Miss Amy Brooks was my grandmother’s best and oldest friend and in the 1950s lived alone, with the exception of half a dozen dogs and thirty or more cats, on a small farm at the top of Red Hill. She was a kindly woman who wore her dead father’s clothes and smoked his pipe and swore like the farmer he had once been.

When I knew her she would have been in her seventies and had first met my grandmother (my father’s mother) in the late 1890s. My grandmother was in service at the home of the vicar of Hampton Lucy, the estate village of the Fairfax Lucy family who owned Charlecote Park, which was something of a hideaway for members of the Royal Family who often required a discreet weekend retreat.

By 1908 my grandmother had married my grandfather, Harry, and moved to Wellesbourne, with Amy working on her father’s farm at the top of Red Hill. Amy had a couple of brothers who also worked on the farm, but by the 1950s she was on her own, with the exception of those dogs and cats and a large gaggle of geese, and several smiling cows, and a couple of bearded goats, and scores of chickens who all came to greet my father and myself as we pulled-up one very wet day in the muddy farmyard in my father’s Austin A45 van to deliver bread and cakes.

For my father Amy Brooks was like a caring aunt who adored him, as did the dogs and cats and cows and goats and chickens who all made a tremendous din and fuss until:

” Stop that infernal noise you heathens! Stop it I say and let Roland and Stevie in for goodness sake. Stop it or I’ll have your hides for boots, so help me!”

And they did and Miss Brooks came marching through the fur and feathery throng wearing her dead father’s corduroy trousers, tweed jacket, plaid shirt, with the tails of his gabardine macintosh flying like kites behind her, and on her head one of his many battered old trilby hats that just about kept her long, once blonde hair, in place; with the inevitable smouldering briar in her wide, rather beautiful, mouth.

” Good to see you, Roland, my dear.” Then, looking at me, “and how are you, Stevie boy?”