Rural Leicestershire

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What our house was like

2.04 mins

[503 kb]

Interviewee:

It was a three-bedroom house and, as I say, cold water tap over the sink, which was a stone sink with a copper in the corner. Big kitchen and a dairy and a, what we said the living room and the front room as we called it then. And that was it but of course we had an awful lot of freedom because you see it was all the beautiful fields around.

EMOHA:

Did it have a garden?

Interviewee:

Oh, yes! My father was a well-known gardener. And yes, we had three gardens.

EMOHA:

Three!

Interviewee:

Three.

EMOHA:

How did you have three?

Interviewee:

Well, you see we had poultry that, free range, so they were all wired high, the, all fenced in and we had permission when it was salad time from mum to open the gate and go and gather it the salad for tea and thing but the other garden was open to us, where the vegetables were. And then we'd got a few flowers because my father, if you if he saw anything that wasn't vegetables he thought it should be dug up.

EMOHA:

So what flowers would he allow in the garden?

Interviewee:

Well, I mean the rose trees were there, fortunately, but we never seemed to keep much of anything else.

EMOHA:

So you had poultry…

Interviewee:

Yes we had a lot of poultry

EMOHA:

Any other livestock of your own?

Interviewee:

We had a pig but that was a few years later that we had a pig. And it was a lovely way of living. It was a wonderful way because you were surrounded by fields of mowing grass and you looked out of the windows, wherever you looked you looked for miles across the countryside.

Last updated: 21/11/03
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