It was a large house, with a large garden . My Granny Lush lived with us and was a great stickler for good manners and our Lush grandfather, Herbert used to seek refuge in our nursery/school room which was in a mobile home always known as the hut. It was not at all like today’s mobile homes but solidly built of wood and immovable. He smoked like a chimney and we were all very fond of him. He used to come over to the hut to listen to the news and to get away from Granny who did not approve of smoking. The hut had three bedrooms I think and a living room but no bathroom, so we had to have our baths in a bathroom in the main house which was at the end of a long cold corridor and was freezing itself. There were two warm rooms in the house. One was the kitchen which had an Aga in it and we used to sit on the lids to warm up and a bedroom in the house which had an airing cupboard in it and was known as Little Hell. It was the only warm bedroom in the house so there was great competition to sleep in it. Brookside was the place I discovered that Father Christmas was my Dad clad in a striped towelling dressing gown and I woke up to see him putting stockings on the bed.
Chris taught both Stephen and I and I seem to remember that various other children joined in for various subjects. I think think she also did some music teaching at a local private prep school. . K T Stephenson had come to live with us permanently. She had been head of the teacher training college that Mum had been at. She lived with us until her death in Addis Ababa in the 1960’s. She taught us Maths and we were a bit scared of her.
There were three hills near us. One called Pitch Hill where we used to get our Christmas trees from, another called Holmbury Hill where we played games of “Cockie Olly” when we hid in the bracken until the leader saw some one moving and yelled cockie olly so and so and you were out. The other hill was called Leith Hill but I don’t remember anything much fun with that one except endless long and boring walks and having to pick wortleberries which was just as boring.
The garden had a tennis court in it where we played furious games and a large oblong pit which had been going to be made into a swimming pool before we arrived, but it never was and at the start of the war, it was decided that it should be made into an air aid shelter. That never happened either but was fun for playing in. Maurice and Diana Lush bought a house about a mile up the road but it could also be reached across a couple of fields so there was great comings and goings between the two families. We had a couple of bombs dropped in the village and there was tremendous excitement when we discovered the bomb carriage in one of the fields. The actual crater was in the main street in the village so we had our bit of excitement. I also remember a dog fight going on between our planes and German ones and we had to crouch underneath the dining room table. Another really exciting moment and rather frightening was when we were in the adjoining field where the two horses we had the use of, were being saddled up, when a German plane seemed to fly at hedge level letting off its gun. Mum shoved Stephen and I in the hedge and hid behind the horses herself until the plane disappeared. The other bit of “war” activity I remember was the Home Guard practising in the vegetable garden and a furious argument developing with one man saying, “You’re dead. I shot you, so lie down” and the other shouting” no you didn’t” and a very childish argument developing “You did”” You didn’t”, which made us all laugh. They were all elderly and behaving like kids. Our own “Dad’s Army”. The last war memory was to discover the horse field full of wire lying on the ground. Can’t think why or what it was for.
We used to have many cousins staying with us. In particular I remember Kenneth Sandford whose parents were in Rhodesia. He and Dick used to be beastly to Stephen and if he had not done the chores he had been given, they used to stick him on the roof of the “Cubby hole” which was a small outbuilding and leave him there until he promised to do whatever he had not done. We also used to keep chickens and there was one vicious cockerel who would follow you and if given half a chance, would try to run up your back and attack you at neck level. This revolting animal did manage to run up Dick’s back and was dispatched very shortly afterwards to become part of Sunday lunch. Christine was training to be a doctor and some of her training was in Exeter. She became part of the firefighting crew on the Cathedral roof during a time when Exeter was bombed. Eleanor was training to be a teacher, at the Froebal Institute in London for which she got a grant and Dick and Audrey were at school. Dick was head boy of Shrewsbury school and Audrey was at Wycombe Abbey.
The war was looming and I seem to remember Chris and Dan going frequently up to London. War was declared in 1939 and almost immediately Dan was sent out to Egypt. When he got there, no-one seemed to be expecting him and from this the famous story of his being on no list until at last he was found on one entitled miscellaneous, miscellaneous, arose.
At some moment during those few years, we visited the Empress and her eldest daughter Tenagne Worq in their house in Bath, where the Emperor had taken up residence during his exile. The Emperor had already gone out to Egypt and then on to the Sudan and finally back into Ethiopia with Mission 101. I remember the visit probably because I had never visited an Empress before but mostly because Chris was wearing a new dress – navy blue with a pattern of white dogs all over it. It was Fairfield House in Bath and he gave the house to the City of Bath. It is still there and I have visited it over the past few years. The Ethiopian community in and around Bath use it for special occasions like New Year and Meskel and in November 2015, I went there for a book signing of a new book on the Emperor. I do remember it vaguely- mostly the outside.
Chris and Dan had decided that Chris should join him in Addis Ababa. Looking back it seems a bit hard on the four children left behind but it also shows the great love that existed between Chris and Dan. However Chris put her great mind to bear on the problem of how to get there. And how to get permission to go. Her doggedness won in the end, not helped by the fact that Wycombe Abbey had been taken over by the U.S army ( Audrey was there at the time and I remember her searching the residential pages of the newspapers trying to find somewhere large enough to house the whole school, as Wycombe had closed and had to find another home in Newquay.) Finally, in 1942 in April, she and KT and Stephen and I set sail on the Highland Princess from a port in Wales. ( Could it have been Barry ?)) as part of a large convey of ships going to the Far Eastern theatre of War. It was a military convey full of soldiers. Needless to say, Stephen and I enjoyed ourselves enormously – but that is the next part of this saga.