Saturday 8 June 2013

..........And Grandma's Gone

I would like you to imagine that we have all jumped forward about three years, give or take, from grandma's visit in the last post, to the second visit by grandma and aunt V.  The war is now over, but little else seems to have changed.  In this fast-forwarded time, I can hear the murmur of conversation between my parents and grandma rising from below.  You see, my bedroom is immediately above the kitchen (where we eat, but not cook.  Come on people, keep up, it was all carefully explained in last week's post.).  The floors in these old houses are very thin, as are the walls.  In a few years time, I will lean out of bed, pull back the rug and place my right ear to the floor, somewhat like Beethoven.  I don't know him yet, but our purposes coincide.  I will in that fashion listen to "Sunday Half Hour", a wireless programme of hymns, to be followed by an hour long programme, "Your Hundred Best Tunes". I will undoubtedly learn a great many of the lighter classical works, although I won't know what they are called, or who wrote them.  It will only be the music that I'll hear.

As I lie thinking in bed waiting to sleep, it is clear to me that grandma does not like my father very much, and it would seem that the dislike is mutual.  Now I have to say that what I am about to tell would not stand up in a court of law.  It's hearsay evidence.  But it is all I have. Father fought in the Great War (WW1) as a gunner in the Royal Flying Corps.  (He was tall, and put his age up.)  From what my mother told me, and from my own researches, I can only assume he was the front gunner in an FE2b.


WW1 Aeroplane - FE2b


"Mmmmm?  Well of course I don't know for certain.  I wasn't there at the time, now was I?  Actually, come to think of it, neither was mother!  Now where was I?  Ah yes!"

Although father flew in the RFC, he was a huge disappointment to his family, allegedly, and when father married my mother, he was cut off from his family completely, without a penny, dime or nickel.  It was a 'class' thing you see.  My father was born into an upper middle class, Victorian family, the sort that bred for business, king and empire. What! What! Don't yer know! Alright so they were Roman Catholics, but what the heck?  In his family's opinion, father married way below his class.  As far as my mother was concerned, well she had hardly reached the first rung of the class ladder.

Now all that is probably why father thought the absolute world of King Edward VIII and that woman, that Mrs. Simpson.  Well they were cut off from his family weren't they?  And they were both rakish sorts (Edward and my father I mean).

"Well I know Edward wasn't exactly penniless, but surely you can see the connection;  no?"

"I heard that!  Someone at the back's talking!  Who said Tom's away with fairies?"

Grandma, as I have said, didn't like father because she also was of the opinion he had married below his class.  Well the educated toffs shouldn't be allowed to mess with the lower classes, should they? Suspicion and dislike rule both upwards and downwards.  Yet for all that, and although neither of my parents ever worked during my conscious life-time (he was genuinely too ill, his nursing skills rarely ever being put to best possible use, even during the war, and my mother needed to be on hand to look after us all) grandma and her brood were not averse to using him when it suited them.

It is now growing dark, my bedroom illuminated by the lights from our neighbour's house, but I can still imagine them seated in the kitchen, just waiting for the time to come when they could leave and 'catch the bus home'.  Grandma is probably still sitting in father's corner, a study in black.  She even keeps her hat and coat on.  All you can see is a pallid face across which an occasional flicker from the fire passes, looking out from an almost shapeless blackness.  But her eyes, ah those eyes, they pierce me to my very soul.  I can't look away.  Earlier, I sat and watched her wrinkled lips drawn back over continually-sucked, toothless gums; her pale, inelastic flesh drawn in under her cheek bones; but most of all, her eyes - the windows to her soul.  There is something in her eyes that is certainly neither hatred nor even great dislike. She would not deliberately harm me I am certain, but there is that indefinable look of a life spent engaged in the hard grind of living, a life spent in non-stop emotional pain, and brimming over with animal street cunning and a sense of waiting and wanting.  It is that sense of waiting and wanting that is so unnerving, even a little frightening.  I would have liked to know her better, but would have felt too vulnerable, too powerless.

As I said earlier, this is her second visit, and mercifully those uncles were left behind.  That's correct, they didn't come on this visit.  Shame!  She did, however, bring my young aunt V with her.  My mother is nineteen years older than me.  That makes her twenty eight-ish, give or take, maybe a little more give than take.  The two uncles who came on the first visit are both younger than mother, and aunt V is even younger.  Now that puts my aunt in that age bracket that even young boys find "interesting".  She accompanied grandma on the previous visit, but I just didn't get around to talking about her, before being sent to bed.  On this second visit I spent much more time in aunt V's company than before.  I can't remember now what we talked about, probably nothing very important, but she listened and made me feel....someone.  I love her company, but I fear that has not gone unnoticed.

Let us fast-forward to the present day.  That second visit was the last time I ever saw any member of my mother's family.  When some years later I asked why aunt V had never visited again, mother simply said that she was no longer welcome.  And that was that;  no explanations offered.

I find it passing strange that although I have tried to keep this post as light as possible, somehow it just keeps slipping and sliding back into the mood of those times.  All my childhood seemed to have been spent with an impoverished superficial fluff that overlaid a deeper, darker experience which I could never escape, and never quite understand, if at all. People just seemed to slip out of my life without my noticing.  It appeared to me as if the universe were gradually getting ever smaller, and I was becoming ever more isolated.   I have to say it didn't bother me too much at the time:  it was only later when I realised that people I had once known were no longer around me that I experienced a sense of loss.  Gradually, life took on a sense of rigid simplicity, a life reduced to the froth of mere daily activity, a life that was cut off from any sense of depth and meaning.  And that left me unfitted to cope with confidence the adulthood that was to come.  Life was an odd mix of rootless formlessness, of loss - recognised and unrecognised - and bewilderment.  Most odd!


29 comments:

  1. How have I missed all your posts? (A rhetorical question: was lost in my own world, not noticing what was going on around me; shame on me.)

    I am going back to the beginning of your posts, to see what other wonderful things you've, to catch up.

    (But the mystery of Aunt V, of what made her unwelcome to her own sister...that will stay with me; has stirred the beginnings of a short story.)

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  2. Martha; I hope you enjoy the retrospective journey as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I look forward to any comments you might choose to make. As for Aunt V, I guess it will always be a source of mystery. I have no doubt that my jealous father had a large part to play in that decision. But there is no point speculating; truth is rarely found that way.

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  3. Wonderful writing, Tom - real, sad and somber too. Reading this sends me back to many books by various English authors about life in that time... names escape me at the moment. Those family secrets, buried hurts, stiff upper lips and all that. It was all about building character, as some used to say, yet those feelings of unexplained loss would leave a hole in anyone. Glad you moved on and found happiness yet you are able to write about this time so publicly and with humour.

    Will there be more? I sure hope so!

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  4. Thank you Marja-Leena. For years I wasn't able to deal with my childhood, not until I faced up to it. I think it was the combination of looking at the outer, material reality, alongside what my inner self was showing me, that did the trick. The much more recent touch of humour has helped enormously. As for expressing my life publicly, well I still wake up at night in cold sweats.

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  5. I too like your writing very much. I hope it serves its purpose as you seem to write with a purpose. I dip in and out of memory at the call of something in me. Much of my writing has little to do with me except that I pilot the plane, so to speak. It would be a mistake to think most of my work is all that personal. I want the space to declare all sorts of things in a first person voice.

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  6. For three decades, I've been working family genealogy, trying to trace the stories of my ancestors. It amazes me that as much as I was included in the lives of the adults around me, there is very little I know for certain although I remember much. And that documenting the lives of the men is so much easier than finding out details of the lives of the women. Writing about one's childhood memories is vital, and I'm gladdened to read your stories recalled.

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  7. there is so much humor and heart in your writing, Tom, even as you reveal very difficult truths in your story. i'm so glad you are sharing these with us.

    Tender humor...it is what i love most about my mother's side of our family...that they were willing and eager to find it, everyday. It helped to buffer the hardships they all went and continue to go through, as well as the ugliness my father dished out.

    Here we are! All these years later...sharing with each other, with hearts continuing to grow.

    Thank you, Tom.

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  8. It seems to me that sense of loss you speak of may affect some children more than others - namely, only children. I don't get the feeling you were raised with siblings as you haven't mentioned them; the way you describe your reactions to your grandmother and the others doesn't seem to have been mitigated by having shared it with another who was close to you. I understand because I was also an only child (of much older parents - wwII was long) and also a somewhat introverted one.

    Your descriptions of time, place and people are very compelling. I too remember the mystery and excitement of early radio and the strangeness of adults.

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  9. Thank you Christopher. There is a purpose to my writing, most assuredly. The difficulty at the moment is that I'm uncertain what that purpose is, at least the full extent of that purpose. Something is pushing me in this particular direction, and I hope I will discover that purpose from what it is I feel led to write. I think you will understand that.

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  10. Hullo Rouchswalwe; It is strange about your disconnect between the lives of the men in your family as compared with those of the women. Strange and interesting.

    I agree that it is necessary to remember, and understand if possible, one's childhood. It is a question I would like to address in a future post. Meditation and Pathworking (see my next, and weekday, post) are invaluable aids to understanding one's own inner experiences, particularly of childhood.

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  11. Dear Zephyr, when I read what you say I sense a hesitancy in my response, as if to say, "Let me tread gently here; I may be too unknowing." I suppose that at heart, and in many ways, we're still children. It's just that our bodies have become older, and we have acquired much on life's journey. But at heart?.....

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  12. Hi Susan; I did have siblings, three sisters all younger than me. I did mention my middle sister as an aside in my previous post. Having said that, your comment was actually to the point. I was probably a lonely child rather than an only child. This didn't bother me as I am very introvert. That is not to say I don't like people, quite the opposite. It does mean that people in the physical vicinity drain me. Extroverts of course gain energy from physical contact.

    In our family, mother was responsible for the discipline of the girls, and my father assumed responsibility for my discipline. The result of all this was that the lives of my sisters (still only two at the time of the events about which I wrote) and my life, never really crossed. In a very real sense, they were not part of my life. In the two Grandma posts, I cannot recall where either of my two sisters were. I cannot see them.

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  13. Tom, the way you recall, interpret and write about your childhood is fascinating and vivid. I can almost see a picture of the characters - are you perhaps a secret novelist?

    Strange the way each of us remembers incidents, people and places in our lives by the way they affected us emotionally, and no two memories will be the same. I've talked with family members about things we lived through together and their
    memories/experiences of the same event are totally, astonishingly different from mine.
    If your aunt V is still around, wouldn't it be interesting to find out how she remembers that particular meeting?

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  14. Natalie: It would indeed. Interestingly, my middle sister can only see her childhood vis-a-vis our father as absolute heaven. But she has good cause, poor dear!

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  15. I have found that writing about my mysterious, jealous, angry family has helped me exorcise their ghosts. So many lies and silences, and I have developed plausible stories to color in the spaces. Not that I think they are factual, they keep the drafts out though.

    The class attitudes flow all ways around, don't they? Sometimes, of course, it's an excuse, and people really just don't like other people personally in person.

    So you see, you are safe telling your tales here, so universal, only the details are specific to you.

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  16. Zhoen: I like your comment very much. Good to know it's safe.

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  17. Tom, as for me, I have stopped searching. I was seeking many things for such a long time. Now I am cultivating skill for no apparent reason and trusting that I am where I am supposed to be. I have a voice. That appears to be what I was looking for after all. Sometimes it arises and I know I have it. Other times I just keep on with things. Back in '66 when things started for me there was so much urgency. Now, 47 years later, I just like waking relatively pain free.

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  18. Tom, your writing is exquisite. (I have added your site to my blogroll.) And who among us doesn't relish the memory of an aunt or an uncle with panache and mystery.

    By the way I loved "...the froth of mere daily activity..." and "...an odd mix of rootless formlessness...". Splendid wordsmithing.

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  19. Christopher; I suppose that for me, searching is synonymous with asking questions. I was probably doing that before I was born, and I haven't stopped since.

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  20. Bruce, as a man accustomed to using words, that comment is taken as high praise indeed. Thank you.

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  21. I would have commented on the first part of your story but I just now found your blog. I read both parts and this comment can serve for both parts of the story. You are a terrific writer! I could feel that house more than see it, but I could see very well your Grandma, Mother and your Father. Thankfully not the uncles. :)

    It seems kind of odd to me that as we get older, (at least I do) think more about parents and grand parents - what they were really like and how they treated us. Some of mine I've come to think more of and some less. Your story spoke to me about the insight I've had about my own family.

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  22. It must have come as a relief to a Fe2b gunner when The Red Baron turned him into a colander; so much more preferable than hypothermia

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  23. David; Welcome to Gwynt, and thank you for your comment. It has been said that childhood is the best time of one's life, an idea with which I totally disagree. I do believe however, that childhood is a period that requires a great deal of investigation and understanding. In my experience adult life, furthering one's career, marriage, children and so on, fall into relative unimportance compared with childhood. And of course that is the period when grandparents are likely to be around. They also help supply the psychic soil in which to extend one's roots.

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  24. Robbie; I trust the holiday goeth well. Well now, I can just imagine some riddled front gunner saying, "Gosh or phew, this is a lovely way to be dead; you've certainly 'riddled me ree' and that's so much better than hypothermia. Thanks baron!"

    It was an interesting discovery that you were the only person, so far at least, to pick up on the aeroplane.

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  25. "I suppose that at heart, and in many ways, we're still children..."

    yes, i believe so. And i am grateful that i finally learned to be kinder to myself, which has allowed my heart more freedom than it ever knew before.

    Okay, i will also comment on that airplane--!!
    i imagine the exhilaration of those boys' first flights had adrenalin pumping hard through their veins (if not to the tips of their cold toes)--but i simply can't imagine being that exposed, up front like that, and finding a way to channel the terror into focused action. That really "took guts"!! (as we say over here).

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  26. Zephyr, I rather gather that aircrews were not averse to 'taking a little something' before taking off. And it wasn't only to keep out the cold. Even up to the last week of his life, my father could occasionally remove splinters of shrapnel from his legs.

    It was an interesting discovery that you were the only other person, so far at least, to pick up on the aeroplane !!!

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  27. It hurts to think that one is being punished not only for feeling but also for feeling ...someone...a boy.

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  28. Dear Ellena. What can I say? I have come a long way since those days, and the journey continues. Without the sadness, how would we know real happiness? Without the loneliness and some mystery, how would we know the joy of friendship and know some understanding? We must have the one to know the other.

    It's all coming right my dear friend. So, arms across the pond and a big hug!

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  29. Yep, I'm ready to argue with anyone that childhood is not the best years of one's life. But I guess it depends on what kind of life a person is having. Apparently ours has improved with age.

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