Andy Vining’s Podcast: My Mother’s Diaries 1948 – 1976: Episode 1 — Introduction

Andy Vining shares his mother’s diaries in his new podcast.
Listen to these beautiful stories on Spotify.

Podcast Title: My Mother’s Diaries 1948 -1976

Episode 1 — Introduction

Hello… and welcome to this podcast.
My name is Andy Vining.

I’m eighty-two years old and as I record this, I I’m sitting quietly at home in Chandler’s Ford in Hampshire thinking about the past, and about the voices, people and places that shaped my life.

This podcast is not about me. It’s about our family. Memories, places, and the quiet, everyday moments that would normally be lost to time.

Most of all, it’s about my mother. And the diaries she wrote about her everyday life being a farmer’s wife and mother of five children while we were all growing up in on Hiltonbury Farm in Chandler’s Ford.

My mother was Peggy “Peg” Vining Nee Miller. Then when my brother Simon was born in 1958 she became BeBe because that’s what Simon called her.

But before I begin to read those diaries, I think it’s only right that I tell you a little about where this story truly starts… and how I come to be here, speaking to you today.

To understand our story, we must go back before my own childhood, back to my mother and father… and to Hiltonbury Farm.

My father’s life began with difficulty because as a young boy he was orphaned, and for a time the future must have seemed very uncertain for him.

But kindness changed everything because he was taken in at Hiltonbury Farm by Mr and Mrs George and Toss Beattie — my father’s aunt an extraordinary act of generosity that shaped the whole course of our family’s history.

There, at Hiltonbury, he grew up not only with a home, but with purpose.

He attended Peter Symonds School in Winchester, cycling there every day on his bike in all weathers while at the same time he also learned the hard, honest work of farming, working the land at Hiltonbury as a young man hand milking from a young age and tending the field crops.

Those early years of learning, and labour — formed the quiet strength that would guide him throughout his life.

Then not long before the Second World War, around 1934 he moved to Cantley, just near Wokingham, in Berkshire where he became Farm Bailiff for Mr Watson. a wealthy man who had made his fortune in margarine.

And so it was in Cantley that the next chapter of our family truly began.

My mother and father were married there on the 21st of November, 1936.

A beginning filled, I imagine, with hope but with no idea of the world events that were soon to unfold.

Then on the 6th February 1938, my eldest sister Jennifer was born and two years later on the 11th of June, 1940, in the shadow of wartime Britain my second sister Janet arrived on the scene.

During these years not only was my father the farm bailiff but he was in the local fire service through the Blitz and in the local Home Guard. I only wish I had asked him more about those days when he was alive but they never seemed to talk about those times.

Then amazingly, on the 6th of April, 1943. I arrived on the scene, a boy at last after the girls and it was right in the middle of those difficult war years with bombing raids going on.

I understand from stories that I was told that Hitler had heard that I had arrived and he attempted to bomb the nursing home where I was sleeping but I was put into a basket and put under the bed and fortunately for me, he missed but a poor Gurnsey cow, minding her own business in the fields, called “Forget Me Not” was killed. We certainly never forgot her.

Anyway, I digress and in 1946, just after the war ended when I was just three years old, the family left Cantley and moved to Chandler’s Ford, moving to “Beechcroft” in Lakewood Road. It was my grandparents’ house, where my mother had lived before she married father and we were to live there as a family for about 8 months while Hiltonbury Farmhouse was made ready for the Vining Family to move into.

Beechcroft became the true starting point of memory for me of Chandler’s Ford. It was a lovely crowded house full of life. My grandmother and grandfather, Auntie Bella, Granny’s sister, and Granny’s father Old Mr O-Brian my Great Grandfather and my two sisters and I and of course Mother.

Family and people were always coming and going. My father working at Hiltonbury Farm and trying to get the house ready for us, to move in. Voices in the house, the rhythm of ordinary days and The sense that childhood was something safe and steady with the family all together.

Then in late 1946 we moved from Beechcroft to live in Hiltonbury Farmhouse. I was too young to remember the first year or two there but I am led to believe from things my father told us, than when we moved in was no running water, and the well that had always supplied the house was condemned by the council as unfit to drink so for over a year the milk lorry that came to collect the milk every morning from our milking herd delivered ten churns of water for us.

There was also no electricity and we had bottled Calor gas lighting downstairs and candles and tilly paraffin lamps upstairs. All extremely basic. We did have a battery radio and a telephone. Chandlers 1212. Funny how I remember that.

Not long after we moved into The Farmhouse my younger sister Heather was born in a nursing home in Shawford near Winchester on the 19th of January 1947 and that winter was one of the coldest ever known. Snow lay deep across the country. Roads were blocked. Daily life was a struggle.

No one could even visit my mother in the nursing home because the snow was simply too deep. That’s is a small detail…but somehow it tells us everything about the world into which mother’s diaries were born — a world of hardship, endurance, and quiet courage.

Although I could not have known it at the time as I was so young the not long after my sister was born (about a year) those ordinary days were quietly being written down because my mother started to keep these diaries.

They were not grand literary diary, not written for history book but simple, faithful records of daily life. Who visited. What the weather was like. The work on the farm. Deaths and births. Illnesses. Birthdays. Small worries. Small joys.

The sort of details most of us never record… and later wish we had.

Our lives became closely tied with Hiltonbury Farm —vthe same place where my father had lived and worked as an young orphan boy.

A circle, in a way, quietly closing. Farming life is never easy. Never was and never is and never will be, It follows the seasons, not the clock.

Animals must be fed whatever the weather. Cows milked, eggs collected, fields ploughed, crops grown or fail, according to forces of nature beyond our control.

But farming life it also gives something precious. It gives a sense of purpose of belonging to the land and of our family working side by side and growing up together.

Many of the names you will hear in these diary readings belong to that world — family members, neighbours, friends, workers, people whose lives touched ours in quiet but lasting ways and later in the diaries, another miracle appears.

My brother Simon born on April 13th 1958 and he is (as far as we know the only child to be born in Hiltonbury Farmhouse for more than one hundred years.)

Moments like that remind us that history is not only made in great events but in families… in homes… in new life arriving and as the years passed, life moves on as it does for all of us.

As I have said this is not my story but the story of a farming family noted down every day by my mother but I grew up. I first found my path in farming and while I was still farming In 1964 I married my wonderful wife, Val, and together we built a life filled with family, hard work, laughter, and love.

Sadly, after nearly sixty years together my Val is no longer with us, but speaking her name carries both warmth and sadness and I know she is looking down on me remembering the wonderful years we had together and our lives with my son Alex and my daughter Joanne, and later the arrival on our wonderful three grandchildren, Tom, Amy and Ellen, and now our beautiful great grand child born to Vickie and Tom 24 June 2024.

Val is part of this story too — deeply and forever because this podcast is not only about the past. It is also about remembering the people we love and keeping them close.

All my sisters and my brother have all got extended families and last May 2025 we had a “Gathering at The Hiltonbury Farmhouse” over 50 people – brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins and grandchildren all together as one amazing family.

My mother passed away in 1994 from cancer and after she had passed her diaries remained, quiet. patient, waiting on a shelf in my sister Janet’s house in Devon.

For many years they were simply there, talked about and part of the background of life.

Until one day, I began to read them and something extraordinary happened.

The past came alive. Not as grand history but as real days. Cold mornings. Shopping trips. Visitors calling. Animals being born. Animals dying. Illness in the house. Harvests gathered. Haymaking and the weather that affected every day in some way or other. Small chicks arriving to busy Christmases preparing chicken and turkeys plucked and drawn ready to sell, Horses shod, cows milked and puppies and kittens born.

All the texture of ordinary living on a family farm preserved in ink…line by line…day by day.

I realised then that these diaries were not just family papers. They were a doorway. A doorway back into a vanished England … and into the heart of a family story that still matters.

And that is why I am making this podcast now, at this stage of my life. Because time passes quickly. Voices fade. Memories blur. Names are forgotten. But stories…the stories can remain If we take the time to tell them.

I don’t know who will listen to these recordings. Perhaps no one, Perhaps family. Perhaps friends. Perhaps someone, somewhere, who simply enjoys hearing about ordinary farming and family life in another time.

Whoever you are and your listening, you are very welcome here. Think of this as sitting quietly beside the log fire , in the old farmhouse in Chandler’s Ford listening to an old friend remember.

So now… we are almost ready to begin, In a moment, I will open my mother’s diary… and read the first entry from 1948. As I do, I invite you to slow down with me.

To picture the places. To imagine the people. To feel the rhythm of days when life was simpler… but never easy. This is not a story of famous events. It is something gentler than that. It is the story of a family…living ordinary days… which, in the end, are the most precious days of all.

Thank you for being here at the beginning. and I hope that I do my mother’s words justice and next week I will begin reading from her diaries which I have condensed into monthly sections. I will when reading them from time to time interject with comments from my own memories or research I have done while preparing these diaries, such as saying what the price of something back in the 1940’s and 50 would be today and also I will try to name and say who some of the people are that appear in the diary as the days go by that of course if I know them.

But enough for now and will soon start the next episode when the year is 1948.

Winter holds the Hampshire countryside in its grip.
Snow lies heavy on the fields, snowdrops press through frozen earth,
and the quiet rhythm of farm and family life goes on.
But beyond the everyday work of washing, cooking, and tending animals,
a deeper story is unfolding — one of worry … one of endurance…
and of love held close in uncertain days.
These are not grand events of history,
but the small, true moments of ordinary lives.
And it is there … that our story truly begins.

I hope you can join me next time to hear my mother’s story about The Family and Hiltonbury Farm, Chandler’s Ford. Thank you for listening.