I’m afraid that this is going to turn out more like a life story than a regular posting, far too long and probably very boring since its about both my own mother and my father’s mother, but I can’t face trying to rewrite it.
My paternal grandmother was the daughter and only child of a not always successful stockbroker, and her upbringing was rather a rags to riches and back again experience which left her with expensive tastes and a determination to avoid more ‘rags’ episodes. It has puzzled me how she came to marry my grandfather, whose father had a not particularly well paid job in India, leaving his son and two sisters, all born in India, to be brought up in England on a shoestring by a gaggle of aunts in suburban Manchester after their mother died of multiple schlerosis., supervised by a somewhat more prosperous uncle who looked after my grandfather’s education. He won a scholarship at Oxford, where he had a stellar career with a double first (two first class honours degrees) and ultimately a D.D. (Doctor of Divinity) degree. After taking holy orders he became a fellow and chaplain of his college and at the very early age of 29 was appointed principal of a well known theological college. Although clearly destined for an exalted ecclesiastical career, such a career is not notably well paid. I have no idea how he came to meet my grandmother, but at that age she seems to have been very beautiful. Her father had lost an arm to bone cancer, which had then spread and there is a suggestion that he speeded up the end of his life - who can blame him? My mother, whose relationship with her mother-in- law was terrible, told me that he was a professional gambler who committed suicide, which is clearly less than fair. He probably died penniless, so to his daughter even a clergyman with prospects may have looked the best catch available at the time. In any case they were married quite shortly after her father’s death, and in due course had two boys, my father and uncle.
His income always proved inadequate to sustain his wife’s expenditure, even when he became a suffragan bishop, and later bishop of an urban diocese. He felt compelled at one point, in order to protect himself in respect of the accounts that she ran up, to advertise that he would not be responsible for her debts. This was not as bad as it sounds in present day terms, and was quite common in those days when husbands wished to distance themselves from their wives spending habits, but it surely can have done nothing for the marriage. At some stage after the boys were in boarding school) she started an affair with a well-heeled doctor in a teaching hospital in London, in pursuit of which she entered the associated medical school and in due course qualified as a doctor, presumably financed by her lover. Divorce was not recognised by the Church of England, and I doubt she had any available grounds to divorce him. My father in due course went to Oxford where he shared a room with my mother’s twin brother (thus meeting my mother) and obtained a law degree, qualified as a lawyer in early 1938, and obtained a job with an industry organisation. My father had been very supportive of my grand father during his marital problems and was clearly upset by his mother’s conduct. My uncle had dropped out of medical school and taken a job in India, where he pursued a successful career there both before and after WWII and independence.
My grandfather acted as chaplain to the territorial (reservist) batallions of a local regiment of the British army, and in view of the increasing threat from Hitler my father had enlisted in one of these batallions. He married my mother in September 1938, and their honeymoon was cut short by the possibility that he would be called up. Thereafter they had something under a year of normal married life. In late August 1939 they went on holiday in Cornwall as the news became steadily more threatening. On August 25 they drove across Caradon Moor (a very spooky place dotted with the headworks of abandoned tin mines) to Liskeard with the probability that they would have to return to London the next day, and that was the night I was conceived. My mother told me that she dreamed that night of all the bad times to come. My father worked that week winding up his job and came home on Friday, threw down his brief case and took off his office clothes saying it would be a long time before he needed them again, and joined his regiment the next day, Saturday. Britain officially entered the war the following Monday, and that was the end of their normal married life together. They were able to spend odd days and some longer leaves together, except when he was serving in France and later Egypt. At some point my grandmother’s doctor friend had moved to the south coast, and on the outbreak of war my grandmother found it her patriotic duty to move down there to assist him. My father refused to visit her there. My mother moved out of London, initially to stay with an aunt but later rented a small house, although she moved around a lot to maintain contact with my father and her own mother. My father was unable to get leave over Christmas 1939, but got New Year 1940 instead. He met my mother in London and said ‘What’s that rash on your face?’ It was German measles, which is now known to be very dangerous to a fetus during the first two trimesters. The timing was such that I’m fairly certain that it is the reason I’m posting here now. I was born in London while my father was waiting evacuation from Dunkirk. Under wartime conditions my grandfather’s job was very arduous and stressful, and once the air raids commenced still more so. His cathedral was only feet away from the most intensively used railway junction in Britain, and his diocese in general was a prime target in bombing raids. His churches and his own lodgings were repeatedly bombed. Later, when a report of his death appeared in, surprisingly, the Houston Chronicle, he was labelled ‘Britains most bombed bishop’. (Later in the war he very narrowly escaped being killed by a doodlebug). I think he was also very lonely. He developed heart failure, and in 1941 he was’translated’ to a less urban but more senior diocese. My mother moved into the Bishop’s palace (one of the oldest continuously lived in houses in Britain, originally built in 1180) to stand in for his absent wife. My uncle, who had joined the army in India, was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, after which he became forced labour on the Burma - Siam railway (which he survived, living until 2009). My father, whom I last saw just before my second birthday, and of whom I have no surviving memories, was sent to Egypt via Capetown, and was killed at the battle of El Alamein in October 1942. My brother, although born before his death, never saw his father.
My mother was hit very hard indeed. One thing she did to help herself was to write a series a posthumous letters to my father, very much on a ‘Do you remember?’ theme . They petered off after a while but continued occasionally, the last being in 1959. We continued to live in the Bishop’s palace, which is the first house in which I remember living. I sometimes wonder whether the arrangement was as satisfactory from my grandfather’s point of view as it was from my mother’s, particularly since her eldest sister’s family and her twin brother’s family were also living in the same city while their husbands served in the army. Before the war, my grandfather had been tipped for further promotion, and when the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1943 there were some ‘vetting’ visits, although he was probably ruled out by his broken health and marriage. One of the visitors was C.S.Lewis, a prominent churchman but remembered today for his children’s books which have now become so popular with the entertainment industry. My mother was concerned that he would be too high powered for her, but was delighted to find that he had a wonderful way with children and was a great storyteller. So I can say that I was personally told stories by C.S.Lewis himself, although unfortunately I can’t remember it. At the end of the war, my maternal grandmother provided the funds for my mother to buy a small (and somewhat bomb damaged) house near her. Three years later my mother wanted to move back to be near my grandfather (my mother’s father died when she was 17), and was devastated when my grandfather wrote to explain why it wouldn’t be a good idea. She put it down to the evil influence of his wife, which seems a bit improbable, and moved back anyway. His heart failure had returned, and he died within a few months. His wife was ‘unable to attend’ his funeral. He had never altered his will and left his entire estate, such as it was, to her. She fairly promptly married her doctor friend, and in turn left anything to him. She died only five years later. I always found her forbidding, her second husband less so - he did at least try to be friendly to me.
I think my mother began to see me to some extent as a kind of potential reincarnation of my father. She was a very conscientious single parent, sometimes oppressively so, and worked very hard to parent us and to participate in all our activities despite very straightened circumstances, and also allowed us a degree of freedom not available to kids today. At the same time our environment was very female dominated, and she sought to correct this by sending first me (at age 7) and later my brother to a boarding school for boys in which I think I first ran into my gender problems. Unfortunately she began to download parenting problems to the head master of the school. One of these was sex education. He did indeed speak to me in terms so obscure that it was years before it dawned on me what he had been talking about. When my mother suspected that I had been thieving, she referred the problem to him. Again his ‘talking to me’ was so obscure that I had no idea what he was talking about. His ‘little talks’ were punctuated with ‘you do understand what I am saying, don’t you’, to which the victim could only respond ‘Yes, Sir’. Another favourite line was ‘You are a disgrace to the memory of your dead father’. A cousin of mine at the school, subjected to similar treatment, considered it highly abusive. A more charitable view is that he simply didn’t know how to talk to kids. On the thieving issue, I had already self instructed or self- hypnotised myself that this was something that WOULD NOT DO, since when I have been neurotically honest my entire life. Similarly, I shocked myself when at nine years old I hit another boy in a flash of temper, and appalled, resolved that it was never to happen again, since when I have never been able to strike another being in anger. Later I gave up smoking on the same basis. I suppose I deserved it, but the thieving issue came back to haunt me since that head master passed on a warning to my next school, making me a prime suspect for any thieving that occurred . In trying to catch me my housemaster caught instead my then best friend, to the extreme shock and complete surprise of both myself and the housemaster, Of course I still remained guilty by association and found myself excluded from various activities in which I desperately wanted to be involved.
In the meanwhile I was allowed at home to do pretty much as I pleased within the means available, which gradually improved, provided that I allowed my mother to participate. I found that this participation, although it applied to things like rain soaked bicycle camping trips, did not extend to technological pursuits. On leaving school, I got the opportunity to take a voyage down the coast of West Africa as a cadet on a cargo ship. This was a revelation in all sorts of ways, not least the discovery that travel allowed escape from my personal problems, and from mothering. Two years later I initiated an overland trip driving to India and back, and found two companions. We didn’t quite make it to India, Lahore being our easterly limit, but we did travel by the northern route through Afghanistan and into the north west territories of Pakistan, truly the journey of a lifetime, and mother didn’t come too (although she would have liked to). The following year she persuaded me to take her on a similar trip by jeep to Turkey, but the following year I was able to make my escape from her increasing possessiveness with a friend and his fiancé. She made her own trip to Macedonia with the daughter of a friend.
Then the family of a neighbour of my mother’s was involved in a very bad car crash while bringing home their son and his family on a visit from South Africa, in two cars. The wife’s car was in a head on collision, and she, her son and her grand daughter were all killed, with the husband’s car arriving on the scene immediately afterwards. My mother became very much involved in helping the husband to put some of his life together again and in due course they married so that he could move in with her: I think the marriage was for respectability only. It took the pressure off me for a while, but as his health deteriorated she found looking after him increasingly confining and the posssessiveness increased again, reaching full force when he died. I had problems in my own life, my prospects in the very dynastic firm I was then working for did not look good, conditions in Britain were bad, and I did not know whether I would get a satisfactory renewal of my employment contract, so when a promising job opportunity turned up in Canada I took it, not without a lot of guilt about running away but with relief and hoping to make a fresh start. When the immigration formalities were complete I booked my flights and then discovered that my mother was intending to come to Canada too, to help me settle in and see that I was all right. At that point I gathered the courage to be brutal and insist that she didn’t come, that it was my life and I needed to live it my way. I did make frequent trips back to England. A few years before, my brother who had emigrated first to Australia and then after a year back in England to the United States, married a Jewish girl, to which my mother’s reaction was that at least she wasn’t a Catholic. However, the ‘in-law’ sparks flew quite soon. My mother had very strong feelings about the sanctity of marriage, and no woman that she hadn’t hand picked was good enough for her sons, so when my present wife, who is no longer a practicing Catholic, came to join me in Canada after commencing divorce proceedings against her first, abusive husband, came to join me in Canada, this did not go down well (apparently she considered a lapsed Catholic even worse than a believer) and we had another classic mother-in-law situation which smouldered with occasional outbreaks and truces for the next thirty years until she died. A further problem that developed as she got older was that more and more subjects became ‘no-go’ areas for discussion, until we were more or less confined to ‘Do you remember’ routines.
