I started work with Plessey Radar in May 1971, commuting for a little while to and from Yeadon on a weekly basis. We bought a 3-bedroom terraced (town) house in Farnham Common (4 Golden Oak Close), and lived there until July 1975, just a month after Chris was born, and then moved next door to the Blundens at 24 Heath Road, Holtspur near Beaconsfield. Adrian was born on 6th November 1972 at Upton Park Hospital, Slough, and Chris at home in Farnham Common on 25th June 1975.
Moving from Yorkshire to “the decadent south” was slightly traumatic, especially for Katie, who had never before left “God’s own county”. The first few weeks I commuted on a weekly basis, but I was doing the leg-work of house-hunting; we were looking, if possible, for somewhere close enough to Stoke Poges to walk or cycle if necessary. We were horrified at house prices! Eventually, we found a “town house” (what northerners would call a terrace house) in Farnham Common, which we bought for fractionally under £8,000 – for which price, as Katie put it, we could have bought one of the best houses on Tranmere[84]. So we employed G A Prince to move us (as distinct from taking us to Scout or Guide camps), and settled in – this was June 1971.
Adrian and Chris: Having got a job I was enjoying, and feeling settled in our new home, we were delighted when after a short time Katie became pregnant. The early part of the pregnancy was fairly difficult, Katie suffering quite badly from sickness, but that settled down after a while. At a number of key moments, we wondered if the baby would come early, notably during a visit by Pat and Rod Charlton, when we visited the Farnborough air-show and ate freshly-cooked hot doughnuts – with the inevitable indigestion, and later when we went to the cinema and watched “What’s Up, Doc?” and Pat (also pregnant) and Katie laughed so much we feared for both of them! The other disquieting thing was visits to the hospital for check-ups, where Katie felt humiliated by the attitude of some of the doctors there. But the time came, and we went to the hospital, and things progressed somewhat slowly. We had a young Australian midwife, who showed me how the monitor electronics worked (Katie claimed she thought I was more interested in the electronics than in her!); I did my best with the cold flannel and sympathy; but in the end, Katie found things difficult, and Adrian was helped out with forceps. Like all babies, he started off squashed and purple, but soon looked a bit more human, and the guessing games of “Clark or Harris” characteristics began.
In the end, it was almost a week before they came home from hospital. Katie’s mum had come down in advance, and I would come home from hospital and tell her the news, then phone my parents and repeat the bulletins. Adrian was somewhat jaundiced, and they wanted to be sure it was going away before they let him home; the problems, and the enforced hospital routine, meant that Katie found it difficult to feed Adrian, so he was a bottle-fed baby – this did mean that I could share in the “midnight feast” duties. We had a dedication service at Beaconsfield Baptist.
We had a scare with Adrian while at Farnham Common – he took a bite out of a loo block! We rushed him to Wexham Park hospital, where he was “observed”, given an emetic, and so on – but just kept smiling and playing in his hospital cot. The poisons register was consulted, and this particular toilet block was found to be very noxious. We managed to get a prayer request to church, and Rev Webster visited us in hospital that evening to pray. Adrian suffered no ill effect, and the hospital eventually gave up and let him home.
The problems of the Upton Park hospital were such that in 1975 Katie persuaded the local Doctor that she should have Chris at home – and when he heard of her experiences with Adrian, he totally agreed. Chris’ birth was therefore totally different. Katie’s mum again came down in time, and when the time came we turned the back bedroom into a maternity ward, and the whole process was vastly more comfortable. The midwives were excellent, there were no problems, and Adrian was able (in the morning) to see his baby brother from the beginning (fortunately, Chris had remembered to bring Adrian a present when he arrived!). Before long Katie was feeding Chris – which meant that she felt I was slacking in the middle of the night.
House Move: We had chosen Farnham Common for proximity to Stoke Park, but after only a week there I had been moved to work at West Drayton; so that reason had gone; in the meantime, we had found a church at Beaconsfield, and our closest friends were there (Peter and Judy Wilkin are the only Farnham Common friends we are still in touch with; their boys Sam and Danny more or less match our two – Katie and Judy shared ante-natal classes etc).
So we decided to move into Beaconsfield, some 6 miles north, mainly so that Katie had access to/from her church friends during the day; and the process was helped when our closest friends, John and Joan Blunden, told us that the house next to theirs was up for sale. We investigated, and bought it; the church YPF group rallied round, and helped us pack[85] at one end and unpack at the other, and were just tremendous; Katie was able to withdraw from the chaos to feed the month-old Chris at regular intervals during the move.
Holtspur years: We had six and a bit years at Holtspur. It was great being next to John and Joan, though they moved a few yards further down the road (to a larger house) after a while. The neighbours on the other side, Frank and Greta Polding[86], became friends, Greta “mothering” Katie a bit; they did not see their grandchildren often, and were glad to have our two boys next door.
The back garden had a number of fruit bushes (and several primroses that moved in of their own accord, from Frank’s immaculate garden next door!), and enough space for us to put up a combination swing/slide for the boys. There was a utility room, between the kitchen door and the garden, which was occasionally used to house a hamster[87] or other small and furry creature.
After a few years, a group of young people moved into the house across the road, and Katie sometimes acted as unofficial house-mother! And that leads to another story.
Enter one dog: When the boys were beginning to grow up, we’d said to ourselves that maybe we could think of a dog. But before we could act on the decision, a neighbour told Katie about a Labrador-cross puppy that had been abandoned in a Slough vet’s waiting room. According to the story, a lady would bring her dog every day, and spend the day sitting in the waiting room … never seeing the vet, just sitting there; after a while, she stopped coming – then one day she was back, for just one day (never to be seen again), and in the evening the staff found a puppy abandoned in the ladies’ toilet. Audrey, our neighbour, and her friend (who worked at the vets) were caring for this puppy. I refused to contemplate a Labrador cross, being too big a dog for the house or the boys. But after several goes at asking Katie, Audrey brought the puppy round, tucked into her anorak; of course, I saw it, and said at once “that’s never a Labrador cross – its paws are too small”. So we took the puppy, and called her “Tess”, and she lived with us for fifteen years, well into our time in Woodley.
So to the story – one day, Katie had got out four pieces of best haddock ready for our dinner, when she was called to the house across the road in a hurry, Pam being suddenly ill. On her return, in the kitchen was a fishy smell, no fish, and one dog licking its lips with a smile of great satisfaction on its face! We had, I think, fish fingers for our dinner. But that was a rare event, and by and large Tess was a good dog, and especially good with the two boys. The occasion we will always remember was in discussing holidays – “if the dog can’t come, I’m not going” showed how much the boys regarded her as a part of the family.
My family: While we were at Beaconsfield, my parents retired “for the first time”; my father was 65, but wasn’t really ready for full retirement; also they needed somewhere to live – so they started looking for a small church with a manse, where in return for preaching and a light workload in terms of meetings, they could have a manse to live in. They tried a number of contacts and channels, but it was John Webster (our minister at Beaconsfield, who was BBA[88] secretary at the time) who put them in touch with Little Kimble, near Aylesbury. They accepted, and left Coleford – this was the occasion for Dad’s “This is your life” document - and moved to Buckinghamshire. From our point of view, they were an ideal distance away – close enough so that either could travel to the other relatively easily, but far enough that neither of us would be making the journey too often.
It was during our Beaconsfield days, in 1973, that Rosalie went out to Zaire with the Baptist Missionary Society as a missionary teacher. And in 1976 Marguerite and Jonathan were married at Great Kimble parish church, with Adrian as page-boy and myself playing the organ. Katie’s parents came down to help look after Chris, and to share the celebrations, and we treasure the photos of all four parents taken at that time.
Round about the time of Marguerite’s wedding, my mother started to feel “a bit wobbly”; my father has documented the progress of her illness, ending up in hospital, where we visited her many times as she slipped further and further away from us and eventually died. The local GP had very wisely let my father draw his own conclusion about Mum’s condition, so when he had got to the point of asking if there was any hope, he already “knew” the answer. Mum was the youngest of five children, and the first to go.
After Mum’s death, we kept an occasional eye on my father; he had always been “fairly domesticated”, and of course had had to care for mum during the early part of her illness, and was now on his own. Physically he was OK. But we sensed that missing Mum had made a big difference to his ministry. After a year or two he was approaching 70, and he decided that the time had come to give up completely; he started looking at housing possibilities, via the retired ministers’ housing scheme, but all the properties on offer (which had typically been bequeathed to the society) seemed to be inner city ones. Talking about it, Katie and I dreaded him feeling forced to take one of them, and being unhappy there.
In our thoughts at that time, a number of factors seemed to be coming together;
· I was happily settled working for DEC at Reading; despite lift-sharing, the 20 miles each way was doing our car no good at all
· We couldn’t extend our current house to make space for Dad.
· But lower house prices in Reading might mean that we could afford a bigger house, with room for Dad to have his own sitting-room and bedroom
· Therefore, was it sensible to consider that as an option?
We had been aware of families where such a move had been disastrous; equally, that such a move, if delayed, might be too late (Mum and Dad had wanted to make a home for my Great-Aunt Em at Kimble; when Auntie was well enough to do so, she didn’t want to; when she needed it, it was too late for her to “fit in” acceptably). I was conscious that if we made a home for Dad, the greatest burden could fall on Katie, but she was willing to face that, and so we started to house-hunt in the Reading area. For a long time, we got nowhere; we were concentrating on large Victorian properties in Reading itself, and looked at many, some beyond our budget. Nothing really gave us what we wanted – a downstairs sitting room for Dad, diagonally opposite the main lounge to allow for potential conflicts of musical taste (we were anticipating our boys becoming teenagers!), big enough to take a bed if needed; where the properties had a suitably sized room, it was right next to the main lounge.
Then came the day when I came home from work, and Katie said “it’s come”; I asked “what’s come?”; “our house!”, she said. I looked at the estate agent’s details, and was far from convinced – for one thing, it was in Woodley; we had looked at Woodley, a massive housing estate with roads that seemed to go round in circles and get nowhere. But we viewed the house, and it was ideal; what would be Dad’s room was a L-shaped room with a French window, next to the downstairs cloakroom. The house looked over a lake (a selling point not mentioned on the estate agent’s details!) and with dog-walking woods close by. So we started to make our plans to leave Beaconsfield after six happy years at Holtspur.
Holidays during these years: as well as we can remember them!
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[84] Tranmere Park, Guiseley, was thought to be just about the “poshest part of Aireborough” at the time. My grammar School head lived there – I need say no more!
[85] We found that the easiest way of packing the upstairs things was to throw them out of the back bedroom window, and the young people made a chain from there to the van. Nothing was broken!
[86] Now sadly no longer alive.
[87] One of Chris’ hamsters was named Fender – the sign that Chris was dreaming of one day owning a guitar of that name.
[88] Buckinghamshire Baptist Association