By the time we moved to Fountain Lane my mother and father had left Little Heath, their very pleasant house on the northern outskirts of Hastings, and moved....
....back into Old Hastings, to 117a High Street. The house was in a good position in the town, in a relatively quiet area but within easy walking distance of my father's favourite pubs, particularly the Cinque Ports, where he could meet good friends like Gordon Faulkner.
Little Heath had been a relatively modern, well-built house, whereas 117a was old, narrow, rather dark, and had only a small, terraced, and a not very sunny garden.
It was here that, in the first half of 1977, we saw my brother Richard again who, having split with his wife Mary and spent the years since 1973 in Australia, was in the UK for a visit.
This picture was taken in the sitting room, which was at the back of the house. The door behind my father led to the stairs and to a narrow dining room which was most easily accessed from the public 'twitten', or passage, which ran up the side of the house.
While we were visiting Richard's daughter Samantha came down from Canterbury where she had been living with her maternal grandparents, her mother having remarried.
Richard had settled around Perth in Western Australia where he had various jobs, one of which was with a geological survey company. Richard went out with wet-behind-the-ears geology graduates, often from English universities, to look after them while they carried out mineral surveys often in very remote areas, like the Great Sandy Desert, and make sure they got back to Perth alive. Since Richard is extremely practical, and has an uncanny sense of location, he was well suited to the job.
Schoolteachers may have had plenty of holidays but they were badly paid so Hastings became our frequent holiday destination. Sometimes our whole family descended on my parents; at others, we met them at a pub half way between Hastings and Hockley and handed the girls over to them.
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