My memories date back further than those of others who have written about the Sladden family, as I am of a previous generation. As a growing up family of four children we lived in Durham in a house owned by the Church Commissioners, for whom my father worked – he was engaged in transferring Church property from the ancient copyhold to leasehold.
I think he was essentially a very serious and conscientious man who undertook everything he did with great care and attention to detail. He was also a well-read man, with a large volume of general knowledge, so that whatever we asked, it seemed that he knew something about it. He could be very serious, but he could also exhibit humour and fun with us children, but I think we were all somewhat in awe of him, and certainly we were expected to behave well and to work hard at school. I was very aware, when we all went out as a family, of his pride in his brood of children.
Of course from 1939, he was also engaged in wartime duties in the Royal Observer Corps, which took him away from home some evenings, and as a family we were all able to identify silhouettes both of Allied and German aeroplanes.
For family holidays, like most families, we had a trip to the seaside, usually on the NE coast in early September – Saltburn and Bamburgh were favourites. Here my father would have booked rooms in a boarding house, a living room as well as bedrooms, where meals were served to us by the landlady. We also had trips to Badsey, to stay with the hospitable aunts; presumably originally we went by train, but that I do not recollect. At Seward House was the old Badsey car, UY 70, driven mainly, slightly erratically, by Auntie Detty (Ethel), who seemed to us to be the more approachable than the seemingly more austere Auntie May. They were however, both extremely kind to all of their nieces and nephews, and sometimes there would be some of our cousins there as well. The garden seemed to us like enormous territory, with huge opportunities for our games, and I also remember the pleasure of collecting eggs with Auntie Detty, and of the mysteries and wonders of the Barn, where there were huge scales for weighing quantities of produce and a variety of other equipment.
We were sometimes taken out by car, but I remember, as we got older, more adventurous expeditions, including a trip on bicycles to Stratford-on-Avon, by about half a dozen of the assembled cousins, all no more than early teenagers, when we first stood in a queue in order to sit in a stool to queue for a matinée performance at the theatre! Such a thing would never happen now, and it highlights the relative freedom which children then enjoyed.