SAME HOUSE

My grandmother's best friend, Helen Wodehouse (cousin of PG), moved from Bingley West Yorkshire to Bristol in 1919 to establish the Department of Education Bristol University. She lived at 66 Egerton Road until 1931 when she moved to Cambridge to take up the Mistress-ship of Girton College (until 1942). In 1973 I moved from Bingley to Bristol and my father, a lawyer specialising in property, helped me buy my first house. He came down to Bristol for a weekend to assess the two houses in Bishopston Bristol that I had selected. He didn't like either of them. Halfway between each house (they were about a mile apart) he noticed a cardboard sign in a window "House for Sale : No Estate Agent involved". Being a Yorkshireman he was attracted by this offer; he liked the house; I bought it; 66 Egerton Road ! Six year later (1979) an elderly relative died in Bingley. My father tidied out the property and came across a box of letters that she had tidied out of his mother's (my grandmother's) house when she had died in the early 1960's. Amongst these letters were three from Helen Wodehouse, dated between 1920 - 1923, from 66 Egerton Road. My father instantly recognised the address as I of course had been corresponding to him from that same address between 1973-1979. In Yorkshire as a 10 year old boy in 1919 he may have noticed letters on his mother's bureau from her friend Helen Wodehouse in Bristol; and subconsciously registered that address until 1973 thereby attracting him to that property.