This morning I visited a member of my congregation in her home. As we shared a time of fellowship over a cup of tea she sat back comfortably in her chair and recalled memories of a long-ago childhood, being brought up in an old double-fronted building that had once been a shop. "We had no electrics there," she recalled, "only gas lighting which was on this great big thing that hung from the centre of the ceiling."
Not only was there no electricity supply, there was no proper water supply either, all of the family water coming wither from a pipe up the road or else from a small stream that ran through the backyard. "I remember", she said with a chuckle, "in the winter it used to freeze over and the back-yard was just like a skating rink." "Of course", she continued, "We never had a modern toilet either, just a bucket toilet with a polished wooden seat which was very comfortable."
I enjoy sitting with older people and listening to them as they unfold memories of times that are not only in the distant past, but which will thankfully never return. Looked back upon, they certainly present a somewhat rose-tinted view of growing up under such conditions, and I'm certain that it was something to be endured rather than enjoyed if the truth be told.
When I was a boy, growing up in a large house in Corsham High Street, we had no central heating in the house, although many larger houses at that time did have a system which often was a series of noisy pipes and temperamental boiler which worked when it felt like it. We had coal fires in the lounge and in the drawing-room, and gas fires in three or four of the bedrooms, but the latter were often insufficient to battle against the colder winter months. Of course, originally, the rooms with gas fires had also had coal fires in although the grates were very mean! Unlike the children of today who seem to live almost separate lives in their bedrooms, we were only supposed to be in our bedrooms for the purpose of sleeping, and so it was not considered necessary to have more that enough heat to take the chill of the room. I still remember long winter months when the windows were frozen with ice on the inside of the panes, and when stepping out of bed and onto a cold linoleum floor was not something which you did with relish!
Conversely, the same coolness of the flooring felt quite different on a summer morning, the sun already up over the trees in the nearby wood. In fact, the whole world was different on those mornings when we had the gloriously long summer holiday period when school faded into a distant memory for a couple of months (well, almost!). Much as I hated getting out of bed during school term time I loved doing so during the holiday period. There was so much to do, and looking back it seemed that the sun shone endlessly throughout the summer months, although I'm sure that we had a lot of rain as well. If it was wet I would quietly play indoors with either my toy farmyard, which was quite extensive, or with my Bayko Building set. Both toys gave me endless pleasure, and are still firmly fixed in my memory. Other occasions would see me trotting down the road to play with my friend Henry Smith, whose father ran the Drapers a few doors away. However, the thing that occupied most of my time, once I was old enough, was to go off to spend most of the day at Park Farm.
How lucky we are to have good memories to look back on, memories which are still fresh enough and pleasant enough to allow you to relive them for a while. Then, just for a change, sometimes we are privileged to share someone else's memories for a while, just as I did this morning. As she shared those few memories with me I was able to 'live' them for a moment myself, and in so doing it enabled me to recall the things which I've now been able to share with you, dear reader. I hope you enjoyed the wander down Memory Lane!
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