Memories...

When Mum and Dad came yesterday Mum brought with her some old photographs of our Married Quarter which was located in Yeovil.  We sold our house and moved to married quarters for five years in order to save as much money as possible before moving out to Cyprus.  This proved to be a fabulous move not just because we saved so much by no longer paying a mortgage but because in some ways this was the best house that we ever lived in.

Had we not lived in Greenwood Road we would never have met our lovely friends Laura and Mark Pamment and we would never have downsized and we would never have hung onto the Hearse (Peugeot 406 Estate) which moved us almost completely save for the mattress off of our king sized bed.

John measured up the house and told me that it was a similar size to Villa 10b so I could try and visualise what our retired living accommodation would be like and what we could fit in.  We went from a large four bedroomed detached house to a two and a half bedroomed end terrace with no garage to begin with although we did get allocated one eventually.

We had a neat little kitchen/diner which was south facing so got glorious sunshine pouring through the windows nearly all day.  We had no real room for a freezer so we went without which was a bit radical but we saved so much money by doing a weekly menu and eating fresh and not wasting anything - that was such a great discipline to get into that I would contemplate going without a freezer again if it weren't for wanting ice, peas and ice-cream regularly, just tot up how much money is sitting in the freezer at any one time because if you have the space in the drawers you fill them.

There was a mini bedroom which we used as a study - I am not entirely sure you could actually get a bed in there and shut the door but as there was only the two of us it didn't matter.  The two other bedrooms were a reasonable size but we had no wardrobes having moved from a house with built in wardrobes!!  John put some some hanging rails in the 'study' and that is what we coped with for 5 years!!  Anyway the back bedroom also faced south so was lovely light and airy.

Our bedroom overlooked the front of the house.  All the houses had a massive green area in front of them so we had little noise from the road and we were right on a bend so any traffic had to slow down anyway.  If I looked out of my bedroom window and Laura was in hers we could wave at one another although she worked shifts as a nurse so that didn't happen very often.  Actually John thought all his Christmases had come at once when he met Laura, a nurse, dressed in her riding gear!!!

Apart from the very noisy central heating system which kept us awake at night there was little I would have changed about that house.  I had stoically avoided living in married quarters for years and then there I was and I loved it.  John was away so much of the time we lived there and I never felt anything but safe and happy.  I was quite sad to leave that home even though it took John and I about 3 months to clean the cooker so that it met with the approval of the out-muster!