Photograph Albums

Both Richard and I had photo albums given to us when we went to school in England. This one is Richard's - on the cover he is "Haylett mi", the small Haylett, and he had this at our prep school, Glengorse, because his school number, 62, is under his name.

The photos were taken on a box Brownie, almost certainly the Flash III, and later on a Kodak Brownie 127. I had the latter with me at Glengorse for a time.

Each page displays a muddle of photographs, usually very poorly aligned. These ones are dated between 1951 and 1956, when we had the second house in Cliff Avenue in Mombasa. Tinker the cat, Susie the dachshund, and Clario the chicken are shown in the first four pictures being fed on the covered way which ran from the back of the main building to the kitchen block. There is also a picture of an Arab dhow passing in front of a headland, two pictures of our neighbour, David, with the cook's son, Barasa, in our front drive, and pictures of Kilindini docks and anchorage.

Another page shows Tinker and Clario sharing lunch, a turtle caught by fishermen, my parents in the front drive, and baobabs and the Likoni ferry. Several pictures are missing. They probably just fell out but my mother did have a habit of editing our albums' contents.

The haphazard layout of the albums suggest that it was Richard and I who put the pictures in using the very fiddly corner mounts. This would also explain why there is nothing written in the albums. I suppose we knew that we would recognise everything and everyone so there wasn't much point. What we never thought was that they would still be looked at over sixty years later.

Mad as a February Hare

What with our seeing very few hares over the winter, with news of the local hares suffering from European brown hare virus, and with notices going up all over the place warning people to be aware of hare coursing, we have been very worried about the local population but today, while walking across this field....

....we came across three hares which were definitely fit and well and as mad as February hares, as they started by running towards us and only....

 ....turned away when they were almost upon us. They bolted towards....

....this brambly bank and, even then, stopped to watch us for a few moments before disappearing.

The bank is riddled with burrows which we assume are hare burrows - they certainly showed signs of recent excavation and lots of footprints, and....

....what we took to be piles of hare droppings.

It was lovely to see them, and we do hope that all the madness results in lots of new hares in 2019.

The Hurricane

By 1987 we were able to afford to have the roof of our house felted, which involved lifting all the heavy 11" clay tiles, removing the mortar between them, laying felt, and replacing the tiles. The job was done by one rather old man and he had just removed most of the tiles and stacked them in rather precarious-looking piles on the roof when....

....the southeast of England was hit by the infamous Great Storm of the night of 15th October, the one that weather forecaster Michael Fish said wouldn't happen. We lay in bed listening to objects sliding off the roof and had visions of all our tiles destroyed but what we heard were the bits of mortar on the move - not one tile was lost.

The wind was still gusting in the morning when we rose to survey the wreckage but nothing deterred Gill from....

....the day's normal routines.

The worst damage was to the local trees. Many came down all over Maldon, several in the grounds of The Plume, which meant the school was closed for three days while the wreckage was removed. Roofs, including that of my parents' house, lost slates and tiles, and many fence panels were destroyed - one is visible missing beyond Gill in this photograph.

Kirton

With another fine, warm February day forecast for today, we walked to the northwest of our house, using footpaths and country lanes and meeting no-one outside the built-up areas except a dog-walker, a couple of cyclists, and a runner.

Kirton is a dormitory village for Woodbridge, Ipswich and Felixstowe, with many new houses and, judging by the notices of protest in several gardens, the promise of more housing development in the latest local authority plans.

The only services we could find were an occasional bus service to Woodbridge and Felixstowe, a pub, a village shop which has, sadly, recently closed, a village hall and a church hall, and a beautiful little church which traces its vicars back to the 13th century. Every driveway had a car in it so the village's population is dependent on deliveries or driving to the shops.

We spent time wandering around the carefully-kept interior of the church and rescuing a tortoiseshell butterfly which had over-wintered in it but was now desperate to get out, and then went and sat in the graveyard.

A feature of some of the graves which I have not seen before is a smaller headstone placed in front of a larger, often with only a brief inscription, and usually obscuring the dedication on the main stone.

In this example, the big stone reads "In Memory of Thom...." with, in a different font above it, the word "Also", as if this had been added after the smaller stone was placed in front of it. The smaller stone reads "I   C", then "1811" then "T + C" then "1819". I wonder if the smaller stone commemorates a child, "TC", who died aged eight.

Dorset Holiday

In the summer of 1987 we had a holiday in Dorset, taking a caravan at Eype near Bridport. We drove down in the Sunflower van with....

....Lizzie and David rattling around on cushions in the back, Katy being on a water sports holiday in the south of France.

I knew this part of Dorset from my geology days as a spectacular stretch of coastline. It is formed of Jurassic rocks, the hill in the middle distance, Golden Cap, being Jurassic oolites.

We walked miles along the coast paths....

....and sat in the sunshine enjoying super views, with remarkably few other people around.

It must have been exceptionally hot as it takes a lot to get me into a British sea. However, we did spend a fair amount of time looking for fossils, particularly ammonites, along the beach, some of which I still have.

Cocktail Sticks

I have three cocktail sticks, each about 3" long, which date back to my Mombasa life. They live in a small white envelope and, because they were never part of the collection kept in the small brown case, they were continually getting lost. It's taken me several days and a fair bit of searching to find them again - they were in one of the three drawers at the bottom of the old Arab chest.

Two of them are Clan Line, and one is from the British India passenger ship SS Uganda. I assume the former came from visits on board ship with my father, whose company was agents for the Glasgow-based Clan Line. He liked these ships because their captains used to spoil him by bringing him a box of Scottish kippers. He loved kippers but his favourite herring was Norfolk bloaters.

I always thought the Clan boats - this is the Clan Shaw - were the very best of the many fine ships built in British yards in the decades after the Second World War. They had sleek lines, sported a black funnel with two deep red bands round it, and always seemed to be kept in top condition - the brasswork shone. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was the Clan Line I wanted to join as an officer cadet, an idea which was only shaken out of my head when I spent several weeks at sea on the Harrison Line Arbitrator on my way to Cape Town and on to Southern Rhodesia in 1963 - story here.

The Uganda stick must have come from my voyage back on her at the end of my time in Southern Rhodesia, when I hitched to Mombasa, stayed with the Chethams, and then returned to England on her - story here. I travelled tourist class and they wouldn't have given out these sticks to the likes of me, so I must have acquired it from first class: I wish I could remember how.

Maldon Sports

1986 and 1987 saw several members of the family taking part in sporting events including the Maldon Marafun. In this picture Gill is wearing one of my precious Bob Dylan t-shirts purchased after we'd been to see him perform at Wembley.

In these pictures Lizzie and....

....David are running along Fambridge Road near where my parents lived.

David, always keen on football, was given this strip, of which he was very proud. He tells me it isn't a specific strip as it has no badge, but he also, at some stage, had a Liverpool  away kit which was grey and white. The picture was taken outside the front door of 4 Lodge Road. Later his interest in football would be encouraged by our active support of Ipswich Town.

This has nothing to do with sports but I couldn't resist adding it, Elizabeth dressed as a Goth standing outside the back door.

Drainage

To the west of the town the flat land on which much of it lies drops gently away, the landscape changing from fields of wheat, sugar beet, potatoes and onions to smaller fields divided by old hedgerows in which....

....the first spring blossom is beginning to appear.

There are ponds along this gentle escarpment where mallard have overwintered. Local people drive out to this particular pond because they can park right beside it and, without leaving their cars, feed the ducks.

The land here is drained by small ditches which, in the bright weather of the last few days, have water beetles skimming their surfaces and the first lesser celandine flowering along their banks.

These ditches lead down into reed-lined fleets which wander across lands occupied by extensive fields in which the winter wheat is being....

....grazed by families of mute swans, a mixture of adults and last year's young, seen here on King's Fleet.

The weather is exceptionally warm, up to 14C out of the breeze, and this has encouraged the coltsfoot along the fleet banks to burst into flower.

The biggest fleets are pumped out into the Deben estuary. Each time we walk along the Deben's flood wall we see a few small groups of wildfowl but their numbers and variety seem limited compared to last year. Yesterday we stopped to watch half-a-dozen shelduck, the first we've seen this winter.

My Parents Move to Maldon

My parents were fine living in Hastings High Street as long as my father was well. Although he had been very firm about giving up driving when he was 70, my mother stuck at it so they were still able to visit pubs and go to cricket - for example, to Canterbury with old friends such as Bill and Margaret Solly, who came over from the Isle of Man every year to stay with them. This is my father outside one of his favourite pubs, the Ferry Inn near Appledore in Kent.

By 1985 he was sufficiently unwell for us to feel that he and my mother should move up to join us in Maldon. It was a difficult decision as they still had many friends in Hastings - this is my father, at right, with his great friend Gordon Faulkner (in the bow tie) at the Cinque Ports in Hastings - but I felt the house they were in wasn't suitable for them as they aged, and I wanted to be near so I could support my mother as my father declined.

I think they finally managed to sell 117a in 1986 and move to a house which Gill found them in Fambridge Road, within easy walking distance of us and just down the road from my school. My mother quickly became involved with All Saints church in Maldon, including singing in the choir with her grandchildren, and my father established himself as a regular at the Blue Boar on weekday lunchtimes. I would pop down after school on a Friday evening to see them, on one occasion taking a colleague and friend of mine, Patrick Noonan, with me, to discover that his father had worked with my father in Dar-es-Salaam.

We also had lunch with them almost every Sunday, taking turns to be host, which meant that they saw a great deal more of their grandchildren. By that time we were making lots of home-made wine and my mother used to drink a good proportion of it.

My mother wrote in my father's 'Life' that she subsequently thought the move a mistake, in particular because they missed their Hastings friends. Such decisions are always difficult ones but, from a purely selfish point-of-view, I am pleased they did make the move.

Hydra

During our holiday in Greece in 2007, we took a boat out to the small island of Hydra. It was midday on a scorching day with hardly a breath of wind but this didn't prevent us from doing what we so often do when we first arrive in a strange place - leave the tourist bustle and walk out of town.

We followed a track which skirted the coast. Hydra has the minimum of motorised transport so walking would have been a pleasure, except that it became hotter and hotter and the little taverna which we had imagined we would stumble upon simply did not materialise until, just as we were about to turn back....

....we came round a corner and found the Greek version of paradise.

The restaurant was perched over a harbour in a small bay and was almost empty of clientele. Gill did her usual thing of heading straight for the water for a swim while Rachael and I sat at a table and enjoyed the peace of the place.

We were served lunch by a very pleasant young Greek with whom we tried to exchange Rachael for a plot of land but, much to our disappointment, neither he nor Rachael seemed very keen on the idea.

We were only ashore in Hydra for a few hours but it was one of those places to which I took an immediate liking. While the town was crowded - it was June - the countryside seemed remarkably empty. Later, we talked idly of moving to Greece: had we done so we would have looked for somewhere like Hydra.