The doorway in the wood

I said in my previous post that I wasn’t interested in history, but several things have happened recently to make me review that position.

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A few days ago I was walking with Ellie in our local National Trust park. Because the weather was hot and steamy and because I had a slight headache, I decided to stick to the shade, even though that meant trekking up hill through woods dark and silent at this time of year and on footpaths rather than going off piste as I usually do.

At the top of the hill, in the thick of the trees, I suddenly saw a doorway up ahead. Ellie barked. I stopped in amazement, almost alarmed. Had I stumbled on an entrance to Narnia? Had aliens finally landed? Was I going doolally?

The doorway in the wood

As I got nearer I noticed an information board and from it I learnt that this doorway represented the possible door to a lost Palladian mansion. Recent archaeology had uncovered for the first time the foundations of a building written about but never finished. I wandered over to a roped-off area and discovered a section of brick flooring.

Brick foundations, recently uncovered

Perhaps because the floor was so scruffy, and had remained hidden almost since it was built, and you could walk right up to it, and there was no one else around, I had a sense of connection with the men who had laid the bricks two hundred and fifty-odd years before. I could see their workmanship. I could feel them still around.

*  *  *

This lovely oil painting (photographed by John Melville www.john-melville.co.uk) shows my father’s mother. It appeared one day on the wall of my mother's house after my father died and has recently come to me (by kind permission of my siblings). 

 

The oil painting of my father's mother that has recently come to me

I took the painting to be cleaned and reframed, and as the framer (Calmar of Exeter www.calmarframing.co.uk - recommended) took it out of its old frame he pointed out at the bottom of the painting an artist’s signature and date, up until then hidden. There, in what I presumed was her own handwriting, was the name Margaret Rowney, and the date 1932.

The artist's signature, recently uncovered

Because as far as I knew no one else in the family was aware of who had painted the picture and because I had discovered this for myself, I felt excited. I felt a connection with the artist.What’s more, I had a vague idea that my maternal grandmother’s family was related to the Rowneys, makers of artists’ materials. Even more importantly, I knew that my grandmother had died of pneumonia when my father was quite young (six, I thought), and in 1932 he would have been eight. I'd obviously been wrong about my father's age when he lost his mother, but had this painting been done shortly before her death, by a cousin?

I rang my Aunt Jane, my father’s only surviving sibling, and she was thrilled with my discovery. She confirmed the Rowney connection – she had photographs she would send me, she said - and she told me my grandmother’s name, something I had never known, even though that seems hard to believe: Joan Limebeer.

That name took me back to the books I’d been sorting. I’d come across it written on the flyleaves of some leather-bound Rudyard Kipling novels together with the date March 1st 1919. I'd kept the books because I mentioned them to my brother J and he said he'd found some too in the boxes of books he'd taken away.

The Rudyard Kipling books I found and the writing on the flyleaves

Two different handwritings appeared in the books. Was either of them my grandmother’s? If I touched the script would I connect with a grandmother I never knew and who was never talked about?

What was the significance of the date?

I'd seen a photograph of my grandmother as a child and I'd always thought she looked a bit like me as a child and here she was, a young woman, reading books and perhaps writing her name inside them. She was real.

 *  *  *

History does of course come alive when you have a personal stake in it, but I wonder if something else is going on here. To quote Juliet Nicholson again (in A House Full of Daughters – see previouspost):

And yet it is often when those people who made us are no longer alive that we can reassess and be free of them and work out for ourselves exactly who we were and who we are.

The fact that I’m now an orphan (as my brother D put it), means that I can explore my family - and even wider - history without fear of losing myself.

The opposite in fact.

*  *  *

Incidentally, does anyone know anything about the surname Limebeer? I've never heard it before and it doesn't appear it in my Penguin Dictionary of British Surnames.

Not that simple

My parents didn’t want me to marry Frog.  I did though and they never forgave me, and I never forgave them for trying to stop me.

    We’re not very good at dealing with conflict in our family. We sweep things under the carpet and smile. I carried on visiting my parents and we carried on chattering about inconsequential things, my migraines – which started with my marriage – a sign perhaps that all was not well.

‘Well,’ said my brother D as we walked round his farm after my mother’s Thanksgiving Service in March. ‘That’s it then. We’re orphans now.’

    (Our father died in 2006.)

    ‘Yes, isn’t it wonderful,’ I said. ‘Free at last.’

    I spoke without thinking and I shocked my brother, but I meant it.

    But it's not that simple, is it?

As I said in the previous post, Frog and I brought back a lorry-load of stuff from my mother’s house, including boxes and boxes of books which my four siblings who had already been through the bookshelves didn’t want. I piled them up in the conservatory and started to go through them. Most of them I rejected out of hand: novels I knew I’d never read; history and biography which I find boring; books of my father’s on boats, World War Two, shooting. One book however caught my eye - A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson.

I remembered my mother showing it to me a few months before she died. I’d thought at the time that it sounded vaguely interesting but my mother couldn’t really explain its significance to me because she had no puff left to talk and her brain was addled by all the drugs she was taking to stay alive. In any case, I used to tune out when she went into long stories about her grand friends or described aristocratic family trees. She did however say something about a friend with the extraordinary name of Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt. How could I forget that?

I picked the book up and saw that it was inscribed to my mother ‘with thanks and love’ from the author. I then found my mother’s name in the Acknowledgements. I started to read the Prologue and came across the following:

A daughter’s attempt to break free from the parental bond can become an act of rebellion against an assumption that submission is not only expected but integral to the relationship.

Yes! I thought.

I delved further. The book turned out to be an account of the women in the Sackville-West family. The author is the daughter of the aforementioned Philippa and grand-daughter of Vita Sackville-West (gardener and one-time lover of Virginia Woolf). According to the family tree in the front of the book, Juliet was born the year after me, and Philippa the year after my mother.

    Knole House, the Sackville family seat, is in Kent a few miles from where I was brought up and where several of my family still live. We went to the house once on an outing from school although I don’t remember much about it. More vivid is the sexually-charged game of hide and seek (or something) I played with friends in my early teens in the park one summer evening.

    My mother was friends with Bridget Sackville-West who lives at Knole.

Knole Park (photographed by Suz, my mother's carer)

I began to understand the significance of the book, and because my discovery of it seemed both apt and timely – not to say synchronistic – I began to read.

The book takes each of the women in turn down the centuries, starting with Pepita the Spanish dancer with whom 'Old' Lionel Sackville-West fell in love in 1852. While all of them struggled with convention and the limitations imposed on them, not to mention the inhumanity of the upper classes (or am I just biased?), it’s Philippa’s story where I am now with its lack of both love and a meaningful occupation that’s really touching my heart. In fact, I’m finding it almost unbearably sad.

I am relishing my freedom, and I probably couldn’t talk to my mother about Philippa even if she were still here, but I’d like to.

One of my mother's last outings - visiting Knole to have lunch with Bridget
(photographed by Suz)