A modest piece of land

 My husband's Auntie Kath started writing up the family history before she was incapacitated by a stroke; these were working people, living through the depression and WWII. But they managed to put money aside and buy a piece of land not too far away from their London council house. Kathleen and her sister Thelma speak of the place with obvious affection:

Before WW2 my father became a carpenter and bought the fencing that was being replaced by iron railings round Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow.  A quarter acre of land had been purchased In Doddinghurst in Essex. I can’t imagine it would have cost much to buy in those days as they didn’t have much money. With the fencing he built a two-roomed bungalow that the family used to go to at weekends and holidays. 

It was called Thelmadene and after the war this was a place in the countryside that I came to love. It was a very carefree place, among farms, with just two shops at different ends of the road. They were both “General Stores” and one included a café. The one we used most was closest to the bus stop at the green. The store smelt of bacon and paraffin and you could buy just about everything there. The bus close by would run a few times a day to the bigger town of Brentwood. I am told that before I was born my father used to bicycle there with my sister in a sidecar.  

I remember it as a place of freedom where you could be out all day adventuring and someone would come looking for you at tea time. But this was later after the war. I remember my mother telling me that they used to go there during the war when I was a baby until the time the army located an anti-aircraft gun on the front of our piece of land and kept firing away all night and no one could get any sleep. 

The bungalow consisted of one living room and one bedroom. There always seemed to me room enough for everyone to sleep no matter how many people stayed. I remember the old iron bedstead that I used to sleep in with Thelma or any other children who stayed. It was all so warm and comfortable. One morning I awoke to a big cow poking its head through the open window sniffing my bedclothes. 

Whenever we would arrive and unlock the door, something would always scurry across the floor out of sight. Rabbits burrowed under the house so sometimes mum would lay a snare at night and we would have rabbit casserole the next day. My mother cooked on a coal range or sometimes outside in a fire built in a hole dug in the ground. We had paraffin lamps for light and in the evening we used to play a lot of card games. We had a fancy carved old chaise longue which would be worth a fortune today, and a huge mirror with a twisted carved oak frame that covered the dividing wall between the two rooms, and came from a tailors. I wonder how they got that there?

Mother, daughter and cousins having tea with a half-built Thelmadene in the background