My grandma, Jane Bagshaw, met my grandad Robert Bell at a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, on Tuesday June 15th 1897 at 3 o’clock at Serlby Park, Nottinghamshire. He was then aged 19, working as second coachman to the Galways at Serlby. Jane, a domestic servant was 14.
After living in Sheffield, the couple retired to Vine Cottage, Sutton-cum-Lound, near Retford, Nottinghamshire in the 1950s.
As you might guess from the photograph of them, standing amongst the hollyhocks in front of the cottage, they were the kind of grandparents that you might encounter in a children’s story.
Taking my cue from a prompt on the Start Writing Fiction course that I took this autumn, I’ve recalled some of the features of Vine Cottage, as I remember them from my childhood, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, when they left the cottage and moved to a bungalow at the other end of the village.
Grandma’s Cupboard
The prompt on the fiction course was to write about ‘Grandma’s Cupboard’, so let’s start with the shelves in the narrow scullery at the back of the cottage.
Grandma lined the shelves with newspaper, cutting a decorative zig-zag on its trailing edge. My father saved copies of The Times for her. At that time it was a broadsheet consisting almost entirely of text so it gave the shelves a more uniform effect than her own Weekly News, a popular tabloid. She always saved The Weekly News for me because I liked the cartoons in it. And they would sometimes also pass on a copy of the Salvation Army’s newsletter, which featured a comic strip of The Adventures of Black Bob, featuring a hill shepherd and his faithful border collie.
