Story Search Results

Here Comes the Bride (Part 1) #29

...vicarage across the road from my house and booked the date. The vicar told us in no uncertain terms that he would expect us to be there when the banns were read. However, as we never got up before lunch on a Sunday, try as we might, we never actually managed to hear our own banns being read! It was almost as bad at the wedding rehearsal. I went to the church with my dad and the two bridesmaids but Kev never managed to get there as he was fitting a shower for someone! I don’t think the vicar was very impressed with us! The nearer it got to our wedding date the more we worried about my mum turning up. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her there but that my dad...

The Grand Opening #5

...ng stones across it. But even though we cleared a lot of weeds, the outskirts of the gardens were still very overgrown as well as the woods which had once had lovely pathways through them where Victorian ladies and gentlemen took their afternoon strolls. Visitors make an appearance - Easter 1971   We soon got used to having people wandering around our house, although they weren’t allowed upstairs. Gavin and I were quite the little monkeys and usually involved our little brother in our tricks too. We would hang over the balcony near the stairs and watch people walk by then drop things near them or make funny noises. Once Gavin was holding an ice cream a...

Hoar Cross Hall - a bit of history #14

...sometimes across to the Netherlands and Germany. She loved painting and would spend much of her time doing water colours along with collecting beautiful objects to decorate the Hall and the Church of the Holy Angels. In 1890 she went on a painting trip up the River Nile on her yacht and filled 10 books of diaries and logs, all illustrated with her drawings and photographs. There were many more trips that the Meynells went on and it looks as though they travelled around the British Empire quite a lot judging from the many photographs that we found in the Library (and which I will share in future blogs).   One of Emily's many paintings   To keep the Meyn...

Alice - the ghost in the mirror #38

...ALICE – THE GHOST IN THE MIRROR:       Whilst researching the history of my former home, Hoar Cross Hall, I came across this fascinating story from author Graham Phillips who had visited the Hall to do some research into the story of Alice and the mirror that inspired Lewis Carroll. As many of my regular readers will know, Hoar Cross Hall is a very haunted house and so it was incredibly interesting to hear another theory on the ghost of the little girl who haunts the rooms and corridors. In 1865 Lewis Carroll wrote another story about Alice following on from ‘Alice in Wonderland’. It was called ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. In this story Alic...

Hoar Cross Hall - Life below stairs #19

...uld bring across masses of palms and pot plants to decorate the rooms. Home Farm supplied the estate with as much produce as was needed. In addition to the farm workers, the estate employed bricklayers, a stone mason, foresters and thatchers, carpenters, a joiner, a plumber and an electrician. They looked after the Hall and the workers’ cottages and all tenanted properties. The head gardener had a lot of authority outside the house and even the mistress would have to seek his permission first before entering the nursery gardens! The 'Bothy boys' with their brooms   Around Christmas time, all the staff and local trades’ people who supplied the house,...

Whodunit in the Library #24

...vicarage across the road. The vicar answered my knock and told me that my dad had collapsed on his doorstep earlier that day and was now in the local cottage hospital!   The (almost) 'murder' weapon   So now it had come to this. I later found out that my dad had gone into the Library to rip up and sabotage the mediaeval banquet costumes and my mum had found him there – an argument had ensued which became violent. My dad had an awful temper and would sometimes attack my mum during these rows (I once found him in the kitchen with his hands round my mum’s throat) so she had grabbed the nearest thing to her, which was the truncheon, and hit him over t...