My mother’s photo album illustrates a tradition of summer seaside holidays, starting when I was aged two in 1928 and continuing to 1931. Successively at Sandwich, Littlehampton, Westgate, Alnwick and Broadwater, my younger brother Rupert and I ‘bathed’ at the water’s edge in the company of an inflatable rubber seal and look happy building sand castles with tin buckets and spades and sitting on an assortment of donkeys and…
This week’s episode relates the romantic details of a highly unusual love story. How many girls select their future husband at the age of seven? My Scottish maternal grandfather Colonel Herbert Brander CB spent his entire career in the Indian Army with the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, rising to be its Commandant. (His adventurous story is told in my book “Waziristan to Tibet” which is available from Barnes & Noble.)…
Blogetty Blog 4: Caterpillars The caterpillar cages were an outstanding feature of our schoolroom. They have emerged clearly as I have dredged my brain for childhood memories, Made of plain unpainted white wood with glass doors hinged to open at the front, they were large enough to hold water vases for small tree ‘branchlets’: perhaps 18 – 24 inches square by 10 inches deep. There were at least two…
The entrance hall in Warnham Court, my grandfather’s house in Sussex - where I lived as a child with my parents, Geoff and Aileen, and my younger brother Rupert, as well as my Uncle and Aunt and their children - was flanked on one side by the Dining Room, a spacious room with east and south windows affording wonderful views across the deer park; and on the other by…