Hi Everybody
Just to share some other memories I found in that camera. On a couple of the other photos on the memory stick more of the garden is showing behind Stephen.
For 5 years after moving in here we concentrated on making the house "habitable" Ok we had running water, a smelly working loo, and windows, although we couldn't see out of the kitchen window for the caked on grease. (I pressed so hard on the stanley blade to get the grease off, that the back of the blade sliced my thumb open)
The stairs stunk of animal urine, and out the back there was a hundred foot piece of ground covered in waist high weeds, an old, dumped, rusting car and numerous amounts of half buried rubbish (including a bedstead!)
Daughter, Donna, who must have been about 12 or 13 at the time wailed that she wanted to go home and Stephen promised that he would make it look nice. Her brother, who is 9 years younger couldn't give a hoot. It was odd to think that a couple and 3 young children had lived in this place for @ 5 years before we moved in.
Around 1987 the house was a great deal better. It is an ordinary, 3 bed, double fronted semi in the London borough of Bromley Kent, but by giving it some TLC, knocking down a great deal of the back wall in the kitchen (boy thick polythene does [u]not[/u] keep out the draughts) and building a large, light, airy extension/conservatory off the kitchen. Insulating all the outside walls, connecting central heating and installing a modern combi boiler (no he didn't do all of that he did the grunt work for his sub contracted electrician and plumber but the building stuff was all his own work.)
Strange to think that Stephen lifted that great big metal beam thingy in the kitchen with just one other guy when he knocked down so much of the back kitchen wall. Is it a JCB? JSB?
In about 1987. Stephen and I started thinking about the garden. All we had done to the garden was strim it down regularly. Red thumbs were more us than green fingers, but Stephen could build! I found a pull out article in one of the Sundays by Susan Hampshire and Roddy Llewelyn (sp?)
It showed a pattern for a "low maintenance garden" smaller than ours but adaptable. We plotted out our own version on graph paper and got started. We divided the garden in half. The half nearest the house was mainly paved with an 8 foot wide, formal raised fish pond. We planted shrubs in each "corner" of that half.
I dread to think what we spent on fish for that pond. Golden Orfe – died. Shubumkins – died. Skeleton somethings Orfe maybe – died – bottom feeding pond Tench to clean up wasted fish food – died. Lots of other things that were supposed to thrive. Not for us. We had the pump. we had the right plants, the right (very expensive) pond liner. Even an ornamental fountain, everything except fish. We gave up and bought goldfish. Boy oh Boy have they grown to a size. Yes they die eventually but I could not even start to work out how old some of them are.
The kids used to dangle their feet in the pond and let the fish nibble them YUCK!. Unfortunately a Heron started visiting us for his breakfast so Stephen put a galvanised steel mesh cover over the whole thing with a hinged pull up flap to get to the pond itself.
After that he started on the front garden. It is only about a car and a half long. He paved quite a bit of it to park a car, laid some turf, built a front wall and put in black iron gates. He built a not wide but long garage/utility room on the side of the house. Never used for cars but shelved out with cases and cases of tools, a cement mixer etc. etc. Kitchen sink and drainer, a stretch of kitchen worktop with cupboards and drawers under. That man could build! He plumbed in the washing machine and parked the dryer freezer, etc. in there all connected to a separate fuse box (electrician did that).
All of this is probably very boring, but such lovely memories for me and lots of smiles. I suppose that the sniffle comes when I look at some of the other pictures.
In the back half of the garden Stephen put in a hidden wild life pond, a shed hidden by trellis, decking on which there is a hand built picnic bench with attached benches either side, a concrete trough with a dribble spout attached to a concrete mask that goes into a flower trough, a pebble fountain constructed with mill stones and ornamental pebbles and Stephen's orchard. Be impressed [b]NOT[/b] 4 dwarf fruit trees yielded 2 peaches (one had maggots) a couple of plumbs (they were nice)and 2 tiny sour apples I think there was a cherry tree. That never gave anything.
The few times there was a piece of fruit we would cut it in half, share it and savour it!!
In these photos he is happily working in the garden, not doing what he could before but doing a bit. The big sniffle is that in some of my photos in the background you can see the blossom on the trees in his "orchard". Down here we see that blossom in late May/early June.
How could he possibly be dead by the 11th of September.
Love from Gill xx
tom 11 years ago.
