He turned up himself, and spent a whole afternoon hand digging 3 ft deep, starting at the road frontage, and on and on to the link up with the sewage pit, commenting the while that he must have been drunk when he put it in as it was so crooked, and when he was at school his father told him he had to keep at his lessons or he’d end up digging holes all day, and now at 35, having done just that and got University Entrance, here he was, digging holes!
Wednesday 27th. Now there is actually going to be a post out today, the first since last Friday, (things are not what they were in my young days, when the postman used to struggle to our door on his bike, two or three miles from the post office with another two or three to go beyond us on his round, on Christmas morning!) so I must really get this finished at this session!
I thought I would type this morning to show off my nice new nylon ribbon. Of course, having fitted it last night, I noticed that the faint one I was replacing appeared to have been used one way only, and should really have been rewound upsidedown – so I put it back on the spare spool and put it away in my desk drawer – where I then discovered another half-length, which had never been used. So I now have about a year’s supply. I haven’t been able to get a ribbon on the right spool for this typewriter, which is made in Sweden and now 25 years old and always have to rewind the new ones onto the same old spools, which have both had replacement lugs added by me with Araldite to make the reversing apparatus work! Sometimes the ribbons I buy seem longer, and overflow my spools – hence having a half-length one put by.
It sounds a very go-ahead school. Last month they laid on a Victorian day ending with a ‘swep up’ [=grand!] tea at the house of one of parent’s parents – with all the family silver out and some of the parents dressed as maids in frilly hats and aprons. I was able to find some old pictures of my Great-grandmother with the maids in the garden of her house when she first moved into it, new. The kitchen up the back stairs was then the conservatory, and the maids lived and cooked in the back basement. Pretty horrifying really.
Your 2 people who nearly died having been in hosp. goes back to the days the babies had at hospitals died – until it was found the doctors went straight from working on dead bods to producing babies without washing.
Just had a call from the library saying they have ‘A man called Intrepid’ in for me, have you read it? I gather it has references to the set-up I was working for at Woburn Abbey. I can hardly believe I’ve been involved in so many exciting things. I really do mean to write some articles entitled ‘It’s funny I’m so boring’!
Listening to secondhand gramophone records was one of my standard ways of spending Saturday afternoon in my first two years in London – only the place to do it in those days was at Foyle’s in the Charing Cross Road. I can’t remember what they cost – of course they were all 78s and I think you could buy a new 10” for half a crown (remember what that was?!) so I suppose you could get a 10” for a shilling and a 12” for two, or thereabouts.
It is one of the memories connected with Christmas which I have, that there used to arrive a parcel of crystallized fruit every year, sent by Dad’s brother. The ones we were least fond of were the pears, and the firm favourites were the apricots. But if you got more than one of those a year you were definitely cheating!
Filed words 