We went to Cambridge for our Creative Writing Course with Helen Moss! We picked up Lillian on the way, dropped William off at school, and then we hurried off quickly to the hall where it took place. Being the third week, we kind of needed to round up on the whole ‘write a story’ thing, so we wrote down our first sentence, and then our whole paragraph, and finally told everybody our plot and scenes. I’m doing a smuggling mystery, where the criminals are hiding gold through the tracks in the mountains, but oh, are they to get away with it! No, my detectives are going to find out the case, or what sort of a children’s story would that be? Anyway…
We went to Wimpole, which is a National Trust estate, with a hall, grounds, and farm after that. It was very fun. We saw lots of animals, from tiny, newborn lambs, to the cutest shepland ponies I have ever come across! Then Mummy found some go carts, hay bales and plenty a pigsty for us to play in! Lillian and I shared our own one (they were proper real ones, with the metal roof and wooden floor!) while Tilly and Nathan had one to themselves too. First we arranged the logs into beds and used the hay from the bales round the corner as eiderdown. Lillian even tried lying on her wooden bed and said it was quite comfy! If only true pigs had the courage to set out to get hay and logs, and they would have a cosy little house for them to live in! Plus, they could wait until the rain had just stopped and stuff the marshy mud into their mouths and carry it to their sty, where they could have a mud rug (well, that wouldn’t last as long as dough on a rolling pin)!
Then, Lillian had to go home 🙁 we went into the house, which, luckily for me, involved lots of clocks! I have some strange obsession with grandfather and grandmother clocks, inticate or plain clocks, little or big clocks; just every single clock is of my liking!
There were some bedrooms and storerooms, and a lovely velvet-covered carpet on some delicate marble stairs. We chatted to some staff people and then desperately had to run to the next rooms as quick as we could 😉 My favourite was probably the biggest bedroom, which had a lovely fourposter bed with a canopy! Tilly’s was the very last bedroom, which was indeed used as a slave’s, but looked so lovely! It had a circular window in the middle of the circular walls, and a little bed with a lace and satin white cover. Both were decorated with portraits and pictures, and mine had a fireplace with a bell to ring at the servants 😉
It was really great, and I do hope we get to go there again!
