Author Archives: staffordshirebred

I paused  – for the purpose of taking this photograph – from heaving my wooden spoon around the luscious, peaty amalgam of this season’s rather late Christmas Cake. This huge and precious old Mason and Cash mixing bowl had only just come … Continue reading →

I inhabit – for the time being – a small rural hamlet strung just off the A513, and equidistant between two enduringly olde worlde villages, a few miles north of Lichfield in Staffordshire.  It’s the sort of quiet place that Torment and … Continue reading →

This funny baby did not appear as pink and cherubic as the illustrations on the cover of the instruction manual that it came with. But a few hours had now passed since my birth. The angry bruising around my face had begun to … Continue reading →

My parents finished building the house at 155 Bosty Lane, Aldridge by the summer of 1957. They had, by this time, been married for almost nine years.  These had been nine years of a childless, double-income life in rented rooms comprising half of … Continue reading →

    Deepmore Avenue, Bentley, near Walsall – nineteen thirty something…. He is out of bed well before the five children rise and put their reluctant toes onto the cold lino before dressing for school. His faithful little wife – in … Continue reading →

  Ken, my husband, dug up this livery button in the vegetable garden of our cottage the other day. He might be a bit mutton, but he’s still a hawk-eye for a bit of garden archeology, and swooped on what looked … Continue reading →

8, Church Street, Walsall: Sunday 7th April 1861. Name: Thos. Day Age: 19 Occupation: Baker Where born: Boston, Lincolnshire My mother’s great grandfather, Thomas Watson Day, was not yet out of his teens. He had left behind all that was … Continue reading →

  My dad told me that when he was at work pegging out building plots for the new estates that were springing up north of Birmingham in the post-war years, he would marvel at how inconveniently small the allotted spaces … Continue reading →

These snuff-brown pieces of thick, stiff, dry, hide have the passing appearance of relics from a medieval fortress siege.  They are my dad’s “tab” (finger-guard) and “bracer” (arm-guard), from his practice of archery , which my parents had taken up some … Continue reading →

Berrow’s Worcester Journal attributes to itself the distinction of being the oldest surviving newspaper in the world.  For over three centuries, its pages have the aired the  local indignations of this largely agricultural corner of England, and proffered its goods … Continue reading →