At about the age of seven we started playing bridge every evening there - Mother, Father, my sister and I. It put me off for life! I can remember squirming with fright and being so uncomfortable at the bridge table. I can still feel the relief when I tell people now that I don’t play bridge! We used to have bridge drives and whist drives in the village hall at Portchester from ever since I can remember. People were always coming to the door and asking for whist drive prizes!
There were seven bedrooms at Murrills, including father’s dressing room, and just one bathroom with a lavatory. There was also a lavatory out in the yard (used for father’s shooting friends), and another round the side of the pig yard that was just a bucket with a hole in the ground for the farm men. We were not supposed to use the outside lavatories. Each bedroom had a
jug, and bowl for washing, and the maids brought the water up for us and emptied our chamber pots. I always shared a bath with my sister taking it in turns to go first. Two maids shared one bedroom where there was a cupboard with a hot water tank heated by the kitchen range. Kate spent a lot of time in her room doing the sewing.
We had a wonderful garden at Murrills and a tennis court too. There were two summerhouses, one of which was thatched and built in the flint wall. In the summer, tea would invariably be served outside, come rain or shine. The poor maid would stagger across the lawn with trays laden with crockery and cakes. Mother was rather renowned for her triple layer sponge cakes and the Mothers’ Union came for a garden party every year because she was the Enrolling member.
Tom Marchant did everything - milked the cows, fed the hens and generally did the vegetables. We kept quite a lot of vegetable garden - of course everybody did then. All through the winter we would have lovely dirty vegetables, full of flavour, such as beetroot, carrots, potatoes and swedes, kept earthed up in a shed, fresh as the day they were dug. We grew masses of fruit that we had to pick in the summer. I can remember that Mr Basher would arrive back from Chatham late in the evening in the fruit season with big round baskets full of white and black Kent cherries. We guzzled the fruit ‘til everybody else would have been under the table.
Clockwise: Odd-job man Tom Marchant and the Potato Crop
Barbara in the garden of ‘Murrills’ 1930
Father, Mother and the thatched summerhouse in the garden of ‘Murrills’ 1929
42 | The Report • June 2019 • Issue 88
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