NORTHOLME, BRAYSTONES
by DOT WALKER
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My thanks to Dot for her photographs and personal memories of Northolme before the Second World War, which I give in her own words below. This is another page which may well grow quite a lot over time- does anybody remember staying there in, say, the 1950s?
The year is 1937 and I am three years old. I am standing outside my great-aunt's bungalow at Braystones. I do not know that a new king, George VI, has been crowned, or that Guernica has been destroyed in an air raid. All I know is that I have been left outside on a tartan rug with a plate of biscuits, and I am not happy about it. My great-aunt takes me into the bungalow. I say that a tiny bedroom at the front looks like a railway carriage, and everyone cheers.
![]() All that ended in 1937, when Kit came into a legacy and moved to Wallasey. She died there in 1968, at the age of 97. |
Here are some more pictures from Dot's family album, showing Northolme in its heyday, with her own captions (note that this first one shows very clearly the railway carriage windows; there are probably enthusiasts out there who could tell us which line it ran on!): This picture shows my mother, Harriet Walker, on the front porch at Northolme in 1929. | ![]() | The next picture seems to be chronologically the earliest. Dot dates it to 1927 and comments: The bungalow already has its flowerbeds edged with whitewashed stones, but there is no trellis against the end wall and, more to the point, no window to the left of it. It doesn't look as neat and pretty as it does in the 1937 photo, because it hasn't yet been transformed by Kit. |