Description

I didn’t realise until long after I had done the pen & ink drawing of this old barn that it’s a building my Dad knew very well.  When I showed him the drawing, this is what he said.  “In my youth, this place was a shop with a large glass frontage and, arranged in rows in the window, were large jars of sweets of all kinds.  How often I looked in when passing but didn’t have a penny to spend.  Looking in beyond the sweets you might see old Donald busy repairing shoes because that is what he did for a living apart from selling sweets.  Quite a large family lived in the house and at least three of the sons died of tuberculosis.  Some thought that the disease was engrained in the stonework whilst others thought this was superstitious nonsense.  One of the sons, Willie, emigrated to New York and, in my time on the ‘Queen Mary’, I did the three-hour trip by Greyhound bus to visit him in upstate New York.”  As they say, a picture tells a thousand words.