Our next stop was to
be Kings Langley, a village close to London. We are going there as a
consequence a Christmas card I’d received a few years back from a very old distant
cousin. It had a letter written in
tiny handwriting in it covering all of the white space of the card. It began
“You won’t know me from Adam, but Adam is my name”. In fact I did know him a
bit from when I was a young girl. My great aunt Bobby took me and my brother Michael to visit him on
his farm called Hellions. He’d been a rather fierce and dashing Devon farmer. I
had a vague memory of wearing unsuitable transparent knickers when being
hoisted up on the combine harvester.
But the Christmas card was
troubling. As an old man he seemed
very uneasy about how life had turned out for our family. Our father, his cousin,
had drowned when my sister and I were tiny. A posthumous child, a boy called Michael after his father,
was born nine months later. We survived
by renting out rooms in our big Earls Court Road house but it was pretty
chaotic, and mum with her bohemian ways was not drawn into the bosom of the my
father’s respectable middle class family. I remember the atmosphere of opprobrium
well. We reluctantly used to visit
an Auntie Minnie who lived in Kingston and she used to say to Mum “We all need to make sacrifices Stella,
even you.” What could she have meant,
I wonder now.
But Adam’s Christmas
card made me sad. He’d got some things wrong and I thought he shouldn’t go to
his death feeling bad about anything.
I wrote and told him about us all - how we had thrived and not to
worry. I never heard back.
Some time later I got
a letter from Kings Langley saying Adam had died and he, John West, his nephew,
had found my letter pegged on a string.
And so a friendship seeded itself in the muck of the long gone
past. Unlike my sister I have never
taken much interest in family connections and had perhaps inherited a wariness
about the family of the father I
never knew .
The next time, when I
was visiting Mum in the UK, John organised a family reunion in a country pub. My sister Sarah
and I drove there. She was going on
to Cornwall to see her kids and I hadn’t realised that the pub was miles from
anywhere and I hadn’t a hope of finding somewhere to stay the night. John and
Peggy, his partner took me in as they had booked rooms for themselves and her children,
a little boy called T and a girl Natalie.
It was such a kindness.
Peggy and her kids were born in Zimbabwe and John comments wryly – who
would have though it – a confirmed bachelor like me ending up with a family.
We all went for a walk
next day and little T took photographs of the tiny golliwog called Little Eb
that Sarah had given him. I was a
bit disconcerted by this gift as golliwogs have long been decidedly politically
incorrect but T loved it and Little Eb had his picture taken by a stream, up a
tree, in amongst the buttercups beside the path. I promised that next visit Grant and I would take them out
to dinner, but Mum died and we never did.
So this year we met again with a booking
at the local pub. John and Peggy had a wedding last year and I sense a contentment in the
family. “The wedding day went by
so quickly” said Natalie. “If only
it could have gone on longer”
T is a beautiful young man now and
Natalie a decidedly attractive young woman and both are at different
agricultural universities – a particular English phenomenon with echoes of the
USA, horrible hazing rituals including dark passages with dead birds hanging
from the ceiling. Drinking clubs
where downing sixteen pints of beer is considered a poor showing. I dunno, it all seems a bit much but I
am sure they are up to the challenge.
I like this family so much for their warmth and
toughness and indeed they do have their difficulties. The middle class part of England that they inhabit is still
quite xenophobic. Peggy and
Natalie are fierce and forthright when they encounter racism but T deals with
it in his own confident and laconic way.
A dead fish slipped under a door gets his message across.
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