I have lots of favourite places – it depends on where I am (was) when it is (was) my most favourite.

In Zanesville, where I was born and spent my first seven years, it would be my great-grandmother’s house followed by my grandmother’s house.

The Great Weller’s house was like something out of an old movie. I think there were about twenty rooms though it could have been a hundred, for all I know. We weren’t encouraged to explore when we were there, so never went above the first floor* but there was a staircase to go to the second floor, I believe. (Without a mind’s eye it is difficult to picture things and I have no memory of a stairway up to another floor – I just know there was one.)

The downstairs rooms were huge. We always went in through the side door, which led, on your left, to the dining room. Ahead of you were the stairs to the first floor*, and, at the end of the hallway there was a wooden, floor-standing cabinet which, when you cranked the handle, made music. To the right was a study with a huge partners’ desk which I remember quite vividly as you could pull the drawers open from either side! If you went through the study, you would arrive at the front door, I think, and a foyer which I don’t remember at all. Off to your right from the foyer would have been a quite grand sitting room, known as the ‘gold’ room because all the wood of the furniture was painted gold. Further round was the music room which had a grand piano and through there was the dining room. Off to the right, half way down the dining room were the pantry and kitchen, which was enormous!

The first floor had quite a few bedrooms and, I imagine several bathrooms. At the top of the stairs and down the hall, the room on the right was the Great Weller’s sitting room. She was always sitting in a chair next to the window when we visited. She was in her late 80s by then and suffered from various ailments. She always had a blanket on her lap which draped to the floor. Each of us in turn would sit on her lap and chat to her. It was there that she told me she was going to leave me her beautiful aquamarine ring when she died. I actually had the nerve (at 4 or 5) to ask her when she expected to die! I don’t remember what her answer was. (She did leave me that ring which I have passed to Veronica so that she doesn’t get impatient like I did!)

Opposite her sitting room was her bedroom. There is a legend in the family that the Great Weller broke her hip when she was 89 and was more or less told that she wouldn’t walk again. About 6 weeks after she broke her hip, they say, she was up and moving the heavy furniture in her bedroom around. I can’t vouch for the truth of this – if she was anything like me, and I’m only 81, she was impatient with her inability to do things she had easily done before and would have tried.

Down the hall, near the stairs, was a room I remember quite well. I don’t know what it was usually used for, but I remember it because, one year, we spent the night at the Great Weller’s house and the Christmas tree and all the presents were in that room. Beyond that room, on the other side of a door, was the room we slept in that night and, I think, other nights as well. Judy and I, being very excited about Christmas and Santa Claus etc, got out of bed and – lying on our tummies – we peeked under the door to find out what was happening. If I remember correctly, our mother and father were there with other grown-ups, trying out a little train on a track. If it truly was my father, I couldn’t have been much more than three and a half and Judy would have been two. It could, of course, have been our step father in which case I was, perhaps, seven or eight.

The room we were sleeping in had windows looking out over the garden. One night, not at Christmas, Judy was lying awake and I was asleep. Suddenly, she later told me, she saw a ‘nun’ on her knees, come through the wall and go out through the closed window. This was the beginning of our belief that the house used to house nuns. (It didn’t). The house was built for the previous owner and sold to my great grandfather, Samuel Weller (His parents must have read Dickens!).

Carrying on through that room, the next in the circle was Herminnie’s room. Herminnie was, I believe, a cousin of my grandmother Ethel. She had been married but, presumably, her husband had died and she was ‘taken in’ by the Great Weller as a paid companion.

Herminnie was a big part of my younger years. She was, possibly, in her forties when she was widowed but to us she was quite old. She was of average height and had very big bosoms! You might wonder how we knew this…..well, one day, Herminnie had to take a bath and she was looking after us so we all went into the bathroom and Herminnie got into the bath as we watched. Then she washed herself but gave us the job of washing under her big, droopy bosoms, first one then the other!

Later, after the Great Weller died when I was eleven and she was ninety two, the house was torn down and a motel was built on the land.

Notes * The Great Weller was what my daughter called my great grandmother Weller when she was young, and it stuck. The Great Weller was born Herminnie Pickens in 1862. She married Sam in the 1880’s and had two daughters.

Note * The first floor in England is what Americans would call the second floor.