooding was made worse by coming through the Cuilfail Tunnel.  Ambulances were floating in the flooding and rescue crews used light inshore rescue boats to get trapped people out of their homes.

Water rose to desk height in our Chandler's Wharf building; smelly dirty water as sewage and water came out of the toilets and mixed with the water coming under doors and through ill fitting windows.  There was going to be no working in the building for days as some staff set about rescuing what could be saved and getting it up to the first floor.  The ground floor had to be emptied and computers, equipment and furniture disposed of.  Meanwhile some poeple were tranferred to other buildings or worked from mobile accommodation that was set up outside the building when the flooding subsided.

I, as part of the Finace Department, was relocated to another Housing Association building in Haywards Heath which was very convenient for me but less so for the rest of the Department.  Our files and computers were brought over and our computer system set up.  We stayed there for several months until the Lewes building was ready to opened as a fully functional office again and we moved back to our upstairs office.  In that office we overlooked the river and took to monitoring the tide level by natural markings on the bricks of the river bank walls as it passed through and under the Cliffe High Street bridge.  It was soon after that that the decision was taken to move further inland in Lewes and slightly uphill too; I wonder why?

Q for Family History topics

 Our March meeting was all about the letter Q.  Members covered various topics including Quarter Sessions, Quakers, an ancestor named Queenie, queries and questions.  My instant first choice was a place  in my research and the the next was an old occupation.

Quetta     My great uncle James White, born 1875 in Kent. died in 1903 in Quetta Balucistan.  Quetta was a garison town in a region close to the border with Afghanistan which was under British control.  He was
a bombadier in the 1st Mountain Battery of the Royal Garison Artillery.

Quassilarius  This is an old occupation for a merchant or pedlar. My great grandfather, Robert Jackson was born 1833 in Kilbarchan Renfrewshire.  His family were hand loom weavers and he stayed in that field until the 1881 census when I found him in the 1881 census with his son as pedlars.  They were in Campbletown, Argyleshire staying with a Catherine Crawford.  Was this a relative as Robert's  mother's  maiden name was Crawford?  He was still a pedlar in 1891 where he was staying in a Model Lodging House in Govan, Lanarkshire and again in 1901 but this time in Mathieson St, Govan together with his son.  I showed a variety of different Scottish documents including Old Parish Registers and a Paternity Decree for Robert and his future wife Helen. This was about the son Robert having been born out of wedlock.

Soap - (Green)

When I was a child in the 1950's we used to have a bar of green soap in a soap dish by the kitchen sink for washing our hands.  It used to get a white deposit on it once it had been used and was drying.  If my memory serves me right it was a bar of Fairy Soap.

For washing woollens, by hand of course, my Mum would use Lux Soap Flakes which were marketed in the 1899 by Lever Bros. and rebranded as Lux Soap Flakes in 1900 .  We also has Lux toilet soap to use for hand and face washing as well but not exclusively.

These were some of the other soaps we would sometimes have:  Cousin's Imperial Leather which was often favoured by men, my father among them; Sunlight Soap which was a yellow bar soap; Wright's Coal Tar soap which was an orangey colour and an antiseptic soap and finally Pears soap which was a translucent honey coloured soap bar that reminded me of my Nan and the soap she used to use.