Barbara Greenshields (nee Jupp) shares with us these wonderful childhood memories around the time of the 1920's/30's, Barbara having been born in 1924.

'Whooping cough, chicken pox, measles. I don't know in which order they came, but I got them all after starting school, bringing them home to share with my brothers, I believe. Peter had whooping cough quite badly when he was small.

Feeling decidedly unwell one day I lay down on the sofa, my head ached and my throat hurt. Presently the ice-cream man came along, not a particularly frequent occurrence at that time.
'Would you like an ice-cream', asked Mother.
'Yes please' I replied, perhaps a little too eagerly, for having devoured the cornet with some indication of pleasure she began to wonder if I was feeling better, but in the evening she took me to Felpham to see Doctor Ferris (Doctor McNair's successor).

He looked in my mouth and told me to say 'ah', took my temperature, pronounced it to be 102°F and told Mother to take me home and put me to bed. Later I was very sick (the ice cream perhaps?) and my nose bled quite badly. I think Doctor Ferris came to see me one day and I expect I was given some medicine. I remember that attack of tonsillitis more clearly than the other ailments.

At about six years old I yearned for a dolls' house and as Christmas approached I would call up the bedroom chimney to Father Christmas to 'Please bring me a dolls' house'. I could see it quite plainly in my mind's eye. It would have a living room and kitchen downstairs and some bedrooms upstairs. The whole of the front would open like a door so that I could play with the inside.

We awoke with all the excitement of Christmas morning, but Father Christmas had made a mistake. He hadn't brought dolls' house. Beautifully made, the rooms even having tiny picture rails, and to play with it the roof lifted off. But it wasn't a house; it was a bungalow, not what I'd asked for at all. Did I hide my disappointment I wonder? I played with it for a while but could never feel truly enthusiastic about it.

How could I have known that Dad had spent many hours making it for me, probably in the mistaken belief that I would like something different? He must have felt hurt because I didn't give it the welcome he had anticipated, and when I was old enough to know that he had made it, I felt guilty for being unappreciative.

Years later when he was in his eighties we were reminiscing about the 'Flansham days' and I mentioned the dolls' house. 'When you are only six, a house and a bungalow are quite different' I ventured.
'I know' he said, 'but I was young too, and there were things I hadn't learned.' Then he added, 'But you liked that rocking elephant I'd made for Dave didn't you? You used to stand on the rockers when he was on it and rock with him, so I fixed a little platform on them for you to stand on.'

Dad also made us a swing in the garden, little wooden stools and some whim-whams - wooden discs (like a large two-holed button) with string looped through the holes. He showed us how to work them. With a finger through each end of the loop we twirled the disc to twist the string together, then pulled gently at each end to make it spin and hum. Whimm-whamm it went. They were popular at the time and some children made them from large flat buttons, but we were proud of our wooden ones. They were bigger than buttons.

My father was very much a family man and devoted a good deal of time to us children. It was customary for him to bath David and me, the water having been transferred from copper to bath in preparation. We were dunked in together and, being so close in age I don't think either of us could remember not knowing that boys and girls are different. I certainly didn't question it. I just thought it was the way of knowing whether new babies were boys or girls. They all looked the same with their clothes on so that had to be some means of identifying them.

Looking back now I guess that Dad took on the bath time duties when Mother was pregnant, though we didn't know at the time. Perhaps I wasn't a very observant child, as I didn't even notice the change in her figure.

We had a fair sized garden at Flansham, or so it seemed to me. What is thought large when one is small often appears to have shrunk considerably when seen as an adult. Dad grew vegetables and flowers, and later kept a few chickens.

David was a toddler when the first crop of sprouts were ready for harvesting and he developed the rather alarming habit of trotting up behind Mother and biting her bottom as she bent to pick them. She used to laugh when she told us about it, but it couldn't have been funny at the time. How would today's child psychologists interpret this behaviour?

One of our bedrooms remained unfurnished for a while and Dad put his seed potatoes in there, only to find each one securely nailed to the floor boards - David had been at work! I can't imagine why either of my parents didn't hear him and investigate his activities. It would be convenient to think that Mother had gone sprout picking while the coast was clear and she didn't have to guard against attack from the rear, but by then David was a little older, able to wield a hammer and hopefully had outgrown his biting habit.

We each had a little patch of garden for ourselves. I can't remember what David planted in his, but I had just two sunflowers in mine, one at each end. They grew to what seemed to me, a tremendous height, much taller than me. I felt sad when they eventually died, but Dad suggested that Nan (Auntie Hilda) would like to have the seeds for her canaries. I thought this a good idea, so he cut the heads off and delivered them on his next visit to Littlehampton. He would often cycle to see his parents and sister, sometimes in the evening after work.

I have a feeling that Grandpa Jupp visited us once after we moved to Flansham, but I don't recall Grandma ever coming to see us even when I was older. I know she suffered badly from rheumatism, but it wasn't far to a bus stop from her home or ours and she did manage to walk to the cinema twice a week. It seems extraordinary that she should not visit her son's home. Perhaps Grandpa had some excuse as he had to attend to the business every day, including weekends but surely he could have spared an afternoon between opening times occasionally?

We were always welcomed when we visited them and I never sensed any disharmony between them and my mother. Grandpa was such a gentle, quiet soul I doubt if he would be in disharmony with anyone.

We children spent quite a lot of school holiday time at the 'Brit' (Britannia Inn). Britannia Cottage had been dismantled, the partitions being removed so that it became one long room and thereafter that is what it was called, the 'long room'. Sometimes Nan kept her canaries in aviaries (made by Dad) in there, and baby chicks and ducks. It served as a storeroom and somewhere for us to play, undisturbed.

A favourite pastime was blowing bubbles. There were no commercial mixtures then. Our materials were clay pipes from Grandpa's stock in the bar and a saucer of water with a small piece of soap in it. We discovered that if the soap was left in the water overnight it turned into a slimy, jelly-like substance, which produced bigger and better bubbles. We built tents and houses from discarded curtains and redundant rag rugs.

On one wall there was a work bench and when we were older we 'played' with some of the tools, testing our strength to see how tightly we could secure a piece of wood in the vice, before hammering nails into it. By some miracle we never squeezed our fingers in it or injured ourselves in any way.

Almost every afternoon Nan took us out while Grandma and Grandpa rested. Grandma sat with her stockings rolled down, rubbing Beltona into her rheumatic legs before going upstairs to bed, while Grandpa often dozed in an armchair. We usually went to the beach when the weather was suitable, sometimes taking the ferry and were rowed across the river to the West Beach where, when we were very young, we liked to play in the sand dunes.

We were staying with our Grandparents and Nan for the weekend when Dad arrived one Sunday afternoon. 'I've got a surprise for you at home' he announced. It was another little brother. Michael had arrived to complete our family.'

It sounds like Barbara had quite an idyllic, but simple childhood, quite typical of the 1920's/30's.