We moved to 28 Hazel Drive, Woodley, on Tuesday December 8th 1981, and Dad joined us in May 1982, living with us until his death on 6th February 2000. Adrian and Chris went to William Gray and Bulmershe schools, went to college at Guildford and Stoke respectively, and started their working lives – were both married in 2006 and had sons in 2007 and daughters in 2009. We lived in Woodley until October 2011, thirty years in the same house.
Let me tell you about the day we moved in .. you remember that we’d asked the Beaconsfield church (at our farewell service) to pray for good weather? We’d booked a wake-up phone call for 5am with BT, and on opening the curtains we found between 6 and 9 inches of snow had appeared overnight (an extreme rarity for the South of England, where half an inch is enough to bring chaos). Our removal van and crew, we found out later, were stuck at the bottom of a hill in Marlow, so were significantly delayed. Eventually we were packed up, and we travelled to Woodley by car, arriving to collect the keys and be ready for the van. By the time the van arrived it was dark – the men put down carpet offcuts on the icy drive, and Adrian and Chris (aged 8 and 6) helped unload the smaller things from the van, for which the men gave them 50p each! The house had been empty for almost a year, so my first priority was to get the boiler working – I couldn’t; try as I might, it refused to light, so we set up the tumble drier with its door slightly open, to try and heat the kitchen; Katie made hot soup for us all. Snow started to fall again – and out of the swirls of snow came a small gentleman with an old-fashioned moustache, wearing a brown gabardine mac and on a black “shop delivery circa 1920” bike; “I’m from the gas board, and have come to see if all was well”. So he got to work on the heating – he emptied and flushed the pipe between the meter and the boiler, adjusted the burners, and after three goes had the boiler working. He refused offers of soup, and after checking that all was well he picked up his bike, and left into the snow. What a relief! Two days later, I phoned our solicitor, and thanked him for having warned the gas board in advance of our arrival – and he said “I’ve just posted the letter this morning”; which led us to wonder why in the 1980’s a gas board person was using an ancient black bike rather than a van. We never had a bill, and remain convinced to this day that we’d had an angelic visitor in (a very effective!) disguise.
After that, it was the usual “settling in” things – new schools for the boys, new shops, a new bank, decorating (Adrian’s bedroom had previously been used by “Laura”, so needed urgent attention), and getting to know the new neighbours. Then there was the garden to tame – something else that had suffered by being left for a year. We found that, being adjacent to a lake and woodland, every Spring we would be invaded by baby frogs, and that the local squirrels thought that our back lawn was just the right place to bury acorns. It was an excellent place to have a dog – apart from the walk round South Lake, on the other side of the close there was some open woodland. Dog-walking and collecting the boys from the school gate were good ways to get to know many of the local residents.
Adrian had the greatest difficulty settling into his new primary school; Buckinghamshire and Berkshire had quite different syllabus styles – in some subjects he was a year ahead of the new school, and was “bored” while his classmates caught up; in others he was a year behind, notably “joined up writing”, and struggled a bit until he caught up. But after the first year, he seemed to have settled down again and made good progress from then on. He went on to the local comprehensive school and did reasonably well there. He joined the local Scout group, as a cub and then a scout; he was quite adventurous – anything to do with water was a great magnet, including wind-surfing and kayaking.
He celebrated his 18th birthday in 1990, and after A-levels went to Surrey University, Guildford to study Physics .. he really wanted to do Mechanical Engineering (we think so he could play at bending steel girders to see how and when they broke!), but found Physics too theoretical, and gave up after the second year. After a spell doing contract work – all sort of odd jobs – he knew what he didn’t want to do as a career, i.e. sit behind a desk; he had been active as a volunteer with the Berkshire Red Cross, so applied to be a Paramedic and was turned down. But Adrian doesn’t easily take “no” for an answer, so he applied to be a Patient Transport driver and got in – and it was only a matter of months when the Ambulance Service realised he had potential, and he started training as a Paramedic. Three incidents stand out in our memory from his training;-
· He came home one day with his uniform wet and in need of washing; it was winter, and an elderly couple had driven into a freezing stream/small river .. Adrian and his colleague and friend Hugh had got them both out of the car before the Fire Brigade arrived, resuscitated them and they had gone to different hospitals, one by another Ambulance and one by helicopter. Hugh and Adrian had driven back to the Ambulance station, to be met with “get into dry uniforms quickly, lads, you’re going to be on TV”. And so they were – top story on the local news.
· During storms, a large tree blew down in Wokingham, landing on a car just behind the driver and trapping the driver. A major incident developed to rescue the driver, and an atmospheric picture appeared in the local paper showing the car with the thick tree trunk through the middle of it, and groups of fire, police and ambulance people surrounding it. But no Adrian! Where was he? .. “inside the car, keeping the patient alive”.
· His training required that he encounter certain categories of emergency, and collect “evidence” that he had dealt with them satisfactorily, and over the 2 or 3 years he accumulated just about all he needed to qualify. All but one – he had not needed to deliver a baby (successfully getting the expectant mothers to hospital in time). They qualified him, but he still needed “a baby” to complete his portfolio of evidence. Eventually at the end of a night shift he came home wearing a silly grin … “Baby”! But not just any baby … it had to be that of the lady who wrote the “family” page of the Reading paper; so 10 days later, there was a piece about this “wonderful paramedic who had been so calm and collected during the birth”, and hadn’t revealed until it was all over that it was his first delivery; we imagine that Adrian had to endure a lot of chaffing at the Ambulance station for that.
The one thing that we were so grateful for was that when my Dad died in 2000, Adrian was not at home – he was on a walking holiday; had he been at home and been unable to resuscitate him, we think that that would have weighed on his mind.
It soon became clear to him that on a Paramedic’s pay he would never be able to buy a house in Berkshire; a colleague had moved to Yorkshire, and recommended that Adrian do the same, so that’s what he did; he was based at Wakefield, and after a bit of research found and bought a house at Stanley (his maternal grandfather’s name – Katie’s family thought that wonderful!). He came back to see us for weekends and some holidays, but as I have said he had taken to long-distance walking holidays, starting with the Dales Way “backwards” (“so I end up in Ilkley, and can go to Auntie Jackie’s for a bath”); after that came the West Highland Way twice, the Cleveland Way, a Drovers route from Skye to Perth, and a week wandering round the Knoydart Peninsular (a place with no roads and no communications, so it was a relief when at the end of his break he re-joined civilisation and contacted us).
It was clear from the phone calls that he was getting to know folk in the Wakefield area (we’d warned him to expect a lot of “Tha’s not from ‘round these parts, are thee, lad” conversations), and he told us that he’d been talked into joining a trip to Romania, to deliver hospital supplies and play equipment; their plan was to hire 4 transit vans, with a crew of 3 per van so they could travel 24 hours a day, each one alternately driving, navigating and sleeping in the back; the only concern he had was that he and Steve had a nurse (who he’d yet to meet) with them who was reputed to be a bit of a dragon! The next call, after they’d got back, revealed that he’d met this “really nice nurse”, and after Katie had done a bit of probing (blood out of a stone??) he said her name was Angela and she was Scottish and a Roman Catholic. So soon after that there was an engagement, and in 2006 they were married at Wakefield. Cameron was born in 2007 and Sinéad in 2009.
Chris being two years younger than Adrian adapted to school much better, and soon got used to the new place (though we think he missed his soul-mate and arch rival Richard Blunden in the early months). He was always a bit quieter than Adrian, but followed him through Cubs (he and another Cub used to regularly come back with each others’ shoes, jumpers, coats etc.) and into Scouts. He showed signs of early musical talent, so we arranged for him to have piano lessons with a local teacher called Linda Allwright; she later became a “regular” member of the audience on the Esther Rantzen TV show ‘That’s Life’, and her son Matt later developed as a TV presenter); she taught him the basics, and entered him in the beginners’ class of the Woodley Music Festival – he won, and we had a “silver” cup for a year, to dust and keep clean. Later on, Katie bought a £10 second-hand guitar for him from an Oxfam shop (when at Holtspur, he’d called his hamster Fender “because what he really wanted was a guitar”), and that really was the end of his piano work. He developed rapidly, played guitar in a local band, and still occasionally plays to this day.
He too went to the Bulmershe School, and always did enough to progress – into the 6th form, and at A-levels just enough to get to University; many years later, he was able to look back and tell us that he wished “now” that we’d made him work harder at school .. at the time, all he wanted to do was “just enough”. He’d chosen to do Business Studies at the University of Staffordshire, which sounded great until we heard that it was based at Stoke-on-Trent; so we started the trek twice a term, of transporting him and his chattels between Woodley and Stoke (and remarking, at every service area, how many other parents were on the similar mission – duvets, frying pans etc being visible through the rear windows of the cars). He had various shared houses, and on one occasion we were constrained to take brushes and scrub the grime from the walls of the kitchen. His course was for 4 years, the 3rd being an “industrial year” when we was supposed to get a job and monitor how close the theory and practice were; he applied for and got a job with Walkers Crisps at Thame, just outside Reading, and with that he “fell on his feet”. Within a few weeks he was involved in transport logistics, bringing home the office mobile phone and taking calls from drivers who had missed their delivery slots, had been given the wrong loads, or had other problems with rules/regulations such as how many hours they could drive without a break; all of these Chris had to deal with. He was then asked to work at Leicester (Walkers UK HQ), which involved him having a company car from the “pool” – often a really good one – living in a hotel from Monday to Friday (he told us he aimed to eat his way through the entire menu!), and getting used to the process of expense claims. But best of all, he learned a lot about logistics in the food industry; that year showed him what awaited him after he completed his degree, and gave him the impetus to finish his degree (though going back to academic study after a year with Walkers was hard to take).
With his degree completed, he went back to Walkers for a while, until a Walkers colleague who had moved to McCormicks “suggested” that he follow her and move; this he did. McCormicks is a US global giant in “foodstuffs”, supplying raw of “mixed” ingredients to the food industry worldwide. Chris joined their operations team in the UK, and rose in influence to the point where as I type he is their UK operations manager, responsible for placing and monitoring contracts with logistics companies. As with Adrian, I’m going to record one or two stories that we recall from his working life …
· MacDonalds decided to do a 2 for 1 promotion in the UK for a week; either they didn’t warn McCormicks, or McCormicks didn’t warn Chris. Anyway, on the Tuesday Chris got a phone call asking if they could get an emergency delivery of onions, as their promotion week was proving hugely popular (they seemed surprised!). Chris discovered that their special onions next UK delivery had just left the USA by sea, and would be too late; could another load be air-freighted? No, the next lot of onions was still growing in the field. On Wednesday he phoned MacDonalds back and apologised, but was told “don’t worry, we’re running out of beef now”. So the whole promotion week more or less stopped mid-week. On the Thursday, Burger King was running TV adverts saying “we have burgers!”.
· ?
· ?
Adrian and Chris had both thrown themselves into the youth group at Woodley Baptist, and a number of young people from other churches had joined in, occasionally for services and often for social events. The latter continued during the University years, notably at the Thatchers pub on Friday evenings; some of them would then walk round the lakeside path to our house to “sleep it off” (we would come down on a Saturday morning with no idea who might be camping out on our lounge floor). One of the girls in this group was called Helen Orme. One day, a neighbour of ours called Joy Nye said to Katie how glad she was to hear that our Chris was “going out” with her grand-daughter … this was total news to us; we had to ask her grand-daughter’s name, and that is how we heard that Chris and Helen were seeing one another outside the group. Questions were then asked in the house! Eventually, there came the engagement, and then the wedding in May 2006 – two months after Adrian and Angela’s, but this time at an Anglican church in Reading. Helen’s parents, Eddie and Christine, were involved in lay ministry in the Church of England, and Christine wrote daily reading notes. Chris and Helen too had a son (Matthew) in 2006, and a daughter (Charlotte) in 2009. At that time, we would tell people that we had a symmetrical family … both our sons married in 2006, had sons in 2007 and daughters in 2009, and that each pair of brothers and sisters were 2 years and 1 month apart. That state of affairs was not to last … Helen and Chris went on to have two more sons, James in September 2011 (we remember it as a 9-11 birth!) and William in 2014.
Dad moved to Woodley to join us in the Spring of 1982. It must have been strange for him. We had “turned the tables” on him … when they had moved to Coleford in 1961, I knew no one when I first visited them; now we had chosen a church and settled in before he arrived. But he was happy at Woodley Baptist, and was welcomed (not least by Stuart Woodward – who was in his first church, and having a retired minister come could have been daunting); he resolved not to go to Church Meetings (“that is for you younger ones”) but he took the occasional service there, and in the early years was a visiting preacher at other churches in Berkshire. He also had a regular session with Carol Runnalls, who wanted to learn something of New Testament Greek, in his snug. We remember that after Adrian passed his test, he would sometimes take his Grandad to preach at village churches; when Chris acquired his first car, it was Grandad who got the first ride in it.
Dad had a downstairs sitting room, which we called his “snug”, with room for some bookcases, an armchair, TV and bureau and pictures, and via a French Window access to the back garden. We soon discovered the benefits of a resident Grandad – there was someone at home to welcome the boys back from school, and to baby-sit so we could go out for evening meetings at church and occasional concerts in Reading. Dad initially took on the gardening; over the years, he had to hand over first the lawn-mowing, then later the rest of the gardening, which Katie took on. He made a few trips “solo” to Zaire to see Rosalie, and to visit family such as his sister in law “Auntie Winnie” at Soham. In the early days he had his car – a Robin Reliant 3-wheeler in bright red; once when returning from Soham he had a scare, a near-miss due to slow reactions, and decided that he should stop driving. So from then on we drove him to church, for family events and on most of our holidays. While physically he “slowed down”, he was still managing a daily walk round South Lake (about a mile) as he approached his 90th birthday – and mentally he was still as bright as a button. He could still manage most of the Telegraph crossword, and spot printing errors “at a glance”, a skill from his time proof-reading before he trained for the ministry.
On Sunday morning, February 6th 2000, Dad had set the table for breakfast, chatted during breakfast about the day ahead; his coat, hymn-book and Bible were ready for church, and he helped with the drying-up. At the end of the drying up, with the tea-towel still in his hand, he simply fell to the floor. We attempted CPR while we waited for an ambulance (Adrian, thankfully, was not at home), and as the paramedics were unable to revive him, Katie and I followed them to the Royal Berks Hospital, leaving Chris at home to phone Church and my sisters … at the Hospital, we were told that they had not been able to do anything; officially, he was pronounced dead there, but we are convinced that he died, as he would have wished, at home, and in full mental capacity to the end. So Bernard had to take up Executor duties, and we had a funeral to arrange; afterwards we (with Rosalie and Marguerite) took his ashes to Amersham, where the records showed where my Mum’s ashes had been scattered, so we were able to lay Dad’s in the same plot.
We all treasure the 19 years he lived with us at Woodley.
Us and the wider family We tried to get back to Rawdon twice a year, usually pre- or post-Christmas and again in the Summer, to visit Katie’s parents and the wider Clark family. In the early years there was a Clark tradition of going out to a restaurant on Boxing Day for lunch, so if we were there we would join in. When Katie’s parents visited us we had some interesting comments .. her father commented that the “sky is lower here”; we understood what he meant – back in Yorkshire the surrounding hills lift the horizon, but in Woodley the horizon was behind the neighbours houses, so much lower.
In 1983 Dad and I visited Zaire (now the D R Congo) to be with Rosalie for her wedding to Boniface Kimbangi; our account of that trip is available elsewhere on this web-site - suffice it to say that it was a memorable experience (even if I caught Malaria just before we were due to fly home).
1986 was a memorably year in different ways; Katie’s sister Marie was married in April (sadly, the marriage did not last), but later that year both her parents died, her father in July and her mother in early September. So we specially treasure the photos taken in 1985 and 1986 that show them; after the second bereavement Katie’s sisters made a “pact” to keep in touch by regular phone calls, and still do so to this day … well done to them.
Katie had helped with playgroups in our early time at Woodley, first at St James C of E church very close to home, later at our church after the building was opened in 1988. Then she got a job working in the library at Bulmershe College (our nearest teacher training college), which after a number of years was merged into Reading University; she “specialised” in book repair (and told numerous stories about the unmentionable students who thought it was fine to tear out pages of their loan books), and made many good friends from the library staff. She retired in 2007 and started drawing her state pension!
I finally retired in 2010, and started a 15-month project dealing with a lifetimes accumulation of paper … some was scanned onto my computer, much thrown out, and a few bits retained; I kept some examples of “how computers worked in the olden days” in case I was ever asked to describe my work. We were by then starting to think about “what next”; our first thought was to live half-way between our sons, but they told us that we’d be equally useless to both of them – too far from either to answer any urgent calls for help. Chris and Helen had Helen’s parents close by, but Adrian and Angela had nobody nearby, so the next thought would be to move near them. We found a nice town in Penistone, north of Sheffield – we found a possible church, checked out on GP surgeries, library, bus routes and so on, but were “dissuaded” by our Paramedic and his Nurse wife on the basis that they found secondary healthcare there to be sub-standard (at least, at the time). So with Yorkshire still in our minds … I’d dragged Katie away from her home county in 1971, for what she thought would be a year or two, so after 40 years emulating the Israelites and “wandering in the desert”, it seemed right to take her back … we looked for houses North of Adrian and Angela. We wanted to “downsize”, but knew that we’d have a family of 4 (at the time .. 6 now) coming to visit we couldn’t downsize that much. After a lot of house-viewing, we settled on an extended bungalow in Embsay, and started the process of moving, having lived in the Woodley house for 30 years.
Holidays during these years:
·
1981
– No major holiday this year; Katie took the boys up to Rawdon at Easter, and
it snowed! She had to borrow wellingtons for herself, and go out to buy some
for the boys. Also, British Railways had a set of cheap day trip events – we
therefore had day trips to Bath, Canterbury and Weston-super-Mare.
·
1982
– An August holiday in Yorkshire, and a Spring week with Dad on the Lleyn
peninsular in North Wales.
·
1983
– A week at Blue Anchor Bay, near Minehead in Somerset. And of course a week in
Yorkshire. This was the year Rosalie was married, so Bernard and Dad went to
Zaire for a fortnight.
·
1984
– In May we were really brave (!) and took the boys and Tess on a boat on the
Norfolk Broads – slightly heart-stopping every time we moored, as the boys
(aged 9 and 11) wanted to leap off and help tie up at every opportunity. The
boat had a 9-inch walk way around it, and Tess would walk round the boat a few
times, then settle herself at the front, facing forwards, ears and tail out
behind, rather like the figure-head on an old naval vessel.
·
1985
– Our main holiday was to Inverary in Scotland
·
1986
– Spring Harvest at Minehead, then a week in Hathersage (Derbyshire, at
well-dressing time) in time to see Rosalie’s new baby, Christopher Matondo at
Marguerite’s home.
·
1987
– Bude, Cornwall; this August was the
holiday where Adrian tried surf-boarding, and Chris archery. The Blunden family
were arriving just as we left!
·
1988
– A twelve-day touring holiday to France, the summer before Adrian took his
French GCSE; this was the best one, using the “flexible France” scheme by
Brittany ferries, where we had 2* or 3* hotel vouchers. We had several
excellent meals out, and Adrian impressed us by giving road directions in
French some 30 minutes after he arrived in a Normandy village. We took
the car over from Portsmouth to Caen via Brittany Ferries; each day we decided
where we would like to stay the following night, and the hotel phoned ahead to
book rooms for us, and we drove along at leisure. One advantage was that
we could change our minds about how far to drive, according to weather,
tiredness and inclination; some days we did 200-250 miles, and some virtually
no driving at all. We got down as far as the north-western part of the
Massif Central, then across westwards to the coast just above Bordeaux, and
then back to Caen. The hotels were all clean and comfortable; some had
superb restaurants (the second night we had a 5-course meal for about £5.50
each) and one a superb location overlooking a lake. We also met Katie's sister
Pauline and family, who were caravanning on the West Coast of France at the
same time, and had an enjoyable day with them.
·
1989
– our Yorkshire holiday was a week in a rented cottage in April (the coldest I
can remember!) and we “did the tourist thing”; we found many fascinating things
to see, that we didn't know existed, such as the free tropical house at
Roundhay park and a motor museum at Hebden Bridge, that have sprung up since we
lived there, and were well worth visiting. We also had a "final
ride" on the threatened Settle-to-Carlisle railway; we must have so
swelled the revenues, that the line was reprieved the following month!
But we later had a holiday in America, during the second half of August; we
were able to go because Bernard had joined a frequent flyer scheme, and had
accumulated flying credits during his many business trips over the last 10
years or so. We flew to Boston, and took a rental car for a two-week tour
of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, visiting a few places that Bernard
had enjoyed during previous trips and many more that were new to all of
us. We all enjoyed a "whale watch" cruise out of Gloucester MA,
seeing many whales at very close quarters indeed. A trip 60 floors up a
skyscraper to observe the view from the Hancock tower, and the incredible
scenery of New Hampshire/Vermont (just beginning to show the "fall"
colours), were among the other USA experiences we enjoyed. Arriving in Stowe,
Vermont, we saw a sign “to the ice cream factory” which we felt we had to see;
it was a small local firm called “Ben and Jerry”, and we heard about the
company history (a 5$ evening class in ice cream making), their corporate
philosophy (“bigger and better chunks”), and had some samples – all this long
before they were heard of in the UK. Also in 1989 Another unusual trip to
Yorkshire, was at the end of September, when we went to a school reunion for
Bernard's year; most of the folk there had not met for 28-30 years. It
was a very happy evening, with a unanimous demand for another in 4/5 years
time; the "frightening" thing, which perhaps ought to have been less
surprising than it was, was how little the group had changed since school-days,
in appearance (grey hair etc. apart!), character or in their mannerisms.
A sober reflection for parents!
·
1990
– Another French holiday, this time for Chris’ benefit – this time we stayed in
one gîte, over towards the Swiss
border, and had days out from there; but we were all badly affected by the
“Aoutats” (August midges). Amongst the places we visited was Rhiems, so I could
see the home of the famous jackdaw (remember the musical I’d been in at school).
On the ferry back to the UK, the vessel “hove to” for a group of Canadian
veterans to drop wreaths into the English Channel, no doubt the place where
some comrades had been lost during WW2.
·
1991
– we must have been less adventurous this year; just (!) a week in Yorkshire.
·
1992
– a week at Center Parcs near Sherwood Forest (the free swimming pool was much
used by the boys), then Katie and I had a holiday in September in Pembrokeshire
(the coast trail was renowned, and we walked some bits of it)
Round about this time, we got to the stage where the boys no longer needed or wanted family holidays, so Katie and I were free to go where we wanted and do “grown up” things (or, groan up things as the boys regarded them). Often, Katie’s sister Jackie joined us.
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