Letters To My Eldest Niece to Answer Queries About Her Mum’s Childhood

Hi Lyndis,

This is Dartan Hall where your Mum, your Aunty Lyndis and I grew up in - where I was born, indeed - when we lived in Ireland. They were different times, less complicated, less money conscious. Your Mum used to practise her cello under the bows of an oak that was near the house and I used to drive my pedal car round the kitchen, much to the annoyance of cook. I remember once your Aunt Lyndis had done something to annoy your Mama and we were all woken by screams of pain and horror. Your Mama had put a hedgehog - Tiggy by name - in Lyndis' bed. Probably the world is a better place now, but it was a joyous childhood

Hello again Lyndis. 

Okay, you asked, what happened next and how did we end up in England.  I know this is public but it’ll make it easier for your siblings and my cousins to read and chip into if interested.  Also, remember that it was long ago and the memory does strange things! That said, here goes! 

Okay, I’m guessing we moved because we all missed your Mum.   This meant the Squire, never motivated by money or power, moved up the greasy pole in education anyway and took a job in, of all places, London, but of course that was logical, since that was where your Mum attended Sadlers Wells.  It was a hell of change but it did mean your Mum could live at home a lot of the weekends.  I wasn’t happy because it meant I left my Nanny, Pam, (who I was far too old to need!) in Ireland, but I was pleased that I could see your Mum, though in those days we would often fight like hell at every opportunity!   (She being older and stronger, when it all got physical I developed the strategy of lying in a corner of a room and kicking outwards.  Great defence if you ever need it!)

We moved into a Victorian house in Teddington.  It was okay, but very different from Dartan.  It did have Teddington Lock to go and look at though, and unremarkably there were a lot more people around!   There was a little Prep school near there which I attended as a day boy.  I’m not sure what happened to Lyndis, school-wise.  Anyway, we didn’t stay there long because your Mum’s knee started moving out of joint which meant the end to her aspirations to be a ballet dancer.   I don’t know it, but I think the folks weren’t really enamoured with living in a city, even though in those days Teddington was very sleepy. 

Anyway, the Squire got a Headship in Carlisle and we upped sticks and moved to Copper Hall in a village about 15 miles away.  (Cous Ginnie, do you remember swapping houses for a holiday, you going there and us going to your Manse in Swindon?)   There your Mum ended up attending an Art College, Aunt Lyndis went to a Convent and after a wee while in a local school, when I was 10 I went back to Ireland to the boarding school the Squire had been teaching in, and ‘my’ beloved Pam used to come and visit me with sweets and comics. 

It was fairly soon after this that your Mama had an accident, throwing her arms in the air in a comical gesture and catching her hand on a meat hook which was fixed into a beam.  (You probably know, but just in case, people used to hang salted meat on them to keep them through the winter.  They were big and sharp!  Copper Hall had them in the kitchens but your Mum was visiting a friend and they had a smaller house and therefore the (obviously unused) meat hooks were in their sitting room.)  Anyhow, she ripped her large finger to buggery and was hospitalised and her fingers, muscles, tendons, whatever were sewn back together as well as possible, but as you will know, a particular finger never quite returned to its original mobility.  

After a while when she came home – I was told about this by the Squire and Mama, as I was away in Ireland – the hospital proved to have extraordinarily good post-operative care systems and a handsome young Scottish doctor who had performed the operation visited the house several times to ensure she was healing properly.   This, of course, was your Dad.  The rest, as they say, is history with regard to that story.  They started courting and then got married.  I remember the wedding well.   They made a handsome couple. 

Your Mama remembered her first sight of your father’s naked body well also.  In those days everything was a bit more ‘innocent’.  Also, then stag night’s weren’t a weekend away on the lash in Amsterdam, they were the night before, and your father’s friends had got him ridiculously pissed – your folks told me this story in your house (was it Lonsdale/Langley Avenue?)  anyway, they told it to me in the sitting room there, and said ‘friends’ thought it a merry jape to take him back to Carlisle Hospital and put him in a bath of some kind of green dye.  When he woke up he managed to use a pumice stone to remove it from his face and hands so he was fine for the wedding and festivities but when he stripped down, the first time your Mama saw him in all his naked glory, the rest of him was like the Jolly Green Giant!   

After that, as you know, I guess, nobody talked to them about contraception – at least I assume this is the case, since it certainly wasn’t for religious reasons - and they had the 5 of you.  I seem to remember that by the time Morag was born you were only 7 or 8?  I also seem to remember you all being Christened by Uncle Peter, the Squire’s brother, and at least 4 of you were ambulatory.

Backing up a bit, your Papa, as was good form in those days, had asked the Squire if he could have your Mum’s hand in marriage.  It was obvious to the folks and even to a small boy like me, that he was a man of good character and they were madly in love, so he said yes.  As a little joke the Squire also said she was a little immature but like a good wine she’d mature well with age and if she hadn’t reached full maturity by the age of 30 he’d have her back.  Talk about a hostage to fortune! 

On her 30^th birthday apparently your father turned up on your grandparent’s door step with your Mum and the 5 of you and handed her back!   You know how serious your Dad could look if he wanted to?   Well, apparently he managed to look that serious and then some and the Squire and Mama thought for a minute or two he was serious!  

When they were first married they were really poor in the early days.  Junior Housemen, as they were called in those days, were appallingly paid and worked ludicrously long hours.  Your Papa sometimes, as a surgeon, worked up to 40 hours on the trot with little or no sleep.  He had remarkable stamina and dedication to duty.  Anyway, they had an account in a garage – people used to do that a lot in those days, indeed even I did for a few years when I started working – which was paid monthly, so if they had been to see my parents several times already in a given month and eaten them out of house and home they used to fill up the car and drive to Paisley and eat your Dad’s parents out of house and home and drive back the same evening.  There being no motorways in those days it was a fair old trip! 

I remember that they had a flat in Carlisle and when I was back from Ireland one holiday I went to stay with them for the first time.  It was winter and when we got to the flat there was a power cut.  I think I’d only just got back from school, literally, that day, and the crossing hadn’t been great and I was knackered (and it was bloody cold!) so by torchlight they showed me to my bed and I crashed out.

Next morning I woke early in the half light, a bit disorientated about where I was, and, I must be truthful, I yelled wildly, madly, extremely loudly and your parents bundled in to see what the problem was, and I pointed a trembling finger, unable to speak – Imagine that! - at the full sized skeleton which was standing at the end of my bed, looming over me.  Your Mum said something like, “Oh, that’s Fred.  He’s Ian’s” and once they’d got me calmed down they went off back to bed.  I felt a bit of a fool and somewhat a coward, but I got up, dressed and sat quietly in the sitting room, alone with my thoughts, until they got up. 

I think it / he was called Fred.  Do you remember him from your childhood?  Was he? I can’t remember seeing him when your folks moved to Glasgow.  Anyway, from here on I guess you know the story, and I hope I haven’t bored you, but you did ask. 

To finish I’ll just say something of my relationship with your Mum and, a bit, your Dad.  As said earlier, your Mum and I used to fight, but after I started living in the Royal, somehow when I went ‘home’ for hols I often ended up staying with your folks.  Your Dad and I had a slightly prickly relationship.  I was a boy, growing into teenager, grunt mode and knowing all the answers.  In retrospect he was very patient, forgiving and always, always welcoming. 

As I got older, however, he still treated me as a boy until, to my shame, and perhaps they told you about this, on one occasion, most extraordinarily, whilst we were having a row standing in your sitting room, he pushed me physically. I’m afraid, though I eschew violence whenever possible, if violence is called for I go from nought to a hundred in a nanosecond.  So … I picked up the coffee table, whacked him with it and then unsheathed the sword by the fire which was used for poking the coals and chased him upstairs where he locked himself in the bathroom and you Mama persuaded me to stop hacking at the door and yelling at him.  Did she say, “Think of the children?”  I’m not sure, but probably not.  After that I think I behaved a bit more cautiously and your Dad no longer treated me as a boy, and for all those many years afterword I’d like to think we were good friends. 

I said, however, I wanted to tell you about my relationship with your Mama.  We became great friends in a way that I think only siblings can.  When you were in Glasgow you may remember I visited often, coming straight from school at the end of terms, and for extended periods – though not as often or for such extended periods, I sincerely hope, as my Mama!   That continued through Uni and on through times of working in the UK.

As later I wandered the world, when ‘home’ on leave I would see her and you all as much as possible.  We had a strange bond.  We ‘clicked’.  We made each other laugh hysterically, easily.  We knew what each other was thinking, a great deal, without a word.  In retrospect I think even more highly of your father, for a lesser man might have been irrationally jealous. 

Your Mum (and sometimes Dad) took me to the theatre, museums and galleries and helped to educate me about art.  She ‘infected’ my eyes so that I looked at art and in some ways the world differently.  I started seeing people differently, also. We were ‘easy’ together, always.  When she phoned me in, say Jakarta, I’d pick up the phone and say, “Hi Carol”.  No, I didn’t say “Hi Carol” to everybody when I answered the phone!  It was only your Mum, and though nothing was planned for a phone call, I always knew it was her and answered without thinking. 

I still dream of her quite often, and often the dreams are so vivid about the absurd things we talked about that it is hard to make myself believe when I wake that somehow, in some incomprehensible way, it didn’t really happen.  She was, of course, my sister but your Mum, and she loved you all dearly, fiercely and proudly.  I was never jealous of that and loved you all also, because she loved you and because you were (are) all lovely children and then adults. 

I see your Mum in all of you and though it has been ‘forever’ since we’ve all seen each other, what I know of you now gives me no cause to change my mind.  As you know, she was a remarkable human being in so many extraordinary ways, she was a remarkable mother and she remains my remarkable sister and friend. 

Love to you all.

‘Unc’

(As Nicky likes to say)