My Mother's Diaries
My Mother’s Diaries began with the handwritten diaries kept by my mother, Margaret Kathleen Vining — Peggy to her friends and later BeBe to the family. From 1948 to 1976 she recorded the everyday life of our family at Hiltonbury Farm in Chandler’s Ford: the weather, visitors, children, cattle, harvests, outings, illnesses, celebrations and all the countless small events that made up ordinary life.
She never intended to write history. But decades later, those diaries have become a remarkable record of family life, farming and a changing Britain. Today I am bringing her words and memories back to life through the podcast, this website and the stories we continue to share.
Our Story
Hiltonbury Farm — Our Family Home
Hiltonbury Farm became our family home in 1946, when my father, Sidney John Vining, came to manage the farm. For us children it was far more than a workplace — it was our home, playground and, as we grew older, somewhere we were expected to help.
The farm revolved around cattle, poultry and crops, with the seasons and the weather governing almost everything. The farmhouse itself was always busy. Friends, neighbours and relations came and went, cups of tea appeared constantly, and my mother somehow managed the family, the household and much of the life surrounding the farm.
It was this world that she quietly recorded in her diaries — never knowing that one day those everyday details would give us such a vivid picture of life at Hiltonbury.
For us children, Hiltonbury Farm was an extraordinary place to grow up. The fields, woods, barns and farmyard were our playground, but as we became older we were also expected to help. I learned to drive on the farm, first on a Ferguson tractor and later on the Fordsons, and there was always something happening — cattle to move, haymaking, harvest, machinery, chickens, calves and visitors arriving at the farmhouse.
It was a childhood with freedoms that would seem unusual today. We explored the farm, helped where we could and grew up surrounded by the rhythms of the seasons. At the time it simply felt normal. Looking back now, I realise what a remarkable childhood it was — and my mother’s diaries preserve so many of the little moments that would otherwise have disappeared.
Growing Up at Hiltonbury
Bringing the Diaries Back to Life
Many decades after those childhood days at Hiltonbury, I decided that my mother’s diaries deserved to be shared beyond our own family. What she had regarded simply as a record of everyday life had become something much more — a remarkable picture of farming, family and social life through nearly thirty years of change.
That decision became My Mother’s Diaries. Through the podcast I have been working through her diaries year by year, combining her words with my own memories, family photographs and the stories of the people and places that surrounded us. This website is the next part of that journey, allowing the diaries, photographs and recordings to be brought together in one place.
My hope is that My Mother’s Diaries will preserve not only our own family story, but something of the lives of an ordinary generation whose everyday experiences might otherwise simply disappear.
It is, as I always say, "All done with love"