Category: Family

Bertie Goes Shopping

Last Saturday Bertie and I got off the tube at Green Park. If he is asleep he wakes up to the command “Beagles alight”.

Big Shot

My grandfather expressed consternation when I got a job in the City after university. I remember him shaking his head, saying he’d always thought I should go into the church and have a parish in the West of Ireland with some good fishing and snipe bogs … perhaps woodcock, he added hopefully.

Good Shot

There were pigs at Barmeath, before my time, but I remember the sties. In the autumn they lived in the woods eating beech mast and the like.

Back to Baroque

My Great Aunt Aline (Lloyd Thomas) is buried in the churchyard of St Swithun (sic), Compton Beauchamp, Oxfordshire.

Things to Play With

It’s not unusual for families to have furniture that has been handed on through the generations.

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Categorised as Family

Waterloo and Other Family Matters

I think I remember my maternal grandfather visiting Barmeath when I was a child; but as he died when I was four I think the memory derives from a photograph of him with me. He was Chaplain to the Bishop of Bombay and it was in India he met and married my grandmother.

White Eagles

Olivia Manning took inspiration from her wartime service with the British Council in Bucharest for her Balkan Trilogy. Lawrence Durrell used his time with the British Council in Belgrade to write authoritatively about Yugoslavia in White Eagles Over Serbia.

Forty Winks

One afternoon when the chairman of the Friends of Margravine Cemetery delivered a plan of the trees in the cemetery, as I had requested, I was very obviously asleep on the sofa in the front window.