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Winston Churchill on Hut Hill; more woodland clearance; a doggy encounter; Rooks in peril; that Cuckoo is back again; “the Egg”; flowers to “the Queen”; Gran has an epiphany and Norris picks a rare flower.

Book 10

March 18th 1949, Gran writes:

Necessity took me to Southampton today… The bombed sites are ablaze with Coltsfoot now, creeping over the rubble and pouring down the slopes like golden streams. Knots of people standing about and the Convent schoolgirls lining The Avenue spoke of some untoward excitement and I was surprised to hear that Mr Churchill was expected to pass at any moment on his way to the docks to board “Queen Elizabeth”. I was already in the ‘bus for home and I cannot say that I saw him but we did pass his car on Hut Hill! In Park Road a Larch tree is already decked in its soft green tassels of fresh, new growth, one of the loveliest sights of Spring.

[Read more…] about Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 24)

Jobs in the Park Road garden; a man – grubbing; Gadwall on Sowley Pond; Waxwings at St Cross; “Jock” MacNoe, and a hare causes entertainment.

It’s late January 1949. Gran spends most afternoons in the Park Road garden on a range of tasks; transplanting Caucasus Primroses; various jobs in the greenhouse (where, on the 27^th, she is saddened to see a long-tailed field mouse caught in a trap – “I would lose all my produce rather than catch them if the place belonged to me”, she writes) also outside weeding a bed of Primula wanda; watering Arums; sowing peas to bring them on for sowing out later, and enjoying the quiet and peace as she mixes soil and sieved leaves for seed-sowing. “I like to feel the soil in my hands…”

On the 27^th she records that:

Iris stylosa opened her first four beautiful flowers to the sunshine in the garden. How I love them, and how they break my heart! Just over two years ago I sent some to Adrian because he had never seen them. He never did see them though he was sufficiently conscious to know they came and were placed near him and later his mother put them into his hand for me – a gesture I shall never forget and one which in itself secured for her my undying friendship and affection.

[Read more…] about Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 23)

Severe winter effects on small birds; an amusing put-down to a proposal of marriage; Barry is delayed by an aerial dog-fight and he ices a cake; Cranbury Lake is “bearing”; Cirl Bunting; floods and mumps.

On November 25th 1948:

Stonechats were present at Stony Cross in the New Forest this afternoon. Here also is the largest oak tree in the New Forest, known as the Knightwood Oak. Last August the tree measured 22ft 4½ ins in girth. The largest tree to be cut down in the New Forest was also an oak – in Langley Wood. When felled in 1758 it was found to contain 300 rings of annual growth, and required twelve horses to drag it to the coast. [Read more…] about Forty Years in Chandler’s Ford – a Journal (Part 22)