Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

becoming the headquarters of the 53rd ASC Remount Depot and the playing area a drill-ground for the Leicestershire Volunteer Regiment. Sometime around the onset of war the Kings perforce moved home. Florence’s sister Elizabeth, a sculptor with a studio in Madrid, returned to England and, being somewhat impecunious, moved into the parental home, ‘eventually taking over our part of the house’, as daughter Margaret recalled. John, Florence and Margaret consequently lived for eighteen months in a small house in Aylestone Park until they were able to purchase 551 Aylestone Road (‘Rutland House’), the slightly older building attached to the parental No.549. Their new home had previously belonged to a nurseryman, most of whose sheds and greenhouses had to be removed. The groundsman from the County Ground helped in laying down and landscaping the top garden. As with father-in-law’s house, the property with gardens and paddock ran down to the Grand Union Canal just east of the River Soar, and King had the boating and fishing rights between locks to north and south. At some point he also acquired shooting rights along Coalpit Lane, and, being a good shot, was able to bring home many a bird in addition to clutches of plovers’ and other birds’ eggs. I can find no other trace of his life in this period apart from the fact that he stayed at home with his family until the early summer of 1918. His daughter said that when he went to work on the farm outside Narborough ‘mother looked after father’s business interests’ but I have not been able to ascertain what these were. (At some unspecified time he worked for what his daughter called an 92 Interlude King with his Airedale terrier, Gypsy, outside 511 Aylestone Road in the autumn of 1914.