{"id":3038,"date":"2021-05-23T17:36:51","date_gmt":"2021-05-23T17:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/?page_id=3038"},"modified":"2021-05-23T17:36:52","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T17:36:52","slug":"daphne-george","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/?page_id=3038","title":{"rendered":"Daphne George"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"http:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Daphne-George-190131_0051.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Daphne George interviewed by Arlene Ellis 31 January 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I was born in Ferryhill, County Durham and came to Egglescliffe in 1982. We saw the cottage advertised in the Evening Gazette. It looked nice and I wasn\u2019t really happy where I was. We came over here to have a look at it and I just loved it on sight. A lot needed doing to it but it had so much character and it was such a nice place so we thought we\u2019d buy it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we came here a lot of the houses were still not modernised as they are now. There was still a lot of old houses, but I think a lot of them now, behind the fa\u00e7ade is not what you\u2019d expect at times.&nbsp;&nbsp;I\u2019ve spent a lot of money trying to keep it as original, and kept as many original features as possible. I think it\u2019s sad that once it\u2019s gone, you can never get it back. That\u2019s the original mantelpiece for the house. The beams are original. They are all farmhouse floors, the wooden floors. Someone came from the council, I can\u2019t remember what for, and he said that was the oldest door he\u2019d ever seen. I wish I\u2019d pressed him on that. I tried to take all the paint off because I thought I\u2019ll sand it down and varnish it, but when I took the paint off it was held together with wire. There was all this mesh of wire.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have four sons and my youngest son, he went to Egglescliffe Comp. The other three were in their late teens and twenties so they were all busy with other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Our son Stephen and wife Anna were married in the church. They both came over from Sweden where they were living. Anna\u2019s mother and step-father and her three sisters and their children all came over. It was quite small because I haven\u2019t got a big family. We had a lovely wedding and at the Pot &amp; Glass. It\u2019s not something the Swedes were used to \u2013 it\u2019s not the sort of wedding they usually have so it was different for them. We were there for Christmas, we go every year. I have two grandchildren over there.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When my family come here, I\u2019ve got one in New Zealand, one in Sweden, and two in London (one came back from America last year), they always go to the pub quiz. They like pub quizzes, especially the one from New Zealand, he was up last year in November, his brother came over from Sweden at the same time and they went to the Pot and Glass quiz.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There used to be a very large pear tree just outside the front door, and it overshadowed the last two cottages on Rose Terrace. There were two cottages, there\u2019s only one there now, it was made into one cottage. The tree was so tall and it was so covered with pears that the children next door could lean out of their bedroom window and pick pears. That was the Bell family, I think Bertie Bell was one of those children, and Connie Bell, who was my next-door neighbour and Maurice Wallanger\u2019s wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Maurice was brilliant. He was a good friend and we miss him terribly because he was a part of our life. On a Wednesday was Maurice day, Bill used to take him shopping up to Tesco. In the summer when they came back, we sat in the garden and had coffee and biscuits. He stayed till about 4 o\u2019clock and then went home. And in the winter, he used to come in and watch the horse racing on TV, so it didn\u2019t matter what season it was we had something to entertain Maurice. He always went home about half past four for his tea. We miss him quite a lot. We used to go in daily, and I used to give him his lunch every day. When I was on holiday, he refused home care, anything like that, said he could manage, but I think his daughter used to come down and stock him up with stuff. She has a tape of Bert [Bell] on the BBC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we moved in here there was central heating and an indoor bathroom in this house, but Maurice didn\u2019t have central heating. He used to tell me that these houses had earth floors originally. The worms had come out on a morning when they came downstairs and they had to pick the worms off the floor and throw them into the garden!&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019ve got to say when we moved here there weren\u2019t as many small children, and it\u2019s nice and lovely to see a lot of small children around the village. I think that\u2019s lovely. I\u2019d forgotten about this,&nbsp;<a>but Jayne and Andrew used to run an Easter egg hunt, so Easter was quite a good time. A lot of children used to come in the village for the Easter egg hunt on Good Friday. They used to go down the day before putting eggs in pots and round people\u2019s houses, so it was quite a nice little event. People looked forward to that<\/a>. But their children are 19, 20 now, so they don\u2019t do Easter egg hunts anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\u2019s a rear access to this house from the back lane. Where that bungalow, Laneside, is now, that was part of the garden for this house, it was a smallholding. Old Mr. Henderson used to have it. We still have one original apple tree there, which we get a lot of apples from. The apple tree is about 130 years old they said. We get so many apples from it, it\u2019s impossible to deal with them all. I\u2019ve got them stacked up in the garden in meshes and things. I used to feed them to the birds and give as many as I can to the neighbours. Everyone around here seems to have plenty of apples anyway. There was a pear tree further up the garden, and it got these insects, carpenter wasps. They buried into it and the tree just died. It was quite tall, actually we kept cutting bits off it because stuff kept coming out of it, and in the end, it was so bad they just gave it a push and it fell over. And so it was sawn up and it\u2019s gone.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mr Henderson decided that he\u2019d sell half of the land because he couldn\u2019t manage it. So he sold the bit that had a brick byre on it, and it was fenced off. The path at the side was in our deeds so we had rear access as well as front access. The byre or whatever it was mysteriously fell down over a week. Then a few years later a bungalow appeared on the site! That\u2019s why the bungalow is there, it was part of the smallholding owned by Grandad Henderson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a nice old house. And we still have Grandad Henderson smoking here. He used to smoke a pipe. After I\u2019d been here a few years I could get this whiff of tobacco smoke. I couldn\u2019t figure it out because no one smokes. I thought the window must be open, it\u2019s getting in. I asked Maurice a few years later did anyone smoke a lot in this house. He said, \u201cOh, Grandad Henderson, he never had a pipe out of his mouth, he was always smoking\u201d. His housekeeper only allowed him to smoke in here, in there and in that room there. It was never upstairs, she never allowed him to smoke upstairs. Occasionally I still get a whiff of it, because my grandad used to smoke a pipe so I know it was the smell of pipe smoke, not cigarette smoke. I used to say to him, \u201cGrandad Henderson, please go away\u201d, because it used to irritate my nose. \u201cPlease go away Grandad Henderson and don\u2019t smoke in here. Find somewhere else to smoke\u201d, because it used to prickle the top of my nose. I know that sounds ridiculous but I still think he\u2019s around here somewhere.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Years ago, people used to get coal and sometimes their houses were scarcely heated.&nbsp;&nbsp;On one side Mr. Butler lived and on the other side a lady called Mrs. Wallace or something like that, she was very deaf. But the house was totally un-renovated, it was very, very cold, and she was deaf too. My next-door neighbour\u2019s daughter, Andrea, who was quite young, used to go do the shopping for her. It was a terribly difficult house to go into because it wasn\u2019t cared for or anything.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Things have changed a lot since then! Next door was two houses, the lady in that house kept a pig during the war in a tin shed.&nbsp;&nbsp;Our outside toilet is still there, it\u2019s a storage shed now. There\u2019s a brick extension to this house which was the washhouse. The ladies from these two houses, maybe others, came down the back path to the washhouse and toilet. There was a big brick boiler or something with a chimney on top and they used to bring their washing down to wash. I don\u2019t know how many people used it, I know these two houses did, whether the other houses did I don\u2019t know. The chimney was still there on the washhouse till about ten years ago when we had it removed because it was falling to pieces, it was getting a bit dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bonfire night was good. It was getting out of hand with people coming in, and at the end of the day, as I read in the book, there was no insurance and people were getting concerned. The council were getting concerned about everything so it was stopped. It was a bit of a relief really because we had to put up with weeks of people in cars throwing mattresses and goodness knows what on it. They took all the grass off the green in a big square and people put their stuff on it, but they were coming from all parts with all sorts of stuff and it was messy and all over the green. After they had gone it smoked for several days and they had to let it die away. Then they put the grass back on the square, which is very neat. But since then there\u2019s a tree been put there by Janet\u2019s father, Mr. Harrison. It was great but it was getting very messy and getting very untidy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;Maurice has told us many tales over the years about what\u2019s happened in the village. We knew Bert because he had a garage at the bottom of Maurice\u2019s garden. They used to fix people\u2019s cars, because Connie, Maurice\u2019s wife, was Bert\u2019s sister, so they had this garage going. People used to bring their cars to be fixed. I don\u2019t know how legal it was, I don\u2019t know how good they were, but I have a friend who lived in Yarm for a long time, she used to live in Eastbourne Avenue, and she said if anything was wrong with her car she used to bring it round to Bert\u2019s and they would fix it for her. The garage has gone now. I think it was asbestos so it\u2019s been taken down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Daphne George interviewed by Arlene Ellis 31 January 2019 I was born in Ferryhill, County Durham and came to Egglescliffe in 1982. We saw the cottage advertised in the Evening Gazette. It looked nice and I wasn\u2019t really happy where I was. We came over here to have a look at it and I just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3038","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3039,"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3038\/revisions\/3039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.egglescliffeara.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}