Homes "Well
My parents had a shop. To go back a little further my father had formerly
been in the cabinet making and antique business but during the 30’s
he had a serious illness and couldn’t work and couldn’t carry
things for some time. In fact they kind of switched into a business which
my mother then ran which was called the fashion centre and sold ladies
fashions clothes of all kinds and so on and they then ran that business
together and it expanded into a shoe business this was at a time before
modern supermarkets or chain stores and so on so it was very much the
fashion business of that small town. And it was quite a successful business
for
many years.
My
father as boy was brought up with his father who dealt in antiques
and things of that kind as well as making furniture. So he had some
kind
of business background in trade and business and I’m sure that
when my mother went into it she picked it up from him and they
ran it together and in fact it was it employed a number of people not
only shop assistants but they actually had a separate workshop with
several young women working there altering the clothes. So when somebody
came
in
and chose a dress it was actually then kind of fitted and altered to
fit them and that was done in a separate workshop.
I
have strong memories of the shop, yes. It was a fairly traditional
shop of its day with wooden counters with little wooden drawers in
them. There
were rails of clothes and mirrors and so on and the shoe shop all the
walls were covered in boxes of shoes and boots and so on
At the beginning we lived in a flat over the shop
and a lot of the time from when I was quite small we had a kind of
mothers help, come char lady if you like, who used to come in, and
I fact I remember
her very well as being a sort of fairly permanent figure of my childhood
so she was obviously doing the housework and looking after me. The
other strong figure who also lived with us, she lived in Malmesbury
at the time
and then moved in with us later was my mothers mother, my grandmother.
She also looked after me and helped with the cooking and the house
and so on so it did release my mother to be in business.
.. With the flat we had no garden at all but
there was a little piece of sort of terrace at the back at a
high level because
Malmesbury’s built on a hill and the land dropped away very steeply
behind the shop and this little terrace which had a chain link fence
around it was one little space there are a lot of family photos Of me
after my
christening and so on with the family standing around on this little
bit of terrace with the landscape behind. When
we moved, we moved from
that flat when I was about six I think probably, and bought a house
which had
a large garden. In fact my father bought a bit more land and enlarged
the garden even more so it was really quite a big garden and that
was a bigger
house and at the back of it it had a yard and adjoining the yard
it had some sort of workshop buildings I don’t know what they
were originally some sort of buildings and one of these building
the lower part of it gave on to the street in Malmesbury and that
was the garage at an early date and above that was the workshop where
the girls that worked for my mother and father at their sewing machines
worked so that was a workroom. Later on we actually sold off that
part and my father bought a different access in so you could actually
bring the car in round the front of the house to the back of the
house so that was.. over a period of years that’s how things
developed.
We lived there until I was about, until 1960 so I’d have been
about eighteen, nineteen when we left there and my father gave up
the business in Malmesbury
and moved to near Bath. Bought an old rectory split it up into two houses, lived
in one of them with my grandmother and then later on sold that and converted
the stable block into a house and that was the house that my parents lived in
until about 1980.
So when they closed the business in Malmesbury, what did they then
do?
Well my father was getting on into being sixty then so he bought
actually a soft furnishing business in Bath which was just off
Pultney bridge, just at the end
of Pultney Bridge and he made covers for sofas and things soft furnishings
and he ran that business for a few years not for a very long time
until he finally
retired.
Was your mother involved with that?
She wasn’t really involved with that, no partly because she was looking
after my grandmother I think and partly because it wasn’t ladies fashions
and things any more. My father though when he had the business in Malmesbury
he did in fact develop a similar business run a similar business in Chippenham
He had a kind of branch business in Chippenham which was also ladies fashions
and shoes and he ran that that I don’t know probably ten years or so
before he retired
What prompted the move from Malmesbury?
I don’t honestly, totally know There seemed to be a bit of a strange
family
background to it and I never really quite understood it Certainly my father
had problems
with his sister who had a mental illness and there
were problems about wills and things. To be honest I don’t know the
truth of the whole thing. He, they just seemed to feel they wanted to get
away from Malmesbury. It may have been partly because by that time I was
leaving home really and working in Dorset and they were therefore moving
nearer me that may have been part of it too but the real reasons for moving
from Malmesbury I never really understood if I’m honest.
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