The Red Pot

The Red Pot is on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, being cast iron it is a good workout to pull it out and get it on the hob, there it sits, in its shiny splendidness with the tiny chip in the red enamel and the deep black interior. It always makes me smile, not least because I quite often cook mussels in it, which are one of my favourites and the reason it was given to me by my late mother-in-law, Renee.

Renee on any level was not a good cook and the pot sat on her shelf in her small kitchen ‘lean-two’ as she called it. We were sat there, one day looking out at her sweet garden, having our customary glass of wine. Renee only drunk whiskey, except for a while she took to drinking a glass of red wine at lunchtime after reading an article in the broad-sheets stating that it aided the digestion and had physical and mental well-being qualities. I did point out to her that the article did not mean to add a glass of red to the near three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey that she drank each day, as this rather contradicted the point of the article!

That weekend I was going to cook us all mussels and Renee wanted me to take the red pot as she said it was the best thing to cook mussels in and she was fed up with it sitting on her shelf collecting dust. Ben got the heavy pot down for us. Renee was insistent that she did not want the pot back it was mine to keep. So we all agreed – Moules Mariniere – mussels in their shells with onions in white wine – Yummy x

Renee liked a tipple or two, it was part of her character and something that she had done all her life, she grew up in an era where drinking was not frowned upon as it is today, sometimes she would talk about her past life when her and her husband used to start their drinking day off early with a good ‘Pinkers’, this was a drink made up of Gin, Angostura Bitters, sparkling rose wine with a garnish of ice cubes and red berries. Drink was part of her lifestyle. We were all used to it and almost all of us accepted that this was the way Renee was. It is easy to ‘right-off’ a drinker, as just a drinker, this is not always the case, Renee had been a school teacher and her skill with children was still called on even after her retirement, where she would go and teach special needs children and children with mental health issues, when she was not doing that she would read avidly; the only other person I have ever met that reads as much as Renee did is our daughter Tallulah. Renee was always on topic with the news and had very strong views on almost everything. She was very much more than a drinker.

I am not saying that after a day when she had more drink than most people would be able to cope with, particularly as she got older that this could affect her, obviously it did at times. One terrifying occasion, when the door knocker went at our house at about 2:30 in the afternoon, when I opened the door it was Renee standing there. She told me that she had just been in town and her car was now making the most dreadful noise, so as our house was the closest to town she came straight here. I went out to the car which was a very old two-tone brown mini. The trim on one side had been partially pull off and there were scrape marks down the side of the paintwork. I turned to Renee and asked her if she had hit anything? ‘Oh, that!’ she said smiling and pulling on her nose, which was a habit she had; ‘that, that is just bad workmanship, Eric put that trim on and it has come away.’ I looked at the damage again and looked back at her? ‘Might have been made a bit worse, when I had to swerve on the Wargrave Road to miss the bus and went up onto the curb into the bushes?’ she offered, just a little bit sheepishly, pulling on her nose again, then waving her hand. I pulled off the trim as it was sticking out, but realised this could not be the reason for any noise coming from the car. So I bent down and looked under the car, and there it was the culprit. I stood back up and asked her where she had been in town? ‘I haven’t been anywhere yet, I came over Henley Bridge, they are doing work on the road by the town hall – did you know? Anyway there were all this men in the middle of the road digging a hole as I went by them that is when the noise started and I came straight here.’ I bent down and looked under the car again, I couldn’t dislodge the offending article. There was a broom leant up against the house, so I got it and used the handle to manoeuvre the traffic cone out from under the car. Renee screamed with laughter at the mangled cone and said that she had looked in her rear view mirror and wondered why the work men were jumping out of the way an all the cones were knocked all over the road! Alcohol and driving do not mix!

Over the years there are many occasions that I cooked mussels in that red pot for Renee, the meal would always start off with her noticing the pot and saying that it was hers! I would say you gave it to me Renee and by the time she left I would feel a bit put out that she thought I had kept her pot and I would have it ready for to take back when Ben took her back home, obviously not letting her drive! She would then remonstrate that she had given me the pot and did not want it back! After many years I got used to the process and didn’t bother to offer it back. So I still have ‘my’ red pot and I do love it, it cooks so many things so well. And I always remember Renee whenever I use it. Cheers Renee….. x

A Twist on Mussels in White wine

I change the Moules Mariniere recipe occasionally, I add Chinese 5 Spice, paprika and chili flakes. Replace the wine for a tin of coconut milk. It is delicious!!  

The Wedding Outfit…

What is in a ‘Snowball’?

A story based on Bridesmaids & Weddings

-        It is not as dull as it sounds! -

Some passages contains language that some people might find offensive. This story is based on my life & these are the first draft chapters of a particular part of my life – But mostly it is about the peculiarities of growing up in my family … Don’t judge me until you have read it all!

The Wedding Outfit

Chapter 1

Circa – late 1990’s

Standing in front of the ‘thin’ mirror, in my favourite shop, Mango, St. Leonards Road, Windsor, looking back at the reflection of myself, I would like to say admiring myself, but that is not for me I struggle with how I look. But ‘I think’ this is an ‘OK’ look and it is what I want; a long black large sparkly jumper that fits over my now seven month bump.

I have been standing in front of this ‘thin’ mirror for just over thirteen years, or so, on and off, it is one of my favourite places to be, trying on bespoke clothes, in this little boutique, in the town I went to school in. The buzz has never abated and I hope it never will. Clothes are one of the very few things that I can honestly say that my mother and I have in common, otherwise we have very different opinions on most things, which makes our relationship complicated – to put it mildly!

I find that it is always important to give the outfit a second glance and some balance so I move across the floor to the ‘fat’ mirror, which I never liked standing in front of for precisely the reason the name suggests – it makes you look fatter than the thin mirror! But it is an important barometer. Before being pregnant, I would look at myself in the thin mirror first, then if I liked the look, which inevitably I did, I would move to the fat mirror, to check out how bad I would look in the outfit if I looked fatter. To most people this would not make any sense, but to me it makes perfect sense, I think it might just be a female thing? It is like the feeling you get when fitting into a new outfit that is one size smaller than the size you usually go for, it is a free positive!! Today it seems a bit mad standing in front of the fat mirror as I am heavily pregnant, so I am obviously going to look fat/pregnant in either mirror, but I have to do it, it is part of the process!

My mind wonders and I glance at the reflection behind me and I watch my mother rootling through the clothes on the display stands. I brought my mother with me on this occasion, we are not good shopping buddies, for many reasons which I will explain later or will become apparent as I tell you this story.

My mother is working the dress shop as she usually does with a sort of forensic mania that you only see in someone who has a compulsive obsession to find something first that no one else has seen, her eyes are flickering and scanning from one item to the next, rummaging at speed through the careful hung clothes; she reminds me of Guilty our cat when he has enthusiastically pounced on a mouse, he just throws his paws around in all directions, punching the ground trying to catch something that has already escaped. This is normal behaviour in a dress shop from my mother.

Earlier today, another customer who was in the shop had a lucky escape. The lady had come in to try on a very expensive thin blue leather coat that had been put by for her to try. This elegant young woman had excitedly and carefully put the coat on, rolling the soft leather sleeves up her arms, she then swayed in delight at her image from side to side in the fat mirror, she looked stunning. This was not lost on my mother, who had stopped searching for a minute and was observing with interest. This young woman, was clearly weighing up the cost of this expensive ticketed couture item, it was certainly an investment piece. She made the fatal mistake of taking it off and carefully tossing the coat on the chair in the boutique. Rookie mistake! My mother was across the room like a sprinter, snatched the coat up and was forcing it on over her arms onto her shoulders. My mother is a tall slender woman, the coat size was for a petite frame, but that did not stop my mother’s efforts in try it on. This poor young woman was shocked as she had not relinquished the coat, she was just simply enjoying the moment of toying with the idea of purchasing such an expensive item. It was an embarrassing moment, I was going to have to intervene.

Moving closer to my mother, with my back to the woman and the shop owner, I mouthed, I think more than clearly; “Take it OFF!” My mother looked at me, and did her usual thing, shrugged her shoulders in defiance, pulling the collar up around her neck, the thin leather straining… I am used to these episodes of resistance so I repeated, “Take it off,” she swung backward and forward, the powder blue pelts following her movements; “take it off – NOW!” I am pretty sure that the ‘NOW’ was audible to the two people standing behind me … Nope I could tell she was in ‘non-compliant mode’. This happens with my mother if she feels I am challenging her in any way, a small example of this is when my mother tells me that I will like something, for example a film; I will say that I have seen it and I did really like it. She will tell me that I did like it, I will say I didn’t and she will move onto the actor in it who she insists I like, I will say yes he/she is okay and my mother will say I knew you would like that film! There is no easy way out!

I move to ‘low tactics’! Turning to the young woman and the shop owner Roz, I say, “You haven’t finished with this coat, have you? You really must buy it, it looks amazing on you.” Turning to glance at my mother, half smile on my face; “Take it off – Mum, this lady is going to buy it!” I have embarrassed her now, this is not going to end well!

Throwing her head to one side smiling, she peals this beautiful coat off, leaving one arm inside out and tosses the relieved coat back on the chair from where she had stolen it… “So sorry, I didn’t realise you were still interested in it.” She did! Balance is restored albeit with a bit of an atmosphere left in the building, Roz picked up the coat, pulled the arm back through. The young woman, who had nearly been deprived of her coat decided immediately that she wanted to purchase it and the deal was done with Roz – I think my mother’s hijacking had most probably helped seal the sale!

In Mango, the clothes are always displayed beautifully with the hangers each placed exactly 2 inches apart, there is usually only one of each piece on the rail, the other sizes are kept upstairs out of sight for when they are needed. My Mum had now resumed her forensic investigations of the display, pulling each item of clothing from right to left, the hangers scraping against the rail above as she sorts through them at an alarming rate, having got to the end of the first rail of clothes they are all swaying hanging on the left side of the rail as if in a summer breeze all symmetry gone. My eyes moved across the white interior of the shop to the owner Roz, a petite lady with wonderful short spiky hair, she is beautifully dressed in one of her outfits that she has collected over the many years of owning the shop. She too is also watching my mother, with I think, relatively good humour considering her carefully laid out clothing display was being deconstructed in front of her, but I guess that is her job.

Reverting back to my reflection… I like this jumper and it is what I want for the occasion and it has stood up to the fat mirror test and just made me look pregnant which is what I am, after all! I think it will work well with my tight fitting maternity black skirt, with a slit up the side. I inwardly smirked, she will go mad when she realises that I am actually choosing my wedding outfit…. devilment takes over. “Mum, I think this jumper would be great for my wedding day outfit.” She stopped ferreting for a tiny moment, turned to look at me

“Don’t be so ridiculous Natalie, you are not wearing anything like that when you get married!” Roz glanced at me and pulled a face and shrugged her shoulders. I guess she was thinking the same as me, I am after all a fully grown adult, pregnant with my first child, not living with my mother but with the man I am about to marry!! – And I will damn well wear what I please. My mother, you see has obsessed over my wedding day for years, meticulously planning each detail, depending on what year we are living in and what are the current trends when it comes to Bridal wear. I have never been consulted!

I realise of course that I am going to have to tell her and Trevor, my father at some stage that I am getting married in just over a weeks’ time in a registry office. It is not going to go down well and it will come as an enormous shock to my mother particularly. Inwardly I shrug, I am not telling her today, I will wait a bit longer. I am buying this jumper as my wedding outfit. “I will have this Roz, thank you.” My mother continues to ‘frisk’ the clothing, she is not interested in the black jumper. She’s moved to the glass shelves where Roz displays all her accessories, Mum bends down to the floor under the shelves and picks up one of a pair of fantastic orange and pink shoes with a splayed out heel, flips them upside down to check out the size, mum has large feet a size 7-8, she kicks off one of her shoes, balancing on one leg and forces the too small shoe over her toes, then puts her foot on the ground with her ankle hanging over the back of the shoe, she bobs her head from one side to the other observing the ‘look’ and the shoed foot moves in tandem with her head from left to right. I look at her face and she pulls that all too familiar upside-down grimace. To the uninitiated, they could take this look as a confirmation that my mother does not particularly like this shoe, but I know better – she likes the shoe a lot, but is internally downloading if she will buy it and what is the best deal she will get if she does buy it and what will she wear it with. In the same moment she kicks the shoe off and it lands haphazardly back in the same spot where it was originally on display, but this time it is on its side, I wince, but Roz ever the professional, is over there in a shot carefully up righting the shoe and putting it back on display. Don’t get me wrong, it is not that my mother is intentionally being rude or disrespectful, it is just that she is in ‘feeding frenzy mode’, with the clothing, the pretty things on display in front of her, she is in the zone! And she has clearly spotted something else.

She has moved onto the third shelf up from the ground, this is where Roz keeps the belts and handbags, top shelf is usually reserved for smaller items like sunglasses, gloves and jewellery. Hawk like, Mum has seized and unravelled a dark brown thick suede belt, holding it to her waist, this type of accessory is a staple of Roz, my mother already has a number of these, but in different colours, she has even given me the colours of the ones she has bought and does not particularly like. This is something that amuses my soon to be husband. Mum will very kindly offer to give me some of her clothing, on occasions when she has had a clear out, I love this when it happens, lots of the items are not for me, Mum is tall I am short like Trevor. Trust me, there is no one that shops or has a wardrobe like my mother, it is like going to Selfridges, she has everything in every colour. So, occasionally, she gives me items of clothing and I adapt them to suit me. I will then wear the adapted item when I see her and she is always be a bit fed up that she gave them to me in the first place! And wants them back! It is normal!

I move over to the rail that has been disrupted by my mother, sliding the outfits back into, more or less the position close to where they were originally. Lingering on a couple of items that I lust after, however with my baby bump I have no chance of fitting into, I am at that stage in pregnancy where I want my shape back to where it once was.

Mum is standing at the thin mirror, and there is! The grimace face, she moves to the fat mirror to take a look at the belt against her, she crumples up her top over the belt, to give it ‘a look’ then pulls her top back down and goes for the ‘nipped in’ waist look. Yup!! I can tell she really likes this, she is twisting to the right and left admiring the look. The fat mirror does not matter to my mother, she has supreme belief in her looks, and she is and has always been thin and stunningly beautiful.  “What do you think Natalie?”

“Yes it is nice mum – but don’t you have lots like that?”

“No Natalie, not like this – not in this colour!” – Then it is out of her mouth I can’t stop it and I did not see it coming!!  She said it, loud, bold and clear – The *N* word. But in its full literation!!! And she continues; full throttle; “It is *N*-brown Natalie.” The women behind me that had entered the shop a short while earlier and who was up to this moment also moving the hangers from side to side, froze. Roz, usually the consummate professional, mouth has dropped open….. Oh God no…

“Oh my God, Mum you can’t say that!!!” On reflection I realise that this is a grave mistake! Saying can’t to my mother is never a good thing and we have only just got over the blue coat incident, I know she will argue the point to the death, no matter even if she knows she is wrong.. This is the most acutely alarming moment… 

“What do you mean Natalie – of course I can say it! This belt is *N* brown!” She waves the belt at me! “That is what it is called, Natalie, *N* brown, *N* brown!! That is the colour of it!”

“Oh My God!! Stop saying it – you can’t say that!”

“For Goodness sake, what do you think I am saying? That is the name of the colour, really Natalie!”; she shrugs her shoulders, at the nonsense I am making of it, - yes really! She continues to enlighten me; “I had pencils called *N*brown when I was a child! It is a very nice colour, don’t look at me like that – stop making a fuss!” There is a look on her face it is impossible for me to distinguish, if she has realised that she has made a colossal hideous mistake or if she really is that ignorant to what she has just said and keeps repeating? She continues, slightly flustered, but she is determined at all costs to fight her corner, “Natalie, everyone knows that is the name of a colour, it is quite normal! *N* brown!” Oh for Fuck sake STOP!! – I give her my hardest stare – I hope it looks like ‘Shut the fuck up mother’ sort of stare…. She opens her mouth …

“MUM – STOP SAYING IT!!! YOU CAN’T SAY THAT NOW IT IS NOT A COLOUR ANYMORE!!!” I charged her and try to wrestle the belt out of her hands, in the vain hope that this might just stop her from continuing, but she’s not having of it, she is holding firm as I yank one way and she yanks the other. She snaps the belt away from me and moves away.

“You think you know, everything Natalie, but you don’t, I can tell you that for years they have been calling it …. “ Oh my God – what the fuck, she is saying it again, what is the matter with her?

“STOP!!” STOP –“ And for real emphasis; “STOP IT - NOW!”

She responds calmly to me glancing toward Roz and the other stunned shopper, by way of an explanation. “Natalie, you are being silly! Everyone knows …..” And she repeats the word over and over again for clarity I presume? “This name is used all over the world”, Oh my God now she is going ‘global’! “On colour charts, paint cans, chocolate for example, haven’t you ever seen it on paint cans? It is used all over the world – as a colour, it is perfectly normal – everyone uses it!” This is one of my mother’s things, she is now trying to broaden the appeal! I am beginning to think that she has either lost her mind completely or has been in my brother’s bedroom one to many times smoking one of his funny smelling cigarettes… When she comes out of his room, happy and dancing, usually this prompts Trevor to ask me – why is your mother so happy? Which is to be fair a rare occurrence in their relationship!

As you can imagine I am acutely embarrassed… I just want to get out of the shop and shut her up! “Please stop Mum! And no you haven’t seen it anywhere recently, stop saying it!!” Her hands have gone to her hips and she is shrugging her shoulders. Again she starts rattling off various items and products that were dark brown, except she did not call them dark brown! It is excruciating. Now I am getting cross, I give her my best stare, you know the one that your parent gives you when you are young and it means be quite or else! It is not working she is adamant that she is right! Shouting now, “LOOK MUM!!! You can’t say it now, on any level! It is offensive, very, very offensive AND it is RACIST!! STOP!!”

This seemed to shake her from her endless listing, she looks shocked, finally!! “Racist – Natalie, what on earth do you mean, I can promise you it is a colour and there is nothing wrong with that? Me - a racist, don’t be so ridiculous, everyone knows I am not a racist!” To use Trevor’s phrase when he wants her to stop – ‘I think the penny had dropped!’

“You can’t say it Mum, it is racist and it is rude and it is unacceptable, we are going, now!” She stopped and stared for a moment, she looked generally a bit shaken. She turned to Roz, who had now moved over to her other customer and was trying to ignore the scene that was unfolding in her shop.

“For Goodness Sake Natalie, how could anyone think I am racist? I mean, I go on holiday to Barbados every year for nearly six months of the year!??” Yes you could not write it – except I am! Oh God this is not happening to me!

“You young people!” Now I knew that she wants a way out, my mother never calls anyone young, she is one of the young people, I don’t think that she has really ever seen herself over the age of about 30 – at a push! “You young people are always changing things, one never knows what is going on, all this new language, you are always changing meanings, making people look silly, I have no idea why you do it Natalie, it is very difficult for people!!” It has clearly escaped my mother that changing any meanings of any words is nothing to do with me – But somehow she skilfully makes it my fault!

And now for the curved ball! A complete change of direction!

“Roz did you know that Natalie won’t let anyone read her Vogue magazines?” To be fair this statement is absolutely correct, even if it had little to do with the belt’s colour. Roz and her customer just looked from me to my mother. “What person is so mean as to not let people read their magazines? Natalie won’t, she hides them out of the way.” I have no idea why I attempt to defend myself in these situations, but I always fall into the trap!

“I don’t hide my magazines!!”

“Yes you do Natalie! You always say that I can’t flick through your Vogue magazine, when I am at your house! Look Roz has some Vogue magazines there on the shelf,” my mother again turns to Roz; “Do you stop people from reading your magazines Roz? – I am sure you don’t?” Roz just looked bemused.

“Of course Roz let’s people read her magazines Mum, that is what they are there for! For God sake!”

“Oh that is kind Roz, Natalie can’t bear anyone to even touch her magazines, and she doesn’t share!”

For God sake – “I do!” This is classic ‘my mother’ – And what is worse is that I engage with it which makes me look like a 5 year old!

“You don’t, look what happened last week – You took the magazines out of the room!”

Just for the record I am not a – Magazine hider! – In the main!

“I DON’T HIDE THEM MUM! I JUST HIDE THEM FROM YOU!!” She winces for dramatic effect at my statement. I mean really, what sort of a daughter hides her Vogue magazines from her mother? I am a monster!

I try and calm my comments; “Look I don’t hide them from you, mum, I take them away from you because you lick your fingers when you turn the pages, which smudges the ink and you fold down the edges of ‘my’ magazine before I have even read them, you know I collect them!” Roz and her customer wince, now, looking slightly revolted. This honestly does not make my situation any better, I now look like I am making out my mother to be unsanitary – which she is not!

The outcome, after a few more harsh comments about my lack of magazine sharing and we are heading for the door!

If only I had had half a brain cell I would have just paid for my jumper and forcibly removed my mother from this poor woman’s shop after the first incident, about an hour and a half ago. My mother to Roz and her bemused customer is still listing all the other magazines that are not in my collection that I don’t let her read either! I can’t win!

I purchased the black jumper as my wedding outfit, I am going to tell her one day very soon that I am getting married, a week on Friday. Based on today, now is not the right time to approach it. My mother purchases a number of other items, not the belt and nothing further is said to me and I think that Roz was happy to get us out of her shop.

Never a dull moment!! …

Chapter 2 – Coming soon!

The Egg Game…

When I was a child, my parents took us on a holiday to Lanzarote. We were staying with their German friends in their holiday home at Easter time. It was a revelation to me, when on Easter morning we arrived downstairs and the table was decorated with all manner of Easter styled chocolates & flowers, in the centre of the table was a huge bowl of rich shinny brightly coloured real boiled eggs. They had been dyed in boiling water & then polished with bacon fat! To my nearly ten year old mind this was chocolate heaven. I have never particularly liked sweet things as I have told in my story, clink the link below…

But I was partial to the odd Easter egg, the smarties one, although I once had my entire chocolate Easter egg collection given to me by the family for a whole year & a bit without any of the sweet confectionery ever being touched or taken out of its packaging . I do however love eggs, boiled eggs are my favourite, I still have two boiled eggs for breakfast every morning & on special occasions smoked salmon & fried eggs with mushrooms. So this table setting with its beautiful centre piece was right up my street!

You may have a heart of gold - But so does an egg!

On this bright sunny morning in Lanzarote our genial host also introduced us to the new game of an Easter Egg hunt … Childhood bliss, even if the chocolate was a tad on the melted side due to the hot early morning sun. We charged around the garden & collected all the chocolate that had been hidden - In plain sight!… Once this was completed, we entered the house for breakfast …

The table was laden with the normal German fare; beautiful sliced hams & cheeses were on offer, crisp toasts & orange juice all served with scrambled eggs & sweet smelling pickles & jars of what looked like to me small cucumbers which I now know to be called Gherkins! Having consumed our fill, our host introduced us to the egg game. We each chose a couple of eggs from the bowl, turned to the person sat next to us & took it in turns to smash the other persons egg with our egg! There seemed to be no particular rules you just kept picking up an egg & smashing it against the other persons egg? This amused our hosts no end & I enjoyed the strange game too…

Whatever the reason for this behaviour it left an indelible print on me.

The next Easter at home and for every Easter after that, we have played The Egg Game. However I developed my own version of this extraordinary game, & made some rudimentary rules, which you can find below.

My children have grown up with this tradition, we still do it now, & it takes president over the Easter Egg hunt! They have over the years enjoy decorating the eggs, if not cracking a few on the way & trying to choose the winner!

But I warn you!! It does get very competitive…

It is a bit of fun & if you are lucky …

You can enjoy egg sandwiches, later!

You can buy egg dyes on line …

Eggs ready to be decorated …

‘Lost in Translation …’

Is it me or is it difficult being a ‘mum’ in lockdown?

Once in ‘discussion with my husband’, I made the statement – “Well I come from a long line of over-reactors”, his response - “No, Natalie! – YOU ARE THE NUCLEAR REACTOR!” Initially I viewed this as a compliment, I am passionate about whatever I do, but I can’t always be easy to be around, because I am so passionate.

Lockdown - we are all having to change the way we do things, adapt to others that are now occupying on a permanent basis our space. My family have done amazingly well with this, because we get on & in the main we all have our own space to retire to…  

However, my daughter calls me obsessive compulsive, because I like the things the way I like them, in place! She on the other hand feels more comfortable with all her things around her at all times, even if she is not in the room at the time!

Recently I have become increasingly frustrated within my ‘space’ and what I am doing, in terms of being house maid, chief bottle washer, head chief, laundrette & shopper. AKA. The menial one!

The children, young adults, conversely have used the lockdown to improve their skills/hobbies, work prospects & generally promote their lives going forward, as of course they should! We are six which includes an extra body in the form of a massive lovely young man who is our daughters boyfriend; his special skill, apart from being charming; is eating - he has the ability to eat his body weight in food a number of times over in a day, if he lived in the 1840’s, Barnum would have offered him a place as a side show entertainment in - The Greatest Showman.

I am a good cook, but it has been an endless task, food plus snacks on a daily roll – It’s like running a small canteen – I have to remember to put labels on food in the fridge, - eat, don’t eat, don’t touch, don’t even think about it! Some food in the ‘larder’ has disappeared completely, with no culprits owning up!

I am working in the hub of the house the kitchen, as my office is otherwise occupied. Naturally everyone comes & goes with snack or cuppa in hand; so interruptions are endless if not completely justified, but it means I get little or nothing done. An example of this, whilst I am writing our eldest son comes to ask me a question about our daughter whom he had just walked past, I asked him, “why don’t you ask her?”, his reply, “She is working!” Actually what she was doing, was painting, with her headphones in, dancing whilst listening to music, whilst pursing her lips & reciting Japan’s phrases as she has decided to learn Japanese for her working tour of Japan that has been postponed due to the pandemic.

It got me pondering, why for example can no one else in the property open or close curtains? It’s not really a special skill, perhaps they just want to walk around all day in semi-dullness or they just don’t notice? Loo rolls these have become another obsession of mine, when you come to end of a loo roll, would it not be obvious to just put it in the bin provide? Instead of balancing the roll on the nearby radiator, for someone else [me] to put it in the bin? Bringing all their shoes down into the hallway & leaving them in a random mathematical style on the floor for me to move so that you can walk down the hallway without fearing for your life in terms of falling. Coats is another fascinating dilemma, how many can you hang on a single hook in the hall before they all fall off & hit the passer by?

Once, after cleaning the downstairs loo, I removed the hand towel & took it to the utility room, collected the clean towel & was on my way back to replace it, in the hallway I came across a person holding their washed wet hands in the air, confused & shocked - “there is no towel in the loo, where has it gone?” - taking the clean towel from me, they dried their hands, gave it back to me & went on their merry way! I made my way to the loo only to find splash marks up the wall, across the mirror & on the floor where they had attempted to dry their hands off! The simple conundrums in my life!

Over this last year we all sit together every evening with fine food to eat & lots of wine. I get to the table last, by which time most of the evening debates are underway & conversation is in full swing. No matter how hard I try to interject in this lively debate to my mind I am either over talked, ignored or marginalised by a tolerant grimace in my direction - I mean what do I know? This ‘irks’ me a – I am not just the house elf! – I have a brain & an opinion.

The next morning, I composed an email & pinged it off to the children, my main complaint was not about the amount of menial work I was doing, it was about my fragile ego, that I had something to contribute other than – being ‘General Dogs Body’ – Let’s face it on reflection it is always a bit of a risky business to complain to your children & try & pretend that you are in any way on their intellectual level or at times even relevant!

First responder; our middle son by text – a kiss emoji with a note saying ‘I love you’. Quite a clever response, it says little but also says everything a mother wants to hear! A tear came to my eye! You see Natalie – They do appreciate you on an intellectual level! Really it is laughable how shallow my ego has got!

Our eldest; I am assuming she just read the email, most probably thought I was over reacting & continued her behaviour as normal… In the hope it would all blow over…

My phone pinged again, title - ‘Rebuttal’ – A message from our youngest son; you had to be a thicker skinned person than me to read it! You know that saying, ‘ask a young person something whilst they still know everything!’ Two of his suggestions that gave cause for thought & I can reveal here.

1. He considered that we drank too much wine over lockdown – ‘enough to sink a small whale’ – Apparently! Well under the current stress, I guess it beats main lining heroin, which is something I can’t do as I am allergic to morphine, so on reflection wine seemed the better option!

2. My bad language – I am not adverse to the odd ‘F-bomb’ when the moment suits, but it is not habitual! I don’t swear at anyone - you understand! Also a bit rich coming from someone who plays expletive driven PlayStation games & full blast music with lyrics that would make Gordon Ramsey blush!

I confess – to the odd expletive, for example when I walk past their rooms & the door is open – I spy the magic carpet of clothes. Clothes that I have recently washed/dried, folded in sorting order of items, socks, pants, joggers, hoodies, jeans – placed in neat piles upstairs outside their corresponding bedroom door. On prompting, they are collected by the owner & deposited on the nearest surface in their rooms. Over the course of the week items of clothing are picked from the pile at random causing the clothes on top to fall to the floor creating a modern day – thick ‘shagpile’ carpet, which stays there, until they are all deposited back into the laundry basket a week later & brought downstairs to be washed again!… I confess I swear!  

On a walk with my husband, I discussed the contents of my email & the responses, he laughed, we both laughed! The conclusion was - they all are just normal, lovely young people & because of lockdown we have had the privilege to have spent some quality time with them, apart from the odd hiccup we have laughed our way through this year together... They are kind & generous even if they can’t put clothes away & they do other stuff! Perhaps writing the email when they too are going through so much was another nuclear reactor moment?

Some days later - I was handed a dissertation by our daughter, she has decided to apply to do a master’s degree in English Literature on the psychopathy in literature. ‘Could I look it over & see what I think? My chance!! Did I add any insightful comments? Yes, I found two full stops missing! Natalie the pseudo-intellectual – At last my moment in the spot light!

Sitting at the kitchen isle my husband went to the fridge, opened the door, glanced around at me – “Hey Whale – Fancy a glass of wine!”

KEEP MASKED UP!

A bit of Fun - Lock-Down is sending us all mad!

Sometimes you have to have a bit of fun in these Lock-Downs - This is about wearing a mask & staying safe, modelled by the beautiful Tallulah - Can you imagine going out looking like this a year & a half ago? You would look like you were house breaking! Sign of the times! I bet David Cameron feels safe about saying “Hug a Hoodie” now!

Lock-Down Hair

None of us have found it easy, this endless lock-down in the UK. I have taken on cutting my youngest son’s hair, my husband & my daughters … Today my daughter took on the task of cutting my hair… She did a grand job… Stay safe and Happy … If it goes wrong just remember it is hair & it will grow back … X

Having your Cake & Eating it!

Victoria Sandwich cake

If you have read any of the Me/Myself & I ‘blog’ stories then you will know that I have an extraordinary relationship with my childhood… Perhaps we all do? This memory came to me when I was making a large Victoria Sandwich cake for the family the other day..

I’ve never liked cakes, ever, even as a child, the very idea of putting that sickly sweet, glutenous mouthful of tacky wall paper glue into my mouth to find that it then sticks to the roof of my mouth & coats my tongue & teeth with edible adhesive .. It’s really not my thing! Agreed, not a great ‘intro’ to a story about cakes …

However I do love making cakes! Also, I’m not half bad at it! I don’t taste them, but to be fair who does taste the uncooked version of cake? I rely on a fantastic sense of smell & an overall understanding of the ingredients & the process, also I have many willing participants who taste the cakes along the way & enjoy testing the ultimate results.

My window into the world of cakes was via my mother who loves cakes & pastries, all things pretty, sweet & nice. Deserts give her great pleasure, she is a good cook herself, now in her latter years, she will happily spend a great deal of time making a good cake, she enjoys them and never puts on weight as she indulges in her home made cuisine! Having your Cake & Eating it very much apply’s to my mum … Occasionally she will ask my advice on a particular recipe. So it is something we have in common on some level.. Having enjoyed herself making a cake or four, she deposits them to grateful recipients in her local area. Often to “the old lady upstairs”, as it happens ‘the old lady upstairs’ is in fact younger than my mother, a minor point in my mothers world!

As children my parents would take my brother & I out on long drives from London to tea houses in the country; another thing I was not keen on, long car journey’s! “Are we there yet?” Arriving at these always busy tea houses crammed full of tables covered in ill-fitting over-washed table cloths, we squeezing through the packed cafe apologising to the already seated patrons to finally make our way to the empty table that beckoned us. Shunting our seats rather too tightly under the table, as we were taught to by my father, which meant that you were pinned to the table & unnecessarily close to the proceeding, in my case being small by my neck, my father was obsessed by making sure we were “tucked in tight”? He would jump up hold the edges of the chair & use his leg & knee to make sure that we were well & truly under the table, it made it impossible for me to get my hands out from under the table so that I might at some stage eat the cake I didn’t like! Parents are weird?

My parents viewed the menu, scanning the many delights of the cafe cuisine. Menu’s in those days were either typed up, carbon copy style with cross outs or tippexed where spelling mistakes were made & then attached to maroon clip boards, the clip boards had always seen better days the plastic at the edges of the board was invariably split & the battered cardboard centre was peeking through. Or the worse menu; the encapsulated plastic menu always a bit sticky & the edges were sharp, they resided in a plastic clip set in the centre of the table, sometimes you would have to prize them apart from each other in order to view. Yuck!

This was my opportunity to scan the surroundings, the decor, the people, but firstly the table were we sat at, I had made a mental note on these many visits & observed that all tea houses seemed to suffer with the same hygiene issues? Being the smallest therefore my face was the closest to the table it was obvious to me that many customers had already sat at this table prior to us. Thus the cloth was invariably covered in other peoples crumbs; which grossed me out! The table cloths were littered with bits of over toasted tea cake, small pieces of crusty toast & cake that had missed the previous occupants mouth & worse of all on occasions slimy bits of butter & jam that were smeared across the fabric. Also Gross!

In some of the more forward thinking establishments, they had a remedy to this problem, a metal tool that they would scrap across the table cloth in an attempt to collect up the debris of the now discarded bun-droppings, but all it actually did was ‘ruche’ the fabric into gathered pockets that would hide the bun-droppings underneath; so when the waitress had finished doing this piece of drama & straightened the table cloth out again you were now left with wavy lines of crumbs, more artistic perhaps, but still equally revolting!

These parlours back in the day, were mostly run by oddly shaped older women wearing frilly floral aprons tied too tightly at the waist; it did not escape my notice that these rosy-red cheeked women also had uneven floppy bosoms hanging over the their waistband, it occurred to me at the time that these ladies could do with what was a phenomenon at Grandmas house, both my aunts never stopped talking about the new revolution a ‘Playtex cross your heart bra’ this apparently according to my aunt Dilys ‘separates and lifts the breasts whilst ensuring the perfect fit’.. Regrettably this invention came a little bit late in life for Grandma & these ladies waiting the tables. Grandma was an advocate of a ‘girdle’, I only saw it once, hanging on the line, I think it was a secret, it was an odd creation with ‘dangly’ elastic hanging at the base, in later life I discovered this was a ‘suspender’, not that fashionable then, but now very Madonna or Jean Paul-Gautier, now the height of sexiness! Although Grandma was not quite that shape or possibly never had the inclination? Given the fact that she already had seven children!

My sleuthing the table cloth was interrupted by mum, “What would you both like to eat?”, she said looking at Laurie, my elder brother; she actually meant what cake do you want to eat? Any public conversation with Laurie, left him speechless. Laurie did not like to talk, he was painfully shy & introspective. I came along a number of years later & took it upon myself to talk for him, something at this stage in our lives he was mostly grateful for! Food wise Laurie mostly only liked baked beans & Arctic Roll, which was ice-cream wrapped in jam & covered in sickly sponge cake, a limited diet to be fair but it kept Laurie happy & that in turn kept my mother happy & I suffered it. I have nothing against baked beans, with the exception of having to share a room with my brother, but I detested the Arctic Roll, I would peal the sponge off & give that to Laurie & try & eat the ice-cream from inside to out so as to not have to eat any jam.

Jam, on reflection I reluctantly accepted latter in my life it was contained in my favourite biscuits which for a short while were Jammie Dodgers, I like the taste of the biscuit bit, less keen on the jam, but I would suffer it. When we moved out of London into the country my parents bought me a four poster bed, which my mother loved. Having a substantially bigger house, my mother followed in the footsteps of my aunt Elvira & took to doing large shopping visits to ‘cash & carry’, the booty was distributed all over the house, if you opened the small high level bathroom cabinet you were quite likely to be bombarded with two gross worth of coloured loo rolls or if you went ‘snooping’ about the house you could well come across an enormous amount of tins of backed beans hidden in the guest bedroom cabinets, there was ‘booty’ stashed everywhere in the house?

For some strange reason best known to my mother she would buy boxes of 24 packets of Jammie Dodgers and stash them in the void under my bed along with multi packs of tin dog & cat food. I was at this time a ‘chubby’ child, so when it came to an after dinner treat, I was allowed to take 1 biscuit from the biscuit tin in the kitchen. Except when I went to bed later, I would hang upside down on my bed & pull up the lace valiance around the bed & view the boxes of Jammie Dodgers hidden underneath. I was not a naughty child particularly at this stage of my life, but if I saw that the box had been open & a number of packets had been removed I would take a packet out & regroup with it in my bed. Having eaten with gusto 3 or 4 biscuits I would feel sick, the only problem was that I was now left with the rest of the packet. This was an issue, it was not easy to hide anything in my bedroom as my mother was constantly re-arranging furniture in there & changing the theme of my room, I would often come home to find that my draws had been riffled through & the entire contents of my bedroom had been moved to a different space. She also had a penchant to raid my bedroom cupboard & throw all the ‘stuff’ in my cupboard out onto the floor, complaining that the cupboard was a mess! Which considering she had thrown the entire contents onto the floor in a heap seemed to me to have made any mess I had made in the cupboard considerably worse? I think it was a ritual for her? So there was no other choice for me to hide my uneaten biscuits & I was forced to consume the entire packet, which made me feel extremely unwell. After a couple of attempts as stealing them it put me off Jammie Dodgers for life! Another thing my mother found issue with as she now had a stash of Jammie Dodgers I was not going to eat!

Back to the cafe table; all eyes were on Laurie’s which made his eyes water up & his cheeks go red & shinny, he was never going to talk, I knew that.. Eventually my mother would say, “Okay Laurie, you have a think about it, Natalie what would you like?” Never backward in coming forward as a child, “I want a coke & a toasted cheese sandwich, please.” My mother would sigh & ignore my request, she would then order for me & Laurie & Trevor, my father. She was always trying to control my fathers apatite, as he was a chubby, & a bit of a glutton.

I have often wondered why parents ask you what you want & then just ignore your answer & order you something entirely different? What is the point of asking in the first place? To be honest I still have these conversations with my mum now. She tells me what she thinks I will like or more to the point what I should like, be it a film or a item of clothing, I say “I don’t like it, it is not my thing!” And my mum will say, “Oh you do like it Natalie!” And so the madness goes on!

On this occasion Trevor was allowed cheese on toast a favourite of mine, Laurie would get a chocolate cake mostly or on special occasions like today a chocolate eclair & I was presented with a Battenberg cake, like it or not! A multi-coloured chess board style of cake covered in sickly marzipan. That I could cope with as Trevor mostly would scoff his food & start on mine, but what really irritated me about these dining experiences & does to this day is that Laurie was always given a coke, despite having not asking for one & I was given a bottle of congealed, split sweet & bitter tasting orange juice? Because according to my mother - ‘I liked it!’.

Battenberg, was not my style of cake, either, so my mother moved onto Meringues glued together with whipped cream, I loved the cream but the over sweet Meringues were not my thing. Mum advanced onto donuts, I didn’t mind the ‘donut’ so much despite the fact that they left your face covered in sugar & stuck your fingers together but there was that glob of jam in the middle? Pastries were mostly not my thing either, but better than cake… Mum proceeded onto home made Lemon Meringue pie, this to be fair was a little better, I could eat a bit of the lemon but not the Meringue. If you are wondering why not chocolate cake, well because I I don’t really like chocolate .. either .. I like cheese if I was to have a dessert…. So I was a lost cause to my mother. And not for the last time!

Having finally accepted that I didn’t like all things sweet mum came up with another wheeze to keep cake in my life. On the understanding that “Other people like cake Natalie”. So now it was rude for me not to accept cake! Cakes were presented to me on my birthdays they were my mothers key gifts. Between the village we lived & Windsor was a village called Datchet. …&… Joy of joy’s there was a little tea shop there called The Astricot, run by two very affable old ladies, who in fairness to them had their bosoms in the right place, perhaps they had discovered cross your heart bras? These very talented ladies created wonderful ‘early days’ themed cakes. As far as my mother was concerned it was inspired. So for the next 6 years or so, these sweet old ladies made beautiful Birthday cakes for me mostly & very occasionally for my brother, who had now been exiled to boarding school, which for me was a bit like being bereaved & for him a total disaster… The cakes were inspired, [by my mother], a Ginger Bread house with a ‘smarties’ roof, was the first, I like smarties! Some of the other themes were, a frog band cake, I am not sure why? A ballet cake covered in ballerina’s, I was not so keen on this. A cake with a glass wishing well and one covered in silk flowers to name just a few. My mother just delighted in each & everyone of them, it gave her such enormous pleasure.

The Astricot ladies were also commissioned to make various cakes for the wider family, one being for my Grandmother’s 75th Birthday that was to be held at my aunt Elvira’s house. This cake was to be the centre piece of the celebrations, well that was the view my mother had! This opulent cake was decorated in silk purple flowers, [my mother was going through her purple phase at this time, there were many design phases such she went through such as gold, lime green & her leopard pattern chapter, I will cover these in another blog!], the centre of the flowers on grandma’s cake had black & pearl wired beads as stamens, these flowers were placed delicately on scalloped white royal icing, it weight a ton. At the grand unveiling of Grandma’s cake, to my mother’s utter horror, my younger cousins dived in & started to strip the icing sugar off the cake & consume it, before we had even lit the candles. My mother was furious & I agree with her… Sometimes you can have your cake but you should not eat it … Until it has been a little bit savoured that is the point in cake it is a frivolous sexy temptress, that needs to be admired.

When I had left home, I used to make a Christmas fruit cake every year, starting the preparation nearly 9 months in advance for my mother’s celebrity friends to enjoy on her annual five month holiday in Barbados. The Christmas cake was huge, opulent & drenched in alcohol for flavour, [much like my mother’s wealthy set of friends!] Each year, the cake was sent out via couriers at Christmas to Barbados, as my mother had long since departed & there was no way that she was cutting her baggage allowance for clothes down with a big heavy cake. So the cake was dispatched along with a trolley load of ‘goodies’ purchased from Harrods, this consignment also included a stash of 20 or so cans of tinned corn beef for Alan & Ray the main hosts who despite their wealth & the luxurious surroundings liked simple fare, they also liked a quality Christmas cake. One of Alan & Ray’s guest on many occasions was Bob Monkhouse, a well known English entertainer & good friend to the Barbados crowd, his passion too was the Christmas cake, however his crime one year was to eat the last piece of my Christmas cake, so irritated was Alan that he flounced off to his bedroom & was not seen again until Bob had gone back to his own villa! It is only cake … Right!?

Don’t think that perhaps I don’t like cakes because or that I was just given badly made cakes by elderly grandparents & hapless aunts. In the main I wasn’t, my parents took us to the best patisseries in London & the home counties, plus trips to Devon & Cornwall, in their pursuits of all things cake. However, one disgusting cake memory was my grandmother’s who was a very good ‘war-time’ cook, she had a penchant for making ‘junket’, a sloppy, wobbly creation like a jelly, made from sweetened & flavoured curds of milk. Grandma would colour it in vulgar clashing vegetable dyes, to entertain her many grandchildren, 20 to be precise. Grandma made this ‘slop’ particularly for my cousin Simon as he was her favourite grandchild outside two other male grandchildren, one being my brother. We all had to suffer junket at Grandma’s gatherings most particularly because Simon liked it and we were an obedient lot!

I have continued to make many cakes & I enjoy doing it, my own children have had some spectacularly wild cakes on their Birthdays & other occasions, I have never forced cake on my children, nor did I care if they liked cake or not, they all do by the way! But what I will say is that cake making was my response in some ways to my mothers love of cake. And therefore she inspired me in some way, I hope that she will take credit in that? So on the whole has been a success… So have your cake & eating it … I suppose I should thank my mum?

Please go to Food & Entertaining …. For all recipes on making Victoria Sandwich cakes & variations …. & ENJOY >>>>



My Family Home….’Dutch Gardens’….

Part One….

Matilda based on my Beautiful mother…

The Reports of My Family’s Demise are Greatly Misquoted! 

I am writing this blog a bit prematurely, in fact it was not a story I would have under normal circumstances put on my site, but I feel my hand has been somewhat forced; by a newspaper article that went viral… About a poor old eccentric pensioner who tried to turn his drab bungalow into a Venetian Palace. You should know I am rolling my eyes right now! So here, I am going to “modify” the true tale to fit my sites demographic! The reality of my childhood is somewhat more complicated and resembles something of a black farce! I will tell that story another time… Here .. I feel the need to defend myself, my mother and brother who have once again been written out of our own history that was so ‘endemic’ to all our lives. I should point out that neither my mother or brother, have any part in this post it is strictly from my point of view … But I want to put the story of Dutch Gardens - ‘straight’ it is part of who I am and I refuse to be simply anaesthetised from the equation that is/was my life!

“Just because a picture happens to be erotic, does not make it pornographic”

Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh

I was alerted by a family member to an article that appeared in a national paper about the house I grew up in, by the time I read the feature… It had gone viral.. ”How I turned my £13,500 bungalow in Staines into a £4 million Venetian Palace” … At first … I was shocked by the article.. I mean I know the story well .. And I never thought the old boy would sell the place as it is central to his life, his existence, nothing else matters to him apart from that house – Dutch Gardens, he has given up and lost everything to build this monument to himself… Some would rename it – The Hammer House of Horrors, particularly if you happen to be one of the neighbours! As he has been building there for the last 50 years relentlessly.. The man at the centre of this spin is Mr Trevor Wynne-Jones, how do I know him? .. He is my father… Although for various reasons we are very much estranged.. But that is another much more complex story..

“If you knew the power of the dark side .. I am your father… “

Star Wars – Darth Vader

Here is the original article which is very good by Fred Redwood for the Telegraph … I think his comment … A first class fake! Speaks volumes!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/luxury/turned-13500-bungalow-staines-4million-venetian-palace/

So let me tell you a bit about the current Dutch Gardens, which as the article suggests is as far away from Italy particularly in terms of a Venice location … It is stuck in between two large towns called Staines and Slough, that is not a particularly inviting start. Granted there is water at the property more than is required at times and the River Thames runs on the other side of the road, but it is not quite the same as Venice and you rarely see a Gondola! However this so called Venetian Palace, built by a self-obsessed megalomaniac, does indeed have its own versions of Tintern Abbey, Rapunzel’s Tower and Dutch Architecture, the Gothic windows which are newly sited next to French style doors, suits of armour and paintings copied from the old masters in oils in the style of fresco’s on the walls; not to forget to mention the hideous commissioned ill proportioned copies of paintings of monumental battles with Trevor sitting at the helm… I cannot tell you how funny I find these paintings.. Everyone that worked for Trevor is in these paintings including family members, even though some requested not to be in the pictures, that made no difference to Trevor you either bend to his will or you were fired! .. If you look at them it is obvious who is in Trevor’s favour and who is not.. I should point out that I am not in any of the paintings as I am Trevor’s least favourite and he had long since air brushed me out of his life!

The current decoration and design of Dutch Gardens is eclectic to say the least, whatever takes Trevor’s fancy he builds, whatever he wants he does.. Simple.. Trevor’s every whim is indulged, he has been building at this development continuously since he purchased it in the late 1960’s.. Trevor’s passion for knocking things down and rebuilding is legendary he gets bored of things/people and so just moves on to the next thing/person… Don’t get me wrong, Trevor has an ability to see and recreate architecture, but he spins from one design to another and thus creates a mishmash of designs all fighting for their place against each other… Losing any sense of style or cohesion and more often than not he will push these design conceptions to their limit so that it no longer works. Most things became a parody of themselves.

As a teenager teetering on my high stilettos, swearing under my breath as I tried to make it unscathed to the front door without falling or shredding the leather from my shoes on the London cobbles that Trevor had laid with such undulations and gaps between as to make the cobbles impossible to walk on … Really the only thing that was lacking in this particular phase of his design creation of the Dickensian London cobble streets was his impression of Dick van Dijk singing ‘Me ol Bamboo’ as he tap dances down the walkways chasing after Mary Poppins!

“Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come”

Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

The property was purchased for £12,500, in 1968, by my young Nouveau Riche parents, they saw it as a massive stepping stone to improve on their lives and make a new base for their family, but most importantly to fulfill their dreams. And why not! They were up and coming and my mother was certainly nubile, they were taking on and embracing a new world of opulence on a scale that they had never experienced before. Prior to the purchase of Dutch Gardens, we lived in a two bedroom second floor flat in a house in Finchley, North West London. This was certainly a change in circumstances for us all.

When I first set eyes on Dutch Garden as a young child; yes it was a pretty dowdy pebble dash bungalow but it was surrounded by overgrown gardens that reminded me of the film Secret Garden, it was all very exciting and to me the house was enormous, full of dark corridors and rooms that smelt of rotting damp; it reminded me of the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho; I speak retrospectively here as I had not at that time yet seen the film, my parents were ‘way out there’ but not that far, well not at that time anyway!! Dutch Gardens was owned by two old ladies…. I had no idea we were going to live in this place … I just saw it as another old house that my parents were looking at, it seemed to me, at the time that we spent an inordinate amount of time viewing old musty houses and having tea on the lawns with strange people, this particular tea party was not much different than the others except we had tea and sandwiches in the old ladies small sitting room.. Having got bored of the adult conversation … I was let out of the rickety old French windows into the gardens to explore on my own… My elder brother had been recently exiled off to a boarding school and so I was somewhat bereft and had to make my own entertainment…This I have never had a problem with!

 The bungalow was set in the middle of the plot and there was endless paving stone walkways to follow through the rambling gardens. Eventually I came to the corner of the garden were there was an old wooden gate covered in cobwebs, it was clear that it had not been opened in many years, I peeked through the wooden key hole and there appeared to be a gravelled drive on the other side and a few houses. This drive was actually the back entrance to the property that had not been used in many years, but all was about to change and this little drive way was about to be subject to relentless building delivery lorries that would cause great controversy including punch-ups between irate neighbours and workmen, not least on one occasion a neighbour pouring boiling fat over a delivery lorry engine, which inevitable, started yet another punch up… All in a normal day at Dutch Gardens and the pattern of how we lived our lives.

After peeking through the old door, I forged my way between the perimeter fence and a thick high hedge and followed the route for a while until I could not stand being whipped in the face with any more sticky spider’s webs so I made a break for it under a hole in the hedge back into the main part of the garden. Utopia!! I came across a large collection of animal pens and even better a horse stable, every child’s dream even though all the huts and cages were empty. I could now hear my parents calling for my return, I chose to ignore their polite calls, I was not to be removed from my investigations! After a few more calls of my name,they seemed to be getting closer, I decided to continue on my quest and move forward along another path around the other side of the house away from them, I picked up speed in order to make sure that I saw as much of this property as possible, I was now running toward the most beautiful purple flowering tree with enormous tendrils dangling down the intertwining branches. In the middle of this beautiful creature was an arch and I made my way through it to find myself back at the front of the house.. I now know that this magnificent specimen was a very old and impressive Wisteria, which was kept in the gardens until the gardener over watered it one year and it died of those injuries.

“We all go a little mad sometimes..”

Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock

So, my bourgeoisie parents, having purchase their new property, went on a frenzy of major renovation. They knocked down and rebuilt most parts of the property within pretty much the same footprint of the original building but on a grander scale. They were creating their perfect dream home. And why not? The ‘new’ Dutch Gardens was in the style of a 1970 – 1980 Spanish Hacienda. I mean there is a theme going on here! How many other countries architectural influences can we include in this property? The old bungalow had an enormous ‘lounge’ situated next to the small sitting room that we had had tea in with the old ladies. The large lounge had a shiny polished wooden floor, which my brother and I made the most of before it was demolished, by sliding up and down on the floor boards, before we complained of being covered in splinters… This large lounge and its small sister the sitting room next door was kept and modernised fully, with floor to ceiling panelled windows and shag pile carpets and the ubiquitous 1970 style purpose built bar in the corner of the room… Which was slightly unusual as my parents did not really drink at the time although later Trevor became rather partial to a nice warm ‘little hock’ … Or even the odd bottle of ‘Blue Nun’ …

Beautiful photograph taken by my brother Laurie T Wynne-Jones, in the good old fashion way. My mother sitting on the edge of the pond holding my cat Dizzy.

Like all houses built near the River Thames, the building regulations stated that the property had to be elevatedfour foot above ground level, to prevent flooding … This afforded an enormous amount of interesting opportunities for me when I looked down before the floor boards were laid, I would see large rats down there dead and alive. Very exciting when you are young, at the time I had not developed enough other hobbies to keep me occupied!

The rebuild took just over three years and we would travel backward and forward from our flat in London, to this large house set in three quarters of an acre of land in the country. We never once slept there overnight as back then the commute was largely without the traffic troubles that it suffers today so the journeys were easy. Whilst I was at Dutch Gardens I spent most of my time playing by myself in the large garden mostly in the water sprinkler that my mother had brought to the house to entertain me. On occasions the workmen played with me, throwing me in the air when no-one was checking on them and I ate more than my fair share of egg sandwiches sitting in the old horse stables in the garden.

 When I got too wet and cold I was despatched by my mother to change in the old pantry which was small and three steps down from the level of the main house, ignoring the rules about the water table and potential flooding! This room contained shelves with chicken net fronted cupboards in which there were old empty jam jars with their lids in neat piles and other empty dusty containers relics of a life lead before we purchased the premises, the jam jars were repatriated to my paternal grandmother who was an avid jam maker. In the restyle this small room was converted into the boiler room, were I was again despatched some years later to do my ceramic enamelling on an electric kiln, with the washing hanging over my head. Considering the electric fired kiln issue and that I was only ten, by today’s standard there seems to be a health and safety issue here... But that was never a consideration for my parents.. I was out of sight and therefore out mind! But it worked for me … Nothing was normal in my life…

While the house was under reconstruction, one of the places that I was not allowed to go near was two very large barrels in the corner of the garden, behind the garage… My name is Natalie and therefore I am naturally inquisitive and rarely to be put off the scent, particularly if I was asked not to look…I had to look … Obviously!! ..Of course I was going to inspect the barrels when no one was there to tell me off… I realised as I got a closer to the barrels, not least because of the smell… That they were the workmen’s toilets… It occurs to me now that perhaps the budget could not stretch to a Portaloo? Quite disgusting!

“It was as though the world had had a fresh coat of paint, and every heart acquired a store of illusions that made the burden of life less hard to bear.”

Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier

As the house transformed in the very early years, and when my brother was occasional released from his new school, we would play together on what was a building site. Once, we were allowed to go upstairs into what was to become my parents’ bedroom. We were told that we were only to stand on the joists as the floor boards had not yet been laidand the plasterboard of the ceiling below would not be strong enough to take our weight. My brother being oldersprinted across the joists to investigate the rooms. I attempted to keep up, my only problem was that I could not span the joists as easily, being much smaller. Having negotiated yet another joist, without falling through, I glanced up and thought that my brother had stepped on the ceiling boards, brilliant I thought and immediately did the same. It was instant, the ceiling gave away with the most almighty crack and I descended through it, hearing my mother scream from below as she fled not knowing what was happening… I landed cross legged on the floor and looked up to see my brother’s face peeking through the hole I had left above, it was brilliant…. Despite the trouble I was in.… This accident created yet another explosive tantrum from Trevor, not because I might have been hurt, but because I had damaged the ceiling.. Trevor was and is the most incredible tantrum thrower on a spectacular level… To see his temper tantrums is to behold.. A man who is out of control in his rage! Quite terrifying at times, albeit we were used to it… I come from a long line of over-reactors!

On another occasion early one morning… My brother and I came across one of the many motorised diggers that were used in the landscaping of the gardens. My mother is the most wonderful landscape designer as you can see from what is left of the gardens in the newspaper articles. As luck would have it some kind person had left the keys in the ignition, so my brother decided that we should take it for a spin … I eagerly clambered into the back of the digger … As my brother took the driver’s seat.. We were having great fun doing a tour of the garden at speed, enjoying the moment then my brother came up with the ingenious idea of driving the digger up one of the large mounds of sand and building gravel, obviously to add a bit of extra excitement and danger to the fun! It was going quite well until the sand gave way under the pressure and weight of the vehicle and it flipped over sending me flying into the air out of harm’s way but trapping my brother underneath… You know those moments as a child when you hope that if you shut your eyes tightly for a second or two, that when you open them again very quickly all would be back to normal and the damage you had just created would have gone away.. This was one of those moments.. But it was not to be the digger was definitely upside down and we were in trouble! My brother then emerged with a bloody nose from under the digger, but otherwise unscathed, as he got to his feet, he let out any number of swear words to illustrate his feelings on the matter… Which secretly I was very impressed by, I saw this as being the height of growing up!…. However there was no way we could rectify this problem and I can assure you that this evoked yet another ’Mount Vesuvius’ explosive tantrum from Trevor .. Perhaps fair under the circumstances! To some degrees ..

“Anyone for a bit of Denis Roussos?”

Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh

When we finally moved in to Dutch Gardens in the early 1970’s, I had assumed we were going to live in a tent in the dining room as to me the house was so big, the dining room was about the size of our flat in London therefore a perfect fit, and I could not conceive in my mind that we would need all this extra space, apart from to play in … It came as a surprise that I had my own room, predictably painted in a revolting shade of pink, a colour I would never have chosen, then or now! … But this was my parents dream not mine… Mostly the house was finished, their Pantile Spanish Hacienda dream house was about to take wings, it was really quite “on trend” at the time, believe it or not, as my mother was involved with the design there was cohesion and a trendy flow to the house… Venice was “still” a long way off and there were no medieval suits of armour anywhere, and most importantly we lived above ground… Not in the subterranean dungeons that you see in some of the pictures in the article..

The outside rendered walls were painted white with floor to ceiling panelled windows in every room, some walls were just windows, all very on trend … It had 3 inch high white shag pile carpets in the big lounge and my parents’ bedroom, so trendy was my mother that there were shag pile carpets in their bathroom and that carpet went up the walls! .. As Austin Powers would say, Shagadelic …. Yeah Baby!!

This carpet however, later became the bane of my family’s life when I took up sewing and continually dropped pins on the floor … Never to be seen again until someone stepped on them with bare feet.. Mostly my brother was afflicted with this torture, usually on one of his exeats from school, on one occasion the pin had embedded itself so deeply into his heel, that Trevor was forced to remove it with plyers and I was banned from doing any further sewing in any areas that were carpeted.. Of course I ignored this command, as no one was ever there to inforce this new and in my view largely irrelevant rule. However the shag pile caught me out too, on one of many occasions when I sneaked into my mother’s dressing room to paint my toe nails with her red polish.. When I swapped feet to paint the other foot, I did not notice that I was wiping the polish from the first foot all over the carpet…When I saw the mess I had made of the white carpet, I came up with the genius idea of trimming the carpet with my mother’s nail scissors to hide the damage except I got caught in the act by my mother! Not so Groovy Baby!!

“Oh lovely” she says “Cos Laurence likes a drop of wine, actually. Oh it’s Beaujolais.. Fantastic! .. Won’t be a sec, I’ll just pop it in the fridge”

Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh

My mother, a traditional follower of fashion, saw my father at this stage in their relationship more as a Roger Moore than an Austin Powers, which when I think about it is quite sweet as he is only half the size of Roger and does not really have the same physique? It must have been love as she would dress Trevor in Roger’esque style Safari suits, with the same comb over hair style, albeit Trevor’s hair was sparser… Trevor would wear this suit with his self-styled pocket watch and chain which sort of spoilt the look! My mother’s style and costumes became the stuff of magazine articles, whatever you saw in Vogue or Tatler … You would see on my mum .. A stunningly beautiful woman, with her own agenda… Most importantly they were enjoying being the ‘it’ people of Dutch Gardens and so they should have been they had worked hard to get where they were… Every weekend they would be designing the garden or a part of the house or visiting country homes or stately gardens… This was their life and Dutch Gardens was at the centre of it…

All the mod trends of the moment were applied and added to the design, including avocado suites in the bathrooms, including bidets, which were never used, well not for their actual purpose … I found them a source of great entertainment.. The sprinklers in the bottom of the pans were so powerful that they would water the whole room, subsequently I was banned from using them! As it would drench the carpets in the bathrooms… Can you imagine carpets in a bathroom now …. Yuck … All the tapsand faucets were gold plated, which very quickly discoloured and corrodedcovering the metalwith unsightly lime spots, which ultimately made them hard to use…

In the morning room next to the corridor kitchen was a glass circular dining table supported by tripod chrome legs and matching black leather chairs, which were lethal if you leaned too far back as they would slide on the tiled black and white floor sending the sitter flying … There was a lurid pink wall, and the very height of modern ‘chic’ was the 3D handmade wall paper of different sized pebble protrusions all painted in white.. My parents understandably would go mad when my young cousins came to stay and delighted in punching and squashing the protrudingpebbles… It was my job, with the aid of a screw, to pull theegg box pebbles back into shape, then the permanent on site staff would come in and repaint and fill the damage … It was also my job to repaint the chips in black and white floor tiles in the morning room, the damage being caused by the movement of thechrome chairs legs rubbing backward and forward over the surface of the tiles.

The house was full of Casa Pupo items, there was at the time a shop in London which my parents frequented, the house was stuffed with their lamps, vases, object ‘dart including metal bird cages and waist height china wild cats and snow leopards, all dotted around the house, which after parties would need to be washed down as my young cousin insisted on feeding them with cake.. In the wooden panelled dining room, which looked a bit like a set from the programme Columbo, one of Trevor’s favourite TV series at the time. In the room there was a black and white synthetic floor with inlaid black dots, it was synthetic because my mother having seen a TV programme had investigated into getting a special treatment for the floor, which involved coating the floor with a substance that would allow it to be used on occasions as an ice skating ring! This was in the period when my mother had visions of turning me into a top British ice-skater.. My grandmother had been billeted into knitting me a red ice-skating dress, which was hideous and stretched when it got wet because I kept falling over! I was forced to take weekly skating lessons, which I was extremely bad at and hated particularly as it was not my idea in the first place! … Thankfully eventually my mother gave up on this plan and turned to other ideas and formulas to plan out my future! And there is another story!

On the top of the black and white floor was a large Casa Pupo vivid green and white fringed rug, placed on top of this was the massive wooden candy twist refectory table, purchased from Harrods, which was now fast becoming their new ‘go to’ corner shop… Trevor was making money by the bucket load… My ever more wealthy parents, were making their mark on the world and Dutch Gardens was at the heart of their lives? Good luck to them I say ..

“That is the last time I play the Tart for You – Jerry” Margot – The Good Life

Later in Dutch Gardens design progress we had a full time architect who had an office attached to the garage, my mother worked closely with him whilst the never ending gardens and house works continued, changed and progressed. My parent’s lives were beginning to take different routes but Dutch Gardens continued to be their great love and perhaps the only thing that now cemented their fracturing relationship. The landscaping was now on the most epic level, with diggers and machinery excavating / creating more waterfalls and ponds, into which, my mother was introducing Koi Carp shipped in from aboard at great cost. To my delight all had to be named!

 One day a selection of mature trees was delivered to the end of the road because the lorry could not make it down the road as the trees were too tall and where knocking the overhead cables out, Dinky the gardener was dispatched to collect them, however my mother negated to advise him that they were full size and he turned up with a wheel barrow instead of the fork lift truck!

Everything was on full scale.. Bling! They never stopped working on the place, it was relentless, and the hammering, drilling, digging and sawing continued; the gangs of workmen, the endless changes went on and on. My parent’s design styles were beginning to rupture and they no longer saw eye to eye, on most things. And the neighbours hated us with a passion.. At this stage it had been over eighteen years of continuous building works .. Little did the neighbours know … There were many, many, more years of building to come… Which continues to go on to this day….

Trevor was sighted in two divorce cases, by neighbours due to the stress of them permanently living next to a building site. One weekend we were barricaded into the house by the neighbours who in their frustration erected concrete bollards to blockade the delivery entrance to the house. Undeterred but furious Trevor ripped them out and threw them back into the neighbours gardens, another quiet Sunday Lunch!… But to me it was all just normal …. Sort of … On the surface at least!

See Part 2 …..

My Family Home….Dutch Gardens….

Part two….

Matilda based on my mother … Which now belongs to me .. Matilda not my mother!

“There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe”

Clochemerle by Gabriel Chevallier

Trevor decided to close up the back entrance to the property and replace the gate to the back drive, it was time for him to seek his revenge on the neighbours. He built the base of the tower that you see in the newspaper article. A very large rockery was already built around the ‘Tower’ with stepping stones to the back entrance. The entire garden was flood lit in colour lights. It was the ultimate party house and it was at that time still alive.. Albeit that more cracks were beginning to show.. Trevor put in a planning application for a forty-five foot high‘look out’ tower which was to be constructed over the back entrance of the house, the prospect of which, understandably terrify and agitate the neighbours.. Once again! He wrote to every house in Wraysbury, the area, looking for support of his design and planning application, enclosing a stamped addressed envelope for their response! We were inundated with press attention, again! Dutch Gardens was once again on the national news, everyone had an opinion about it. We were door stepped by press as we left the house, everyone likes a nutcase …. The Telegraph article success proves that...

 At the planning meeting to determine the planning application, which was held in nearby town of Windsor, police had to be called to deal with the crowds baying for Trevor’s blood and more punch up’s ensued between rivalling camps in support and against. We made all the papers and the press the next day! One Westminster MP who was interviewed by the press stated, “The whole thing is getting more like a scene from Clochemerle” – A French comic novel written about the battle between the Catholic and Republic locals over the erection of a urinal being built in the local square!” Very apt! Finally the planners decided that Trevor could have a 25 foot tower, much to the dread of all the neighbours and who could blame them! Once he had finally got permission, Trevor did what he always does and lost interest in the project, until some years later. …More divorces and new sets of neighbour replaced the last, like a never ending supply of new people for Trevor to irritate. My mother as ever was social climbing and moving on to her ‘new’ life seeing a better future for herself.. She wanted to move on to bigger and better things. Trevor saw this as a betrayed and refused to be moved and so the building went on … As the relationship faltered..

“Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll … Is all my brain & body needs ….” By Ian Dury

Massive pumps were incorporated into the ponds to create the streams which ebbed and flowed night and day. Super powered switches were wiredinto a control panel housed in a cupboard in the house so at the touch of a button you could ramp up the volume of the water and the noise should you wish… It was very Rock & Roll! ‘Knock me down with a feather.. Clever Trevor…Ian Dury & the Blockheads’… As wild young things.. My brother and I took advantage of all the facilities whenever our parents were not there; although my mother did sometimes join in our partying.. The house continued to evolveand devolve as Trevor began demolishing finished area’s to create his new found artistic design tendencies, this was a cause of much tension between my parents … Amongst other things!

After a visit to a golf course Trevor noted the beautiful lushgreen fairways, despite it being a very hotdry summer, all made possible by the golf course irrigation system. He decided they had to have the very same “commercial” sprinkler system, installed at Dutch Gardens. Trenches were dug into the lawn and pipes were laid, at strategically placed intervals prehistoric lookingsprinkler headswould emerge from the ground whenever the system was switched on. The first attempt at running the sprinklers, which was all very state of the art as it was unforgettable… The ground literally vibrated with the power of the water, there was the most wonderful whoosh sound as the long neck sprinklers emerged from the lawn making ticking sound as they rotated backward and forward. All very exciting the only problem was, no-one thought to investigate the power of the sprinklers or the coverage of water they would emit.. They were after all designed to water the vast acreage of the golf coursenot asuburban garden… To late … So powerful were the jets of water, they were knocking the garden staff over like nine pins as they tried to run away from the soaking .. The sprinklers built up to full power… Pandemonium … The window cleaner who had just finished cleaning the vast amounts of windows, was nowbeingpinned to the window panes by the force the water. Leaks of water were entering the house as the sheer pressure of the water was now unstoppable. I watched from the large lounge as water smashed through some of the panes of glass. I could hear my mother screaming in hysteria… Eventually someone managed to get to the switch and turn the system off…. The water jets from the sprinklers slowly decreased in power, the ticking sound slowed up and then the spouts disappeared back into the ground… Dutch Gardens very own Tsunami …

It subsequently transpired that one sprinkler put on top of the house would have watered the entire property, Trevor had installed eight in just a quarter of the garden! More complaints filed in from the neighbours, as we had soaked them, one man had left his open topped sports car outside his home only to come out and find it filled with water! Another day with all the madness!Over time the sprinklers would periodically have a mind of their own or Trevor would take revenge on someone and my mother would issue further apologies to the neighbours as their barbecues were ruined.

In my late teens on the long summer’s evenings, my friends and I would sit in the grounds, smoking and drinking and just having fun, enjoying the environment with the haze of the outdoor lighting and the sound of the waterfalls all around us. Trevor would return home from work hear us laughing in the garden and set the sprinklers off to ruin our fun, he hated anyone enjoying the space.. Everything was only on his terms …. As the sprinklers rained down on us, we would attempt to run for cover…. Usually into the house … Dripping water all over the place, which would further enrage Trevor into one of his legendary tantrums…He would evict us all… I was glad.. The house was losing its glory… My mother had moved on to social engagements of her own and only occasionally lived or visited Dutch Gardens ….. Their relationship like the house was descending into the stuff of nightmares …

“The Madness of King George” By Alan Bennett

If He swears and indulges in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... He will be restrained. If He throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS towards His OWN RECOVERY... then He must be restrained. George III: I am the King of England. 

As Trevor madness and megalomaniacal tendencies became more prevalent and the money continued to roll in, which saturated his wildest dreams, and now there was nothing and no one to restrain HIM. He was possessed by what he could create constantly changing what he had already created, turning what once had some cohesion as a fun ‘home’ and transforming it into a gauche pastiche of miss matching homage to Trevor’s ego. It was now the only thing that Trevor could fully control.. Things that were unfinished remained unfinished … My bedroom for example, had been subject to a number of my mother’s interior design projects, much to my irritation as I grew up. It was never finished, the new lighting now consisted of a half-finished florescent tube fittings all around the top of the walls, hidden behind a half finished pelmet that flashed on and off incessantly. When I switched it on the continuous strobing effect, was like living in George Orwells 1984…

 We were all at war …. These were corrosive times.. Yet the building went on …There was no stopping the madness …

Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

“You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs”

Trevor’s obsession with living underground had taken hold, he continued digging under the house now obsessively, 14 Irish labours dug and dug at any one time, more skips of soil were dispensed with, more aggravation for the neighbours. Inevitably the hole under the house filled with water. Trevor got bored again and works stopped and he started digging somewhere else… Where there was once a beautiful landscaped garden now half the garden was just a collection of big holes filled with water and half finished … Soul destroying for my mother..

I spent a great deal of time on my own in this property, everyone else was always out and about, I was used to my own company. One night, I was sitting in the big lounge with my stash of snacks ready for the evening, I did this so I didn’t have to venture back into the house, the two dogs who were with me were going mad, barking, growling, and digging at the shag pile... Dutch Gardens could be a very scary place to be inat night, particularly as my parents had an aversion to curtains, so you always had the feeling that you were being watched through these enormous floor to ceiling windows. Which I later found out was exactly what was going on .. But that is another story.

I was trying to ignore the dogs and watch TV but they were not going to have it, fussing and barking, this meant only one thing … I was going to have to make the very scary run, through the dining room into the hall then hang a quick left into the kitchen to get them some treats to shut them up, I was not keen … On the TV was a programme called Police 5, presented by Shaw Taylor, it was about catching criminals, this episode was a special on man dubbed, The Black Panther who had kidnapped a young heiress, it was all quite scary … Suddenly there was a massive whoosh sound and the floor gave way under me, I was thrown back onto the leatherChesterfield sofa by the force, the dogs shot out the room screaming and urinating in terror as they ran for cover …The naff 1970’s bar in the corner of the room moved and clunked as the glasses clattered together from their position on the shelves in protest, dust filled the room then the floor came to a short but abrupt halt and everything shuddered. Good old Shaw Taylor continued to give details about the Black Panther albeit that the TV had now moved position… I glanced around the room through the haze of dust nothing in principal had changed, but instinctively I knew it had. I pushed myself off the sofa; Shaw Taylor was doing his signature sign off of Keep ‘em peeled… Dust was sparkling in the light, looking up I saw a large gash in the wall above the bar, at some points at least four inches wide, the plaster that had fallen from the crack was now decorating the black bar top. On the other side of the room was even longer and wider crack, the sliding glazed panel door that separated the lounge from the adjacent small sitting room was hanging at a slight angle. Looking down at the floor line, there was now a gap were the wall and the floor had divorced each other, the skirting was splintered and cracked but still attached to the wall but not the floor, the black tile grout, that circled the bar was still attached to the skirting yet the tiles had remained unseated and scatted haphazardly to the floor. There had been a serious parting of the ways!

What had happened? The team of Irish navvies, Trevor had hired to dig the massive void under the house in order to create the underground dungeon’esque area, had not adequately propped up the structures and the floor under the house to sufficiently hold the house up! Only a minor detail, but as ever a crucial one! The water from the nearby River Thames had seeped into the void raising the level of the natural water table. The sheer force of the water whooshing and swirling around inthe large holehaddestabilised the stone and sand sides of the excavationthusdestabilising the foundations of this part of the house causing the groundfloor of the house to drop accordingly! Never a dull moment, but this, could not be blamed on me! But none the less there was the inevitable blood chilling tantrum from Trevor!

As the years rolled on Dutch Gardens imploded asTrevor’s obsession with living like a mole underground continued, digging endlessly under the house to create his own new space, creating issues with the water table and creating his own artesian well, the pressure of which causing theground water to increase to such a pressure that it forced the next door neighbours garage out of the ground. All in a day’s work! As you have seen from the article and VT on the net … Trevor has over the last thirty years created whatever has taken his fancy, with total disregard to some of the most basic design ethics and lack of care to many people … That said, some of his work is extremely clever … But to me none of it really works.. It looks like a theme park … The only thing that really works is the original bit of the garden and waterfall which was part of the redevelopment that both my parents undertook … But then it is not my house it is his and this is his baby – Dutch Gardens…

“Well, Clarice have the lambs stopped screaming..?”

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

This was a house that was once lived in, it was alive it had a pulse and a heart of sorts. Now in my opinion it has descended into one wealthy man’s mental health issue /disorder.

 I hope I have given you a small flavour of what it was like to be part of Dutch Gardens, it was an amazing house of its time and its period, and it was a credit to both my parents despite the darkness that lurked in every corner. I have a lot to be grateful for, for a start … I got out alive with a story or ten to tell…. Dutch Gardens in its ‘hay day’ featured in a number of television adverts and was very on trend for its time despite its very odd location in Wraysbury or Toilets-Ville … Which was my pet name for the area as a teenager ….

My mother had moved on, as had I. Trevor became more entrenched and more obsessed in his madness like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, said. “I knew who I was this morning but I’ve changed a few times since then”… He has made his way through tens of millions of pounds, recreating a property that he loves and turning his back on all else … And in that vein … Everyone should be able to create their own madness …. To a point ….

“You would have to be half mad to dream me up”

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Having read the article Trevor has once again changed the facts, to me it was like we were all airbrushed out of our own lives. As the article pointed out Trevor has based himself on Napoleon, a man who was exiled from all reality; and was eventually confined to the island of Saint Helena to live in a rat infested house called Longwood. Napoleon managed to persuade the Governor of the island to allow him to build a new Longwood House, a new beginning, if you will, but like Trevor he negated to reflect on the past? Napoleon died just before the house was completed and after the Second World War … It was demolished…. Napoleon is remembered as a tyrant ….

I will keep you briefed on the full story …

Turning ‘Grandma’ into a mud Pie…

‘Pie’ … Grandma is not in this one!

Normal ‘Apparently’ … In our family …

I have thought long and hard about writing about some 'bits' of my life. If I should? .. If I can? Like most people’s lives it has been an interesting journey, particularly with regard to my family and extended family. I have a great memory for detail sometimes the memories are too vivid, however and even better I have a good sense of the bizarre and the humour that is required to go along with it. Some of my stories are very black, but my survival technique is comedy. Turning Grandma into a Mud Pie, is the first of my stories, to be committed to public scrutiny. Here I can introduce you to some of the characters in my life! Enjoy ….. (I hope)…

So welcome to my musings on a mad world …

Turning Grandma into a Mud Pie

Ten years ago, or thereabouts, we were invited to my favourite aunts home, (my ‘fathers’ sister). Her name is Elvira, she has an eccentric rambling house outside Brighton, which rather matches her character. She was going to host a large ‘Jones’ family party, in addition to which, was to include the final resting ceremony of my grandma's ashes and to celebrate what would have been her 100th birthday. Well as near as dam it! To the senior members of the Jones family around about that time … Facts rarely influenced a situation and almost never get in the way of what they want to do and how they want to present a particular set of circumstances …… They just make up the pieces to fit and if they don’t they lie or shout! … To be honest …. I come from a long line of over-reactors! They only worry about reality if and when it happens! To my reckoning it would have actually been grandma’s 103rd or 104th birthday .. But hey-ho!

Grandma passed away at the grand age of 98, whilst me and my husband and our then two children, we now have three, were on holiday in France. We did not attend her cremation, but like most of the family cremations it was held at Golders Green crematorium, all the organisation was as ever controlled by my biological father, known to me as Trevor…… I think I was asked by him to call him Trevor, which is his name, when I was about 13 and it stuck, for many reasons….. Suffice to say that there is a great deal of bad feeling between Trevor and myself!  But when you have money you have control and he was in control of grandma’s cremation arrangements. But Trevor is not the story today that is for another time. At the end of the cremation Elvira was handed the ashes until such time as the family agreed on a final resting place…. The ashes were to be safely stored at Elvira's and her husband Doug’s sprawling overgrown house for the next few years. Or so we thought! 

So, for this momentous family gathering various members of the Jones family clan were shipped in from all over the UK and from far flung corners of the world. The party was to be a two day event…  I did not attend the party on the Saturday as Trevor was attending… He cannot abide to be in my company … And it felt fair to me to give him and his long term partner Hilary some space with his siblings and others. My totally eccentric aunt Elvira kindly invited my mother and I to meet up with the rest of the family on the Sunday, as Trevor would have left the proceedings. So I took my mother and my nine year old daughter to meet grandma’s children, my aunts and uncles and her great aunts and uncles. I thought it would be an exciting occasion for us all … If not illuminating… 

Grandma I was told had thirteen pregnancies and seven surviving children, five boys and two girls. Which, in itself is quite an achievement as my grandparent’s contempt for each other was so extreme that they could not bear to be in the same room together, in their own home, so as not to come across each other, with the exception of bedtime, she had the front room he had the back room… When they were out together in public there was a heartfelt and palpable atmosphere of utter disgust between them…  One of my earliest and most shocking memories of my grandma Doris Margaretta Jones was that she would regularly have outbursts of a varying pitch and level at my grandfather publically. Saying in response to any comments he may have made…. “He makes me spit! He makes me SPIT!” She would during the day repeat this comment with unfettered distain toward him… As a young child this was quite shocking and alarming, as to me grandma was a pillar of society and the matriarch of the family, whom I felt safe around, which in my childhood was rare at times. To me she had the highest moral values. It was out of character to ever imagine that grandma would lower herself to spit… Like a navvy in the street! Simply shocking! … Although being the type of child I was, I was kind of excited to see her do it and wonder what effect it might have on my mother’s sensibilities … Wicked child I am!  I can confirm that to the best of my knowledge grandma never did spit and over the many years I just came to accept that is what she said when grandpa was around..… Another childhood dream of seeing her spit was dashed!

It was a further source of equal bewilderment to me that grandpa, with equal regularity, when we were all out, in a restaurant, in an airport or any public place, he would hold up his hand and point out the signs to the Ladies toilets? …Raising his pointed finger at the sign of the WC and booming at my grandmother ….. “Doris there’s the Lavatory, ….. THERE…  The lavatory Doris …The lavatory’s are there Doris.” I realise now, it was his way to irritate her and embarrass her…. But as a child it seemed very strange that grandma could not see and read the signs for herself and why would she not be equally interested in where the restaurant was, for example? I mean she was partial to a cup of tea?… Never once did he not do this …. He would then slide up behind me, grab my arm with the most painful iron like grip, which made my legs buckle under the pressure… And hiss his laugh in my ear through the front of what I think were his dentures, this gesture always ended in a quiet throaty whistle…  Her obvious response was that he made her spit! But still, to my irritation, no moisture was ever forthcoming! 

Growing up in this strange world, finally at the age of about four I realised that my grandparents could not stand the sight of each other but were tied to one another in some form or other … Possibly because it was a generational thing … ? They were never to my knowledge kind to each other, except on two occasions, Grandpa was knocked over on his bicycle on the North Circular Road, on arriving at hospital he was given a pain killer for his injuries; unfortunately he was allergic to the drug and he had a major stroke, which rendered him unable to speak … He would stutter, stammer and shake, however I do remember on occasions he was able, under his breath to hiss the audible words, at grandma .. Bitch and Fuck … At times of his frustration … Despite this …. She sat with him day after day, for over a year, such was the determination of my grandmother to coax him back to health. Writing endless sentences and doing sums for him to copy and say to her out loud. 

She would put a heavy glass ashtray in front of him to pick up, to try and reverse the paralysis in his arm and hand. After a year or so …. I think in order to get away from her he made a full recovery… He wanted to get back down the bus depot where he was a bus conductor and where there were men and free whisky! She had done her job and he was off her hands again. The second time there was some kindness from him was when he was dying and she was at his hospital bed and he wanted her to hold his hand …. She refused … 

For the party grandma’s ashes must be found … So the search was on … To put you in the picture and describe Elvira’s and Uncle Doug’s wonderfully shambolic and rambling home. You approach the property via a joint driveway shared with the large old house next door which has been converted to an old people’s home, their house is on the right as you approach. This Sussex property has beautiful views over the adjoining countryside. The house has a large number of rooms on the ground floor, on the second floor is a more open planned area, stuffed full of their life’s accessories, bits and bobs. To the back of the house there is a large acreage of overgrown scrappy lawn that has been vaguely tamed into walkways by a ride on lawn mower, to be frank it is really too much for two people in their seventies to handle, but this is the way they want to live their lives.  To the left of the house, on a lower level is a 1970’s style building housing a very old and rather frightening swimming pool, with water that has more than its fair share of shades of green and in one corner looks slightly like a swamp.. Beyond that is further bumpy scrubland lawn with a five foot hedge denoting the perimeter of their property to its neighbours, the old people’s home. However the hedge just stops and you can walk around it onto the neighbouring lawn. To the right of their property there are a number of scattered outhouses one of which is a dance studio, where my aunt has been a very successful dance professor. There are many glasshouses scattered around the main house, that are filled to the brim with overgrowing plants that have pushed their way out through smashed windows. Other outhouses are filled to bursting with more relics from their past, Doug who was in the film industry, has containers of scripts and reels of films billowing out of boxes in these storage huts. Under the house is my aunt’s collection, thirty plus years of The Telegraph newspaper, bundled into piles tied with string. Elvira needs these newspapers just in case she may require an article contained in these precious documents, she has a penchant for cutting out snippets of articles and sending bits of news to you in order to demonstrate a particular point or to inform you of something you might not have known or understood, in a previous life!  I have received a large number of cuttings over the years as have the rest of the family. Nowadays Elvira sends the information via email. Interestingly the emails arrive in the most unusual staccato format that is sometimes difficult to follow, she uses stars, exclamation marks and full stops like some people use emoji.  Without exception Elvira always signs off her notes or emails with; ‘So busy’ or ‘In haste’. Both ‘sign off’, comments over the years have really irritated and infuriated her brother Trevor. Because he likes to think that he is the more important and busier than anyone else! Families and their foibles … Don’t you just love ‘em! It makes me laugh!

Back to the party …. As ever with all families there is always a back story, ours is a black comedy drama. Grandma's final resting was agreed to be in the back garden of Elvira and Doug’s house. A marquee had been erected and vast amounts of food had been ordered from Marks and Spencer to see us all through the weekend, as Elvira now refuses to cook. Grandma's seven children and their respective wives and partners and some of the eighteen or so grandchildren and any vague relatives with the similar surname were wheeled in for the event. The Jones have a strange ability and need to find distant relatives to enthuse over, I think this is mostly as they don’t particularly like their actual close family who have seen them for whom they really are! Therefore new shinny relatives are always handy and welcome at any event. Having the common surname Jones you can imagine we have a lot of potential new family members to choose from! 

The final resting place for Grandma was to be under a newly planted tree, by the hedge adjoining the neighbouring property. The placing of the semi-mature tree turned out to be significant and was to be paid for by Trevor. Uncle Doug had confided to Trevor that the position of the tree was critical, as he and Aunt Elvira like to sunbathe in the nude, this had sometimes confused the old people in the nursing home next door. Particularly the Captain, who resided at the home, and whose window looked down on to my aunt and uncles back garden. Confused or not the Captain sometimes with other occupants of the home would wonder over into the garden, to join the fun, possibly in the hope of something more than your average cup of sugar? If you get my drift? ..

I suppose, if you think about it, sometimes the days in an old people’s home must drag a bit so the occupants must look for other ways to be amused? Elvira and Doug provided perfect adult entertainment in this regard! …. So to avoid unwanted guests the tree needed to be placed in a precise location. Some of Trevor's many staff were dispatched prior to the ceremony to plant the ‘modesty’ tree.

On the day we were there, drinks were flowing well and my uncles were making a great deal of fuss over our daughter who is always rather pleased to be the centre of attention and enjoying the fuss, and why not! As ever in the UK the weather was living up to the “not as summery as it should be” factor, in fact it was quite chilly and there was a hell of a wind. So instead of eating in the marquee, which was bellowing in the strong breeze, we were to eat in the main house. One of my cousins, Elvira’s child, was entertaining me, telling me all the gossip about various members of the family and all the goings on at the party the day before. Really is that not the point of these meetings … The gossip? My cousin told me to look at the fireplace, “we could not find grandma’s ashes anywhere in the house or in the out buildings!” Elvira had put grandma somewhere safe but she could not remember where? Therefore Elvira had had no choice and was forced to scrape out the ashes from the fire place for the event until she could lay her hands on the real grandma! I told you at the beginning of this story … facts or reality rarely affects what the Jones do! Totally irreverent of both us, but it added to the humour of what was to come! And it was most probably true!

After lunch we were all forced out of the house to undertake the main event and indulge in a little mud pie making! My beautiful mother dressed as always like a supermodel was asked by Elvira to make her way to the back of the marquee, where my mother came across a wheel barrow of soil and another wheelbarrow filled with dried manure! Elvira holding grandma’s ashes in a canteen in one hand and a desert spoon in the other explained to my mother that she had worked out, presumably into a kitchen bowl a night or two before? That each of the family had two and a half scoops of grandma’s ashes, to mix. The plan was to scoop out your allotted amount of grandma into a Tupperware box then take two spoon full’s of manure from the wheelbarrow deposit that on top of grandma and then sprinkle an appropriate amount of soil of the top of the mixture! Yes really!! There was a watering can on hand so you could pour some water over the grandma mixture and combine her into a smooth ‘roux’.  Finally, the wet human slop was to be deposited in another wheelbarrow located nearby, which had a net covering it, containing the contents of the day’s before ceremony of grandma’s “bake-off” mix congealed together by other members of the family!  … Quite literally turning grandma into a mud pie! 

I could tell something was up as I could hear shrieks of hysterical laughter from my mother, there is no stopping her once she gets started, and then you could hear loud chastising from my aunt who was trying to control my mother’s guffawing. To my aunts horror and my mother’s lack of reverence in the face of the ensuing ludicrous task. My mother’s attempts to deposit two and half scoops of grandma into a Tupperware box was being hampered by the wind and the ashes were being blown away. My mother, due to her violent laughter attack was not quick enough to secure grandma’s ashes under the manure and soil and slosh her with a gloop of water.... So as a result some parts of grandma became unattached, blown away by the wind and are now residing somewhere over the Sussex countryside, a lucky escape for that bit of grandma if you ask me!

When it came to mine and my daughters turn .. I went all haughty and said that I could not be involved in turning grandma into a mud pie, the idea was quite ridiculous! In hindsight, writing this, I think this was wrong .. And I should get a life!  Perhaps grandma would have found it quite acceptable ….. And funny … Let’s face it some memorials are boring!

The interesting thing was that once we had a barrow load of grandma’s mud pie mix. It sort of just sat there and no further progress was made on that day…. We just got chatting and the scattering of the ashes got put to one side! Grandma was immortalised into a mud pie, so I guess she could wait, other things were going on. 

A bit later, having gone into the house to hide from the weather, I had an interesting if not surreal conversation in the kitchen with my aunts and uncles, with the exception of Elvira and Doug, they took me to one side to discuss on where my aunt kept the breakfast cereal? Not exactly a scintillating conversation, but each to their own! My aunts and uncles, knowing how close I am to Elvira told me of her habit of repatriating the breakfast cereal back to the bottom cupboard in the kitchen, they were all taking it in turns to put the cereal into one of the top cupboards. However each and every morning, the cereal would find its way back into the under counter cupboard! … As you might imagine, I could not quite grasp the importance of where the breakfast cereal was housed, I mean did it really matter? But they were most insistent that I discuss the matter with her! Delving further to see what the actual problem was, why does it matter where the cereal is kept? Well you would think!!?? It transpired that Elvira has always kept the breakfast cereal in the lower cupboard… For my Uncle Doug’s delight and personal enjoyment!

Then the penny dropped … It emerged that my aunt does not wear underwear in the mornings a long standing arrangement between her and her husband, she wears the equivalent of what we would call a baby doll nighty, I guess having being a sex kitten of the 1960/1970, why not??.. Incidentally, to her credit at the opening of the premiere of the film Entertaining Mr Sloane by Joe Orton, produced by her husband July 1970, Elvira knocked Princess Margret off the front pages of the newspapers at the premiere  … So beautiful is she? 

However back to #cerealgate. In the mornings when Elvira enters the kitchen, to her siblings and respective wives horror, who are happily sitting at the table eating breakfast …. Elvira bends down, full ‘flash’ to get her breakfast cereal!??… What can I say??? And indeed that was my question to my aunts and uncles….. What do you want me to say to her? The general consensus was that I am close to my aunt and I would be able to make her see sense … Christ this is my family, no one sees sense! But okay … I will give it a shot …!

Elvira came into the kitchen to collect some more food so I seized the moment and took a deep breath. Whilst my uncle and aunts shuffled conspiratorially behind me to see what the response would be! “Elvira!” I gesticulated toward the assembled members peering on with childlike interest. And they shuffled back slightly, again! “Elvira why do you or Doug keep moving the cereal from the top cupboard where your guests are putting it, back to the under counter bottom cupboard? Did you realise they can all see …. Well, em see your naked bottom?” She turned around with condiments in her hands and stared at me, seemingly with her mind elsewhere, so I continued, as if to try and point out the obvious … “these are after all - your brothers?” Without even a blink she shrugged her shoulders, glanced at the assembled crowd and just confirmed.“ Oh they never see my front bottom they only ever see my back bottom, I do it for Doug!” And off she went out of the kitchen … To stunned silence … What can you really say? Well I am sure we can say a lot …. But I suppose the nub of the matter is that it was their home and she can have her cereal in whatever cupboard she wants to put it … I guess?? …. Each to their own! … I turned to my aunts and uncles, picked up my glass of wine and attempted to copy my aunt’s aplomb  .. Suggesting that they admired the ceiling in the kitchen when Elvira was deciding whether to have Rice Crispys or Co-Co Pops! What can you do! … Clearly they are nudists!

As I said, grandma, or what was left of grandma thanks to my mother’s hysteria was never on that day, consigned to the ground as on this family occasion talking and musing on life had taken over and the weather became windy and dull so grandma remained quietly in her wheelbarrow… As it turned out this happened to be a good thing … As some weeks later the ‘modesty’ tree which had already been planted with a hole left to one side for grandma’s ashes… Died before the ashes had been scattered! It had been planted over a Nissan hut which had restricted its root system and killed it off. I have to say another bodge-up by Trevor. 

So some weeks later another tree was purchase and delivered to the house for replanting in the same location… Two more Polish workmen were dispatched to my aunt’s house to undertake the planting of this fine new specimen. However before planting the Nissan hut needed to be dug out first, as you can imagine a fairly major job, particularly by hand! These poor men dug and dug, extricating chunks of concrete as they went. The weather had improved, it was now a heat wave and the sun was shining down upon their backs, making it not only back breaking work, but they ran with sweat in the heat. They dug and dug and dug over a number of days.… Eventually they were close to the end of the job.. Back filling the hole with manure and soil ready to plant the tree. The hole was deep enough at this point for the men to stand with just their head and shoulders above ground level…. 

In the house there was a knock at the door and it was Elvira’s teenage granddaughter; who had been taking a student gap year and had turned up to see her grandparents. To see her granddaughter was a great excitement to Elvira. She wanted to show her the progress of the final resting place of grandma, which her granddaughter had missed due to being abroad … In the ensuing excitement Elvira on the way out of the kitchen door to the garden, grabbed a canteen that was on the shelf, proclaiming to her granddaughter that she too could be part of grandma’s final resting place as these were grandma’s ashes … Elvira ran toward the two workman, slogging away, digging in the hole, glimmering with sweat … And in a moment of supreme dramatic gesture, ripped of the lid of the canister and threw the contents into the air directly above where the two workman were digging, both who had stood to watch what Elvira was doing…. Too late to get out of the way, the men were open mouthed at this performance, yes grandma’s ashes flew into the air in a blacken smoke only to land on the sweaty workman … Sticking and clogging to their wet skin …. The men spat and gasped and spat again trying to rid themselves of the dried ashes of grandma … Scraping at their bodies trying to brush off the dried powdery residue of grandma off their shiny wet bodies …. 

To this day I am unsure if the two workman were fully aware of what was thrown at them, really not nice … But a number of things spring to mind? Firstly, I do wonder at the quantity of ashes grandma managed to create, she was only a small woman. There was the measured out number of spoonful’s at the earlier family party occasion and a further canteen of ashes thrown at these two unsuspecting workman. And secondly, I feel somewhat gratified, as grandma had spent most of her life announcing that she wanted to spit and to my knowledge never managed to carry out this threat.. So at least in death she managed to make someone else spit and I secretly think that she would have been pleased… 

As a footnote to this story, some years later when my uncle Doug had been diagnosed with a mild form of Alzheimer’s. I called the house to speak to Elvira and Doug answered the phone.. We got chatting and he advised me to his delight that Elvira was riding on the lawn mower … Presumably mowing the lawn? He then told me that she was knicker-less! This is not the sort of thing he would have normally said to his niece under ordinary circumstances therefore I was desperately thinking of ways I could divert this type of conversation and so to speak … Get him off topic!! …. Then he announced that he was sitting watching Elvira with his Percy … To this day it makes my toes curl.. I mean what the hell do you say to that? I was stammering over my words ..  Anything to move on with a different conversation …. One of those dying moments… I carried on chatting about whatever came into my mind other than my uncles Percy! … Then over the line I heard a meow…. “What is that Doug?” … “It’s Percy my new cat … He was a stray and he has adopted me…” Well as you can imagine not only a welcome relief to me … But a lovely moment .. As Percy gave them both such delicious joy in the years to come and Percy, I am guessing had no problem with where the cereals were kept!  

I guess all families are like this right! ?? ….