About Me

Sunday 6 March 2016

Those who went before - some memories for Mothers' Day

Inspired by the Gentle Author at Spitalfields Life,  I fell to thinking of  great grandmother Rachel, who I never knew but whose memory was cherished by my grandmother, Richmull, and her two sisters Edna and Eliza-Anne. It saddened them deeply that they were never able to visit her grave.

Widowed young, Rachel's  youngest child was born out of wedlock. Just after the first world war, she took her two younger daughters to Australia, leaving the elder one, who was working and ‘courting’ behind. The story does not end happily. As a child, the idea of wicked relatives was not confined to story books. Bullied by her sister-in-law - my grandmother would recall her mother being burned on the arm with an iron -  soon Rachel became ill. A couple of years later, she died from cancer. My grandmother and great aunt decided to return home with only a handful of photographs and some locks of Rachel’s hair, one of which my grandmother kept for years in a sewing tin, to remind them of their mother and their shared misadventure. Returning home was quite an adventure, however, with exciting rickshaw rides through Singapore and an board romance for Great Aunt Edna.

As a result of the move to Australia, my grandmother had lifelong issues with her kidneys, after becoming dehydrated in the intense Queensland heat. Back in the damp, cold north-west of England, she married a miner, who contracted a particularly nasty flu virus in the 1930s, which would leave him disabled. My grandmother worked full time while her husband looked after my mother. A non-smoker, my grandmother died aged 68 in 1968 from lung cancer triggered, perhaps, from working in the carding room in a cotton mill or from pouring liquid explosive material into bombs as a munitions worker in World War II.

Thinking and writing this has made me realise the narratives of our forebears are important and should not be forgotten. Yet they will be if we fail to tell our children or fail to write them down. And even then, the stories of their lives will vanish as if they had never been.

Joy and sorrow blown away like dust from our hands.

1 comment:

MMP said...

that whole narrative experience.....of sitting with and listening to our relative's stories.....is in danger as so many live away from relatives. So writing down is a good option. It's There, for others to read later on.

I thought that i knew about my family, but having my mothers diaries to read now (while she is still alive, how brave is That?!) shows me that i was mistaken. Maybe i was too young when i ( mis) 'heard' the stories? Anyway, i certainly mangled a fair few and so it's nice to have the reality laid out in neatly ordered script for me to make sense of now.

And my aunt's poetry and her writings; scribbled on bit and pieces of paper for us to suddenly come across after she has died.....very poignant. And sometimes very surprising too.

Family history. Very important.