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.