Lady Watts and corrections

Walk down Broad Street on the left hand (West) side and continue down Mill Hill and you will find this garden on the left. When I was a boy it was owned by the widowed Lady Dorothy Dudley Watts. She was very friendly and would even talk to us children and I thought it was neat to have actually conversed with a real lady.  The term "lady" is horribly misused now-a-days.

As for the "corrections", here are some extracts from an email from my sister following my last blog:

Aunty Eva was mum's mother's sister, not granddad's.  Sorry!

The picture of grandad and mum and you and me was taken at Aunty Bee's house, Anglebury, in Woking.  Here is a Streetview picture of the cul-de-sac that Anglebury was in.  I remember dragging a wooden toy with wheels along this road which was then rough gravel. I also remember my dad taking us children to the nearby footbridge over the railway to watch the trains.

In the picture of East Street granddad and Aunty Eva lived in the purple house, number 50, (it did not have the single story extension then).

The old Congregational church where dad and mum got married still exists though not as a church and is in Pound Hill, not West Street. Dad used to run the Sunday school but they left when I was 8, so you would have been 5. We didn't immediately go to New Farm - for at least a couple of years we went to the Baptist church in Winchester and dad played the organ.  I remember being allowed to sit next to dad on the long organ bench as he played.  The hymn "Crown Him with many crowns..." still always reminds me of that church.  I found the building that was the Congregational church on Streetview:

Regarding mum's illness, she had had rheumatic fever as a girl of 14 and missed a whole year's school. This damaged her heart and when I was about 10 she had a recurrence of it and we were farmed out to stay with all sorts of people, and given a midday dinner with David and Betty Fairhead for ages, which disgusted me as at first dad had taken us to the Corner Cafe for lunch which I thought was wonderful in that you could choose what you ate!  I remember eating a roast chicken dinner at the Corner Cafe, complete with bread sauce, and it met all my expectations. There is nothing quite so bad as eating out and paying through the nose for it and the meal not meeting one's expectations - I regret this happens all too often.