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My earliest memories of my grandmother are of being ushered into her bedroom where she dispensed peppermints from a large brown jar at the side of her bed. The house had no electricity until the mid-1950s and my grandmother would issue visitors with an oil lamp to take up to their bedroom. When I was very young, she occasionally took me out into an area off the farm-yard which I think was called the 'mowie' where she would carve me a whistle from the twig of a tree. In her final years, she went totally blind and never ventured far from the house. She died, aged ninety-three, in 1965, but lived long enough to cradle her great-granddaughter Sara in her arms.
It was a great day when electricity arrived in Sydenham Damerel. When the man from SWEB came to read Mrs Sandercott's metre, he was amazed at how few units the old lady had used and queried this. 'My dear,' the old lady replied, 'I just switches on to light my candle and then I turns the 'lectric off!'.
Almost as soon as Fred and Evelyn, my mother's brother and sister, were wired up, they bought a large TV set, throwing out their old radio set and accumulator. In fact, the Andrews had a television years before my own parents bought one. My aunt and uncle quickly fell in love with Richard Baker, the newsreader, and a young and enthusiastic David Attenborough who brought the sights and sounds of birds and animals from far-away countries into their living room. Our visits to the farm on winter Saturdays were made more memorable for me by watching Dixon of Dock Green before we set off for the return journey to Exeter. I remember once a technologically-minded friend from Callington enquiring whether my aunt had heard that you could install a magnifying lens in front of the screen to improve your picture. Evelyn replied that she thought this was only necessary with small sets.
My Uncle Fred had inherited the farm from old Emmanuel Andrews but had none of his father's ambition. He kept the farm ticking over, never investing in a tractor, relying on his horse and a more mechanically-minded neighbour to harvest his few fields of corn. I can still see him milking his ten cows, perched on a rickety three-legged stool, resting his head against Daisy's flank. He once invited me to try my hand at squeezing Buttercup's teats, but I barely managed to cover the bottom of the pail with milk. The shippen, where he did the milking, boasted a dovecot at the top of stone steps and, often today, when I hear the lazy coo of a pigeon, I am transported back to summer days at Treleigh.
(Picture: Treleigh Shippen today)
Uncle Fred's limited ambition for the farm was to ensure that it provided him with enough income to finance an annual coach tour to Europe. He spent the winter months reading about the medieval cathedrals he planned to visit, later impressing his fellow travellers with his knowledge. His other passion was buying furniture at local auctions and I am glad that one or two of his best buys now grace my own thatched cottage in mid-Devon.
Years before I was born, Uncle Fred had been fitted with a badly made and rather obvious glass eye. This disfigurement didn't prevent a lady who lived on the Cornish side of the Tamar from falling in love with him. But Fred was never a man to rush into a quick decision and entered into a long engagement with the lady. After nine years, the engagement was broken off, amicably as far as I know.
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