My mother spent her infancy in Hopesay, in the Shropshire Hills, now officially designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

The largest dwelling in Hopesay used to be Oakfield House (right). The village is ten miles north of The Lydiates, my great-grandfather's seat.

Oakfield contained a ballroom and twenty other rooms on a five-acre site. That was where my newly-wed grandparents, George and Ethel McLaughlin, went to live with my mother, her Nanny, a butler, a cook, a lady's maid and a housemaid. Today, renamed Hopesay House, only the former servants' quarters remain.

But to mark their status among the squirearchy my grandparents needed an even grander home as their Country Seat. They therefore moved to the  Hall at Felthorpe (left), six miles from Norwich.

When Ethel came into a large inheritance at the death of her father in 1908 she leased an abode with a still more commanding presence, Lyston Hall. The photograph below is a view from the croquet lawn at one side of the house. The house is described in Kelley's Directory of Essex as "a modern mansion of brick, seated on an eminence in a well-wooded park."

                    

The estate was located in the hamlet of Liston, Essex. With typical English eccentricity the address was Lyston Hall, Long Melford, Suffolk. The leasehold was acquired from the Lambert family, who were given the manor by King Henry III in exchange for their baking wafers to present to him at his coronation feast.

In 1809 the house had a simple rectangular plan, as can be seen from this detail of Charles Towne's painting A bay hunter and three pointers in a landscape with Lyston Hall beyond. (In 2002 the work was sold at Christie's for £138,650.) By 1880, as this fragment from the Ordnance Survey map with its sensible spelling reveals, each corner of the original building had been connected to a two-storey wing by a fenestrated corridor. The photograph above shows the wing containing the ballroom on the right; the wing on the left, which included a billiards room, served as a retreat for George.

The schoolhouse was in a wing at the front of the house, the kitchen in one at the rear.  Thus when Ethel entertained at the center of the edifice she was not affronted by the sight or sound of her children, nor by the aromas of English culinary arts such as boiling cabbage.

The catch was that meals congealed while they processed through the icy corridor to the dining room. The family dined in style, with footmen behind their chairs. This ensured that nothing of interest was said at mealtime; any indiscretion would have been reported immediately to the servants' hall, disseminated thence to every other servants' hall in the county, and finally passed above stairs by eager lady's maids.

As for the interior decoration, it was too, too . . . oh, let the photograph speak for itself!

Lyston boasted an ideal location. The children were thrilled that they could walk to Borley's famously haunted rectory. Two miles off was Sudbury railway station, expressly to take Ethel to Town.  And George, who had to give up riding after an accident, was now able to race his string of thoroughbreds at Newmarket, only 20 miles away.

When George died, Ethel abandoned Lyston and in 1916 moved to Langley Court (left) near Liphook, East Hampshire. It has now been converted into flats for a charity ... Felthorpe was later the home of Geoffrey Watling, president of Norwich City Football Club, until his death in 2004 ... Lyston Hall was largely destroyed when soldiers were billeted in it during World War II.  It has since been completely demolished.