Vicars Daughter Growing Up In Gratwich

A Memory of Gratwich.

After living in Jamaica and Barbados for some years, we returned and my father became priest-in-charge of Gratwich and Kingstone in the 1970s and early 1980s. I was the eldest of five. Our crumbling, draughty, white-and-blue Queen Anne vicarage, now done up with deluxe helipad, was as if out of an Albert Camus novel. We swam in the marl pit at the back in summer and skated in winter, and played and rode our little welsh ponies in the fields around us and went swimming with the ponies in the pond in the river Blythe at the back of St Mary's, the Georgian gem of a church where Mrs Caldwell played the pedal organ and her daugher Joy sang with a voice to match her name and the prayer books still referenced King George.

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