A House in Quorn

Cottage with church in background, 2003.

Miss Grain: Well it’s rather select, it’s a bit snobby and it still is. You see in my young days there was a lot of gentry there, the Quorn Hunt that attracted them for the jobs, looking after the hounds and that. We lived in Barrow Road. The Prudential got my father the house, like. 1901 we went there, it was new house, my father saw it being built. There were two, a pair of houses, Gordon Cottages and the next house was Gordon Villa, he was the man that had these two cottages built and he gave my father the choice of either of them. My mother never liked candles, we had an oil lamp, a little oil lamp to take upstairs to bed. We used to have a tin bath. In the summer have it in the kitchen and in the winter have it on the hearth in the living room. Ours, I think, were about the first water lavatory in Quorn. When Joan’s mother, they came, they were girls as I say, they couldn’t stop going and pulling the chain in the toilet! I’ve heard my mother say the big houses on Loughborough Road, they had pan lavatories at that time. My father had an allotment, he were a keen gardener. Time he had two allotments, we never had to buy potatoes or vegetables, and he grew soft fruit, currants, raspberries, loganberries, but no top fruit.

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