Following On

I don't remember that much of my childhood before South Wales.
Moving to Herefordshire was equally shocking.
My mother spent the entire time we lived in the mistakenly bought house, stripping seven layers of wallpaper off every wall and re-decorating. My father probably installed a blue bathroom (as he did in every property he ever owned), but I've managed to block that out. When the house was finished, it was put on the market and sold within the week, this time rather than a plethora of property, we had no-where to go.
We moved into a very old and grand hotel for six weeks and ate Gammon Steak and Chips every night for dinner (well that's how I remember it). My parents sank the odd bottle of Blue Nun or Black Tower and life was just tickety.
While we lived in the hotel, my parents desperately added the finishing touches (roof, kitchen, blue bathroom) to the cottage they had bought just before Dad bought the last house by mistake (instead of the dining chairs he'd originally gone to the auction for). Am I making myself clear?
I remember the electrician fitting the kitchen units and the decorators were called Harry, Harry and Harold.
Of course once we moved in no-one turned up with a pot of morning tea! We would leave our rooms in the morning and when we wanted to go to bed no-one had bothered to tidy up and waitress service was lousy. I hadn't seen washing up for months, it was terrifying.

The children all spoke differently again, and I couldn't understand them either. We went to school in the remnants of a blue Morris Mini-bus and were always so very grateful and awfully surprised to get dropped off within sight of our house each afternoon. We had pheasants in our field that made strange noises like they were choking and the wind howled through the woods behind the house in Winter.
Locals told us it was haunted..
Great, another fine mess we'd just gotten into.