Savage Amusement

Bigbrother emailed us a photograph of our family home taken in the early 1980s from his light aircraft.  As an RAF child all he’d ever wanted to do was fly and eventually he got his own private pilots’ licence and aeroplane.  It was parked at Rhoose (Cardiff airport) a short drive from his house.  As well as hops across the Bristol and English Channel to the Continent, he would fly West over the hills home.  He always phoned before-hand and Mum and Dad, and any other family members who happened to be home, would rush out onto the lawn to wave.

The photo has tiny beige and black spots, Mum in her pinny waving a tea-towel and Dad in his gardening cardigan.   That photo, and the one I posted the other day of me, Granma, Grampa and Mac the dog has prompted a splurge of family memories shared on email.

Our Great-grandparents and grandparents left or planted quite a few trees around our home, some too close for comfort. 

Home, taken by me in 1970s, on a Kodak Instamatic

To quote Bigbrother

“Dad and I hated cutting down the fir tree outside the kitchen window! Besides being somewhere nice to climb/hide in, there was often a pigeon or two around it.

(BANG! BANG! Lunch is served!)

It only happened because Mum and Grandma kept on creating for years about the kitchen being too dark and eventually gave orders in a manner which could not be disobeyed!”

I can just remember the tree outside the kitchen window being cut down.   
There seemed to be a lot of ropes involved in order, presumably, to get it to land in the field behind the house and not on our roof.   

The stump made a very good bird table.

There was also a fir tree, possibly a Leylandii, in the middle of the lawn in front of the house.  Mum said it was meant to be a short ornamental.  It grew to over twenty foot: an elegant elongated emerald teardrop, that on bright days turned the lawn into a giant sundial.  I remember her describing how it was blown over in a gale with the lawn being pulled up like carpet before the roots finally gave way.  If you pulled the foliage back the inside was solid brown fallen needles.  So many things must have nested in there, not all of them feathered.

I emailed my siblings:

“I can also remember you lot throwing my Bobby doll over that tree, and Middlesister making me run around it in a thunderstorm.”

Bobby was a “fur” dolly with a rubber face that was my first Christmas present.

Middlesister replied

“Bobby was a lovely doll.  I can remember removing dried broadbean seeds etc from his mouth that you'd fed him. Perhaps throwing him over the tree was a type of Heimlich manoeuvre !?

Sorry about the run in the thunder storm 😋🐑xx”

Bigsister

“I remember mum buying Bobby in the post office/ newsagents shop in Netheravon village.  She wasn’t sure about him but Babysister was.   
Also remember hurling him over the fir tree on the lawn for Bigbrother to catch.  Usually held by his arms or legs to fling, latterly with ominous tearing noises! Xx”

I phoned Middlesister

“Did I really make you run around the tree in a thunderstorm?”

“Yes, but we all did it, not just me, but you definitely made me.”

“I didn’t think it could have been just me, Mum would have come out and thumped me.”

Bobby came up in the conversation.

“I remember pulling all sorts of things you’d fed him out of his mouth; broad beans, Smarties.  I didn’t eat the Smarties, I was worried about sell-by-dates even then.” 

(Middlesister became a nurse)

Eventually Dad told me Bobby had got too smelly and put him in the oven in the old fireplace with the kindling sticks to “dry him out”.  I never saw him again but at least I’d said goodbye.  These days a cuddly toy can often be put through the washer.  But Bobby was stuffed with straw and the “ominous tearing sounds” probably meant his fabric was rotting.  That and the combination of fifties fake fur, rain, other liquids, flights into the fir tree and whatever I’d fed him probably produced a cocktail of bacteria you wouldn’t want near a small child.

Mum once told me she hadn’t been sure whether at three months I’d like a doll.  She brought him out of the shop to show me.  I cried when she took him back in to pay for him.  You can imagine how hugely upset I was at three or four to see him sailing over, and sometimes into, a huge tree.  As the siblings were ten, fifteen and seventeen at the time maybe they can be forgiven (maybe).

But it was definitely what Mum would have called “Savage Amusement”.