Longleat

A Memory of Great Dunmow.

My grandfather Cecil Welch, who was the local estate agent and auctioneer based at the Old Town Hall in the High Street, bought several old cottages next to the blacksmiths in Church End for his son John and wife Peggy, at the vast cost of £600. She came from Wiltshire and changed the name from Jackman's to Longleat. They had been living with their in-laws at Kasama on the Stortford Road and they needed their own home as they had just adopted a baby - that being me - Pene. They had married just before he left for the Second World War in 1942 but had never really lived together. My father kept  a diary and wrote of the many hours he spent at his new house finding blocked off windows and hidden fireplaces, and what had been a near hovel with rats in the back garden and drunken brawling at night became a family home for myself and my parents. I remember picking at bits of plaster between the newly exposed lathes during this time! At some point Mr Crisp and Mr Norberry's house next door was bought and demolished and a fancy garage built and on the other side another small cottage was demolished to give us a larger family garden. Trees were planted on various birthdays, lily-of the-valley bulbs sent from Wiltshire for the garden and the family grew to five when my sister Sarah and brother Clive were born. We had many happy and unhappy hours there. My father worked long hours and the needs of small children were not something my mother enjoyed or coped with well. I was sent to a boarding school in Bishop's Stortford as my mother's expectations of marriage and a fairytale life failed to materialise, my father had an inability to deal with this and they both developed ways of coping that were not positive. However I have fragmented memories of house martins nesting in the eaves and their happy calls as they flew round the house and of the starlings squabbling in the gutters when I woke. The pea flowers poking through our fence from gardens behind and the smell of the creosoted shed. The uneven floor boards in the house and the stairs that threatened to topple all who attempted them! There were family visits on summer days when the atmosphere was relaxed and on cooler days our grandmother Emily Richens walked us and to the churchyard nearby or around the fields. I can remember my mother whistling a little tune as she made her way along the upstairs corridor and my father taking me in the push chair all round Biggott's farm fields to give my mother a break. My father was very active in the community and was often at church meetings. My brother sister and I played happy little games in the garden and spent much time running from our rather snappy Pekingese dog! My father was a keen photographer and recorded our years there very well so I have many photos of those times and the house as it changed. We moved in 1956 to a house called Windy Ridge on the Braintree Road. My mother, yet again, changed the name to High Acre but within a year or so she developed a brain tumour, from which she was survived but she was never quite the same again and we moved again to what is still called Bank House in Dunmow High Street. Longleat is now 'Jackman's' again and although the house has not changed much on the outside the garden and garage have been replaced by houses, and the inside has been altered too, although I have not seen it since 1996.