My earliest memories are not actual
memories at all, they are memories of images in the family album that, aside
from being the vicar’s wife, was for many years my mother’s primary passion. It
was a huge, oversized tome with a dark blue cover and a glossy red spine,
containing seemingly hundreds of pages—many of them filled with photographs,
newspaper clippings, birth certificates and such, and many of them blank,
awaiting further family news. It was a special treat to sit with her from time
to time, turning the pages and listening to her stories. This, along with
treasured moments in the big rectory kitchen, was perhaps the closest I ever
came to knowing her.
There are three images that stand
out in my memory of those moments. The first is a sepia tone photograph, a
little faded, of my sister Flora and myself posed on our grandfather’s knee. I
am perhaps a year and a half old, and my sister three. She is wearing a pretty
smock dress, and her dark hair is bunched in loose curls around her head. I am
in shorts and a white shirt. We are both wearing “smile please” smiles. My
grandfather is the picture of elegance. He wears a tweed suit and a wing-collar
shirt, with an ascot fastened by a pearl pin. His walrus mustache is neatly
trimmed, and his eyes are smiling in harmony with his lips. Being now a
grandfather myself, I understand the look of grandpaternal joy that his face
and his body posture as well as his embracing arms express.
This is my father’s father. He died
quite soon after posing for that picture, a few months later, of a heart
attack, I think, on a business trip to New Zealand. He was a distinguished
electrical engineer, mentioned in a professional journey alongside Marconi and
nine other prominent innovators as one of the greatest pioneers in harnessing
of electrical power for industrial and domestic use. I never knew him.
I never knew my father’s mother,
either. She died long before I was born, when he was only thirteen years old
and, as the oldest of three brothers, he and his sister Nancy were left with a
bereft father—and responsibilities far beyond their age. My grandfather
remarried. The grandmother I knew for just a few years before her own death was
Granny Murcott, so named after the grand house she occupied at the far end of
the village in my father’s parish, where our border collie, Hank, would run to
fetch us children bags of sweets…
But I’m getting ahead of myself
here. The second image is another photograph which does indeed feature Hank. He
was a handsome and strikingly intelligent dog—witness his long trots to the
other side of the village to bring us sweets!—who was a friend and guardian to
my sister and myself in the course of our earliest years. I think to remember
the time before I could walk, when Hank was taller and stronger and far more
mobile than myself, reaching up to bury my little hands in his soft fur. That
could be so. Here I am, in this picture, lying on my belly on a blanket in the
garden of the vicarage in the small village of Holywell, just outside the city
of Newcastle-upon-Tyne where I was born, and Hank is sitting upright right
beside me, standing guard.
(As an aside, I note that I have
always been inordinately proud of being a “Geordie”—a person born Tyneside, as
a Cockney is distinguished by being born within the sound of Bow Bells. Having
left the city with my family at the age of two, my claim is perhaps tenuous, and
if I have the temerity to introduce myself as a Geordie to anyone from my
native England, it will not be long before they point out that I lack the distinctive
northern accent, largely unintelligible to anyone but other Geordies. I excuse
myself with the joke that my accent, after many years in the United States, has
finally made it halfway across the Atlantic.)
The third image is a newspaper
clipping from the local Newcastle newspaper, dated somewhere around 1936, the
year of my birth. It features a picture of my father, then a curate at the
parish of St. Cuthbert’s, where I was born, bent over a treadle fretsaw,
working on his lifelong hobby, working with wood. Trained as a pattern-maker in
his pre-college days, he never lost his love of making things, often as gifts
in the days when money was scarce and the generosity of gift-giving was a more
personal expression than it is today. Here, intent on his work, he is wearing
his clerical cassock with its narrow white dog collar—a token of his status as
a “high church” Anglican. The wider the collar, in those days, the lower—i.e.
the more Protestant—the church.
The caption in bold letters above
this image reads “Hungry, Desperate, for Want of Two Shillings and Sixpence a
Week”, and the article is about my father’s dedication to the needs of the poor
people in his parish—mostly coal miners and their families suffering from
severe deprivation in post-Depression days. My mother used to joke that it was
Harry, her husband, who looks hungry and desperate; and indeed he does seem
gaunt and harrowed. He was already suffering from the stomach problems that
plagued him for his entire life, and for which no diagnosis ever discovered the
cause. None of the many doctors he consulted—one of them in distant
Switzerland—was able to provide relief, and my sister and I grew up with a
father who was in constant pain.
(Another aside: my father, who had
studied psychology at Cambridge, was a big believer in psychosomatic symptoms,
and I have always wondered whether his skeptical mind was in conflict with his
profession of religious faith. I know he struggled with his belief in the God
he dedicated his life to serve, and suspect a spiritual torment at the root of
his physical distress).
But again, I get ahead of myself.
Bottom line, it was concern for my father’s health that led the doctor’s
insistence that he leave the coal-dusty air of Newcastle and head south for
better air.)
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