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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.
The water supply tank was located in the bathroom as it was the highest point in the house compared to the intake pipe from the spring in the retaining wall of Clayfield Mill.
Other houses in the hamlet were connected to the spring, and so when they opened their taps our flow ceased. This was a constant problem which I never managed to solve {and which didn't cost money for booster pumps and suchlike}.
Therefore the size of tank helped to tide us over the non-flow periods. These were usually short-lived, except when Louis Habgood arrived and watered his garden.
So the tank was cased in hardboard but was always a nuisance. A double sized cast iron radiator ensured that the room could be nice and warm for babies to have a bath.
Planning approval allowed us to employ Philip Ford & Son from Stroud on contract to rip up the kitchen and hall floors, and build a boarded floor on joists over a concrete-lined cavity in the hall to link up the lounge hall and main lounge and dining room floors, thus getting cross ventilation which had been lacking.
He also built brick walls in fair-faced work between kitchen and hall, created a draught lobby at the front door with a mat well for six coir mats, and laid a new concrete floor in the kitchen for me to put down PVC tiles.
Large glazed panels and doors gave more light to what had been a dull area. A half-glazed barn door with cat flap allowed more light into the kitchen. {Henrietta, our bitch, used to spend hours trying to gnaw the sides of the cat flap to allow her to pass like George the cat could.}
Cant think why I didn't have a board floor in the kitchen, would have been much warmer. His bill came to exactly £491.15.3d. which I liked. None of this rounding up to the nearest pound as now.
About the same time, I employed a local chap named Dowdeswell to strip the main roof, give treatment to all the rafters, add new ones or extra support where necessary, provide roofing felt and replace the slates.
His price was £670, but at that time I couldn't afford to have the rest of the roofs done. That work had to wait till after I had been for a 12 months stint in Saudi Arabia, and when daylight and snow were entering the roof space in generous quantities.
All the work I did in the house I priced at nil with materials at cost bought piece-meal when a few pounds was available so the total cost to achieve a liveable house will remain unknown.
The garden too had been neglected and needed attention in tandem with the house, so my regime developed into a system where I toiled all day at the office, climbed into the car to listen to the Archers on the way home, said hi to the children, had a snack meal, then worked in the house till bedtime.
Weekends were devoted to the garden until perhaps 9.30 p.m. on Sundays when a bath preceded a start on a sketch design for another project due for submission to the developer by mid-morning. Bedtime would be about 1.30 a.m.
I bought a Suffolk Punch grass mower and a Landmaster cultivator kit with pump and lawn scarifiers to help speed up the work.
Continued ......
Jack Hill, St Alban's, Hertfordshire, 2002
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