Completing the kitchen, bathroom and passage felt like a miraculous achievement. After this work began on the outside on the car park side. Dave stripped off the old render and exposed the killas stone beneath (a metamorphic sedimentary rock), with brick arches around the windows. It looked lovely so we had no end of people requesting we kept it in its naked state, but this was not how Brunel would ever have intended it to be, so to us it was inauthentic.
Dave divided the job into three parts; the left, the right and finally around the door. We put in new passage windows at the same time. At some point I took a trip to Leeds to see my grandparents, Ruth and Jack Lister, and went with Ruth to Leeds market to choose material. Ruth was a great one for a bargain. She’d scour charity shops for big dresses with quality floral material for the patchwork cushions she made and sold in a little shop in Roundhay. I stayed with them for the summer of 1987, when I was sixteen, and learnt much about finding a bargain and up-cycling, something that has become second-nature ever since.
Some jobs like removing the rendering are quite satisfying and relatively quick to do. At the time we had help in the way of Ian, a nine year old village lad who we took under our wing. He and Dave were always doing something practical; be it mixing rendering or sawing up planks. We enjoyed his company, and he enjoyed ours, and so he was with us every weekend, and often after school too.
At this time I was being paid to do the cricket teas every other week, which was a regular summer job that I’d done since I was fifteen, and briefly resumed for the summer of 1994. One Saturday Ian asked if he could join me. We’d given him some enamel paint as he wanted to paint his bike and I’d left him merrily painting beside the pickup while I went to put the cakes and sandwiches out. Some time later I was sorting the cups in preparation for the cricketers to come in when Ian came in, proclaiming proudly “Hey Lizzy, come and look what I’ve done.” There on the side of the pavilions in large black enamel letters was Ian’s name. Ian didn’t have much idea of right and wrong, but by the time we’d finished scrubbing he’d certainly been made aware that perhaps it wasn’t the best of things to do. The wall was pebble dashed, so it was no easy feat to remove!
Another memorable thing happened that Saturday. Ian had been playing by the perimeter of the pitch and managed to lose his trainer in the adjoining field. During the break the whole cricket team took to the field to try and find it, and for some considerable time white caps bobbed up and down among the golden ears of corn. Unfortunately the trainer had disappeared without trace. This would have been very unfortunate for Ian, who didn’t have it easy at home. However he was pretty extraordinary in his ability to shrug things off.
Ian’s happy-go-lucky attitude had come in handy when a rumour had gone round that there was a children’s fancy dress competition at the Quay Sailing Club Gala. Ian fancied dressing up as an Indian, so I covered him with poster paint and we passed a pleasant hour or so together making a grass skirt and a headdress. Dave and I were busy working on the station that weekend, so didn’t accompany him. When Ian came back later he was soaking. It turned out he was the only one there in fancy dress. Unperturbed he jumped in the river, washed the paint off and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around in his trunks.
Ian moved to Paignton fairly soon after this, which was a shame, as we had grown very fond of him.
The chimneys
The chimneys of the station building when we bought it were really tall; perhaps even disproportionately tall. They needed a lot of work as the render was cracked. We decided as part of the repair we would lower them a little. However we had little idea of what this might entail. Here’s the story of the first chimney, as told by Dave.
“The rendering for all the chimneys was in a bad way, so needed repairing. I started on the chimney at the footbridge end of the building and put scaffolding up on the roof around the chimney. I chipped off all the old rendering, assuming that the top was one big piece of granite, but it turned out that it was actually two halves. These had been held together by an iron strap which was long rusted and gone, and the two halves were moving apart. So now of course I had taken all the rendering off and the Victorian bricks were just sitting there without much holding them together, with two massive great halves of chimney capping stone on top.”
“They were far too heavy to lift – they must weigh a quarter of a ton each I should think, and so there was a real risk of them falling off the chimney, or the chimney collapsing even, and that would have gone straight through the scaffolding and straight through the roof, which would have been rather a mess. I took the big grinder and cut slots in them. It wouldn’t go right through because they were too thick. Dad was with me; I think it was a Friday afternoon. I cut each one into four sections and drove chisels into them so we could crack them into pieces, and then we could just get them down onto the scaffolding one piece at a time. They were still pretty heavy though! I don’t remember how we got them down to the ground, but the emergency was over.”
“Having learnt my lesson on that one, for the subsequent chimneys I made a frame to go around the capping stones and we lifted them off with a crane and then rebuilt the chimneys from below roof level up.”
The crane was hired from Ron Craddick, who has a plant hire and sawmills on the quay in St Germans; a facility that has been more than useful on many occasions. We knew Ron’s children Angela and Tony from our days at Landrake Young Farmers and they worked with him in the business and have been so supportive of us over the years, for which we are deeply grateful.
The chimneys were reconstructed using breeze blocks. Ingenious as always, Dave created a metal mould for the top piece to create the authentic shape of the original chimney. It worked rather well, and hopefully the chimneys will do another 135 years before they need repairing again.
