Hi! I am Back

Hello everyone. I am back. Have missed you all.

We had a wonderful time driving to and walking round so many beautiful villages in the most stunning countryside.

Afternoon tea and cakes next on the agenda.

Our cottage on a working farm was superb.

We left the Cotswolds on Friday, spent a couple of hours on the way home at Janie's as she had been home from work with a nasty infection, got home, had a quick meal and then straight out again to a 'drop in' nibbles and drinks evening at a friends home.

Since then have not stopped, you know - the usual - unpacking, catching up with events, church, looking after our son's home and cats while he is in Spain, the garden and now it is Monday.

I went into my E-mails and there amongst the 88 waiting for me there was one I had to deal with right away. My server was telling me that I was up to full capacity in Outlook Express and if I did not clear some files quickly then I would not be able to receive my E-mails and they could not store them.

So before I even thought about blogging I needed to deal with this. So looks like this is another chore that has been neglected since I started blogging!

So I am looking forward to catching up with you all. I have downloaded about 320 photos from the Cotswolds.

I don't know how long it will take me to get them all sorted and filed but I will be posting many of them eventually.

To wet your appetite I'll leave you with this picture of the Fleece Inn in Bretforton.

Holiday and an Indian Summer

The last post before going away for this seriously addicted blogger.

Due to a problem in ordering a spare picture card on line I now have 2GB of picture cards for my camera. That's 640 photos! I'm sure I could find enough in The Cotswolds to use this amount but maybe not when I think of the time involved in filing etc that amount of photos.

As I am as addicted to photography as I am to blogging, who knows though!

Before I even think of posting Cotswolds photos I want to do my posts on Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill's country home and also Blenheim Palace which is his ancestral home and the place where he was born.

See I am already thinking about blogging when I come home! How sad.

But for today

Some delicate colour in one of the borders that was seriously affected by the hailstorm.

Nature does repair itself. With a little help from me of course!

I always prune back any shrub that has flowered and in doing this I get another late flowering as seen here. Never as striking as the first but good all the same.

Plus the sky last night and some cards I made this week

Hope you all have a good week, I will miss everyone.

MY STORY Chapter 3 - Early Family Life

I would like to acknowledge the help I have received in getting a new header up and running.

Linda of Crafty Gardener very kindly did this for me.

Like most others I'm sure I will be experimenting with different pictures over time.

For new visitors to my blog who might be interested, Introduction and chapter 2 can be found listed under My Story on the sidebar

Chapter 3 Early Family Life

In the last chapter I majored on my memories of life during World War 2. This chapter covers more personal family life up until the time I met Alan and we got married. Obviously it is only a flavour as it would take forever to go into detail. My childhood was painful and traumatic at times due to a violent and heavy drinking Father.

I don’t have a lot of memories of the very early years. We lived with my maternal Grandparents, my Father being at sea in the Navy for some of the time. I remember an elderly great Uncle also living in the house who was suffering from Dementia and to a small child this was very frightening. I used to run past his bedroom door, hoping that he would not appear. Also during the war years we gave a boarding base to 3 French sailors whenever they were in the country.

It was after we moved to our own home when I was about 5 that I recall things becoming very difficult. I remember one particular day when my Father sat me on the kitchen table and asked me who I loved best, him or my Grandfather. Being young I obviously did not understand the implications of the question so just told the truth – my Grandfather. My Father went into a rage shaking me violently and beating up my Mother. Looking back I realise that my Father must have been deeply jealous of the input my maternal Grandparents had in my life. For me it was a lifesaver. Also I now see that he was a very disturbed and unhappy man.

My Mother’s only sibling, my Aunt, did not marry until she was 38 so she lived at home with my Grandparents too and she was like a second Mother to me. She adored me as I was her only niece. She paid for elocution, tap and ballet lessons, bought and made me clothes, and generally made a difference in my life.

When I think of my home life the over riding sense is one of physical and emotional abuse, accompanied by constant fear and tension which increased the nearer it got for the time for my Father to return from work. There were many times when we were not even allowed to speak and I was very afraid to be alone with my Father. Once when out alone with him in the countryside in the dark I was absolutely terrified that I would not survive. To this day I do not know why. My Mother spent her time trying to ‘keep the peace’ and as a result suffered a lot of depression and ill health. We moved to a larger house when I was about 8 years old. I had 2 surviving brothers by this time and was able for the first time to have a bedroom of my own.

From a young child, I always had a deep awareness of God (I was told that I stood on the platform at church, aged 4, saying that I wanted to be a missionary) and in these traumatic times I came to know God in a personal way. He became my personal Saviour when I gave my life to Him at a Youth for Christ meeting when I was 11 and was baptized in water. Alone at night I remember really sensing the presence of God as I talked to Him and prayed.

When I was 10 years old I was awarded an Art Scholarship. I went to a Grammar school, my parents preferring this to the Liverpool Art School where the Beatles later went. I did not enjoy the Grammar school and always felt that I did not fit in.

Around this time my Father went to live in London. I never knew why, nobody ever said. While there out of loneliness he went to a Pentecostal church and gave his life to Christ. He then came home but nothing seemed to have changed except that he stopped drinking and smoking. He started breaking up lots of crockery in the home. Apparently this had been stolen and he wanted nothing more to do with it. For a child this was frightening and bewildering. I was still frightened of him and he became maniacal in his beliefs. We were forced to kneel down for ages in the evenings while he prayed long prayers. His God was not the God I knew, I did know that. We were not allowed friends in the house during the whole of my childhood and in a way I was glad as I did not want friends to know what was going on at home.

It was in this environment that I came to really know God for myself, I truly knew Him as a friend, comforter and Saviour. I would be locked in my bedroom at night, with no access to my Mother, too afraid to call out, even when ill, as this would disturb my Father. However I did know God as my strength and reality and would pray and talk to Him endlessly.

When I was 11 years old my Aunt married and went to live about 200 miles away, much further north and on the other side of the country. This meant that I was able to go and stay with her for school Summer holidays. I have lasting memories of the good times I had. When I was 13 my fourth brother was born. It came as a shock as that was the last thing I could ever have imagined at that age. As I was that much older I was expected to be very hands on in helping to care for him, so we bonded well. My Father took a special interest in him and cared for him in a way he never did the rest of his children. He always said that he felt he had been given a second chance with this child.

When I was 15 my Father took a glass of Guinness because he was unwell and that was the beginning of his drinking again and his walking away from God. He became more violent than ever and I was witness to some very unpleasant scenes of physical, mental and emotional abuse of myself, my brothers and my Mother. I would walk the streets at night crying and praying as I was often too frightened to go home.

My life outside of home was very different. I belonged to the Girl Guides and Rangers and spent many weekends camping. I was a Campanologist (Bell ringer). I bought my first bicycle at 16 and spent many weekends with friends cycling around the mountains of North Wales. Jobs were easy to come by in the 50’s so I tried a number of avenues before finding out what I really wanted to do. There were many happy memories.

However, there was one memory that was not a happy one, and it shows how different things could be in those days. I took a job in a company importing fruit and after some weeks I began to feel very uneasy. I sensed there were things going on behind the scenes that were not right. I was asked to go into work one Sunday morning and the scene I witnessed was so shocking that I could not write about here. I left abruptly. When I went in to work the next day my desk had been put out into the corridor and all my belongings piled on top of it. I was so traumatised by this whole event that I left the city and went to live with my Aunt for some months and got a job near to her. I did not even tell my parents what had happened.

In all this confusion and agony I began a serious relationship with a non-Christian and stopped attending church. I was looking for love and acceptance and ended up in wrong and sinful relationships. However, the more I travelled down this road I was aware of God prompting me (almost like a parrot sitting on my shoulder). He kept saying that there was no other way but Him. I felt that God’s hand was on me and that He would not let me go. I also did nothing about it as I felt too sinful. I somehow felt that I had to get my act together and become a much better person before God would accept me. Grace was something that I did not understand at that point. I also thought it was down to me and not God to change my life.

To be continued……………..

Cotswolds in Watercolour

We are going to The Cotswolds on Friday for a week. We have rented a cottage on a sheep farm. I will not have access to a computer - how will I survive!

It is such a pretty area that I can't imagine how many photos I will be taking. Have taken photos there in the past but that was in the days before digital cameras.

These are a few paintings that I have done of the area. They are framed and the photos taken through glass so the reflection affects them.

A visit with Princess Diana's Father

In reading others blogs this weekend, I realise that a number are referring to the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death.

It reminded me of a time when I met her Father when visiting her ancestral home Althorpe. Diane was still alive at this time.

I said to her Father, Earl Spencer, that I expected that he was very proud of his daughter Diana. You know what he said, "I am very proud of all of my children" Wasn't that nice.

I bought a bottle of wine from his wine cellars and he signed the label for me. I threw it away when having a clear out some time ago, only to realise that there were folks in the USA who would have loved to have the label.

Hyde Hall

We visited Hyde Hall Gardens a few weeks ago.

This is somewhere we like to visit at different seasons of the year.

Hyde Hall was one time a private residence but it now belongs to The British Horticultural Society who have extended the gardens enormously.

It is only 45 minutes from home.

The first picture is of part of the library there. Every book is about gardening and plants.

The last picture is of the wild flower meadow.

I do hope you enjoy the gardens as we did.

Garden Reality

Thought we'd have a little reality here. I have so many people enjoying my garden but thought I would show you the other side for a change.

We have 2 garden sheds and this is one of them. I have been wanting an opportunity to empty it and get it cleaned up. It is also in need of some repair. It is amazing what collects in these places when neglected for a few years.

We cleared out old sun umbrellas, beach windbreak, horrible old covers for garden furniture, never used. Rusty screws and the like, rusty garden tools, a host of unopened and old packets of seeds, wire, empty boxes, numerous tins of old and solid paint, mildewed cushions, old pots, rotten garden gloves and much, much more - you get the picture!

And now restoration has begun

and it is looking a lot cleaner and more organised

Our second shed which is much newer and more organised

And here to give a little light relief, some of the colours today.

In the right hand bottom corner, the old shed door.

The window in the background is where I sit and read the newspaper after breakfast and look our onto the garden

I am so glad that this job is being tackled.

Just part of the week. It began with Janie and family coming over for the Bank Holiday on Monday.

We then began the shed overhaul on Tuesday (continuing today Thursday).

Wednesday we had a day out visiting Sir Winston Churchill's home and garden. I took lots of photos of this beautiful place and will post in due course. Will be a treat.

Tomorrow we are out for dinner and over the weekend our church will be working hard Spring cleaning the school that is part of our church.

Just a few highlights of my week.