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Jack Hill moved with his wife and family to a house called Brookside at St Mary's, Chalford, Gloucestershire in 1962, and renovated it over a number of years.
On occasions, chaps from the office would volunteer to do work at our house but usually it was safer to decline the offer as things often seemed to go wrong.
For example, Frank Epple came over on a snowy day and was up in the attic with me, having to stand on the floor joists as by that time I had taken out all the worm-eaten floorboards.
His foot slipped and crashed through the ceiling of the guest room just above the entrance. I patched that up with hardboard and some dozen years later managed to do a proper repair.
Very early in the occupation, the Aga started making gurgling noises and the local plumber diagnosed that the pipes were all furred up. The only sensible solution was to remove all steel pipework and renew with copper, clean out the Aga boiler with acid and have an indirect system with cylinder and calorifier .
The cylinder was located in the spare room for the shortest route of the primary flow, and from there pipes fed the bathrooms via a long route passing through the bedrooms.
Eventually cupboards and pipe ducting took shape and the place eventually looked almost finished.
The coke-burning central heating stove did sterling service until it began to leak just before Beryl died in 1969. With an insurance I had taken out in her name I was able to have a gas boiler installed at the end of the lean-to shed.
This worked well on town gas but when North Sea gas came into use the pilot light used to frequently blow out. Hence a vertical flue had to be attached instead of the balanced flue.{In 2001 there are two gas boilers with blown air flues high near the roof.}
The plaster ceiling in the main lounge worked loose with movement in the room over it, and great chunks fell at intervals, so I decided to remove all casings to the cross beams which then were exposed as flitch beams with a lot of spring in them.
S
That done I went the whole hog and changed the character to 20th century with a suspended ceiling and Cashmere drapes across all the windows.
With a white carpet and modern settee and chairs and bookcases over the black stone fireplace one was in another world. Three hanging lights had dimmer facility and other lights were at table level, controlled from the door switch.
During the time when the family were in the Seychelles, work on the house was limited to maintenance. There was the continuing embarrassment that the Council were getting no nearer their proposals for a sewage scheme from Hyde down to Brookside then along the river.
Thus for all the time the house had been occupied, say from 1800 or before, all sewage had been shot straight into the river. I am amazed how casual we were towards people working or paddling in the water which always seemed so clear. {Apart from bits of toilet paper and towels sent down by people not in the know}
Nine years later, I returned to Brookside, but alone since the children were now approaching the crucial years at school and couldn't be taken from their accustomed surroundings of Adcote and Denstone.
A period without regular income saw me working in the garden where no costs were involved, and I made many amendments to the footpaths, but never managed to keep the weeds at bay for more than a half year. The kitchen gardens had been neglected and so were full of perennials.
Continued ......
Jack Hill, St Alban's, Hertfordshire, 2002
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