Sugar and Spice and...by Sheila Claydon

Click here to find my books at Books We Love

No! I definitely do not feel like this picture of Kerry in my book Double Fault. She was at her wit's end trying to bring up 2 year old twins on her own,  and so missing out on the joy children can bring, whereas I am feeling blissful!

With the partial lifting of the CoronaVirus lockdown in the UK, my house is now full of teenagers, dogs and, not to put too fine a word on it, mess!  There are dog toys all over the conservatory courtesy of the 11 month old puppy, dog beds taken apart with blankets and cushions awry as my own dog attempts to hide her bone, and a muddy towel on the the floor by the garden door because it's been raining and they all know the rule of paws being wiped before they come in.

Then there are the teenagers. With iPhones attached to their hands like an animated extension, their music and chatter has banished the long silence of lockdown. Of course the bathroom is now far from pristine (although they do hang up their towels to dry), and I'm just ignoring their bedrooms until they go home again. There is more washing too. And more housework. But there are many compensations.

The long walks to the beach with all three dogs, the games in the garden, the different meals as they take over the kitchen and make bread, or a club sandwich, or risotto, or soup, are all welcome. They are both good and practising cooks too, so no longer having to provide every meal, as I did for their grandfather and me during lockdown, is a real bonus, even if their clearing up skills still need quite a bit of refinement!

And the conversations! With one a budding biologist who is also testing her political opinions, our discussions range from the interesting to the heated to the downright amusing, while the younger one concentrates on educating us about everything to do with horses and craft projects. We do learn a lot too because, thanks to their permanently available friend Google, they access facts and figures 24/7, and have the sort of conversations with us that their busy, hard-working parents rarely have time for. Hopefully they learn from us too. They seem to because, during lockdown, I had many phone calls from the biologist for advice on setting up a herb garden, while the arty/horsey one sent me regular updates on her painting projects. Today a tie-dye kit is arriving but it'll be staying in it's box until the rain stops as, lovely as it is to have family with us again, I do draw the line at tie-dying indoors!

Then there is the little one in Hong Kong, who should have been with us now but, thanks to CoronaVirus, cannot travel. It doesn't stop her joining us though...often, and loudly. She reads to us via Skype and we manage to play card games too. And now they are all on school vacation she doesn't just call us, she also calls her cousins, making it possible for all of them to maintain a relationship despite the distance.

In other words I prefer the mess, noise and busyness that comes with having young people around to the peace and quiet we enjoyed during lockdown. And eventually, Kerry in Double Fault was able to do that too. That's the good thing about happy endings!

How to keep 3 children happy for one week without really trying... by Sheila Claydon

Anyone who reads my books knows that children frequently feature, usually as background or secondary characters, but occasionally battling for prime place with the hero and heroine as in Double Fault and Kissing Maggie Silver, so it stands to reason that I like them.

Sometimes this liking leads me down unexpected paths. For example, when I was younger I never thought I would spend months in Australia helping to care for my youngest grandchild, nor that I would attend school sex education meetings for my middle grandchild when neither of her parents were available because of work commitments. Then there are the concerts and the prize givings, the birthday parties, collecting grandchildren, and sometimes their friends as well, from school, and the sleep-overs... the list goes on and on, as any grandparent knows.

This week, however, could have been a real challenge. 3 children aged 15,10 and 3, 2 dogs and a husband all staying together in a cottage on a working farm in very rural Wales. How easy was it going to be to keep children of such disparate ages interested and happy. The older ones brought their technology of course, but the Internet in such a remote place is unreliable to say the least. So is the weather!

I need not have worried. The resident donkeys and goats arrived at the kitchen window for breakfast each day and for the price of a few bags of the cheapest carrots and apples kept all 3 children occupied for hours. The younger ones also learned how to chop the food and how to keep their fingers safe as they fed their new friends. Then there were the alpacas in the next field, and poor old Sunny, the one male alpaca who had been banished to live with the donkeys while his babies were growing up, much to his disgust.

There were the ducks too, and the ducklings, and the chickens and newly laid eggs. And a field of swishy grass behind the duck pond that was exactly like the grass in one of the 3-year-old's story books, which made the whole holiday just that bit more exciting.

Then there was hide n'seek. Bales and bales of newly cut silage waiting to be bagged provided hours of fun, as well as comfortable places to stretch out in the sun. And for the little one, the sight of the tractor moving the bales a few days later made it even more interesting.

Then, on the sunny days, there was the local sandy beach. Fortunately it wasn't just any old beach. It had a freshwater river running into it, with small fish darting through the weed. So a couple of 99p fishing nets later everyone was happily engaged. And when they were all fished out there was the river to splash in, or jump over, or sit in.

A barbecue was another hit, especially as it was in a wooden Hobbit House that was complete with benches covered in furs, and lit by fairy lights, just like the one Bilbo Baggins lived in in The Hobbit. This came courtesy of the farm and provided high excitement both before, during and after the event.

Nobody was bored, nobody wanted to go anywhere 'exciting', and everybody loved being muddy and dusty and not having to care what they looked like, and that included the adults! Even a walk in the rain offered excitement, what with the muddy puddles and dripping hoods.

All it took was a few bags of carrots and apples, 2 fishing nets, a hay field and a whole lot of friendly animals. Now I need to see where I can add that to the mix in my next book!

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Chilblains and icicles by Sheila Claydon

Fortunately it hasn't actually come to chilblains and icicles but only because the weather in the UK has been warmer than usual for this time of year. What has happened though is that our central heating and hot water have packed up and the three weeks we have been without them has taken me right back to my childhood.

How spoilt I am now. The house is always warm. Hot water is available at the turn of the tap. I can have a shower whenever I want. I can even walk around the house without a sweater in the middle of winter if I want to (I don't!). My kitchen is full of gadgets from a toaster to a steam iron, an ice-cream maker to a microwave. My kitchen hob is ceramic so it's clean at the swipe of a dishcloth, and my cooker and fridge are self-cleaning, and of course there's the washing machine and tumbler dryer. How could I manage without those?

Now let me take you back to when I was tiny and my mother, father and I lived with my grandparents. It was at the end of WW2 and we lived in Southampton, a maritime city that had been severely blitzed, so there were no houses to buy or rent. In those days laundry was either done by hand, using a big block of green soap and a washboard, or it was piled into a copper boiler and the dirt was stirred into submission. Then it was rolled through a mangle and how important I felt when I was allowed to turn the handle. Then, after hours flapping on the line in the garden, it was ironed with a flat iron that had to be heated on the stove. Even so, everything was ironed. Nothing was easy care in those days.

Then there was the cooking. The milk, which was delivered daily by a man driving a horse and cart, was kept in a bucket of cold water on hot days, or, on cold days, outside.  The food, too, had its place. A big old meat safe with a fly cover was kept in a shady part of the garden and everything in it was used within a day or two. No supermarket shopping, no packaging either. Everything was weighed out and wrapped, even the biscuits. My favorite job was to go to the shop next door and fill a bag with broken biscuits because that way we got a selection instead of just the one kind.

As for central heating and hot water, forget it. An open fire and the warmth from an old-fashioned black-leaded range were the only forms of heat we had in that cold, dark 3-bedroom house, so going to bed was a sprint up the stairs to an icy cold bed made marginally more comfortable by a big stone hot water bottle wrapped and pinned into a cotton cloth. I remember the cotton coming off mine one night. I still have the small burn scar on my leg to this day.

Washing for me was from a bowl beside the range or, once a week,  a tin bath that had to be filled with pans and kettles of water that had been heated on the stove. For my grandparents and parents it was ewers and bowls in their cold bedrooms and a weekly visit to the public baths.

I can still remember how happy my parents were the day we eventually moved into a property that had a bathroom, a fridge, and a water heater, whereas nowadays nobody expects anything else.

Of course all this was a very long time ago, and because we lived with my grandparents who were still using gaslight instead of electricity, we were probably at bit behind the times anyway. Other people lived in more comfort I'm sure but I didn't have a problem because, like all small children, I thought what I was used to was normal. I didn't like the chilblains (caused by sitting too close to the fire in an attempt to warm my frozen feet), or the chapped knees and lips. I didn't especially like having to wear layers and layers of clothes either. Scratchy woollen vests, a liberty bodice with tiny, fiddly buttons, a pleated skirt that hung from a warm over bodice, then a thick woollen jumper. My knees were always bare though, above very unattractive woollen socks held up with an elastic garter, and this meant chapped knees and thighs. Little boys suffered a similar fate because in those days children were deemed too young to wear long trousers and I didn't know anyone who wore woollen tights...maybe they hadn't started making them.

So although I'm not enjoying being without heating and hot water, it's not all bad. Without the sudden upheaval it's caused in my life I wouldn't have remembered how lucky I am, and how much harder domestic chores were for my mother and grandmother.  I haven't got any chilblains either and I am very grateful for that.

None of my heroines have ever had to suffer such deprivations although Kerry, in Double Fault does have a bit of a hard time when she's a single mother. Before the path of true love can run smooth they all have other problems to contend with though.

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