Nostalgia

Georgina got back from her adventure in Africa last week so I took her over to Melton to see her Grandparents. You can see Dad in the background looking at the MK Citizen that I took over as it had a photo of Molly Waugh in it. Molly is Harriet’s paternal Grandmother (Molly Nanny) and had been invited to have tea at Buckingham palace because of her work over the years associated with Sistric fibrosis. Well done Molly and keep it up; a cure seems to be on the horizon.

After a lovely roast beef and Yorkshire pudding lunch we shot of on a nostalgic tour of the area. I had quite recently found out that I was born in a house that I couldn’t remember. The reason being that we moved when I was only 6 months old and can only remember the house that we moved into for the next 14 years before moving into their current house. This little cottage on Ironstone lane in Scalford and when we lived there it had no gas supply, no electric supply and no water supply. When Mum got up in the morning she had to go out with her torch to the farm opposite and draw some water from the well, take it home, light the fire and heat a kettle on the fire for their first cup of tea. She said that in the winter, sometimes she would have to boil water first to defrost the well pump before she could draw more up. My Aunt Daphne told me when we visited last week that she had come to stay there for my first 2 weeks of life and neither of them had a clue what to do and that it is a wonder I had survived it. Kids today don’t know they are born.

We then drove off to Buckminster to see where Mum and Dad had lived prior to getting married. This first house is where Dad lived as a German prisoner of war along with 4 other German prisoners. The second house is where Mum lived with her Mother and only the foreman’s house was between the two cottages. Her Mother remarried after Mum got married and was dead within 3 months in very suspicious circumstances. While I was doing my family history a few years ago I found that he had married at least two other old widows that had also died within the first 6 months of marriage. We went to visit My Grandmothers grave in Buckminster as Mum hadn’t been there for years. Although I remember as a child we seemed always to be going there with fresh flowers. It’s a shame I never met her before she died.

While we were at this graveyard as I was looking at the gravestones for other relatives Mum said that her Grandparents were also buried there. I didn’t know that, you thought someone would have told me when I was doing my family research. Anyway I took a picture of John James Briggs grave with his wife Elizabeth’s behind. John James was born in 1859 and was one of 12 children; they didn’t have TV’s in those days.