Eva to the family:

Dear Alec, June, Susan & Carol,

Many thanks for both letters & Susan’s drawing. I should think she will be a first class sketcher in time.

I don’t know about the children not being able to sleep this weather but we can’t. I am in one room & Dad in the other & I can’t seem to get to sleep for ages & making tea about 4 or 4.30 every morning then when it is time to get up I fall asleep, it must be the heat.

We had a lovely trip over the Malvern Hills & it was a glorious day. We left about 2.45 the coach was hot to start with but soon cooled down. We had a good trip round Bristol picking up, places I had never been before. Tewkesbury is a quaint place, the abbey is very large outside but disappointing inside. We had a good tea lovely butter & pineapple (home made) & strawberry jam lovely cakes & to finish up fruit sundae 3/6 ea. We did ourselves proud. On to Malvern where there is a British Camp/earthworks the biggest in England & from the top you can see fourteen counties. Where they lit bonfires after the Armada. We passed through Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire & Somerset so we had a bit of everything. On return we stopped at the Prince of Wales at near Berkeley & had a Golden Godwin*. Back to Bristol 9.45 & home after a cup of tea at Newmans. Mrs Newman’s great niece (17) and nephew (not great) 33 went with us. They all came down here on Thursday to tea. The niece lives at Harefield & the nephew at Devizes.

Thank goodness we have finished picking plums but not tomatoes to date we have picked 70 lbs & still going strong.

Mrs Pugh was buried on Friday afternoon she died in C[levedon] Hospital. Lionel Mogg is very ill & also in there. He can’t stand and it is thought he may go like his father who had creeping paralysis**. I am going to get a pattern to make up that material that June gave me am getting short of blouses.

Heels have gone to Bournemouth. We had a card from them they went to Swanage which seems a very nice place so we were thinking of going by car on Tuesday for a last trip & taking Mrs Cornish with us.

The assistant surveyor has been measuring up drawing plans you would think we were going to have the house pulled down & rebuilt they are so fussy. I don’t suppose they will start until October as the meeting is not until the 15th inst.

Well I think this is the lot just now so will close with best love to all from us both.

Mum & Dad

*A ‘Golden Godwin’ was apparently a champagne perry marketed by Bulmers (cider manufacturers). I tracked it down via a 1950s message board, to which I am indebted, but the same Google search produced a link to a specific Golden Godwin glass being sold on e-Bay for £5. This looked very familiar, so I did some in-depth research in my china cabinet (!) and produced two vastly superior examples of the genre which I had thought were simply champagne glasses. I now know that they are specifically Golden Godwin glasses and date from the 1950s. Little discoveries like this are the whole reason for running this blog in the first place!

**’Creeping paralysis’ is not a recognised medical term these days, and it seems a little unfair to diagnose the poor man from a distance of sixty years, but this sounds like Guillain-Barre Syndrome to me. Tick-borne paralysis is not as common in the UK as it is elsewhere, and from the descriptions it sounds more ‘galloping’ than ‘creeping’. It isn’t hereditary, but it’s not impossible that Mr Mogg and his father could have been infected at the same time – and also may have shared some genetic precondition which exacerbated it. But that’s as far as I’m prepared to speculate with the limited data available – and many may already consider it too far.