Sad

My Sister rung me up at the week end and she gave me some sad information. My Cousin has passed away, he was about 6 months younger.
 As children we used to play together, he lived about 8 doors away so it was easy to contact each other.
 I guess this would be in our infancy, I should think it would be when we were about 9 or 10, certainly no older as in early 1947 we moved to another house and from then on we didn't see much of each other.
 We would go conkering sweet chestnutting, walnutting as well and mushrooming and blackberrying. We knew where every walnut tree was also where the chestnut wood was and gathering conkers was great fun.
 What we did though was to create our own game of cricket. It must me remembered that it was in 1946 /7 so nothing was available.
 My Cousin would find a thick piece of willow and whittle it down to some sort of shape of a bat. I, for my part made some pads out of some bathroom mat which was very thick. I also made it a must that I would look for the wooden balls, the ones that folks threw at the local fair to hit a coconut. They were a perfect size for us young lads. I tried to get as many as I could but to be honest I never managed to get sufficient to last the summer months. We had much fun though. I wonder if youngsters would believe  what we did but it is true.
 My Aunt, who was my Father,s Sister was not quite as houseproud as my Mother was. In those days, everyone had a scrubbed table in their kitchen. They looked good, I presume they were made of pine and when scrubbed the look of them was fantastic. My Aunt had one just like we had only it had, what I thought was a fancy edge to it.
 One day I asked my Mother why we didn't have a table like Aunty M. She queried my question so I told her that hers had a dark fancy edge to her table and ours was just plain.
 She grinned and told me that the dark edges were in fact cigarette burns. Obviously her and her husband put the cigarettes on the table to do something and would forget about them. What surprised me was that the entire table was covered with cigarette burn marks.
 The other 2 things which surprised me was that there was an alcove which had a curtain covering it and there were dozens of pairs of shoes, it was  something to watch somebody try to get a matching pair. Also there was no part of any window ledge that was not damaged by  a pen knife slicing bits of wood off. However they were happy days, a thing that the youngsters of today will never have the pleasure of. Catching a bus to the country and then going to find the fruits of the early Autumn. What memories. More soon.