Ullswater: The Nelson's.
First draft.
For 9 years from 1939 until 1948 my father worked for the Nelsons of Sharrow Bay on the shores of Lake Ullswater. I was just 5 years old when we moved to Sharrow Bay, as I grew older I had a Saturday job to help in the big garden and sometimes the Nelson's home as well. One of the jobs at the Nelson's home was burning the rubbish in the central heating boiler. I enjoyed that particular chore, I used to sort through and find all manner of things, foreign stamps on envelopes and postcards from overseas, travel magazines and sometimes a prized National Geographic magazine. The Nelson's travelled a lot. T B Nelson, his wife called him Jay, was very, very rich and he had not held a job in his life, not that he couldn’t, he did'nt need to. He was a very shy and literate man, he had a large library and used have all new book issues sent to him and spent much of his time in his library reading. His wife Dorothy was on the other hand an outgoing and talkative person. I liked Mrs Nelson, she was always giving me little things in her fussy way and telling me things, sometimes of their trips abroad. They went abroad every English winter for the duration except during WW2, always a cruise ship.
I'm sure she used to put those foreign postcards and magazines out for burning deliberately to wet my appetite for the outside world when I used to think back later. Was that the start of my hankering to travel and eventually go to sea as a Radio Officer? I think it was. I still hanker to travel, even now when I read travel magazines and if I was rich, I too like the Nelson's would shut up the house and travel overseas every winter.