Perhaps this is the old Scots background. "Leisure and travel’ were not words in our vocabulary for the most part, except that you went where the Lord sent you. That would be your travel, and idle hands, well, you probably know that one!

My first big travel adventure, if you don’t count being evacuated, was going to work in Ireland. This was  the country actually where my mother’s parents orginally came from but I went to work in the Mission for the couple who would become my parents-in-law. The only stamp that appears in my post-War ’Employment Permit Card’ (see above) is 19th April 1948; "Employment from 1st April, 1948, in Private Domestic Service in Northern Ireland’. The address is ’Thornleigh’ Alexandra Avenue, Whitehead, County Antrim. That was my only place of employment, with the McFarlane’s. I was to work for them until I married their son Duncan when I was 22.

As it happened, because we ended up raising the children in London (actually, Wimbledon: 49 Evelyn Road; ’49’ as it became known), and the Meeting folk were in Scotland and Ireland, we did make that journey every summer with all the children, which was a great adventure for the little ones and lovely for us to be with our friends we would only see then, except maybe if they came down to us here and there. That house, ’Thornleigh’, was kept through all the years for the ’Meeting Folk’ and , as our little brood grew, that house was big enough to fit us all when we came ’on holiday’ to the place where we could attend the Meeting away from home.

And while it’s hard to think of ’leisure’, we certainly always had our happy reunions with friends. Like when we returned after the war. Our old friends from the London Mission Hall were so glad to see us all grown up, and getting married, and ready and willing to carry on the Good Work. We always lived according to ’grandfather’s advice: "Invite no one but receive all who come." It was just great to be back, and our friends were so glad we were taking up the banner that ’Dick’, Richard Glaister, Petty Officer from our early day in the London Mission, went and bought us the old oak table that lasted all our lives.  Many a-happy gathering around that table we had. Sometimes as many as 26 at Christmas, and there was always room enough for all. I am happy to say, that table is still going strong, now with Skye and her man, Phil, and their wee ones, serving yet another generation.

 I must tell you this, that one of those boys raised at The Dam, one of the sons of Janet and Jake McFarlane, came from Canada every year on the money he made in the stock market, who said to my Duncan (his nephew) "Don, you don’t have to take off your coat to make a dollar." And it was he who gave my mother the first £10 she ever received (at a time when my dad earned £5 a week!!). And it was he who sung in our house at Wimbledon:
 

I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the Voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

^{_{And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own…}}