CHAPTER 2

   SISTER ALICE & I

 The next year when, Fred was just the baby in the pram, only Alice and I played on our own together, because brother George he had started school. But on Saturdays and Sundays he was at home, and we liked him with us, as he could push us in the swing, and take us to a nice little paddling pool where we could sit on  a stone plank, and put our feet in the shallow stream. But we couldn't open the gates or shut them without brother George to help us, and we knew how important it was to shut all the gates in case the pigs or sheep or calves or cows got out, and we had 2 horses as well as a donkey, and once the wood lodge door was left open by someone we never knew who, and the mother pig was so adventurous she walked in the wood lodge, and broke a big bag of chickens feathers which our mother was saving to stuff pillows with, but mother pig made a nest with the precious feathers, and had nine little baby pigs in, and there our mother found her the next morning with her fine litter of pigs.

So that was a lesson to all of us; that year because I was two years old, I was taken to Ashford in the cart and horse, and had my photo taken. All the family when they were two had their photo taken. The best lace dress was taken out of its big box, the same one sister Grace had her photo taken in, who was now seven years old, but sister Alice had a different dress; because the dress was too big as she was a dainty little figure. All having our photo done when we were two, was an important event before the days of snapshots and individual cameras.

Alice and I used to go with our mother to collect the hens eggs, once a day. The hens had places to lay their eggs but some used to go in any of the farm buildings even in the stable in the horses mangers. But after they had laid their eggs, they used to cackle as if they were telling us where to look for the eggs, and mother used to throw the maize in the farm yard, and call, and we would watch where they came from, and so know where to look for the eggs.

Once we didn't find a stray nest, and the mother hen had kept it a secret until the little chick hatched out, she had laid her eggs in the hedge round the orchard near a stream and hidden out of sight by some rushes. Our mother was fond of doing the flower garden, and we two, Alice and I watched her, and learnt all the work which had to be done. Mother would pull up the weeds, and we would pick them up, and put them in little lumps, but mother wouldn’t let us pull up the weeds because we didn’nt know which was weeds. alice thought she knew once, and then she recognized she didn’nt know, because mother wasn’t with us. Then, she had gone to do something for baby Fred who was crying. Mother never forgot how amazed she was that alice was so honest about it, she ran in to find mother and said “Mummy, I have been a naughty little girl, I have pulled all your lttle tomatoes up”.

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