Saturday 21 July 2018

Looking back


We're going out to the country to have a barbecue at Mary Berry's old house this afternoon. It was this area that I first lived in when I came to Bath, all those years ago. I must have been a neighbour of Mary's but didn't know at the time.

The house I lived in was built on the site of a medieval convent, later to be the local manor. Sometimes I could feel the benign presence of the nuns, or so I thought. The above old photo is of what used to be my front door. Thanks to my friends of Bath in Time, not that I asked them permission.

Down the lane there was a very old market gardener called Mr Ham. He supplied the town's only vegetarian shop with organic vegetables. He was somewhat bemused at how in awe they were with him for his vegetables, because he did not think of them as being 'organic', they were just grown in the same way he had done all his life.

Between the manor and Mr Ham, lived a mad antique dealer. Numerous stories of his eccentricity abounded in the area, and they were all true. He had once bought a huge oak table at auction somewhere, when his van broke down. He walked into a car showroom and the first vehicle he saw in the window was a small red sports car. He paid for it in cash, drove it out of the showroom to the stricken van,  tied the massive table to its tiny roof with rope, then drove home with it. I used to talk to him when we occasionally met, but later I found out that he had been telling others that I was a police informer and should be avoided.

The old church has a small well in the yard fed with water from a sweet spring. This was the only water we drank in 1971, and every morning we would go to the church with a container and collect it.  The spring was considered holy, and these days it is celebrated as such with ornamental stonework. In my day it was a hole near a wall.

Most visitors think of Bath in two timescales - Roman and Georgian. I like to remember the 2000 years in between those eras as much as I can. The Baths were ruins even in the Dark Ages.


11 comments:

  1. I must say you are building up a rather strange picture of yourself Tom! Police Informer and living in the Dark Ages in one blogpost.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It it could be stranger but I have to keep parts of my life secret.

      Delete
  2. Mary Berry could have lived next door to me and it would have meant nothing. Her becoming a household name bypassed me somewhere.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It meant nothing to me. This was 40 years before Bakeoff.

      Delete
    2. I do remember her cookery programmes of the 1970s...she was rather snooty then

      Delete
  3. Is it sold as holy water too? Here they would do that and invent a miracle happened at that axact entrance door and have a pilgramige started there in no time.
    Greetings Maria x

    ReplyDelete
  4. Her house and garden that I saw on tele was beautiful .... is that he one you are going to do you think ? The water from the well must have been good for the hair !!! XXXX

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It doesn't sound like it. I haven't seen the one on the telly.

      Delete
  5. Tat's a very beautiful looking old house. I agree with Mr Ham; I would never call my vegs 'Organic'; it sounds so pretentious.

    ReplyDelete