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to be born into…or not?
On the face of it, the environment that I was born into was, in a word, ‘jammy’. Two loving parents, no money worries, comfortable home…all the trappings of middle class (whatever that is) affluence. Yes, you could say I was spoilt, wanted for nothing – except the far-fetched cravings for the impractical or impossible, such as dogs and horses (acquired with a vengeance later in life, actually…another story).
But, this chapter of my investigation is not so much about me, but what I was born into, that could have later impacted on the person – the blank canvas (or is it?) that was me. And, most importantly, what sort of ‘baton’ I subsequently carried forward into parenthood.
Of course, both my parents are dead now, so I have missed the chance – the opportunity, to question them. Nor do I have any siblings (yes, an only child- and all that jazz!) to compare notes on common experiences – although I now know from reading about it, just how different the life- views of siblings – twins even, born under the same roof belonging to the same parents can be. So, no, nothing is straight forward.
Plus I was born into a time that was just emerging from a Victorian era where people tried to keep a stiff upper lip, to keep calm and carry on – a Victorian wartime mantra, and remain stoic in the face of the adverse – whatever shape that took. May be not easy to understand – alien almost, within today’s society where perhaps ‘things’ have possibly swung too far the other way.
However, although I was barely conscious at all of my parents’ considerable individual issues, these issues must have affected their inside-out health. And now, as I investigate the sort of life I led and especially the parent I became – and everything in between that has formed my own life, I believe that the sort of lives my parents lived – especially the harsh life-events that must have impacted on them – and which I barely noticed and they never even tried to talk about, need to be given the space – the airing, they deserve – albeit and sadly too late to benefit my parents. They lived and died with their invisible private mental injuries.
So, although I touched upon my parents’ issues earlier…for my father, the loss of his little sister when she was just seven (due to appendicitis/peritonitis – I don’t really know, except his father eventually died of a similar ailment – may be a family trait) and presumably while he was away at boarding school (another story, another line of investigation) must have been dreadful. And whether the death of his sister was the catalyst to the breakup of his parent’s marriage – who can be sure. And whether the very public divorce of my grandparents – in which my grandmother was loudly reported as the wrong-doer, the unfaithful party, was truthful or untruthful well, we’ll never know – and especially, as I later learnt, you could pay for that sort of thing to be arranged or fabricated. Or whether my grandfather’s subsequent re-marriage to a much younger woman – shortly followed by the birth of their daughter, irrevocably altered my father’s role of being the eldest son and heir (for which he clearly felt he was predestined (yes, important in those days), escalated my father’s lifelong adoration of all that had to do with his father, and loathing for his mother – well, we’ll never get the truth about that either. But, certainly (and I will only touch on this for the moment, but more to come later), I can say his obsession with our family tree (rather than actual day to day involvement in extended family life), having a son and heir of his own – certainly impacted hugely on me, as you’ll find out soon enough.
On my mother’s side…she too experienced an early and huge loss when her adored high-flying brother died in a skiing accident in the Alps trying to save his friend.
From being an educated (even my grandmother had been to university – a rarity in those times), comfortably-off, happy close knit family, the death of Jack – their son, in his twenties (from my distant viewpoint…I never met my grandfather who ran a boxing club in Holborn for many years and actually became Mayor of Holborn), seemed to tear the heart out of the family and destroy this comfortable and educated family unit. From what I have been able to see my grandfather seemed to stop functioning, seemed unable to work and never did recover, dying a couple of years after his son’s death. This seemed to mean that my mother had to cut short her education and earn, which she did very successfully as a fashion model. And my grandmother was eventually left in reduced circumstances living out her years (she died at the age of 80), in a rented bed-sit in Bloomsbury, London, which could even have been paid for by my father. Of course, I don’t really know the facts (maybe I will later be able to get to grips with the crates and crates of family papers that are
currently under my bed). But, looking at things from the outside, that is what seems to have been the case.
From what I can also see – (from the old photos and news cuttings etc), certainly my parents appeared to be beautiful, carefree, golden and glitzy people when they met (if you’ve heard of David Niven and the rest of the film star head turners of the time, you won’t be far out) living, on the face of it, at least, some theatrical dream. This was an inside-out dream that was ‘enacted’ both at home on the stage of Northlands Little Theatre in Dulwich – my grandfather’s creation, as well as out there – from provincial theatres to Shakespeare’s Stratford upon Avon or the cosmopolitan West End, which they both shared in (to a greater or lesser extent – that is my father more, my mother less), but which seemed to liberally sprinkle upon both of them, much more than their fair share of ‘fairy dust’.
And then, as they settled into married life at Northlands, against the backdrop of war (all before my time so it has to be a case of best-guessing again), it became apparent that my mother, for whatever reason, was not a robust enough ‘vehicle’ to provide my father with his life’s dream of a son. Whether it was because she ‘fell pregnant the first time’ (as she put it), after which my father had to return to the war effort, so she opted to have an abortion – which residually left her with physical disabilities so that my subsequent birth very nearly killed her, and all efforts thereafter resulted in miscarriages and so she was persuaded to give up on my father’s dream – we’ll never know.
No matter what the actualities were during this time when my parents were trying to start a family (but just so long as that family had a boy in it), the weight of the word ‘disappointment’ must have always been there between them – invisibly suspended above their lives. And this is what the conveyance on which I arrived, must have increasingly looked like.
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