It would have been your grandad and grandmother that I remember calling round as a child, many an hour was spent with my mother and your grandparents discussing uses for the large garden as it was then and I do recall mention of chickens. Your grandad was also very friendly still with the two couples that lived in the railway cottages. Both husbands remained in the railways employment as linesmen until the mid sixties when they retired. I still have vivid images of them passing my house with their lamps of an evening as they went to work. Sadly they and their spouses have since died but they all lived in the cottages until their death. Like you I spent a lot of time as a child in the old signal box, pulling levers and turning the handle on the old phone. I also felt very important in my class at the old village school in Halton as I could brag to all the boys in the class that my train set was far bigger than their Hornby train sets and that I even had my own platform, ticket office and waiting room. Your memory serves you well regarding the house. Downstairs there was a kitchen and two reception rooms, a large one overlooking the old platform with a large iron leaded bay window and a smaller one with the range fire overlooking the garden at the front. The smaller room had a door leading outside into the yard where there was a toilet in the far corner. There was a door on the corner at the house side that led into a coal shed. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, mine overlooked the railway line and I would wave out of it at night to the signal man. The roof of the bay window in the room below also provided a useful means of lowering oneself out of the bedroom window at night and sneaking out to meet friends! The other two bedrooms overlooked the garden and the large pine trees at the front of the property. You are right at that time there was no inside bathroom. Outside there was the 'old gents toilets,' from its days as a station at the back of the property and of course the waiting room (complete with an old heater/brazier) and the old ticket office. Both gave me and my friends endless hours of fun. Then of course there was the platform which stretched on down past the house almost reaching the old brick signal box on the opposite side of the lines. The most magical part though in those days was the embankment opposite the house. It used to be covered with flowers in the summer and had excellent hiding places, especially if you hid behind the old concrete equipment shed that, believe it or not, is still there, albeit hidden by ivy. Behind the house it was just fields. In the one immediately behind there was an old retired farm horse, called Dinah who belonged to the farmer at the top of Norton Village, called Ste Dixon. At the end of the drive where it met the road there used to be a wooden staging for him to drop off his milk churns for daily collection. Now of course we are surrounded by houses and the farms have gone. However, the signal box is still manned and I still watch the signalmen come and go past the house as they change the shift and without exception they still wave and call out a greeting to me and my family, so in that respect little has changed. My memory of your grandparents is that they were lovely friendly people, your grandad certainly had many stories to tell of his time in the house, it was obvious that they had been very happy here. Kind regards
