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My husband has done a little research on my family history. My family have lived in the same area for centuries on one side (my mother’s) but only moved to the area relatively recently (in the great scheme of things – less than three centuries) on the other side.
Back in the mid 1800s my family moved from The Cotswolds to Derbyshire in the midlands. Coal mining was getting a real foothold in the area, rich seams of ‘black gold’ made landowners and mine owners very wealthy. The work was hard but the pay was better than that of a farmhand in a poor area where farmhands were many and so work was hard to come by.
My family upped sticks and came to live in Blackwell in brand new, ‘built for purpose’ houses. There were four sets of these houses, two rows of two sets of fifty. Two hundred families were given the opportunity to come and live better than they had ever lived because of a regular and ‘good’ wage.
My family moved into a house on the ‘Top’ row and stayed close to that area for the next hundred or so years.
My parents moved into a house on the top row when they got married and wanted to start a family.
The houses were exceptionally basic, two-up, two-down houses with no bathroom, no central heating and a toilet at the bottom of the garden.
The houses were one room wide and therefore, the stairs from the ground floor up to the bedrooms was frighteningly steep. As a child, I was scared to go up those stairs because I could feel the great abyss behind me.
Not only that, but the stairs to the side of me when I stepped over from one bedroom to the other (front and back of the house with the staircase the divider) was terrifying too. It didn’t matter which way I stepped, I always felt something compelling me down to the bottom of the stairs (I believe it was something other than the force of gravity).
If I wanted to go to my parents’ bedroom from mine, I hesitated and had to build-up my courage. And the same for the return trip.
Maybe it was because I was so very young and I wasn’t 100% confident of my own feet (we left the house before my 7th birthday and these occurrences happened before my sister was born – I’m 5 years her senior). Or perhaps it was something more… sinister that I sensed.
A ‘guzunda’ or chamber pot was still a necessity for late-night bodily functions.
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One day, before I was born, my heavily pregnant mother took a tumble down the stairs. She slipped while taking the contents of the chamber pot out to the toilet. She didn’t spill the contents of the bucket and fortunately, she slipped rather than fell and slid on her back, down the steep stairs. She believed she was exceptionally fortunate to not have done herself or her unborn babe (me) any harm.
I was born later that year and all seemed well.
Apart from my recurring dreams. Amongst the dreams was one that has stayed with me clearly and even now, half a century later, I can picture the dream clearly.
I slide down the very steep staircase of our old house, a little higher than the steps themselves, approximately the same height as the bannister. I’m on my back, in a similar position to how anyone would slide down a slide for example.
It’s important to know that I feel safe during the dream.
At the bottom of the stairs, I don’t ‘land’ but the dream does end there.
The position would have been where I was as an unborn child.
Knowing other aspects of the house, I can tell you that I didn’t always feel safe there. There was something in my bedroom that disturbed me. Something high up inside the wall opposite my bed.
I don’t know any more than that, just a feeling of indescribable unease and vulnerability.
Years later, when I had my own children, the story of my recurring dream came up and my mother was deeply shocked.
“You can’t have dreamed that,” she said.
“I did,” I said. “I dreamed it often.”
Then she told me about the slip she’d had when pregnant with me.
Skip forward a few more years and my husband tells me where my family lived when they came from The Cotswolds to live in the village of Blackwell. In the same row, possibly the same house.
Not a huge coincidence, one house out of only 200, but the occurrences after, when one of their descendants needed help…
When I was born, there were five surviving generations of my family. That was quite a big deal back then.
Somewhere, there’s a picture of me as a babe, my father, his father (my grandfrather), his mother (my great-grandmother), and her father (my great-great-grandfather).
My great-great-grandfather’s parents were the ones that took that leap of faith and moved kith and kin to a new home and a new life. To me, that means I have direct contact (through my great-great-grandfather) to those days in the 19th century.
Now, the question could be, was there something that protected me that day when my mother took a tumble down those steep stairs?
Family from way back reached out through the century and a half and prevented disaster?I was the first grandchild in the family. My grandad and I always had a strong bond and if I allow my fanciful nature to take its own route and conjure reasons, I can easily believe that his father, the one that died when my grandad was a boy, reached out from beyond the grave to prevent further tragedy in his life?
I am 