Posted by Peter Ceresole on September 28, 2003 at 09:28:21 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: Lanehead posted by John Nichols on September 28, 2003 at 00:19:41:
She also noted that some-one in the houses used to pump water for the whole house once per day. I gather although it is vague that the water was pumped up to a holding tank in the roof space, as I see in the plans of a Windermere house from the 1900's. Interesting concept.
In the late 1940s we used to stay, in the holidays, with an aunt who had a chalet out in the forest in the Swiss Jura mountains. It was new but fairly basic, reached only by a footpath; my uncle was slowly building a spur from the forest road using rocks of which there was no shortage at all, and muscle power of which he had plenty but of which at the age of eight I had little. This was also an issue with the water. There were animals all over the place, so although they had streams nearby, locally called 'bis', their drinking water was collected from the roof into a large holding tank at ground level and pumped back up into a header tank in the roof. We'd pump it up once or twice a day, using a mechanical pump in the kitchen with a lever which was exactly the wrong size, stroke and resistance for a small child. This was a very common setup for the time.
The best thing about the chalet was that it had no electricity. All light was by oil lamps, soft and lovely. I have wonderful memories of a mountain thunder storm at night, vivid and bright by contrast. Quite scary too. Some of the flashes through the rain were bright red.
And the next best thing was the milk, collected each day from a nearby farm, hot and frothy from the cow. While it was still warm, ir was absolute nectar. That part of the Swallows' Lakeland life was always a familiar and part of my holidays too.