17 December 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

The Stuart Turner catalogue is on its way.  I called in at the model shop in St Albans and they said Stuart Turner doesn’t deal through shops, he markets direct so I thought I’d look on the internet and he has quite a useful site there, with a phone number to order his catalogue. I spoke to a nice young fellow there and he said he’d be happy to send a catalogue to NZ, so it’s on its way.  I don’t know if it’ll take a week or three weeks, but it’s all paid for and done n dusted.  Pleasure me old mate. Hope you have lots of fun with it. You can order the parts you want through his fax number, which will be in the catalogue.

Our trip to Cyprus starts on Wednesday morning, so since it’s Monday night here now, we’ve only got TWO SLEEPS until we’re on the way. The travel agent contacted me a couple of days ago to say that our departure time has been delayed until 0955 because they (Britannia Air) are putting on a much bigger plane.  It means we don’t have to get up so early to be at the airport 2 ½ hours before departure. We have paid for our car to be garaged at the airport so we can drive there and back and not be at the mercy of somewhat erratic train schedules.

Looks like I do get a final chance to give you a big Christmas Greetings – we went up the St Albans Cathedral and lit a candle for Jas. We also remembered that the Christmas we spent with you in your house before we came to England was the second-to-last Christmas you had in your Hahei house and we remembered all the work and the fun we had helping you get the building started. I think very few people have made of their retirement the adventure and the challenges you made of yours.  We salute your courage and your enterprise and we admire the home and the community you made in Hahei. The years we spent going to see you each Christmas, with your reciprocal visit to Pauanui for New Year, were magical times and we are deeply grateful we could share them with you.

We have put some bright and sparkly snow crystal lights in the window which will come on at 5:00pm with the Christmas tree and our security lighting and we have given our valuables and our keys to the care of Ivor and Iris. So we are all ready for Christmas and we’ll be able to see how the Orthodox Greeks celebrate Christmas in Cyprus. We are so looking forward to this new adventure.

We do hope you have a very happy Christmas.  

Love: Ewart and Elaine.

9 Dec 2001

I’m absolutely delighted that Joni went to see you yesterday. It sounded on her mobile as though you had a very good visit and it was very nice to hear you on the phone. When she called me from outside the home she said she was standing near the harbour and I could hear all these birds singing in the background.  It was quite remarkable.  You don’t hear birds singing like that here very often.  The robins go berserk in late winter and early spring and they sound wonderful. We can also hear a few larks in the summer, but mostly we hear only the raucous squawk of the ravens and the dreadfully monotonous two-tone call of those bloody pigeons from as early as 4:00 in the morning, when the dawn is that early.  The only time you can hear birdsong is when you are walking in the local patches of forest.

Just before Ivor went into hospital we went to see the local production of Chess at the Arena Theatre.  The St Albans Operatic always put on a very good show. The lead singers are imported professionals but the cast are hardened locals. Chess is quite a good show, with the music written by Bjorn of ABBA fame. I don’t think he made a particularly good job of the music since much of it is monotonous bouncy stuff intended to get the words out rather than a song or songs as such.  

The best two pieces are in the second half – Bangkok and I Know Him so Well, the song Elaine Page made her own. I didn’t know the song is actually a duet. The hero is a chess champion and the game in Bangkok is a re-match; the American girlfriend and the wife sing this song just before the wife marches him off in triumph back to Russia. It’s an interesting enough premise – when two players are equal in ability and talent, sport is about gamesmanship, not the game.  Therefore what goes on behind the scenes will heavily influence what happens on the field of play.  Nothing new there.  Two good songs in the second half and some nice voices to listen to.

A word about the murder of Sir Peter Blake.  We were very upset to hear that a man whom we admired a great deal had been killed by pirates in Amazonia. The local press (eg the Guardian, The Times and the Evening Standard) all called him the “Legendary British yachtsman Sir Peter Blake.”  New Zealand born, you see.  We thought about that for a while, but eventually decided that in order to write a meaningful story about him you have to find a local connection and after all, Pippa and the children do live in Hampshire. I wore my All Blacks tie to work. It’s a black tie with a silver fern on it and it was sufficiently different from my usual colourful computer ties for people to ask me why I was wearing a black tie. He was a remarkable and courageous man and we shall not see his like again.  New Zealand and the whole world are much the poorer for his leaving us.

Since New Year is coming up, I ought to give you a bit of a confession: I don’t run any more.  A few weekends after I finished the London Marathon my legs fell off. I can walk ok, but I can’t run.  It’s an Archilles injury in both feet and I feel pretty embarrassed about it. Still, I suppose if one goes from being a smoker and a couch potato to running a sub 3:45 marathon in just three years, you may have to pay for it and it looks like I am.  

The only thing you can do with an Archilles injury is wait until it heals, so now I go to the gym with Elaine.  I use the rower, the kayak, the stepper and the crosstrainer as the main equipment and on Sundays – as today – I spend about 1/2hr on each. I’m hoping I can run in the Garden City 10mile in September next year, so I’m not going to do any running at all until about April, when I’ll start working on the treadmill.  

I suspected it was too early to try the marathon, but the opportunity presented itself and I just took it. I am still immensely pleased with my London Marathon medal; it’s one of those things you have to work very hard for and once you have it no-one can take it off you.  There aren’t very many people with a better time than mine, and I still haven’t met one.  I enjoy going to the gym because after the training session Elaine and I go to the steam room and then have a soak in the spa (which they call a Jacuzzi here) so it’s really rather civilized. We go to the gym three or four times a week and you can see the changes it’s made to Elaine.  She really does look taller.

The last thing I have for you is the news that we are going to Cyprus for Christmas. The office co-ordinator at accenture asked us what holidays we wanted over the New Year period and Elaine has been dead keen to go overseas (abroad, as they say here) for part of her winter holidays.  On Thursday of last week I finally got the email to say I had four days off from the 19th – three days, then the weekend, then the Monday, then Christmas.

I rang round lots of travel agents and they all said, “Not now, you can’t.” Yesterday morning I called in at our local travel agent in the Quadrant, the shopping centre for Marshalswick (our suburb, of which Jersey Farm is part) and he had THREE holidays I could choose from.  I could have Alicante, Madeira or Cyprus, all within our budget, including accommodation and all with flights leaving on the 19th and returning on Boxing Day.

I went round to the hairdressers to see Elaine and we agreed that we’d had a holiday on the south coast of Spain, so we’d give Alicante a miss, Madeira is mostly England “over there,” so we thought Cyprus sounded suitably exotic and we plumped for that.  Since then I have found out that Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean, it’s a Commonwealth country and has a history going back to 7000 BC.  There are castles and old cities and Greek and Roman remains.  It’s the home of Aphrodite, it has deep clear blue seas, the winter temperatures are about 16 degrees C, most people there speak English, they ride on the left side of the road and you can drive around the island in about 3½ hours. New Zealanders don’t need a visa. We should have lots of interesting things to do and see.

Since we are leaving in 10 days time I doubt I’ll get the opportunity to write to you again before Christmas.  I that case please accept the warmest Season’s Greetings from both Elaine and I.  You know that we’ll be thinking of you, about our family and all our friends in New Zealand.  Merry Christmas.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine

3 Dec 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Ivor is improving every day.  We went to dinner at their place last night and Ivor ate everything we did, although not as much, and as far as we could tell enjoyed the meal and had no after effects.  He doesn’t go back to hospital for any tests for a couple of months yet but he is in good heart and certainly looks much improved.  He was absolutely delighted to get your Christmas card, which we delivered last week, and it was one of the first such cards he got.

We put up our Christmas tree yesterday.  It’s the thing, here.  You do your Christmas decorations on 1 Dec.  The shops and the daily advertising have been full of it for the past couple of weeks, of course, but the beginning of December is when you start to see the decorations go up in people’s houses and see the lights flashing in their windows.  We didn’t do anything particularly startling this year because I just stood last year’s tree up and put last year’s decorations on it, as well as last year’s lights. I did, however, get a snow blanket for the tree.  This is a length of thick, white, woolly cloth and you cut it up and crumple it on the ground around the foot of the tree to make it look like the tree is standing in thick snow.  

I have set the little Dickens doll under the tree and she looks absolutely gorgeous in her copious red overcoat standing under the street lamp in the deep snow singing her carols from the song book held in her green mittens.  I shall get a battery for her shortly and we will be able to hear her singing from amongst the presents Elaine has set under the tree. When we went to Ivor’s I saw that he has some coloured lights flickering bravely in his living room window and everyone in the street walking past can see them.  I must do that; it’s all very well having lights flashing on the Christmas tree, but coloured lights flashing in the window are de rigeur. We have a timer that turns on small lights in the living room at 7:00pm and I’ll rig the tree and window lights up so that everything starts at the same time.

We have now come to that time of year when it’s dark at 4:30pm, long before we start coming home and just getting light at 7:00am as we scrape the frost off the car before driving to the railway station. I have no idea why the English insist on having outside parking for their cars, with very few houses having a garage or even a carport. Actually, since I’ve touched on the point, the one topic the English talk about more than the weather is transport. Everyone has to get to work, almost no-one can walk to work, so almost everyone relies very heavily on the transport system to get them to work. The system is heavily overloaded and it is groaning and cracking under the pressure.

Everything is overloaded – the roads are choked such that a single accident on any motorway can cause a 20 mile four-lane tailback within half an hour, the city streets are nose-to-tail with cars and lots of parked illegally on double yellow lines because finding a park is so difficult. Cars weave in and out amongst the parked cars in a way I’ve only ever seen done in England. It’s like this; if there are no yellow lines to prohibit you from parking, you can park – anywhere.  This often means that streets wide enough to allow only one car in each direction get cars parked on both sides of the road, usually half-way across the footpath, with a corridor wide enough for just one car. If there’s a car already in the corridor, then you wait until that car, and all behind it, have passed through before you can go forward.  

The trains are fully crowded, at least at peak periods, with most of the train-load standing, and very few trains now run on time because a whole generation of under-funding and under-investment have left the track and all its infrastructure breaking down many times a day everywhere, all over the country. The train traveller going to work pays the most expensive fair of the day, and generally has to stand for the whole trip.  The buses are hopeless; on time for a bus is that time 5 minutes before until 5 minutes after the time on the timetable. Here in Jersey Farm I’ve had to give up using them because at the time I want to catch one, about 6:30 am, they far too often don’t arrive at all.  So with an overloaded road system, an overloaded train system and a bus system that doesn’t arrive for the working person, it’s very difficult to find a way to get to work that isn’t almost as stressful as work itself.

The neighbourhood I work in is that part of Southwark called The Arches. When the London to Dover railway was built from Blackfriars Station through Southwark it was on an elevated platform about 30 feet off the ground and it left behind a real forest of brickwork arches and within them is a darkened underground mini-world.  Lots of the arches have been boarded up and provide rented accommodation for small businesses with narrow alleyways following the bridge above to give access to the doors cut into the boarding.  In one particularly densely arched area there is a permanently manned car-park of about 200 cars.  It’s like gangster alley: Mercedes, Alpha Romeos, BMWs, a Ferrari – that sort of thing.  If it was parked on the street it might be attacked, or perhaps the owner likes to keep it here so the tax-man doesn’t know he’s got it.

 Just down the road from 168 Union St is the house that Mum’s grandmother, Helen Hinkley, lived in so this is the neighbourhood in which she grew up. It’s full of dark brick buildings and 3-storey warehouses and with all that coal smoke from hundreds of Victorian brick cottages in the neighbourhood, each with a coal-fired stove in the kitchen as the only source of warmth, it must have seemed a very dismal, cold, damp place to a young girl growing up in poverty in Bankside. Add to that the noise and smoke from the railway overhead, the constant rattle of wagons delivering goods to the warehouses and the clip-clop of horses hooves it would have been noisy as well as smoky, dismal, cold and damp.

Add to all of that the open sewers and the horse manure all over the road and it would have been smelly, noisy, smoky, cold, dismal and damp.  Just the place you’d want to leave; I don’t blame her.  Today, you can only see where this neighbourhood has come from, it’s not like that at all to be here now, but on a cold, misty morning walking to work from Blackfriars through The Arches to Union St, it’s not hard to visualize how the Victorians lived in Southwark.

I have just bought a book called The Magic and Mystery of England by Ivan J Belcher because it had the Bridge of Sighs in Cambridge and a Morris dancing troupe on the cover, while there was a photo of the fishing boats drawn up on the beach at Hastings on the back. Now that I’ve got it home to read more closely, it’s even better than I thought; the man who wrote it likes lots of the places we’ve been to.  Look at this list just for the time we have been here.

St Paul’s Cathdedral.  We have both been inside and stared at its majesty and grandeur.  Every day, I see it as I go to and from work over Blackfriars Bridge and every day I marvel at its simplicity and its elegance. The chief mason to Sir Christopher Wren, and who helped build St Paul’s, was a St Albans man who is buried in St Peter’s Church on the main road in St Albans

The Chiltern Hills.  These are the hills that wrap around Tearle Valley and across which runs the Ichnield Way, picking carefully the dry route all the way from near Norwich almost to Henley-on-Thames.

Ilfracombe Harbour.  It has a 30-foot tide, smugglers caves carved into the mudstone cliffs and beautiful little stone cottages clamped to the hillside overlooking the town and the harbour. We went there several times to see dearest cousin Clarice.

Tower Bridge, London.  I took Genevieve’s photo in the late afternoon light from the Embankment with Tower Bridge right behind her. It’s a lovely photo. I was also given the privilege of running across it during the London Marathon earlier this year.

The Radcliffe Camera is a circular stone building in the heart of Oxford and is actually a library of which our cousin Barbara is the Head Librarian – the Bodleian Library.

The Magdalen Bridge, Oxford. You hire a punt and go punting down the river, gliding under this 18th century stone bridge.  Magdalen College was built by the Bishop of Winchester – he of Winchester Palace in Southwark with The Clink in its basement, which I walk close by every day.

The Houses of Parliament just down the road from where I work

King’s College in Cambridge with that fantastically beautiful chapel in its grounds, begun by Henry V1 and not finished until Henry Viii.

Christ Church, also in Oxford, with its most beautiful Norman cathedral.

Clapper Bridge, Eastleach, Gloucester. Two parishes, two little Norman churches, not more that 200m apart, one either side of the clearest trout stream I have ever seen, crossed by a small stone bridge that is centuries old.  The bridge is made of slabs of stone piled up and topped with a horizontal slab.  Very simple but very strong. It goes by the name of Keble’s Bridge. The village is made of old stone cottages with two very nice large stone farm houses and a most beautiful stone pub, where we had lunch.  Elaine’s family comes from Eastleach, that’s why we went there.

The Grand Union Canal near Soulbury, Bucks.  Not far from Tearle Valley, this canal was part of the backbone of the Industrial Revolution and these days long thin, brightly painted and decorated canal boats still potter slowly up and down the canal, opening and closing the locks as they go.

Shakespears’s Birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.  We’ve been there twice and had a tour through this house. Stratford is a charming town, but Warwick has a lot more genuine Tudor buildings and is much more authentic in feel.

The Tower of London. We went through there and I had a go at the warder about the Princes in the Tower.  I said the Tudors had turned on the publicity machine to blame Richard III and he said, “It was Richard III.” I saw I wasn’t going to win with that line, so I said it was his fault, that he was the jailer and he had let his charges be taken away to be killed illegally, knowing it to be illegal and therefore collaborating with the murderer. We glared at each other and then he turned to the much more polite lady next to me at the counter.

Churchill’s grave, Bladon, Oxfordshire.  This is quite a site.  There are families of Churchills and Spencers, here.  Winston Churchill has a big stone monument in Westminster Cathedral, but he is buried in this little churchyard in a village not far from Blenheim Palace, just outside Oxford.

The Horse Guards, Whitehall. On a warm, sunny day we watched the horse guards sitting still on these tall black horses. Whitehall is a wide street linking Parliament buildings with Trafalgar Square. When the Horse Guards change watch there is quite a ceremony, but when the men dismount, they are very stiff and sore young men indeed.

Morris Dancing.  We have several morris dancing troupes in St Albans and the city often hosts Morris dancing meets and competitions during the May celebrations.  There is a lot of drinking and a lot of fun and many of the troupes come from the Continent – more in the tradition of country dancing than actual morris dancing – but lots of fun for all that.  When we were visiting Redbournebury Mill a troupe turned up and it was there we first met Martin, the St Albans Town Cryer.

THE places in London: Regent St, Oxford St and Harrods in Knightsbridge. Famous for their lights at Christmas time. Famous for their shopping and their shops. Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus, Covent Garden Market.

Big Ben.  People usually call the tower or the clock Big Ben, but it’s actually the name of the 14 tonne base-tone bell that tolls the hours. The man who designed the clock was our own St Albans lawyer Edmund, Lord Grimthorpe. He also paid for and restored the St Albans Cathedral so that the building we see and visit today is the result of his work.  Some of the Victorians were remarkable men with huge amounts of energy and unbounded ambition and skill.

Fishing boats drawn up on the beach at Hastings. One of the first experiences we had of solidly, determinedly traditional ways of life. Elaine got second in the run to be the marketer for The Stade – the heart of this traditional fishing industry – but you don’t get any prizes for being second.  They didn’t want someone not English to do it.

Buckingham Palace.  This was the end point of my London Marathon and it’s always somewhere our visitors simply MUST go.  Outside the gates is the monument to Queen Victoria and the two huge statues facing the palace were given by New Zealand.

Knebworth House.  There are lots of gothic pillars and bits tacked onto the outside of a very large Tudor house not very far from here.  We have been there twice and have driven past it lots of times. Knebworth House was used for the filming of Batman and it has beautifully laid out and well attended gardens and grounds.

Hampton Court Palace.  We went on a trip there down the Thames with Ivor’s daughter Jill.  Christopher Wren did most of the work on it that we can see today, but the house is internally a Tudor building and majestic in its own right, though you wouldn’t really call it a palace, more a grand country house.  The gardens are just wonderful.

Warwick Castle.  Joni and I went there on a trip we did to Rugby and Stratford-upon-Avon.  It’s a magnificent building, owned these days by Madame Tussaud’s, started by William the Conqueror, with large round towers at the corners and a commanding view along the Avon River. Joni and I explored it for a couple of hours just before it closed for the day and there’s a tableau set up through several rooms of a visit by Winston Churchill when he was a young man. We were very impressed with the town itself.  Thelma’s son, Martin, lives there.

Hedge Laying.  Some of the hedgerows in England are over a thousand years old, including one near us, along Jersey Lane. The hegderow maker partially cuts through the shrub or branch and then bends it more or less horizontally, laying the next shrub over it and so on all along the row.  The top part of the hedgerow is tied with prunings. The hedges are usually kept about 5 feet high and the resultant woven hedge is stock proof without a single post except for those necessary to make and swing the gate.

Bluebells.  One of the most dazzling and magical sights you can ever see is the carpet of bluebells under the slightly greening trees in woodland open spaces in early spring. It is impossible to describe it and the effect is much too subtle to photograph because although you can see the massed display of blue flowers covering the ground, what the photo cannot catch is that the very air is turned blue. There is green at your feet and the view gets progressively bluer, the further away from yourself you look. The carpet looks about a foot thick and seems to float in the air.

The daffodils at Waddesdon Manor.  Waddesdon was the very first Great House we visited in England, a Rothschild mansion.  Our cousin Alec, Thelma’s brother, took us there.  We’ve been back to the village a couple of times and the last time there we bought a delightful copper and brass Victorian bed warmer from the antique dealer there, who knew the local Tearle brothers.  The daffodils cover very thickly some fields directly in front of the house and are a thick sea of yellow in spring.  Around us in St Albans there are long stretches of highway and city roads which are lined with daffodil yellow that have been planted by the council over many years.

Swans.  All the white swans in England belong to the Queen. On our own River Ver, very close to the cathedral, and out on Lake Verulamium, the white swans glide around and will accept bread from your hand if they feel like it.

Ashridge Forest, near Tring. Thelma took us here for a day out quite recently. The huge Gothic house here was built on the site of a 13th century monastery and it was here that Elizabeth I arrested her sister Mary.  Most of the trees here are beeches, native to England since the Ice Age.  The seat of the Rothschilds was here at Tring Park and we have also visited the Zoological Museum in Tring.  Thelma said that she and her cousins, including Jennie Pugh, used to walk and run through the trees and along the paths in this small forest when they were young. Thelma is particularly proud of her association with Ashridge Forest because it is owned and managed as a nature reserve by the National Trust and Thelma is a long-time active member of the NT, including working in this forest park.

23 November 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Just a very short note to let you know that my contract has been extended to end of March 2002.  We are both very pleased because some of the contractors did not get their contracts extended, and since there is an increasing number of permanent staffers on the helpdesk team, accenture’s need for contractors is becoming less.  I’m a bit lucky, I think, but I’m also really pleased because it shows that accenture/Sainsbury’s values my work..

We have recently moved to the Union St building, so we are only a couple of hundred metres from the house where Mum’s grandmother, Helen Hinkley, grew up.  I noticed that she also called herself Helen Brenda Hinkley, so no doubt that’s where Mum’s mother’s name came from.  Isn’t it interesting the things you find out?  I have also been stalking the streets and the place is CROWDED with little Victorian terraced cottages and dark brick 3-storey buildings that used to be warehouses, still with their lifting tackle attached, often painted blue or red to decorate the building in its new guise as an office block. It’s a very interesting neighbourhood, but it must have been extremely dark, damp and dismal for Helen and her family.  

The bricks are all a uniform dark brown, almost black, there’s the London-Dover railway overhead making lots of noise and smoke, there are all these Victorian buildings with two coal fires (living room and kitchen stove) belching smoke, there’s the constant noise of horse-driven vehicles taking goods from the river to the warehouses and the strong stink of all the horse manure on the roads.  Add to that the houses would be very warm, that the neighbourhood is historically an area of thieves, footpads and prostitutes and it may not have been all that desirable a place to grow up in …  It’s an interesting place, now, because it’s relatively safe and has been opened up quite a bit by some modern developments, but we still get asked to keep to the lighted streets at night and not to walk along talking into the cellphone because you then become a target to a pick-pocket or a phone-thief.

Thank you VERY much for your Christmas card for us and for Ivor – we’ll give him his this weekend when we see him – and thanks for the lovely letter inside. We are planning to go to Paris in the Eurostar next weekend and hoping for a week’s holiday somewhere – anywhere – in Europe for a week near Christmas, in Elaine’s school hols.

Be careful, be happy. Big kisses for Mum.

Lots of love  Ewart and Elaine.

4 Nov 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you very much for your letter re Mum’s jersey; I’m very pleased it has arrived at last and we’re also delighted that she likes it.  It’s certainly a nice warm material and we hope she gets lots of use from it. She can tell anyone who wants to know that it came from St Albans and it’s English made so it will do very nicely for any New Zealand winter.  It’s also a lovely colour and style, isn’t it?

Ivor came home last Wednesday and we went to see him yesterday afternoon.  He’s pretty tired, as you would expect after such a big operation, and he says he’s still very sore under his right lower ribs which were cut during the op, but he has good colouring in his face and he’s very cheerful and happy to be home. He said the doctor ascribed his lack of appetite to having a very small stomach these days, but he actually looks much better without his pot and I’m sure he’s healthier for that.  He’s eating a little, drinking a little and sleeping a lot, but he’s home and independent and looking forward to getting out and doing things.  No-one knows if they’ve beaten his cancer, but for the moment we are all hopeful since none of his tests so far show any sign of it lingering.  We took him a card to welcome him home and had a cup of tea with him and Iris while we listened to stories of his adventures in hospital.

We also took three things to show him and Iris.  The first thing was my Blackfriars sheep – I’ve called her Geraldine.  She is a knitted toy about 8inches long and tightly stuffed so she is quite fat.  She has a white (woollen, of course) body, black legs and tail and a black head with a slightly cross-eyed but very appealing expression.  

There is this late middle-aged, skinny, faded blonde woman with broken teeth and a ring in her lower lip who sits under a blanket in the mornings at the foot of one of the stairways in Blackfriars Station and she makes knitted stuffed toys.  One of her toys is a most beautiful black-faced sheep and I thought “I got a Paddington Bear from Paddington Station, so what about a Blackfriars sheep?” When I asked her if I could have one she said that all the ones she had there were already sold, but to pick mine up on Friday.  Other people who sit at the foot of railway station stairs are just beggars, but she works very hard to make beautiful little toys.

The next thing we showed him was Iris’ present for Elaine’s 50th fully stretched, framed and ready to hang on the wall. Iris has spent more than A YEAR making a cross-stitch entitled Saint Albans and it’s a diagrammatic map of all the major elements of St Albans and its predecessor, Verulamium.  So there is the city coat of arms, the Roman theatre, the Abbey Church and Cathedral, the clock tower, the Fighting Cocks pub, Kingsbury Mill; in short all the places we know well and go to often. Elaine never knew or even suspected that Iris was doing anything and Iris told her that every time we were coming to see them Iris had to sweep her handiwork away so Elaine wouldn’t find out.  The work is exquisite and it looks so beautiful in its gold frame on our wall.

When Iris gave Elaine her cross-stitch, it was rolled around a cardboard drum and when we asked her where we should go to get it framed she said to ask the man in the paintings stall in St Albans market to do it for us. We bought a small RF Carter print of The Fighting Cocks pub for Elaine’s brother, Gordon and I asked one of the men on the stall if I could get a print of the cathedral, because I have very much admired Carter’s watercolour paintings of the St Albans area, and there wasn’t one on display.  He said he’d have one for me if I came back the next weekend.

“Oh, do you know him, then?” I said.  “You’re talking to him,” he said. So boldly I asked him if he would paint the cathedral for me and when he gave me a price it was quite reasonable, so we agreed. He framed his picture with the same frame and gave it to us at the same time as we got back Iris’ cross-stitch. So the third thing we showed Ivor was our fabulous water-colour of the magnificent Norman church of St Albans Abbey. It is absolutely beautiful.

We also went down to the clock tower to see if there was anything interesting happening at the other end of the market.  The clock tower was built in about 1405 and it’s easily as tall as a 4-storey building, made of the local flint stones and brick.  The area between it and the High Street is a favoured spot for street theatre and musicians. There was an excellent string quartet – two violins, viola and cello – who call themselves Sigma and whom we recognised from their previous trips to St Albans.  They are very animated and usually dance and jump about and have little by-plays with children while they play.  But they play very well indeed with every instrument working hard and each playing a different part, so that the work is quite intense, it has a satisfying depth to its tone and there is warmth in the interpretation.

Even though there is a lot of traffic noise and plenty of people talking in the area, you can hear them very clearly because the clock tower itself forms part of the resonance that enhances their work.  There is always a very good crowd sitting and standing and listening intently.  Some of the listeners give their children coins and these little toddlers walk shyly up to the violin case on the ground in front of the group and drop their coins. Sitting in front of them, for the first time, was a box of tapes, so Elaine bought the three they had and we have been playing them every day since.  Mozart, Handel, Bach, Elgar, Dvorak, Debussy as well as English and European folk tunes are all on these tapes.

That’s something that has never ceased to amaze me about England – there is music everywhere. Live music.  Whenever we go to the cathedral, there is a choir either performing or in practice – which is almost the same thing – and the cathedral has an enormous endowment which is dedicated solely to enriching its musical heritage. The morning I went to explore St Peter’s church there was a choir practice there, too and the lady I got talking to said St Peter’s had a better choir than the cathedral. Rivalry? There are musicians in the Tube, buskers in Blackfriars and more in Bankside, we have seen them and heard them in every town and village we have visited. And they are always so very GOOD.  

Elaine says her little boys come to school quite proudly with their violins ready to go to music lessons after school and no-one slings off at them.  It’s not unusual for children to learn several instruments.  Cousin John Tearle, in Padstow, is a choir singer for his church and Alec Tearle is a wedding singer. We have a tape of John of French Row who sings English folk songs in St Albans, we have a CD of JigWeed of Chichester which we bought from them when we heard them playing in the street on our visit to Chichester, 2 CDs of Paescod of Manchester University when they played at Luton Hoo and Jim Couza on the hammer dulcimer, also at Luton Hoo. So all of a sudden we now have a nice little collection of English street music that is wonderfully well played and quite varied.    

It’s just past Guy Fawkes Night so outside there are loud explosions and screaming whistles from late fireworks.  Last night we walked down past the cathedral to Verulamium Lake and watched the fireworks there.  For the past two Novembers we went to Jersey Farm and participated in theirs but this year we decided to see how St Albans did it in town.  Well, they did it all right.  At 7:30pm it’s pitch black here and all around the lake, about 15 deep, were at least 20,000 people.  Some were wearing little red glowing balls and flashing lights they had worn a few nights ago for Halloween, and some were waving sparklers around but all of us were well wrapped up because it’s pretty cold at night here in early November.  

The fireworks lasted for at least half an hour and the cannons that shot them off from the ground ejected fire to about 8 feet high in bright orange stabbing flashes while the fireworks roared, crashed and thundered and rivers of gold and red cascaded down from about 300 feet directly above us. We could smell the gunpowder and the whole lake valley filled up with thick brown smoke. The noise was deafening and you could feel the big booms go thumping through your chest.  It was awesome. We also got another lesson – as if we needed it – from English crowds.  They are just so quiet and well-behaved.  

There are only three exits from Verulamium Park and the one we used went past the Fighting Cocks pub through a narrow bottle-neck and up a twisting, narrow lane through the gatehouse of the cathedral. For most of the way we could walk only inches at a time, shuffling along slowly and yet no-one got impatient and started to push, no-one yelled or tried to hurry us up.  There were lots of very small children in the crowd and plenty of pushchairs so we kept our eye on the ones closest to us in case there was a pushing match and we had to rescue a small person or two; but the whole thing was so quiet, orderly and good-natured that there was never a time when we held any worries about their safety.

We have just returned from a day out in Cuffley, to Elaine’s friend, Liz Stredwick where we had a yummy turkey and fresh carrots dinner followed by American apple pie. We were sort of “celebrating the harvest” because John had dug up all his carrots, put some in the freezer and some in sand and we were eating the little ones that were left over. After dinner we took a stroll round this village of very impressive million-pound mansions and admired the view all the way to Canary Wharf and the NatWest Tower about 20 miles away in central London.  

Mind you, it might be 20 miles by road and/or rail, but I doubt it’s even 7 miles as the crow flies.  Still, it was such an exceptionally clear day that we could even see the hills of Kent way beyond London. I thought the owners of the houses might be London stocks traders and bankers, but John says they are builders and electricians.  Maybe it’s time to change my job…  When we got home, Elaine made us a snack of scones from the stone-ground flour we bought during our visit to the Ford End mill in Ivinghoe. The flour may be coarse, but the scones are thick and tasty with a full-grained texture and they were delicious with Anchor butter and the home-made strawberry jam we bought at the farmers market.

Thank you very much for the card for Elaine’s birthday; she was really pleased you thought of her and it’s a beautiful card.

Take care, and thank you very much for your letters. We eagerly leap upon them whenever they fall through our mail slot.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine

4 Nov 2001

We do wonder about what’s going to happen with all these terrorist threats about, but they don’t seem very real and they are certainly not an immediate danger.  From time to time during the working day there are teams of police cars and vans screaming around the South Bank and St Pauls areas but where they are going and what they are after is always a mystery; there’s never a word on TV or on the BBC web site. We take this to mean that nothing happened.  Still, they make an impressive noise and they do need something to entertain themselves with, don’t they?  How else do we find out they are important?

I didn’t tell you about the bomb scare we had. The street outside Rennie House filled up with sirens and screeching-to-a-halt police vehicles and we looked out the window on to the road one floor below us to see what was going on.  Security sent a message up to us to say there may be a bomb in the blue van suspiciously parked in the loading bay of the building opposite our window and for us to move to the other side of our floor.

When we moved to the other side, as directed, one of our supervisors waved at the phones on the desks and told us to log on and go back to work. And I thought, well they’re taking this seriously, aren’t they? Vacate the building in an orderly fashion, leave your personal belongings behind and assemble in a park nearby? For us? Never. If the bomb goes off and all that glass from the windows overlooking the van comes showering, snaking and slashing towards us we would take it like a man, shake it out of our hair, pick it out of our bleeding faces and go back to helping the people who really matter.  So don’t worry about me ….. I’m being well looked after by caring and safety-conscious employers and cocooned in impregnable buildings.

29 Oct 2001

Dear Mum and Dad

Ivor is improving by the day.  This is not to say that he can leap tall buildings in a single bound but he is out of intensive care, sitting up in bed and is very lively and positive. He still has a little bother breathing because they had to collapse one of his lungs in order to carry out the surgery, but his colour is very good and he’s actually looking forward to going home as early as Tuesday 30 Oct.  He has repaired so quickly that he is weeks ahead of where they expected him to be. He is looking forward to coming home, perhaps going to the Canaries for a holiday and most of all to a slap-up family feast for Christmas. I say best of luck to him, too.  

Elaine and I went to see him in Hemel Hempstead NHS Hospital on Sunday and he even walked us to the door, “Look, no hands.”  They gave him a walking frame to assist him but he reckons it’s more use as a set of bull-bars to push through the crowds.  He says the bit that hurts the most is where they cut through his ribs to get at his lungs and when I suggested they’d hacked into him with a meat cleaver, he pointed to a chap on a bed opposite him who was to have the operation next!

Elaine and I are delighted you like our coat.  We thought that since there are going to be more cold days before Christmas than after, you should use it immediately.  Because it’s designed for English winters and it’s waterproof and nice and long, and has big, velcro clips we thought that it would suit you on your racing machine. We hope you get LOTS of fun out of it. Mum will enjoy her pressy … I hope it doesn’t take too long coming since it was posted at the same time as yours.  Weren’t those St Albans Christmas cards nice?

We are also pleased that Graeme is still at work on that wonderful catamaran and that he still enjoys the work.  The cat sounds huge.  We are also pleased at the progress that Abby and Geoffrey are showing.  They have told us they are off to Norfolk Island with their mum on a week’s holiday.  They will remember this holiday for more than a little while and they are old enough to get a great deal of fun out of it.

Every day in London is an adventure and another day of discovery.  Elaine is on school holiday this week and after I got to work this morning I discovered, on a quick trip to the coffee machine, that outside was a simply glorious day; mild but not cold with a clear blue sky and a golden tinge to the reflection of the sunlight from the buildings.  I rang Elaine immediately and she dropped everything, caught a train and sent a text message to my cellphone from her favourite coffee house opposite The Black Friar pub, just off the City end of Blackfriars Bridge.

Elaine needs only the slightest excuse or the mildest of invitations to leap on a train and go enthusiastically to London. During my lunch hour I showed her things she might like to explore: the remains of Winchester Palace and The Clink jail in Clink St – she had lunch in Porridge, a very attractive little coffee house in Clink St, with reasonable prices, right opposite the ruins of Winchester Palace – Southwark Cathedral, the full-size replica Golden Hind, the Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern.

When I met her after work in Doggetts pub, just off the South Bank end of Blackfriars Bridge, she was brimming with all the things she had done in just a mile or so along the Thames, in Bankside.  She had met a Dean of the Southwark Cathedral, a chap called Holman, who had greeted her at the door – as they often do here – and on hearing her Kiwi accent told her a lovely story of visiting his daughter when she was on a 2-year stay in New Zealand. She explored the cathedral and left a candle burning for Jase. She visited the Golden Hind and then went on a tour of The Clink. It’s a gruesome and horrible story, but extremely interesting.

We also found out that Westminster Bridge, for which one of her relatives organised a petition to get built, in 1750, was the first bridge over the Thames apart from London Bridge itself.  The Romans built the first London Bridge and when King Ethelred tore it down when he fought the Danes to get London back off them, the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is falling down …” was born.  Westminster Bridge was built in 1750, so it took 1700 years between the first bridge over the Thames and the next one.

I’m not forgetting that it was torn down and rebuilt several times, but it was always on the the same spot and always called London Bridge. Still is. The old London Bridge – you know, made of stone in the 1170’s with houses built all along the top of it – lasted until 1825-ish when Rennie – who also built Blackfriars Bridge in the 1760’s and after whom the building I work in (Rennie House) was named – built a new London Bridge. It’s Rennie’s London Bridge that was sold to the Americans and is now in Arizona. The new-new London Bridge is a low-slung stressed concrete bridge with not a shred of romance in any foot of it.

Oh, yes! One last thing about old London Bridge.  They used to stick the par-boiled, tar-dipped heads of famous men convicted of treason on stakes mounted on the roofs of the houses along London Bridge.  The first victim was William Wallace (of the movie Braveheart) but another was Sir Thomas More.  

We also have a connection with Southwark Cathedral.  Apart from the fact that Helen Hinkley, Mum’s grandmother, lived just around the corner from it and must have gone there at some time, since she was a devout Christian, it was in Southwark Cathedral that your cousin Richard Blake was ordained.  Richard was the son of Ellen Tearle and Harry Blake.  You will remember the photo of the wedding being held at Levi’s smithy with the large family portrait with your father in the right hand side. The bride was Ellen.  

There was never to be a better wedding than the first Tearle girl to be married, Ellen – to her first cousin, Harry Blake.  Their children were Norah, Gladys and Richard.  Norah is still alive, in Norfolk. I have spoken to her quite recently and I think you have written to her on occasion.  Richard Blake was an Anglican priest in South Africa.  He wrote to me once – a kind, gentle, intelligent man who was very highly thought of.

A week or so ago I had to go to Old Street for a Windows 2000 course.  I knew it was in the north of London just outside the City, but I wasn’t perfectly clear, except that I had to leave the train when I got to Farringdon, two stops from Blackfriars.  A very nice chap with a beautiful, full-featured Cockney accent told me the way to go when he saw me looking in my London A-Z. In a very short time I was walking along Clerkenwell Road, which you just follow along until it becomes Old St and I realised that on my right was the remains of an old courtyard and I had a quick look because I had a few minutes to spare.  I was at St John’s Gate, built in the 1550’s.  It was once a courtyard for the Knights Templar and became the centre for an organisation called St John of Jerusalem whose main concern was care for the injured and then the establishment of the St John Ambulance.  I was a zambuk for most of my high school years and here I was at the very centre of the St John’s world.

“The man who is tired of London is tired of life.”  Dr Samuel Johnson. 

I had found the location of the church of St Mary Le-Bow, the source of the Bow Bells, and I was dead keen to go and see it so Elaine and I took the train to Blackfriars a couple of Saturday mornings ago to see what we could find in and around the City, just by walking.  When we came out of Blackfriars Elaine reminded me that Iris had told us that the plot of now-vacant land behind the Black Friar pub was once called Times Square.  It was where The Times of London was printed and distributed and Iris worked there then.  

We walked along past St Paul’s Cathedral to Bow Lane, which is a little shopping lane, closed at the moment for repairs, but right there was the elegant tower and spire of St Mary Le Bow, another of Christopher Wren’s little church masterpieces.  We bought some lunch and waited for the bells to ring.  As far as I could tell there were 3 of them and they are beautifully tuned and very melodious, though not very loud. On Saturday, with almost no traffic about, the City is very quiet. Some people who say they are Cockneys must have very good hearing, says Ivor.  On the outside wall of the church (closed on Saturday!) was a plaque for John Milton, saved when his church in nearby Bread Street was demolished.  The divine poet, John Milton; I had never associated him with London.  I rang Norah to see if she knew where Fred was born, but she said she didn’t know, so soon I shall go to St Catherine’s House and get his birth certificate and then I shall visit the place.

We had a highly amusing and very entertaining night out with Jo and Neil in their last week in London. Jo Mark is the daughter of Jimmy Mark who leases our farm block.  We met at the Sherlock Holmes statue at Baker Street Station. Baker Street is a most interesting place. 221B Baker St is in the window of the Abbey National Bank.  Of course it was a fictional address, but the bank has put a little tableau of Holmes and Watson in the window in recognition of the fame they have brought this street. But there are lots of three-storey houses still there exactly the sort that Holmes would have lived in. There was also an Elvis shop. We couldn’t stop laughing.  We had dinner in Pizza Express and then after-dinner coffee down the road in a delightful little coffee and dessert place. I had an ice-cream parfait with my coffee.

Elaine’s just had her 50th and although it was fairly low key, it was still an enjoyable time.  I got her a heart rate monitor to help her at the gym and just so Mum wouldn’t accuse me of only buying her tools, I also got her a very nice silver dragon on a silver chain for her to wear with a black t-shirt – which I also supplied. We had a most enjoyable dinner with our St Albans friends at a local Mediterranean restaurant and in a week or so I shall take her on the Eurostar to Paris for the weekend.

The news about Joni is all good.  She has just been made Brand Manager of Fresh-n-Fruity, New Zealand’s biggest brand.  AND she’s in the middle of buying a new house.  It isn’t quite hers, yet, and anything can happen, of course, but she has done the paperwork and it all looks in pretty good shape.  The house is a terrace of  two-bedroom apartments in Ellerslie so it’s very central for her friends to visit her, but only 20 minutes to work on the more or less traffic-free side of the motorway to and from work.

Keep up your bowls and keep happy and healthy.

Lots of love

Ewart and Elaine