Home Sweet Home Four

I obtained the post as Warden of the Eagle Centre, a church run organisation in Newbold, Chesterfield in 1965. I was brash, enthusiastic and single. The centre was home to various groups, my home was the adjoining house next door. Completely undomesticated, I survived, and I choose the word carefully on tinned Irish stew, complete meals in vogue at the time in tinfoil trays, including roast beef and Yorkshire Pudding and chips and chicken from the local 'chippy'. Plus dinners at both the YMCA in town and the local C of E junior school (the latter on provision that I did not eat left handed as the head suggested it was a bad example to set children). Also various meals with sympathetic parishioners who perhaps not coincidentally often had spinster offspring of a higher than average age.

Tidiness was not a strong point though I did occasionally wash up (hose piping a weeks pots in the sink was not unknown) and some of my washing and ironing was delegated to Christian ladies in the congregation who were sympathetic to my plight. (Until one day a pile of immaculate washing and ironing was returned in the middle of a hectic jumble sale I was running for much needed funds. And promptly sold unknown to me for pennies to delighted customers ever ready for a bargain.) Which left me without spare socks, shirts and underwear for some considerable time on wages that did not lend themselves to replacing half of my limited wardrobe.

It was my first experience of living on my own, though various youngsters used my house as an emergency abode when they rather than I deemed necessary. A hectic, disorganised period of my life but in the main good fun in a novel sort of way. Definitely a house but being my first attempt, home in a bizarre sort of way.