Happy Holidays.

A Memory of Dhoon.

I have many happy memories of holidays spent at Dhoon from about 1934 to 1940, when I was under ten years old. My parents had visited the Isle of Man for many years before I was born and had discovered Dhoon on those visits. We used to lodge at Miss Henderson's cottage, which was just off the Old Dhoon Road, not far from Dhoon Station and close by the cottage of Watson, the shepherd. It was very olde worlde, with slate floors, a huge open fireplace in the kitchen, complete with a hob and a cauldron suspended over the flames. All the cooking was done on this fire. Sometimes Miss Henderson would let me get the fire hotter with a pair of enormous leather bellows, to her chant of " Jeremiah blow the fire, puff, puff, puff. First you blow it gently, then you blow it rough". Lighting was by paraffin lamps and water was obtained from a small stream which ran down beside her cottage and which had been channelled into a pool between the stone flags in the back yard .
It was my job of a morning to walk down the field in front of the cottage, through the ferns and alongside the stream and the dirt wall, which was covered in fuschias, as were all the local farm walls. I carried a milk jug with a lace doily over it and went to the farm by the station to get it filled with cream from the top of the milk in the churn (this was before milk was pasteurised or homogenised) to have on our breakfast cereals.
The electric railway ran behind the cottage and I would sometimes stand by the tracks, amongst lots of rabbits, to wave at the passengers on the train as it passed.
Weather permitting, most of our days would be spent walking down Dhoon Glen to the pebbly beach below, where I would play and paddle. My mother always took a picnic lunch for us to eat on the beach . On the long climb (or so it seemed to me) back up the Glen, my Dad would often stop for a dip in a pool under one of the waterfalls .
I remember once we walked along the cliffs to Maughold Head lighthouse a few miles up the coast and my Dad got told off by the keeper for risking his family by walking along such a narrow path halfway up the cliffs, with a sheer drop to the sea below.
At least once during each holiday, we would take the train into Douglas and I remember watching them making and rolling out "Isle of Man" rock, in all different colours and flavours. We would also usually go into one of the many open fronted music shops, where someone would be playing the latest hits on a piano and you could buy the sheet music for them. As my mother was an accomplished pianist and had played in cinemas to accompany the silent films, she always bought some sheet music to play when we went home to Wallasey.
I subsequently emigrated to Australia and my next visit to Dhoon was not until 2006, some seventy years later. I went looking for Miss Henderson's cottage but a large mansion-style house seemed to have been built where her cottage used to be and the fields had all been cleared. There was a foot and mouth disease scare on at the time, so, unfortunately, passage through Dhoon Glen and down to the beach was prohibited.

---

---