Mother

This is brilliant. 

This is what my mum wrote in response to Two Maple Grove.

The place she grew up in Wales. 

I love what she remembers about it all.  

One in a billion-gazillion. LOVE YOU MUMMY! 

(take a deep breath)
 

maple grove is very good - but 6 pence downstairs, 9 pence upstairs I think it was - that gave you scope for a bag of shrimps and blackjacks and some sherbet. Maple Grove was also opposite the allotments and where Miss Mansell kept her large cart horses and she gave riding lessons to Liz and I. and David Mercer's dad - now swanky with Wimbledon - had the only TV in the street. and Mr Koffman lived next door, and there was a swing in the garden and a very steep back lane which all the kids sped down on tea trays with string as handles and always fell off or hit the wall at the bottom. There was a coalshed in the back garden and a lavatory and a very strange lodger called Miss Hastie who haunted the upstairs - she rented a room and was about 90 and a Christian Scientist. When the coalmen came I hid under the bed. Every Christmas we got a pillowcase with oranges, games and jigsaws and something knitted by Ding. An annual pair of knitted bedsocks came from an ancient aunt and were relegated to the chest of drawers (now in back room but then was on the landing). In the garden were lots of gooseberry bushes and lots of roses in the front. Judith Benjamin was my friend and the Benjamins lived in the big house on the corner and she was given pocket money for sweets each week. Her dad was a solicitor with an office on Sketty Road, Swansea and another office in Llanelli so he often took us both for a ride when he went to Llanelli stopping at Kidwelly Castle and other such places.... and they always made sandwiches with radishes - and I've never liked radishes really. Geoffrey Benjamin went to Cambridge and I looked after his terrapins when nobody was around. Susan Benjamin was the elder sister. Every Friday Judith and I joined the family for the Jewish blessing with matzo bread. This is all when I was small. At Christmas we wore party frocks - and mine was always a hand me down from Elizabeth which I didn't mind as I didn't like party frocks anyway. 2 Maple Grove looked a bit pokey when we drove there but it probably looked bigger when I was smaller. Love mam

(she decides, after all, to continue)

I can also let you have my views on Lon Illtyd and Glanmor, the Gypsy Boy and the Macabre cafe near the Odeon cinema, buses and caravans in Oxwich. Watty the dog from Tonypandy who lived with Auntie Esther and Uncle Jack - she taught piano to the Houston brothers and Auntie Ginnie had a second hand bookshop in Tonypandy which was full of old books and comics everywhere - very dark and with a musty small but you could climb on a table and read the comic books. She had a leg in a calipher, was very smiley, but never married. Liz and I were sent there in the summer. Esther and Jack left Tonypandy and went on to run a b&b in Great Yarmouth around the corner from the Singing Postman - I was sent there to help with the b&b in the summer.

(she ends there. perfection.)