When you are ten ………. and the days are full of sun and adventures

When you are ten, away from your friends and spending the long summer holiday with your grandparent’s, time can hang heavy, especially as they had yet to own a TV.

I remember endless hours spent playing beside the ornamental ponds imagining them to be a series of secret lakes which hid mysterious monsters.

Or looking down into the apparently bottomless well in the greenhouse with the pungent odour of growing tomatoes and wondering who would rescue me if I fell in.

But these were as nothing compared to what greeted me in the hay loft above the barn at the bottom of the garden.

There was still a powerful lingering smell of hay which combined with the heat from the slates and the fustiness of the crumbling mortar made this a place with a difference.

If I were particularly daring I would open the loft hatch allowing fresh grass scented air to invade the room and look out across the fields. This was daring given the drop to the lane below seemed enormous.

On other days I just walked the country lanes, empty of everything but the occasional bird. There can be no greater sense of freedom than to be alone with just the hum from the telegraph wires and the blistering heat.

I don’t ever remember getting lost, but then I don’t suppose I ever went too far and never underestimate the homing powers of a ten-year-old who had not eaten since breakfast. Not that I remember many of the meals.

Our bread was baked at home on a huge black range. It was strong brown bread which granddad buttered before he cut a slice. The vegetables were also home grown and more than anything I remember her peas which Nana cooked using cloves which was fine until you ate one by mistake.

They had bought 170 and turned into bedsits with their living accommodation at the back of the house. I however got to stay in the front room and can still remember what seemed the long and scary walk from their kitchen.

The candle I took with me cast small pools of dim light and I was never quite sure what lurked in the corners of the passageway. True there was some safety when I got to the light switch by the front room but then there was still a night of darkness to endure punctuated only by the headlamps of passing cars.

Despite my nighttime fears this was a good place to grow up, and a world away from how my grandparents had lived close to the centre of Derby. In their two up two down terraced house in Hope Street people lived on top of each other, knew each other’s secrets and were even aware when they visited the outside lavatories in the back yard.

Chellaston and in particular 170 Derby Road were different. Our neighbour kept pigs at the bottom of his garden, there were fields behind us, and everywhere there was grass, trees, and open land.

 But I suppose these very things that had brought my grandparents to the village also brought others. They were in fact partly responsible having sold two of the three fields behind the house to a local builder who quickly filled them with houses.

The summer of 1961 was my last holiday there. I have to say the intervening years have wiped my childhood memories. The trolley bus terminus at Shelton Lock is fenced off and the disused weed infested canal has gone, and 170 Derby Road is no more.

We were lucky to visit just before it was demolished. In its empty, abandoned, and neglected state it seemed much smaller than I remembered. Nor did the garden seem to stretch forever while the stables had shrunk.

But I guess that is why we treasure those long ago memories belonging as they do to a time when the sun always shone, our grandparents were always cheerful and the worst that could befall a ten year old was a Sunday when it rained.

Location; Chellaston, 1959

Picture; open spaces, and secret hideaways, 1960-2018, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

My pacamac and a day in August 1957

When you are nine years old and spending the summer in the village of Chellaston, time can hang heavy, especially when it’s raining.

They say you only remember the sunny summer holidays; well this is true only up to a point.

Given our English weather all too often I woke to a wet morning. And as if to rub salt into the wound
it would still be hot which made it a double whammy.

Hot enough to go out in just shorts and shirt which in August is how it should be but so wet that there was no fun in being outdoors.

To make matters worse Nana would insist I wore my pacamac which was ideal for summer showers. But they were a cruel invention. Despite being light and flexible enough to be squeezed into a small bag they smelt awful and were a nightmare to wear.

It didn’t take long before the warmth of the body trapped in a sheet of clinging plastic made you sweat and the more you walked the hotter and more uncomfortable you became. Which meant you had a choice, wear it and suffer or take it off, get wet and suffer later when Nana discovered that this act of rebellion had got me soaked.

Now their garden was a big one, which they had lovingly restored. The ornamental ponds had been repaired and once again water trickled from one to another down one side of the garden. They had replanted the Japanese bushes and tamed the overgrown trees.

All of which was fine on a dry summer day, but after a night of rain and some brief but powerful morning showers, the bushes and trees held the water like a reservoir. And I never seemed able to avoid them. Even if I took care not to brush up against the bushes which would smother you in wet clinging leaves there was the ever present danger from trees, any one of which could send an avalanche of rain drops on to the back of your shirt or worse still down your neck.

All of which meant you were forced back into the house. Now my grandparents didn’t have a television back in 1958, and with grandfather out at work and Nana doing something, the long morning from breakfast stretched out before with little hope that the tedium could be broken.

The house was large or so it seemed to me, but it had been turned into bed sits and so I was confined to the kitchen, scullery and the posh front room. There was also my grandparent’s bedroom which was off the kitchen but this held little mystery and any way was their private place.

So it had to be the posh front room which was like a grave yard. The furniture was the “best” and never used and so the room had an air of being forgotten. It also had an odd smell which I suppose came about because for most of the year it was never used and not even aired properly. Nana kept it spotless but it somehow smelt dusty. Nor was it much fun to be in. The clock on the mantel piece ticked away and emphasised that it was the only thing in the room that regularly did anything.

This just left the landing with a fine old massive oil painting hanging from the wall. When all else fails a gigantic depiction of some historical event is guaranteed to pass the time. There were days when I sank myself into the picture reliving the event and acting out the story. And there were other days when I tried copying some of the detail. Eventually my grandparents took advice, had it cleaned and sold.

The same fate befell the suit of Japanese armour which had somehow been left by the previous owner. It fitted perfectly but even at nine I was aware that it might have been valuable and so it became something to put on and then take off. Sadly I never remember fending off fierce Samurai warriors or saving a young girl from the hands of an oriental dragon. On the other hand the army holster from the Great War was something different. It had that strong leather smell and was perfect for the Roy Rogers cap pistol. I kept both in a draw in the cupboard beside the kitchen range.

And more often than not when the posh room and the landing had been exhausted it would be the kitchen I sat in.

Thinking back I am amazed at how my grandparents lived in just two rooms.

There was their bedroom and the kitchen. The kitchen doubled up as the main living space, work area and of course the place we ate. But then they had spent almost their entire married life in a two up two down in Hope Street.

So nothing had changed except for the garden. Here they spent much of their time. Granddad in the greenhouse with his tomatoes and Nana pouring over the vegetable patch.

Even now sixty three years later the memories of that green house are powerfully vivid. Nothing prepared you for the heat as you entered or that pungent smell of tomatoes or the damp. Behind all that glass it was a silent place and for a nine year old it held my attention for about ten minutes.

Which was about right, because summer showers eventually go away and are replaced by sunshine. And that of course is another of those experiences of summer that has never left me, that damp warm smell of wet grass which you know soon enough will be dry and offers the promise of hot carefree afternoon under an August sun.

Location; Chellaston


Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, circa 1957-2020