There's a Fair View from this Hill

and in memory from the house called Fairview I remember from childhood. Fromes Hill in Herefordshire. A house on top of the hill, overlooking five-bar-gated meadows across the road. Barely a car an hour to spoil the quiet and the view of the Malverns in the distance. The house was owned by my Grandmother's aunts on Mom's side of the family, the Taylor sisters Lizzie and Annie. Victorians, both and unmarried. When I first started going there for holidays, I was too young for any remembrance now, but I know that there was no electricity, gas, running water or mains sewerage and certainly no telephone. For those who can't remember a time before the Internet and mobile phones, well if the current crisis gets worse not better, you could find yourselves revisiting history in real-time.

In fact, by the time Annie died in 1966, there was still only electricity, which came over the hill three or four years before.

When we were children, this house seemed vast, rambling and mysterious, with an enormous garden and all the countryside around to play in. In comparison to our two-up-two-down terrace in Winson Green, it was Balmoral.

Karen and I used, when big enough to manage,  to take the enamelled drinking-water pail to the village pump at Postin's Farm up the road to fill: the rim was blue enamel with a lid similarly marked to distinguish it from the washing-water bucket - edged and lidded red and filled from the rainwater cistern by a hand-pump on the wall in the wash-house/scullery next to the kitchen. The wash-house also held the copper. This was the beast that the clothes were washed in, over a fire lit in the grate below. A large copper bowl in a brick surround over a fire-box. Behind this was the bathroom and the enormous cast iron bath, which I don't recall ever being used as it wasn't plumbed in.

And the fires: in the best room, which could be divided fore and aft by a heavy chenille curtain on winter nights, there was an open fire, with a selection of fire-irons, dogs and bellows. I still remember my Grandmother singing as she got the fire going in the grate: "Jeremiah, blow the fire, puff, puff, puff..." to the rhythm of the bellows. And in the parlour on the opposite side of the house to the left of the staircase, there was a cast iron range with enamel tiles on which we would toast autumn crumpets after days out walking in the lanes and fields.

In the early evening before we were put to bed, we might play cards in the parlour before going up and when we were really young, Nan would read us Grimm's fairy tales in the big room by the fire, while the rest of the grown-ups would head to the Majors' Arms in Bishops' Frome for drinks, returning after we were long well a'bed.

Summer days - hot, clear-skied afternoons spent aimlessly playing, the dry sound of crows on the still, windless air; the heat inside the unused workshop at the back of the old tin garage, cobwebbed and dusty; a myriad of curious and unknown objects. And as if archaeologists, we unearthed an old Victorian Bath Chair and were wheeled around in the black iron and canvas contraption, as Grandad managed to set fire to the orchard, duly captured on silent, 8mm film by Dad from the back bedroom window.

As always, we didn't ask questions enough when our family was larger than it is now and so these fragments of memory and a clutch of photographs are all.

More later.