Thursday 29th October 2020

 It was my birthday on October 27th, I would have written earlier but things went so quickly.  I bought a gluten free cake to share up SP2 cafe, I'm not saying how old I am because I hate age and it's only a number.

Apparently I came screaming into the world on a Friday at 11am, my mum thought I was wind!  Well I certainly came 'breezing in'.  

At the time we lived at Clifton Road and where this house now stands, was a red telephone box where he had to go and phone the hospital to get mum in.  Dad wasn't in the room when I beamed out, there was a lovely Indian summer afterwards so I was told.  My earliest memory is of a seagull flying overhead with sunlit wings, I will write about Teignmouth later.  

Aunt Joan sent me some money which was very kind of her, things are a bit different this year because of the pandemic.  I had some candles which Erin presented to me on a cup, I did make a wish but I'm not saying a word; har har.

I stayed the night up my parents, they wanted to leave Clifton Road because it was damp and had cockroaches; apparently i tried to eat one when i was a toddler!  Our dog Jinky used to follow them across the kitchen floor, apparently they came from the gasworks.

Sometimes aunt Francis (grans sister) stayed with us, I shared a room with her when gran died.  Sometimes during the night when i couldn't sleep I would get up and stand at the window overlooking the darkness of the back garden, it it had been raining i would stare through the raindrops on the glass.  The orange sodium lights would make strange patterns in the water, sometimes I would see dad comes out from the outside WC, ciggerett in mouth; luckily he doesn't smoke anymore or so he says.

On the right hand side was a stone wall bordering a passage, in those days it was used quite a lot; but now it's rather overgrown.  I remember people carrying ladders down the passage which went up behind the houses, I wonder if that was there in 1912?

Aunt Francis lived in the village of South Newton just outside of Salisbury, in Val Vue Road.  She had a bungalow with a vegetable patch overlooking fields out the back, nothing compared to the beauty i saw in Cornwall; but the smell of Rhubarb brings it all back.  She had a tabby cat called Topsy who I thought was the bee's knees, Topsy is long gone now.  When aunt Joan, uncle Mike and my cousins came to visit, we used to go for walks along a big cornfield to where another ancestor lived in a farm called Folly Farm.  Grans mother and father lived here.  It's now a nature reserve, the old farmhouse was taken down years.

I remember great aunt Francis has blue painted bathroom with one of those awful chain pull toilets.  Sometimes when it was dark, the Milky Way could be spotted over the fields.    

There's a few manor houses in South Newton which I expect have seen a lot of history, I'd like to go round there and take a few picture's.