We moved up to 23 Superior Way, when Lin was about a year old and Mrs Ansell and Robbie Wassel lived across from us. Robbie was a year older than Geoff and was a bully. He used to chase Geoff around the block with a stick and I got fed up with it. Tom gave Geoff the stick and told him to chase Robbie and after that they became the best of friends.

Andy Ansell and Geoff got on very well together and used to hang around together. My main worry was the Waggoner’s Wells ponds and that they might be tempted to go down there. They were extremely dangerous and full of weed. Three young soldiers were drowned there one Sunday afternoon when they went out in an old punt and it sank. They became trapped in the weeds.

We used to go down there on Sunday afternoons for a walk around the ponds. There were swans and Geoff loved it there. Sometimes Kath and Ted would bring the twins, Brian and Colin, and we would all go down there.

We kept chickens and Geoff loved to collect the eggs, but people were always coming and telling me that he was poking the cockerels again.

Lin and Geoff used to pick all the summer bean flowers off! We couldn’t be cross with them when they presented them to us.

Tom and I used to ride our bikes with the child seats on the back with Lin and Geoff on board and walk when we got to the hills. We often rose to Selborne and on the way back we would stop at the pub in Headley and have a drink and some crisps. It was good fun but I was worn out by the time we got home! It wasn’t so much of a hill but a long slope from Selborne to Superior Camp.

On Coronation Day in 1953, we went to Ken Butcher’s, a West Indian who lived opposite, to watch it on his television. There was a celebration in a field and there were races and sideshows etc. Tom won the 100 yards race and I was mad because he fell over and split the only decent pair of trousers he owned.

There was a Walls Ice Cream van, which used to come round and at first we tried to trick the kids into thinking it was something else, but after a while they twigged. They used to call it the “bingdy bong man”.

Fred Hodgkinson made us a box kite from balsa wood and tissue paper and we took it to the old parade grounds to fly it. It got away from us and Nobby Clarke put his foot on the string and saved it.

There was a man called “Tiny” who worked at the Sewage Farm and he used to give us sludge, as garden fertiliser and wood for fencing.

Bill Reynolds used to ride from Headley and leave his bike at our place. He became “Bill Bicky” to the kids as he always brought biscuits on Thursdays. The kids seemed to know it was Thursday.

I took Geoff on his first day at school and he screamed his head off and tried to kick the teacher Miss Blackburn. He hated school until he was seven.

I didn’t take Lin for her first Day at school in case it was a repeat of Geoff’s performance, so Tom had the day off work to take her. She just walked in and asked where she had to sit!

When Lin started school Mrs Ansell and I used to go to jumble sales at Haslemere on our bikes, but that was after Geoff had got out of the habit of running home from school. He didn’t seem to take to school very well and when he went up to Tudor House he wouldn’t go without a packet of Spangles (sweets).

Geoff was very inventive and was always making things out of odds and ends. A hole in the bottom of the garden with the old round base of a stove, and it was a car. He once covered the lawn with small tents that he had made by tearing up squares of cloth and placing them over a central stick to make a sort of square wigwam. He said it was a camp for his solders. He had a fine collection of Dinky toys, which were all the rage then. He constructed a strange flower by putting a lot of flower heads onto a stick to form a sort of small lupin and arranging the leaves from another flower around the base and it foioled us for a while!

One of Geoff’s friends was Phillip Longhurst, who lived at Headley Down. His father had a vintage Morris Cowley. He picked Geoff up one day to go to a party at their place. It was about the only party I ever remember him going to.

Then we moved to Admers Crescent in Liphook. It was a brand new Council House.

Geoff had to go to Bramshott Boys School then. At first he wasn’t very good at going, but when he got used to it he was fine. They had to catch a bus on the A3 London/Portsmouth Road and then walk the mile or so up Bramshott Lane to school. Sometimes he would come home late after walking home and spending the bus fare on scratchings from the fish and chip shop or a slice of bread and margarine from Radford Café. I didn’t like that because it was dangerous road, but he survived.

Geoff learnt to ride my old Hopper bike up and down the back garden path well after Lin had learnt. Whilst learning I remember he crashed into a rose-covered trellis that Tom had built! Bikes were the love of his life and it wasn’t long before the chainguard and mudguards were removed from my old bike. He had a brand new dirt-tracking bike for on of his birthdays. He was forever dirt-tracking, whatever the weather and I always knew where he was and what he was doing.

He didn’t like fishing, too slow! He only went once with the boys who lived two doors down, Michael and David Sutton. He also made lots of billy-carts, using old wooden boxes, pram wheels and old reclaimed nails.

Bert Benham, the man living next door, gave him a bicycle sidecar and he bolted it onto his bike and took him for a ride, but the best was Speedy Gonzales, a sidecar that he built to ride in the Liphook Carnival. He had young David Hodgkinson in the sidecar.

Linda joined the Girl Guides and became a second. She enjoyed it but I think it disbanded in the end due to low numbers.

We had some great times at motor bike scrambles. I used to be busy on Saturdays cooking for the picnic on the Sunday and it was hot and dusty in the summer and cold, wet and muddy in the winter, but it got us out. Geoff’s favourite rider was Ron Stillo, and he used to sulk if he fell off, which invariably happened.

We often went to Bognor Regis with Win Dewberry, Uncle Reg and family. We didn’t have many holidays away, but we did stay at Hayling Island for a week when Geoff was about seven and Lin about five. It rained nearly every day. We had a bungalow and it blew half a gale most of the time. Geoff had a wooden sailing yacht and he sulked because he couldn’t sail it because the wind was too strong. We had to go to the beach, whatever the weather.

We also had a fortnight at Bognor Regis at a guesthouse run by a Mrs Gutsel. We went to then pictures there and saw Harry Belafonte in “Island in the Sun” and “Yangtze Incident”.

We went to Ilfracombe to Watermouth Caves for a week in a caravan, and it was a good holiday. I wasn’t very keen as it brought out my rheumatism and didn’t agree with me at all. I don’t like donkeys and I was trapped in the caravan by a pet one that always seemed to be around.

When Geoff was about twelve or thirteen, he and George Stapley, Chris Bedlow and Mick Bradford decided that they would go camping on their bikes. They set off fine, heading off on the A3 towards Portsmouth. We were going to do some shopping at Petersfield on Saturday morning and we came upon them repairing a puncture at the side of the road. Heaven knows how they got on or where they went, but one dark thundery night about six days later when all the power had failed, I heard this squelching outside. It was two polecats, stinking to high heaven. I gave Geoff and Mick Bradford a good meal and put them both to bed. The next day they were no worse for wear and they seemed to have had a good time.

When we had decided to move to Derby Mr McMullan told Tom about Rolls Royce and we thought it would be a good opportunity for Geoff to get an apprenticeship there if possible. He was very enthusiastic about that. Poor old Lin wasn’t so keen as she would have to go to school in Derby for a year.

Geoff went off to Derby to have his interview at Rolls Royce and they were happy to take him on. Tom and him lodged at Nan Turnbull’s in Hilton, near Derby and came home at the weekend on the motor bike and sidecar.

Lin and I were alone in Liphook until Tom found a house in Derby. Tom found it a bit cold coming home every weekend on the bike so we got a Ford Anglia.

It was a choice of two houses in Derby, a new one in Hilton or an old one in Chaddesden. We all thought that Buxton Road, Chaddesden was the most convenient for work etc.

Lin never really believed we would move and was very upset for a long time. I was pretty miserable too, because the house wasn’t nice and especially when one of the metal windows came away in my hand. The house made strange noises in the night that I couldn’t get used to. To crown it all Tom had to go on a course in Camberley. I couldn’t get warm in that house. I went to bed in socks, cardigans and a balaclava!

One night when the water tank was making a funny noise I asked Geoff what we would do if it burst and he said we would open the front door and sweep the water out. He told me to get into his bed and it was even colder than mine!

Rolls Royce seemed to be good for Geoff and he bought a BSA Bantam motorbike. Sometimes on the cold mornings he pushed it up and down the drive a couple of times to get it going. When he came home in the evening he often had a little dog chasing him.

I wonder what happened to the dog that bit him while he was riding the bike down Chequers Lane to the scrapyard one afternoon?

Soon after we moved to Derby Tom and I went to Bingo. Tom won forty two pounds. It was the first time we had been and we never went again. We found an advertisement for a caravan in Ilfracombe for forty two pounds, so we decided to go. Linda was going out with Chris and we asked him to come too. Geoff and he were on a bunk bed and in the middleof the night Geoff fell out of the top bunk and completely smothered Chris. They were up against the door and we couldn’t open it and it was a bit of a laugh!

Geoff announced that he was going to emigrate to Australia and I didn’t really think he would go through with it. I tried to block it from my mind but he was very determined and it would have been wrong of me to try and stop him. After all, I left home at fourteen and Tom at sixteen, so I guessed that would make it alright. That didn’t stop me worrying though. Linda sat on his empty bed for hours crying her eyes out, but like most things, we got used to it.

Geoff wasn’t a very good correspondent.