Tag: Keep life simple

You know how it is, you’re having a conversation with someone, the topic changes and you’re left behind.  That’s when you need a back up memory aka someone to remind you of the things you’ve forgotten 

One minute I’m chatting to my next sister about what life in India must have been like during the late 1800s for our Gt Grandparents – John Joseph Patrick Doyle and Jane Muir.

Even with the ‘perks’ a soldier of his rank (colour sgt) would have had,  the climate and environment would have been something neither would have encountered before.  Likewise for many of the ordinary rank soldiers who would have been going on patrol up country.

Then a short while later we are talking about hop picking.  For a few years during the late 1940s/ early 1950s we lived in Cosham Hampshire – Dad had been posted away and Mum was always looking for ways to earn some extra pennies.  I could remember during the summer school holidays travelling on an old bus along with what seemed like every local woman and crying baby up Wymering Lane and over the nearby Portsdown Hill to huge fields full of enormous poles with vines hanging down. Then having to carry bags full of ‘stuff’ my mother deemed we needed for the day.  Next sister sent me this old photo to remind me of the look and feel of the hop fields.

She remembers so many different things to me, mothers singing in the bus, primus stoves and enamel tea pots, green coloured flasks with corks in the top, door stop sandwiches (no sliced bread).  Being allowed to get dirty, running amok amongst the tall hop poles barefooted or in the previous years gutties with the toes cut out…..because our feet had grown and there was no spare cash to buy new ones.
You can tell from those memories who was the younger one with less responsibilities!

Lots of laughter because when she mentioned gutties – I thought she said putties and had returned to soldiers in India😊

No, she said, those canvas shoes we wore during the summer.
They made your feet sweat and we had to clean them outside with some pastey white stuff.
Blanco I told her, made the laces go stiff and the white stuff used to come off, floating in the air like a fine dust

But weren’t they called Sand Shoes? Gym Shoes? Plimsolls?.
No, Dad called them Gutties, something else I’d forgotten.
That’s what they’re called in Northern Ireland

I showed her the photo of me in my white shoes and seeing the dress she had on she remarked (once again) how she’d never forgotten how she had to wear my old clothes. So I had to remind her about no extra cash and everything being passed on.  There don’t seem to be any photos to prove otherwise but we think our little sister also wore the same dress one summer a few years later. Sadly she is no longer with us to say yay or nay🙁

Not the shoes tho’ – they’d had the toes cut out so we could get another summer’s ’round the house or playing in the street’ wear out of them

You know, all these years later I still wear some form of those white canvas shoes during the summer.
Perfect for round the house or down the beach.

No need for all that messy white stuff these days – I just chuck them in the washing machine and hang them on the line to dry  and if the toes wear through, no worries, they’ll be right for gardening the next year

What memories have you relived recently.
~ ~ ~ ~
I see no wrong in admitting you’ve forgotten something – to me being reminded in some circumstances makes the memory fresh again

Linking to  Wednesday’s Words & Pics hosted by Denyse. 
Where you’ll find lots of life to read about

#keeplifesimple