Cranham Close

This painting of Cranham Close, seen from the front garden, hangs in our bedroom. It was the house that Gill moved to when she was 14 or 15, before her father became Chief Executive of Gloucestershire County Council. It stood on the scarp of the Oolitic limestones on the A46 between Stroud and Cheltenham, and was built of the local Cotswold stone.

It was a beautiful house, with a large sitting room - extended by the Rogers while they were there - a snug, a dining room, a large kitchen with a big solid fuel Esse, a pantry which had a stillage on which the butter and other diary produce lived, and five bedrooms upstairs. Gill's room was the one on the end at the left.

The house stood in large grounds on the corner where a lane off the A46 led to the pretty little Cotswold village of Cranham. A little further down the A46, on the other side of the road, a drive went down to Prinknash Abbey where the monks made a living by producing pottery.

The area in the foreground of this picture was a tennis court which Gill and her sister Pauline used but when they began to leave home their father Don turned it into an extension of the garden. Before they sold Cranham Close it, and some of the land between it and the Cranham road, were sold as a building plot.