A stroll round the garden, while you’re all being so kind as to indulge my nostalgia.  To start with, Broad View Road is a cul de sac.  As you came down the road, our boundary started just past Romany Staithe, at the corner of the kitchen garden where there was a large holm oak at the start of a shrubbery. This oak blew down in a storm one night which was a great pity as it was a beautiful tree.  After the kitchen garden there was one of the gates to the drive, which ran all along the house and garage and then curved back towards the other gate.  Another shrubbery was between the drive and the road and there was five foot tall chain-link fencing.  Just past the drive and before the hedge between us and the next-door house, there was the stable and the adjoining shed where feed etc was kept.  I suppose these were just outbuildings originally until we had Tommy, the milkman’s horse – oh good, there’s another story to tell you.

As you look at the picture at the top of the page, you can see the conservatory at the side of the house on the left.  Next to that is a passageway which went past a small courtyard – this wasn’t used for anything much, and the outside toilet (I don’t know if our gardener used it but none of us ever did) was in there.  Then came the back porch and back door and then you came out on to the drive, with the gate in front of you and the garage on the left.

Past the garage and there was a large, lean-to greenhouse, the lower half made of brick.  Beyond that was another building, I think it was a sort of Nissen hut, and possibly used for storing logs but it was removed eventually, and then the hedge.  When you went down the path by the greenhouse you came to another brick-built greenhouse, this one being freestanding, so you took a left and a right turn (in the corner was the fig tree) and came past the small lean-to greenhouse behind the garage – in the picture it’s almost hidden behind the tall plant in the left of the herbaceous border.

We had a lot of greenhouses.  In the garden there was one more greenhouse – the kitchen garden was very much our gardener’s domain so my father created another plot for himself so he could grow things and not get in the way.  His greenhouse was aluminium and he liked to grow more unusual plants – one year he grew loofahs, for instance.  I grow loofahs every few year, they’re quite easy but take ages to dry out and mustn’t be damaged at that time or else they rot.  He also grew things like aubergines, okra, chilli peppers and so on, which you couldn’t buy locally.

The conservatory had a flower bed on one side and a plumbago and a nectarine were planted in it.  We were the only people I knew who ate nectarines as a consequence – peaches were easily obtained in the summer but, quite oddly, you couldn’t buy nectarines in our neck of the woods in the early 1960s.  There was staging on the other side with lots of pot plants on it.

In the kitchen garden were the hothouses, two long greenhouses with a boiler house adjoining.  At the end was a tank for water, so that it would be room temperature and not chill the plants.  The kitchen garden had a number of long beds with paths between – I expect each of them was about 10 feet wide, probably 40 feet or more long.  There were 6 – 8 of these beds.  There was a big greenhouse, the width of the bed on one of them and it was on a sort of track – the idea was that it could be moved each year onto fresh ground.  Tomatoes were grown here and I think chrysanthemums were too.

Pots and so on were stored under the wooden staging in the brick greenhouses and plants in their pots were put on top.  Cucumbers were grown into a pile of manure.  I don’t suppose that was put direct on the staging but I don’t remember*.  My parents and our gardener, Mr Weavers, were keen competitors at the local horticultural shows.  They specialised in vegetables of course, and also in delphiniums and begonias.  Mummy and Daddy went to Members’ Day at the Chelsea Flower Show every May – in those days you needed to be elected, not just *anyone* could join and you definitely dressed up for it.  The last time she and I went, she was quite upset at the sight of a man with a large stomach, dressed in shorts and sandals and nothing else.  Anyway, they headed straight for the Blackmore and Langdon display to see and order the latest delphiniums and begonias.  I remember one huge bloom that was grown in our greenhouse – my mother fetched a 10″ dinner plate and held it in front of the flower.  It showed all round.  The trick to get a delphinium stalk to open on the right day all along its length is to spend the night with two buckets of water, one hot and one cold.  Dip the stalk in one, then the other and it brings on the topmost flowers before the lower ones droop.

Showing vegetables and flowers is not only a matter of having perfect specimens, they all must match too.  You might have to dig up a whole row of potatoes to find six that are the right size, a nice shape and are all virtually identical.  When the Norfolk or Suffolk or even the local show were coming up, the best produce was kept for that and we got the also-rans into the kitchen.  My sister and I were allowed to help ourselves to as many undersized tomatoes as we wanted though, and they always taste best straight from the vine.  Once, Mr Weavers came and spoke to my mother – “is Zoë helping herself to raspberries?”  Mummy assured him that I was not.  She didn’t even ask me first, she knew I wouldn’t do that without permission.  A watch was kept and it turned out to be Huckleberry, jumping over the fence into the kitchen garden and delicately helping himself, taking each raspberry between his lips and pulling it off the cane.

We used several sorts of manure, pig, cow, sheep and horse.  I can’t now remember which was best for which purpose, but Mr Weavers knew his muck.  I do know about the sheep droppings – sheep being kept outdoors, their droppings had to be collected individually.  They were put into water and the resultant dark brown liquid was diluted and used as liquid feed.

*Yes I do, the manure was put on a square of wire netting – I’m still not sure about the staging though.

Wendz asked about the car in the picture.  We only ever had one white car, so either it’s that or it belonged to a visitor.  I’ve been looking for pictures of our white car and can’t find one taken from just that angle, but I think it’s possible that the car is my father’s Daimler Dart.  If it is, this dates the photo to the very early 1960s.  My parents saw the car at the 1959 Motor Show when it was introduced and ordered it.

My father’s previous sports car was the Austin Healey Sprite, the frogeye model.  We travelled all over Europe in that when I was five.  I was a dainty child but my mother said I got heavier with a bonier bottom by the day – it was a two-seater and there were four of us, they put a little seat in the middle behind the seats for my sister, who was just eleven that spring and must have been quite uncomfortable, and I sat on my mother’s lap.  That was the holiday we were about to leave for when we first got Simon.  I don’t remember all that much about it, we visited several countries but I only really remember Austria.  We stayed at the Sport Hotel which might have been in Innsbruck and I do remember liking Innsbruck very much.  I also remember being overcome by the sight of all the snow with the sun shining on it and crying – little wuss – but afterwards eating oranges and enjoying the scenery.  The next year, my parents went back to the hotel and the staff were very disappointed that I wasn’t there.  “Where’s Alice?” they asked – I was often called Alice in my younger days, even when grown up, right up until the time I had my hair cut short, in my thirties.

I suspect that this car wasn’t fast enough for my father and that was the reason it was replaced by the Daimler Dart.  My mother always had a second-hand Daimler and my father also had a small runabout for general getting about town.  All our cars were always British, there was no question about that.  My mother had learned to drive in a big car – I think it was a Lanchester – and there was no clutch but, as she told me, a “fluid flywheel and pre-selected gears” which was, I suppose, the precursor to the automatic gearbox and she never mastered the clutch.  If she’d had to, she would have but she liked the feel of a big, coach-built car and didn’t mind how old it was.  I have to say, I see her point – I used to like a nippy little car that was easy to park when I used to go to Norwich a lot, but I do like the weight and high seat of my present Landrover and I’m rather enjoying having an automatic again, though I don’t mind either way.

My parents’ first car was an elderly Landrover which was missing its back door.  When they drove to London for a banquet at the Mansion House, they wedged a suitcase across the gap to stop everything from falling out of the back, and cheerily handed the keys over for it to be parked, not being a bit dismayed by having such a scruffy old car among the smart ones.  I was born later the same year and my mother insisted on selling it because she was afraid of my carrycot falling out.  Later they had a Morris Oxford – there would have been no question of an Austin Cambridge.  The town was never mentioned in our house – as an Oxford graduate, he’d have referred contemptuously to ‘the other place.”  I never even visited Cambridge – which is lovely, of course – until after he died.

I’ve been rambling on and I meant to tell you about the Daimler Dart.  It was a marvellous car, very fast with a superb engine.  However, as so often happens, there was a problem with the detail of manufacture.  They had a reputation in the early days of a door flying open at speed.  Worse was a fault that came to light when my parents were on that holiday they took without us.

We had been left with our Dutch au pair’s parents in the Hague and they left for another tour of Europe.  They visited Nice, Chamonix, Capri, Innsbruck, Vienna – can’t think of other places at the moment, but it was a lovely tour.  They had been driving across the Alps, up and down winding mountain roads with hairpin bends, then reached their overnight destination.  When they set off again, my father drove down the road, braked for a junction and the brakes failed completely.  He twisted the wheel to the right, turned the corner at some speed and, changing down gear, slowed the car with the wheel against the kerb and finally stopped it with the handbrake.  When it was taken to the garage it transpired that the brake cable was too long and rubbed every time he put his foot on the brake – the mountain trip had finally caused it to wear through and all the brake fluid was lost.  And if it had happened an hour’s drive earlier, they would have still been on the mountain and would certainly have left the road and been killed.  When they arrived home, there was a letter from the garage calling the car in for the fault to be corrected.

But no matter, an accident that didn’t happen isn’t one to dwell on.

Some years ago, we visited the Haynes Motor Museum near Yeovil and it was a brilliant nostalgia trip. They had all the cars that my parents and the Sage’s parents and their friends had ever owned, large and small.  What was particularly good was that it wasn’t just the big cars, like the Sage’s godfather’s Bentley, but the little Morrises, Austins, Rovers and so on that most people had.  Few people had a foreign car in those days.  

Well, I have been back before as I said, but this time I looked at the road with a more critical eye, and my goodness, they have crammed in the houses.  Of course, having Broad frontage and a proper quay heading, right opposite the park, it’s valuable real estate – but almost all the houses in the road now have another crammed in their garden, but as the building line is way back from the Broad, they must all have really long, narrow gardens.

Anyway, this is the view of the house from the park opposite.

And with the house itself picked out.

You can see how the house was divided in two because the original slate roof has been replaced with tiles on the right-hand side.  That was done last year – the Sage happened to call on a friend in the road and saw the builders and he brought a slate back for me, very thoughtfully. I rather loved that roof but I can quite see why the present owners had to choose a different material.  They were Welsh slates, they’d cost a fortune now, even supposing they were available.

We drove round to Broad View Road.  On the way, I took a snap of Caldecott Road, where Simon and Huck used to chase the cars.  It’s a long road – I said half a mile and I wasn’t exaggerating.

Here is the house, the two halves, from the road side.  Not very attractive at all, the front was the river side and that is the nicer view of it.

The wall and railings weren’t there in our day, there was a chain-link fence and a shrubbery and then a drive the length of the house.  A garage has been added to each house and the original garage has been replaced by another house.  Four houses have been built in the kitchen garden and to the left of our house and the gardener’s cottage has been massively enlarged and two more houses built in the garden and paddock there.  That’s ten houses where there used to be two.

The original gardener’s cottage, with the dormer windows added, is the pebbledashed part on the right.

I’ve been out today with Dilly, who has been reading my recent posts and was interested to see the house I’ve been talking about.  Having known her for nine years, she says that I’ve never told her anything about it – and it’s true, the past is over and done with and I don’t normally revisit it much.

So we went to the park for lunch and looked at the house opposite (and I did take some pictures, but it’s mostly obscured by trees) and we drove round to the road and saw it from the other side and then we went to the church and visited my father’s grave and my half-uncle’s.  And then we went to the place where our new saleroom will be at our next auction in September.  Hay was with us so, while at the park we took him to the playground and he had fun on the swing and slide and so on.

I’ve been out this evening and have just got back, so tomorrow I’ll download the photos and see if there’s anything worth showing you.

Must phone Wink now, she left me a voicemail message a little while ago.  

I’ll track back a bit so you know why we lived there.

My grandparents married in 1909 when Helen was 16 and Selwyn (I know, poor chap) was 26 (I think) and my father was born the next year.  Selwyn (was he ever called that?  Shorely not.  He was later known as The Major) had visited Lowestoft – his parents lived in Sussex and London – and loved the area, as well as Helen.  They lived in a rented house in Cotmer Road when they were first married, while they were having their own house built.

The land they chose was in Oulton Broad and was the first house to be built in that road.  The building materials were brought up the river by barge.  There were 4 acres of land altogether, the house set well back from the river, with a substantial kitchen garden alongside the flower gardens and lawn and a gardener’s cottage on the other side of the road with a lot more ground including a paddock.  They moved in in 1912.

When my parents married in 1947, my mother was taken to be introduced to her new in-laws (yes, that way round).  She and the Major got on swimmingly from the start (we’ll gloss over Helen who didn’t get on with anyone) and it was her dearest wish to move up from Weymouth to look after him – his health was none too good by that time.  Sadly, they couldn’t sell their hotel for quite some years, the Major died in 1952 and it was 1958 by the time we finally moved in.

When the house was built it was normal to have staff.  So there was a butler’s pantry complete with butler, a housemaid’s pantry with a housekeeper and housemaid, a chauffeur, a head gardener and two other gardeners and I don’t know what else besides.  We never lived in that sort of style of course, when I was a small child we still had a live-in gardener and another part-time gardener and my mother had a daily help, though we did have a live-in Spanish maid for a while.  Later we just had a gardener, later still an odd-job man.

The house had a lot of rooms, though they weren’t as big as the rooms in this house where I live now.  Coming in through the front door there was a lobby which we called the air-lock, to the left was the cloakroom and separate lavatory.  Straight ahead was the door to the hall, which was large.  To the left of the hall was the gun room.  Off the hall (clockwise from the gun room) was the drawing room, the passage used as a junk room, the study, the dining room, the door through to the kitchen quarters, the stairs which had two half-landings – there were five stairs, turn right and there were seven stairs, turn right and there were six stairs and the landing was above the hall.  Between the stairs and the door to the air-lock was the room under the stairs where we kept drinks, which was known as the beer cupboard.  Off the dining room was the conservatory as I said yesterday.

Through the kitchen door into a little lobby and straight ahead was the butler’s pantry.  This was lined with shelves on which we kept china and glasses.  There was a sink and a dishwasher.  To the left was the kitchen.  In about 1962 my parents had it done up with all the latest mod cons, built in split-level oven with 8 gas rings on the hob in an alcove with a huge extractor unit, brick-built peninsular work surface with lots of cupboards.  The sink had a waste disposal unit and the Kenwood liquidiser housing was built in – you removed a cover and set it in to the worktop.  The room had quarry tiles in front of the hob but was otherwise carpeted in pink.  There was a big white dresser where all sorts of things were kept and a bit oak Welsh dresser on the other wall.  The white dresser was built in and included the hatchway through to the dining room.

Through towards the back door, there was the pantry on the left as you went into the scullery, with the stairs down to the cellar off that.  The back stairs were next, then the back door which had a porch, then the larder.  The cellar was large and housed the boiler and had a separate small room for coal with a chute down from the drive.  We kept the fridge in the pantry and there was a sink in there too.  The scullery was no such thing when we lived there, it was a kitchen while the big kitchen was being done up, then it was a little sitting room.

Upstairs, to the left there was a passage.  First there was the housemaid’s pantry, then the bathroom which was large and cold, then the upstairs loo.  Going past the passage you got to my parents’ bedroom and, as I said yesterday, the bathroom and dressing room were en suite.  There was a door from the landing to the dressing room but not to the bathroom.  Next you came to the spare bedroom, above the dining room.  Then there was another passage, off which was the night nursery (many years later, Al was born in this room) and steps down (because the scullery ceiling was lower than that of other rooms) to a half-landing off which were the day nursery and the back stairs.  Go back along that passage and the door to the linen cupboard was on your left (it was a small room, the size of the butler’s pantry below) before the bit of the landing leading to the stairs to the next floor.  It was here that Bobby the leopard lived, so I went past him every time I went to and from my bedroom.

The upstairs ceilings were lower so there were eight steps, a half-landing and another eight.  Oddly, the window to the half-landing started half way down the wall and the floor didn’t reach the edge of the wall as the window continued to the upper half of the half-landing beneath.  Does that description make sense?  When I was a child I wasn’t fond of that gap.  I always ran up that bit of the stairs because I imagined a hand reaching to grab my ankle.  At the top of the stairs there was a room to the left down two stairs (this room was the one where I later had a double bed shared with three dogs), the big bedroom I shared with my sister next, then a little long narrow room with much of the width under a sloping ceiling under the eaves.  Then there was the attic with its big water tanks.  Oh – before the attic door was the ladder staircase to the hatchway leading to the tower room, that copper-covered dome at the top of the house.  Apparently, you could see the sea from there, at least in theory.  The house’s name, Seaview, was my grandfather’s joke – the sea is a couple of miles away.

Yes, I have been back there once since my mother left.  Friends of friends bought the drawing room half (it was divided in two) and invited us for Sunday lunch and kindly showed us round.  It was much altered of course, but the big sash windows had their original curved brass fittings and, as I went up to the top floor, my hand slipped under the banister for the flat bit where a piece of wood was missing.  My host noticed my hand remembering.  The great pity was that the builder who bought the house had the beautiful parquet floor removed from the ground floor and it was carpeted.  Parquet flooring had been relaid, but it was not nearly so nice.

I’ll come back to dogs, but now I realise how clear the whole place is in my memory I want to write it all down.  I have never reminisced so vividly before, this is quite strange to me.  But if you have been, thanks for listening.

There’s not much point in describing the whole house to you, not without pictures.  I wish I could take you there, there are so many pictures in my mind’s eye, I remember every bit of it.  If you look at the photo above, the two-storeyed building on the left was actually the garage, which was huge, big enough for lots of cars, with a loft above.  There were steps up, a workbench up there and a pulley on the exterior wall for hauling things up, though it was never used in my time.  In front of that is a building with a pitched roof which was used for storage and in front again was a greenhouse, one of many in the garden – six, I think, or was it seven?  Two of them were hothouses, one was a modern aluminium jobbie.  Then there was the conservatory, as you see, which led off the dining room.

You can see what I meant about the big windows.  It was the smaller ones at the sides that we used to open to let the dogs in and out – on the right as you look at the dining room and the left as you look at the drawing room, which is the room on the right-hand side of the house.  In between was the study, one wall lined with the bookshelves that are now on my own study walls, filled with the same books, mostly, that I have not been able to dispose of as yet.  The yellow door was never used and the passageway leading through it to the hall was used as a junk room.

The room above the drawing room was my parents’ bedroom, with en suite bathroom and dressing room above the study.  There was another bathroom but only guests used that, we all used our parents’ bathroom.  You see the window sticking out on the first floor on the right? It’s not an open window, there was a triangular window seat and two windows at 60º angles.  This was ideal for the dogs to keep an eye on things and it was normal for one of them to be there on guard duty when we were out and at night.  My mother used to say that sometimes, awake at night, she could hear the watch change.

My parents had a four poster bed and we all – well, that is, the dogs and I – got on to it by taking a running jump.  I also used to swing on the end posts.  My mother would try to stop me, telling me how old the bed was but Z-logic thought that was quite silly.  Obviously, if it had lasted all these years being swung on it must be quite strong enough to carry on doing so.  Underneath the bed was the Club.  I’m not sure if the girls ever went in there, but it was mainly a gentlemen’s club and Simon and Huck hung out there.  I joined them sometimes, of course, and was made welcome.

When we were children, the room above was our bedroom, mine and Wink’s.  There were three bedrooms, a landing and a big attic on that floor.  Much of the attic, quite half of it, was occupied by four big water tanks.  We were not on mains water, there was a deep artesian well in the kitchen garden and water was pumped up twice a day into the tanks.  I’ve a feeling they each held 250 gallons – er, can anyone work that out?  How much room does 250 gallons take up?  Times 4, that is.  It was lovely water, completely pure without chlorination and the well never ran dry and the pipes never froze.  In the incredibly long, cold winter of 1963 the mains supply failed and people had to fetch water from a standpipe in the village.  Or they could come to us, we had plenty.

There was a dog bed in the house.  It was kept in the gun room.  I’ve no idea how keen my grandfather was on shooting, all I ever heard about is his Purdey shotgun, inherited by my father who never used it, nor did my mother or the Sage who now owns it.  It would have to be adapted if the Sage did use it (Granddad was right-handed and left-eyed) but, although a crack shot, he prefers rifle shooting at targets.  He doesn’t kill for sport.  My father was a rotten shot anyway and wasn’t allowed to be a soldier in the war.  He was sent to join the medical corps.  Anyway, the gun room was lined with cupboards and shelves, mostly filled with books, and at the end was a desk with the telephone on and in front of that was the dog bed.  So when you used the phone you stood in the dog bed.  And because of the way my mother always picked up the receiver and turned it when she put it down again, the lead became kinked tighter and tighter until it could hardly be put down, so once in a while someone would go and pick it up and hold the lead while the receiver spun round and round to unravel.

The dogs slept in the bedrooms of course.  As I said, one of them was normally in the window keeping an eye on things, one or two might be in the Club or they might be on the bed.  Wink and I didn’t have dogs sleep in our room when we were children but later, when she went off to college, I had my own smaller room and then at least one dog slept with me.  I moved into a different room, still on the top floor, in my mid-teens and then had a double bed and then three dogs slept on it with me, Jess, Susie and Cleo.  Although it was a double bed, I never had a lot of room to myself because the dogs liked to snuggle up and one of them usually stretched out across the bed so that I couldn’t stretch out myself and slept with knees bent.

I said I couldn’t describe it without pictures and so I can’t.  But you’ve got over a thousand words-worth all the same.  I haven’t touched the surface, of course.  I wish I had pictures.

Darlings, I keep remembering things that I should have told you about Huck and Simon.  Those were the dogs that made me the worryingly canine woman I am.  I still tend to call a grandchild over with “here boy … please” because of their influence.  I am, honestly, mostly dog.  Though it was Chester, my beloved and much-missed dog I raised from puppyhood that taught me fluent dog – look, if I raise a lip or make a sound deep in my throat when I’m with you, I’m talking dog.  Ask your hound to interpret, he’ll know.

Okay, having made my weirdness quite clear to the point of embarrassed silence, back to Huck.  If he wanted you to do something, he didn’t fuss or bark or simply gaze at you and hope.  He took you there.  He would take your wrist in his gentle mouth and lead you.  I’ve never known another dog do that, not even Simon.  He thought it out for himself.

Gentle mouth – Simon once caught a duck basking herself contentedly on the lawn.  We saw and ran, he ran for as long as he could and then let her go.  She legged it, panic-stricken, down the lawn, paused in the rose bed and continued towards the Broad.  When we looked in the rose bed, she’d laid an egg.

Egg – once Simon stole an egg from the kitchen.  Of course, its retrieval turned into a game.  We chased him about the lawn for a good half hour unable to catch him until, starting to get bored, he relented.  We took the egg from his mouth.  It was undamaged, not a crack.

Here is the house I lived in then.  Sorry for the grubby picture.  I must tell you a bit more about it, in dog terms, tomorrow.  

Don’t worry, I’m not leaving the shaggy dog stories but I must tell you about our afternoon out yesterday.  We went to the Ashmanhaugh Light Railway, which was having an open afternoon.  Weeza and Phil booked it for Zerlina’s birthday party last week – not that she’s had her birthday yet but the day suited them, and they had a brilliant time.  The place was opened up specially for them and the ten little guests (well, z and her nine guests to be mathematically precise) and their parents had the run of the trains.  Two trains ran all the time and they only got off when they wanted to eat or run around for a bit.  It was fantastic value, only £85 for the whole thing and they took their own birthday tea.

We couldn’t go because of the wedding (which not only made the local paper but also the Da1ly Ma1l because of the unusual circumstance of the bride’s father both giving her away and conducting the wedding in the same service) and it so happened that their next open day was this week, so off we went.

It’s not always that you can find an activity that is great fun for children of varying ages but also for their parents (and grandparents).  Crabbing is one, this is certainly another.  It’s only £3 a head or £10 for four for unlimited rides and lots of people simply got off the train and promptly joined the queue for the next one.  It was, simply, fun.  There was supposed to be an MG rally as well although only one car actually turned up, but no matter.

Yes darlings, I did take pictures.  I’ll add them later, I’m a bit busy this morning.

And here they are.  In one of them, six members of my family are featured.  In another, Zerlina is all blissed out.  It was a good day.

Just a recap on yesterday’s doghouse post – it was a year earlier than I thought, it must have been 1966 and I was 12.  I’ve remembered a day out when things went wrong again.  I don’t know where we went, but my mother suddenly hissed that Diana Rigg had just walked past.

I have no idea what I’d been doing on the evening that The Avengers was on television, but I’d never seen it.  In the Honor Blackman days I’d been in bed by the time it was on and later I did see the Mrs Peel series, but only the first episodes had been shown – I’ve looked it up and they started in October 1965.  Anyway, not having ever heard of Diana Rigg I didn’t take any notice and neither, apparently, did anyone else, and my mother lost her temper at having been ignored.  Really, it was a most peculiar holiday.

Susie was black all over with some white spots.  Her previous owner believed that she was Labrador with a touch of Dalmation, but I’ve no idea if that was true.  As I said, she and I became inseparable  and we used to go out for hours at a time.  My mother was rather over-protective of me and I had rarely been allowed to wander off on my own before (my sister was allowed much more freedom, but I was always thought of as the baby of the family and treated as such) but Susie was thought of as totally reliable and quite able to look after me.

Susie was quite thin when she came to us.  None of our dogs had ever been greedy, but Susie was never confident that there would ever be enough to eat at the next meal, so she might as well take advantage of every eating opportunity that came about.  This is typical of black Labs of course – in her later years when I’d left home and she didn’t get so much exercise, she became very overweight, nearly box-shaped, although it never seemed to affect her health and she lived to 16.

But this is going way ahead.  She had a lovely personality and my mother hankered after some puppies in the house again, and the next thing was that a litter of eight pups was born to Susie.  Simon was the father of course.  They were named Muldoon, Tutankhamun, Rameses, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, Xavia, Yolande and Zena.  A couple of themes going on there, it seems.  Homes were found for five of the puppies (my mother always regretted giving away Zena) but we kept three of them.  So the next three chapters will be given to Muldoon, Neffi and Cleo.

Zerlina and Gus went shoe shopping.  These are Gus’s First Ever proper shoes.  He is very proud.

And these are Zerlina’s new school shoes.  The little darling is still three years old for the next couple of weeks, yet she will start full-time school in September.  She’s looking forward to it, mind you.

We went for a walk by one of the Broads, then we went for an ice cream sundae at the pub.  Weeza and I also drank beer.  I emailed as much to Phil when I sent him pictures of the shoes.  He was awfully jealous.

I’ve bought some Adnams for him and will take it over tomorrow.  I am not a bad mother-in-law.