THE STORY CONTINUES. 5 Family

 This is part of an autobiographical series.

Click here for the first instalment.

The full list of instalments is in the sidebar to the right.

Note

This is a replacement to an instalment 5 posted earlier. Sorry for the confusion.

I’m finding this part of the story very difficult to write.

My mother’s family was racy and dramatic.

    She, like my father, came from refugee stock. Her father’s family were Huguenots who fled France in the sixteenth century and came to England. Queen Elizabeth I, as a Protestant herself, gave them land in Ireland which they then lost in the Irish ‘Troubles’ of the 1930s.

    My mother’s father, Max, was a naval officer but in 1925 on fishing patrol was badly injured when a gun exploded next to him. This put paid to his career. Luckily his wife, coming from a family of coal-mine owners, was rich, but she died young of a skiing accident complicated by pneumonia, leaving her money to their son.

    Max married again, to a Norwegian, my grandmother. Her family was from Oslo and both artistic and well born, with Queen Maud of Norway being one of my mother’s godparents. She too died young – of cancer, in her forties.

    During the war Max served as a ‘naval attaché’ (a sort of spy) and after the war he tried his hand at farming in collaboration with his son by his first wife, but this didn’t work out. His son took back his inheritance and Max was left with nothing.

So, by her early twenties, my mother had lost both her mother and her money. She had to leave the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was studying and find a job. She went from a life of ‘hunt balls’ (as my aunt, her sister, puts it), family and a country mansion to scraping a living in London on her own.

    Her family background was volatile. All she and her family now had left was their aristocratic background.

    She never talked to us children of her mother’s death and I don’t think she ever recovered from it. Her emotions stalled.

   Her golden time was, I think, Oxford University where she’d studied before the Sorbonne, where women were in the minority and the men, back from the war, older and dashing. This was where she stayed.

    

She made a good choice in my father. He may not have been quite her class but – unlike her family – he was solid.

    He’d built his business – the family business he’d inherited – on trust and honesty, he said. The traditional way. And he was traditional. He believed in the establishment. He trusted politicians and the police. He believed that everyone should be like him and, if only they could see sense, they would be. Marriage and children was the correct order of things and he frowned on any divergence from that. He invested his spare money. ‘Capital’ was the key to happiness.

    His mother had died of pneumonia when he was six and he went to an all-boys boarding school, but he did have two sisters so women weren’t a complete enigma to him. But – perhaps as a result of my mother – he considered them a different species. Frivolous, inclined to spend money unnecessarily and without proper judgement.

I’d been lying to my parents from an early age. Well, not lying, but certainly hiding my real self.

    I was the eldest of five children born within seven years and not only was I the guinea pig, the one my parents practised on, but there was always a child younger than me whose needs were greater – and certainly noisier - than mine.

    They wanted me to be obedient and docile, both because that’s the way they thought children should be, and because that was the only way they could cope with so many children.

    I tried to please them, as I wanted to be loved, and I was never sure that they did as they weren’t demonstrative.

    I suppressed everything that made me an individual.

  

My parents didn’t know me but now, if I was to tell them about John, they were going to have to. I’d run away to Australia and found myself but they’d fetched me back. Now there was no running away.

    By my parents’ standards, John failed on every count. He wasn’t upper class. He wasn’t rich. He didn’t have the sort of job that either of my parents would understand. He didn’t actually have anything in common with them at all.

    There were two of them and only one of me. They both in their different ways had the weight of the establishment behind them. I was young, alone and a woman to boot. Who was going to respect me? What were my opinions and needs worth anyway?

    I loved my family and I couldn’t bear the thought of losing them. But if I didn’t believe that blue-sky voice in my head, what was there left?

    It was an impossible dilemma. A nightmare come true.

John didn’t react to my answer. It wasn’t a ‘no’ and maybe that was all that mattered to him.

    That was all that mattered to me too - for the moment. Maybe I could shelve the problem. Maybe it would work itself out in time. Maybe I didn't have to do anything about it.

    ‘How about I take you to my local pub?’ he said.