A bit more family

My mother’s parents had more humble backgrounds than my father’s.  

Esmond Lloyd Rea was a Yorkshireman, from Wakefield. I know nothing about his early history.  He was employed by the Inland Revenue, which entailed being sent to wherever the job demanded, which is probably why my mother was born in the Welsh borders and fetched up in Bournemouth to meet my father there. 

Grandpa must have been allowed to stop being peripatetic, or perhaps to retire, because by the late thirties he had settled down and bought 66 Watcombe Road, just down the road from us.  He was a jolly man, who enjoyed his beer and his music.  We’d be taken down the road for Sunday lunches and record sessions, and sometimes sleep over, presumably when my parents had other engagements (which doesn’t feel very likely) or more probably just wanted to be shot of us and have some time together alone (though that doesn’t seem very likely either).  It was presented to the children as a treat – you’re going to sleep at Granny and Grandpa’s tonight, won’t that be lovely? – and of course accepted without question. 

Ethel Jones, Granny, had roots in County Cork, but I don’t think she was Irish.  It’s impossible to find out anything more from the internet – the surname doesn’t help – and no family documents that I know of have survived.  How she met Esmond in the Welsh borders is yet another unanswered question.  I’ve explained what I know of how he got there, but how did she get there?  Anyhow, they were in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, when my mother (their only child) was born in 1907.

Forties (part 4)

I wish I could remember anything about my Latin teacher. Not because I’m interested in him as a person, but because I’m interested in how he managed to make this dead, irrelevant language important to an eight-year-old.  

I think it wasn’t actually about Latin as such.  More likely, he inculcated an interest in ordered structures, which grew and has persisted ever since.  The notion that a chunk of language could be broken down into verbs, nouns and such, then rebuilt into phrases, clauses, sentences and such – all according to a set of rules (or at least conventions) that could be codified and obeyed – that must have been deeply comforting to that insecure ungrounded infant I was.  

Of course, that was all drummed out of me when I moved on to the grammar school. (We can’t have them teaching grammar, can we?)

Forties (part 3)

Southbourne Preparatory School was what would now be called my primary school.  

It was housed in a rambling building, probably a former grand residence of some sort, up on the north side of Southbourne Road, just opposite Stourwood Road (where I would be moved to a few years later).  The plan was that I’d stay there until I was fourteen, when I would go to a ‘public school’ (I put the term in quotes, because they hadn’t been public since the seventeenth century).  The choice was between Canford or Bryanstone.  If I’d gone to either, my future would have evolved very differently, but it wasn’t to be.  The reasons for that were never spelt out, but I like to think that it was due to my own timid willpower.  

I was terrified at the idea of being a boarder. I was actually taken to Bryanstone to be interviewed by the head, who was very kind and solicitous; but I made it quite clear afterwards that I was incapable of surviving that regime.  Canford was the runner-up option, which wasn’t seriously pursued, so I ended up going to the local grammar school, of which more later.

I have scattered memories of Southbourne Prep.  The headmaster, Mr Morgan, was too decent to be the disciplinarian the role demanded. When I and another boy were caught bullying Shaun Kilkoyne, we were given the choice of being caned or apologising to Shaun.  We chose the latter, much to everyone’s relief, especially Mr Morgan’s.  (Shaun and I later became friends, to the extent of trying to play chess.)  I remember the music lessons, which consisted of everyone being issued with a tambourine, some castanets or a triangle and having to bang along to the teacher’s piano accompaniment.  And we were required to do sports.  Throwing the cricket ball was the only one I was any good at – except when I was required to do it accurately in an actual cricket match, when I’d usually fail dismally.

I obviously learnt a lot more at Southbourne Prep – some vestiges still surface and will probably do so as this narrative proceeds – but the only enduring lesson is Latin.

A Bit of Family

My father was the middle child of a Gloucestershire farmer and a well-to-do Jersey lady.  These bare facts exist, but the substance –  how they met and married, how and where they lived, had and brought up their three children, what their life together was like – all that remains a mystery, which will never be resolved.  Grandfather Frank Large died before I was born, and just after my sister was.  There’s a 1939 photograph of her in his arms, but there is no other record of him that I know of.  He’s buried in St Brelade churchyard in Jersey, so he must have lived there; but my father used to talk in some detail about his childhood in Lechlade, so they must have lived there in the early years of the twentieth century. 

Grandma Emmeline Walker was certainly from old Jersey stock.  She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen.  Emmeline is a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family.  Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable.  Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry.  The surname is still eminent in Jersey.  And now I come to remember, I had a work colleague called Arthur Walker who once mentioned a Jersey background.  The connection clearly didn’t register with me at the time (we were probably on about lunch pint four), but I now wonder whether we were related.  I’ll never know.

Grandma was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives.  She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated.  Certainly there was an uncle called Oliver who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties.  This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household.  My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand.  And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less re-ordering things in her own image.  She was pretty good at that.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry.  You’d see that in her face.  Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin.  She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing. (How did she know?  Was she monitoring?)  And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose.  This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession.  I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice.  “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot.  Of course they can play with the hose.  I almost wish I could join them.”

Her two sons – my father Ivan, and Douglas – had already lived in England all their lives, but their elder sister Ruth certainly ended her days in Jersey.  She didn’t spend the War there; she had married a Jersey man, Eric Hobson, who was in the RAF and died in 1941 I believe (but he’s not listed as a Battle of Britain casualty, at least not a decorated one).  But she returned after the liberation and moved back into the family home in St Brelade, a bungalow called Ipsilante, where she lived for many years until it became too much for her and she moved to a flat in St Helier.  Her only child, my cousin Rosemary, never left Jersey, except to travel, which she did a lot of in her later years.