The Girl in the Red Car

It's almost a direct quote from a Welsh lesson: "Pwy ydy hi, y ferch yn y car?"  (Who is she, the girl in the car?)  Only this time, having seen it, I can say it was 'car coch' - a red car - and I'm not interested in who she was, just the memories of which she reminded me.  I find that some things are only brought to mind at certain times: this was definitely a Saturday lunchtime recollection.  

I had been working in Norwich one Saturday morning and was going home on the train. (Those were the days when it was cheaper to take the train than to pay for the petrol and drive.)  Like many a railway, the line passes the backs of suburban houses as it leaves the city and I could see people who, like me, had been at work during the morning and were just arriving home.  For some, I pictured lunch waiting for them, children agog to know what was happening in the afternoon (just as I would have been, ten years earlier), and wives anxious to have some DIY job sorted as soon as possible.  The younger ones would perhaps be calling mates about an upcoming football match or the evening dance.  The weekend was about to take off.

So what of the girl?  It must have been about 1.20 a few Saturdays ago as I was taking 'a walk around the block', when a young lady of late teen-age or early twenties walked out of her home to a red car by the kerbside; she opened the door, parked her carrier bag on the seat beside her and drove confidently off.  For all I know, she may have been going shopping, or off to work for an afternoon shift.  My fertile imagination said she was off to visit her boyfriend for the weekend.  Apart from the carrier bag, which could have contained absolutely anything or nothing at all, there was no evidence to support my conjecture.

Music came to mind as I dredged back in my memory to determine whether I had ever embarked on such a weekend as I now vested upon her.  It is, I believe, a very old Welsh love song, Ar Lan y Môr.  There are several verses, with which I won't bore you, but the English version begins, "At the seaside are red roses, At the seaside are white lilies, At the seaside is my love, Sleeping through the night and rising in the morning."  

Yes, I decided, there was one relationship - with my first proper girlfriend - in which this scenario was acted out quite regularly.  She did indeed live at the seaside, so to get together at the weekends, one of us had to travel to the other.  Sometimes there would be 'an event' to attend, more often than not we would just share whatever the other happened to be doing.  I remember one afternoon spent cleaning our cars together outside her home, and another when we spent some while sitting in her brother's home a few streets away, while his wife was upstairs giving birth to a brand-new nephew or niece.

On one Saturday, after working the morning at the factory where she was a supervisor, she drove to mine.  I don't know what we did for the afternoon, but we spent the evening in Norwich, after which I stayed at hers that night and then on Sunday afternoon she drove me out of town to the main road and I hitch-hiked home: something that just wouldn't be possible today.

I sometimes have that same 'Saturday lunchtime' experience when I'm going to a football match ... the supreme example of my 'second teenage'.  It's a perennial situation: the routine of the working week is finished (even if I'm no longer in paid employment), and the liberty of the weekend is about to begin.  It is a wonderful feeling of freedom.  Long may it last!

And a personal footnote - on Monday, I booked my seat at Biggleswade's first FA Cup tie of the new season, so tomorrow afternoon I shall be hoping that it will be the first of many this season!

Lock-down - the Epilogue

As I come to the end of my second (two-day) week back at (voluntary) work, it seems right to look back over the last five months.  Many, no doubt, will have found the isolation and restrictions tiresome and uncomfortable in one way or another.  For my part, once I'd sorted out a 'food-stream', it was quite nice to be able to spend seemingly limitless days working on family history.  That's not to say I didn't look over the horizon, but with concern, and with no feelings of desperation.  I quickly realised that the holiday I'd booked for June wouldn't be happening and, rather than take up the offer of a 12-month delay, I cancelled it completely and am free to do whatever takes my fancy next year.

On the genealogy front, one 'project' followed another.  In March, I was already working on a 'distant twig' in my father's tree and most of April was spent exploring the possibility of a link between my great-grandfather's family and that of my cousin's husband ... the same comparatively unusual surname in a small area providing an intriguing, but in the end negative, possibility.  Then, in May, I remembered that, some years ago, I had started writing a history of my mother's direct ancestors with a view to completing a biography.

This absorbed my attention for many weeks, as I formed my earlier work into chapters, set out pages and styles and re-wrote paragraph after paragraph, incorporating many stories and links I had discovered since my original efforts had been put together.  It was also at about this time that I enjoyed the diversion of preparing some graphs for a political group.  Did you realise that, over the last twenty years, 70.1% of votes cast have had no effect on the outcome of the elections? ... But that's a script for another stage.

By the time I'd got to the point of my grandparents' marriage and the establishment of what became my mother's early home, the general lock-down had come to an end.  It was a convenient point at which to park that project - but perhaps not for so many years this time - and to turn my attention to the resumption of 'normal' life.

Normal life for me, however, proved still to be some weeks away and, as a 'filler', I decided to dig into one of the spreadsheets in which I store the original findings of my research.  I knew that many entries in my record of Civil Registration Births and Deaths were lacking reference numbers, so I determined to begin correcting these omissions.  There were many reasons for these gaps; for one thing, the record itself pre-dated the decision to include the references.  At times I was working with such enthusiasm that I hadn't given myself time to complete all sequences before following up new discoveries ... and there are, too, many entries that were collected 'on the off-chance' that they might be connected one day.

This is a job that can be dropped at any point, so it was ideal to begin it with the view to probe gently any entry that seemed to ask a question as to its relevance.  So it was that, yesterday, I came across two possible entries for the death of the father-in-law of one of my dad's sisters.  Did he die in 1914 or 1941?  In establishing that the former was the case, I examined the first census entry following his birth in 1855 and hence have now begun the sequence of adding the man's parents and eight siblings to my database and, subsequently, to the family tree itself.

These days of triumphant success and achievement are not without a grain of sadness, however.  I was reminded this week that the coming weekend will mark the second anniversary of the death of my former manager's wife in a road traffic accident outside their home.  This tragic event occurred just as I was making arrangements to begin this present job so, unsurprisingly, that is where some of my thoughts will be at the moment.

A Rose (or Sarah, Elizabeth or Emma) by Any Other Name ...

'What's in a name?' asked Juliet.  In some cases quite a lot, it seems.  But this is no Shakespearean exercise.  I've spent a while this week tidying up my family history records.  The job is far from finished but, in the course of it, a particular phenomenon has distracted me into a little statistical research.

Out of the 5,369 names on my database, 171 relate to children who died before their third birthday.  Given the stories we hear of infant mortality in past centuries, this might seem on the low side, but I haven't gone searching for them and it's quite possible that many others have fallen 'between the cracks' as it were, having been born and died between two censuses, and so have escaped my attention entirely.

What specially aroused my curiosity was the number of times that the names of these unfortunates had been re-used for later children born to the same parents.  From this limited population, this appears to have been a particular phenomenon in the 19th century.  Out of the 171 who died, I counted 48 instances where their names had been re-used, 3 in the 18th century and 8 in the 20th, but by far the greater part of them in the 19th century.

Sometimes the exact same name was repeated, but often one or other forename was combined with another name the next time; and it was often a practice that ran in families.  Let me tell you about some of them, beginning with the children of George and Sarah Bowker.  They married in 1840 and named their first child Elizabeth.  She died in 1841 and when their sixth child was born in 1857, they named her Annie Elizabeth; she also died in her first year.  George and Sarah's son John married in 1878 and named his first daughter Sarah Elizabeth.  She, too, died in the year she was born.  John's brother Edward had married four years earlier.  When his seventh child was born in 1885, she was given the name Sarah ... and died the following year.  Two years later another daughter was named Annie Elizabeth; she survived until at least teenage and probably longer.

William and Rebecca Carman married in 1862, three years after William's brother James married Mary Ann. William's first child, Emma Rebecca, was born in 1864 and died the next year.  They named their fourth child Emma in 1871 and she lived until 1878; another daughter was born in 1882 and was duly named Emma.  James's first child, Eliza, was born in 1860 and died in 1862; their sixth child, born in 1875, was also called Eliza.  Eliza's brother Alan married Alice in 1890 and named his second son Allen in 1893.  Allen died when only a few weeks old;  nearly eleven years later Alice gave birth to their ninth child, who was called Alan.

Wiliam and Alice Steggles married in 1890.  Their first child was named after his father, William, but died within weeks.  A year later son no. 2 was also called William.  Eight years and five children later, Gladys was born in 1900, but also lived only a few weeks.  Her sister born the next year received her name ... and lived until 1984.

Finally, I must mention probably the first example of this that I came across.  It concerns the family of my 4xGreat-grandfather, Charles Hurrell, who married Elizabeth in 1780.  Their first daughter was born in 1784 and named Mary; she lived just eighteen months.  Their second daughter arrived in 1787, was named Mary and lived little more than a week.  When their next child was born in the spring of 1789, Charles and Elizabeth were not to be caught out.  Still loyal to the name Mary, this time they added 'Wakefield' - though I have no reason to believe any connection with the Yorkshire town.  Mary Wakefield Hurrell rewarded her parents' perseverance, married, bore a total of nine children and died in 1869.

For good or ill, it would appear, names - like anything else - can be second-hand.

When War comes to Winchester and Siege to Shrewsbury

I think my adult interest in history can be explained as the 'enabled expression of an appetite'.  In case you think that is pompously academic and unworthy of your reading further, let me hasten to explain just what I mean by it.

I recall in my teens hearing - I know not whence - the expression, 'History ended in 1914'.  I guess that, down the ages, it had to end somewhere, and there are significant dates that separate one book from another on my bookshelves. (If you are able to enlarge the picture sufficiently, you may be able to pick out 1485, 1648, 1789, 1832, 1848, 1918 ... and you might be able to recognise the significance of at least some of those.)

My 'history library'

Similarly, history has to have begun somewhere, too.  1066 is a good starter for England, 1603 for 'modern English' history.  When I was in primary school, I remember we had books that were slightly bigger than A4, with a red and black cover, and these were followed by a second volume in yellow and black.  Each double page covered a distinct period and, I suppose those two books fed us with a year's history.  At high school, it was assumed we had learned no history at all and we began with Greeks and Romans.  Very quickly (it now seems, looking back over half a century) we moved on to the Tudor and Stuart periods and then the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for 'O'-Level.

Hence, in adult life, I've found I have appetites to learn more about the earlier part of the twentieth century and also the two centuries or so on either side of the Norman Conquest.  Over the last twenty or thirty years I've had the opportunity to satisfy some of those yearnings or, at least, have acquired several shelves of books that remove the veracity of any complaint that that chance has been denied me.

Starting sometime before lock-down, I decided that I would read the whole canon of Ellis Peters' Cadfael books, alternating these with something else that takes my fancy.  Having finished earlier this week Laurie Lee's three-volume autobiography with 'A Moment of War', describing a few very cold months in Spain in 1938, I'm now back in the twelfth century as I start on the second half of the Cadfael series.

I find that I'm learning a lot of history from these.  Although not overtly a series of 'history books', the author has very skilfully woven her tales around the events of a period of which I remember only two pages from those primary school history lessons.  The Victorians, apparently, gave this period the name 'The Anarchy' to distinguish it from later civil wars.  

Imagine, if you will, a time in the middle of this present century.  William is happily established as our king, and suddenly out of nowhere, Princess Beatrice (daughter of the duke of York) has turned up with an army, has invaded the west country and half of Wales, and has set up her court in Bristol, claiming that she should be queen in William's place.  

It's unthinkable, of course.  But it was in the midst of that sort of quarrel that England and her people found themselves between 1137 and 1153 and I'm now learning what was going on then, but at the speed of horse-borne messengers rather than TV newscasts, alongside of the mysteries that Cadfael, the one-time crusader and now monk-cum-detective, is trying to solve. 

It's thrilling!  My only fear is worrying what happens when I get to the end of book 20!

Gone but not Forgotten - a Personal Tribute on VJ-Day plus 75

 "We were dragged out by the hair to go to work, beaten with bamboo poles and mocked at.  We toiled, half-naked in the cold, unfriendly rain of Upper Thailand.  We had no time to wash and if we did it meant Cholera.  By day we never saw our bed spaces (on long platforms of those bleak hundred metre huts). Our comrades died, we could not honour them even at the graveside because we were still working.  The spirit of the jungle hovered over this Valley of the Shadow of Death ... and we lay and starved, suffered, hoped and prayed."

The above is an extract from "A Japanese Holiday", broadcast to London from the Far East on 12th September, 1945 by Padre John Noel Duckworth (1912-1980), chaplain to 2nd Bn. Cambridgeshire Regiment. 

NMA - Terry Waite chats to veterans beside
the track - opening of FEPOW memorial
15th August 2005

The phrase that I have emboldened appears on a plaque beside a stretch of track preserved at the National Memorial Arboretum 'in memory of those who worked on the Burma/Siam railway and those who sacrificed their lives in its construction.'  

The suffering those men went through is unimaginable; only those who were there could truly know what it was like.

Duckworth's essay had already stated, "The lowest daily death rate came down to 17 only as late as September 1943, when the weather improved and things began to get a little better."  For me, that improvement came too late.  My uncle, Charles William James Sturgeon, died of malaria on 21st August and lays in Thanbyuzayat War Cemetery.  A painter and decorator by trade, he had enlisted some three-and-a-half years earlier in the Royal Norfolk Regiment and was one of the 80,000 or so British, Indian and Australian troops who became prisoners of war at the fall of Singapore on 15th February 1942.  This was the greatest ever surrender of British-led forces and was described by Churchill as "the worst disaster in British military history".

Charlie and his sisters on the beach at
Great Yarmouth - embarkation leave,
September or October 1941

Charles - always known as Charlie - became a prisoner of war just two days after his 24th birthday.  He was the third child and only son of my grandparents and, while all three siblings were very close, I sense that there was a special bond between him and my mother who were born little more than a year apart.

Whether by accident or design, it was on the fifth anniversary of his death that my parents were married.  As I grew up, a similarity was noticed between early pictures of me and those that my mother had preserved of her brother.  I have no doubt that this resemblance meant that looking at me regularly renewed and intensified her grief at his loss.  I cannot remember a time when I wasn't aware of Charlie and the fact that he had died in the war.  Even in death, he was just as much part of the family as my father's many siblings, all of whom were still alive.

Later in life, I knew as a colleague a man who had survived the war in the Far East.  I had first met him on Remembrance Day, and recognised that the medals he was wearing included the Pacific Star.  Like me, he was a lay minister in the church; while he never spoke of his wartime experiences, it was noticeable that, if he introduced a 'time of silent prayer', Arthur would spend most of it gently listing the topics that should be prayed for in what, when it came, was a very short period of actual silence.  Rightly or wrongly, I understood this to indicate his great reluctance to entertain silence and believed this to be a product of those dark days forty-odd years earlier.

On this anniversary it is good to spare a thought for all whose lives have been affected, directly or indirectly, by the war that ended seventy-five years ago today.

If You Can't Take the Heat ...

 ... get out of the kitchen, so it is said.  But this week that has offered no acceptable alternative.  Indeed, at times the kitchen was cooler than the lounge!

Last weekend I was excited about the charts I've been producing in recent weeks for a political organisation.  I'd sent off a sample of the latest project on Friday evening but, knowing that I should hear nothing until Monday, the weekend was largely a combination of data extraction and preparation accompanied by commentary on the Test Match.  

On Monday I was so keyed up that, despite the heat I went ahead and produced all the charts to complete the project, thinking that any adverse comments or critical suggestions that might come along could just as easily be applied to something already created as incorporated in the original production.  In point of fact, no comment or acknowledgement has been received, which neither surprised not disappointed me.  These are busy people, but at the same time August is a quiet month in many walks of life.

At that point, the heat took off and took over.  With the pressure (albeit self-generated) off, boredom and lethargy quickly set in and motivation to do anything departed just as swiftly.  Thus the pattern was set for the next few days.  Tuesday passed in a blur.  I had received an e-mail after I'd gone to bed on Monday (not all of my friends and family are retired!).  It raised a couple of questions that I knew deserved a prompt reply, despite the answer to one of them requiring a bit of thought.  Having devoted time and energy to this, I discovered that it was lunchtime and the only other achievement in my day was making a dental appointment.

I might add at this point that this will be my first such visit for 11 years!  When the recession hit in 2008, and my income dropped by at least half virtually overnight, I knew I had to prune my outgoings severely.  I recall summing up my decision quite harshly. "If I lose my teeth, I can live on soup; if I lose my sight, I stop earning completely and have nothing to live on.".  On the strength of that, I cancelled my Denplan subscription in order to balance continued expenditure on the spectacles that I needed to drive.  I believe it proved to be a wise move for, with only one incidence of toothache in that time, the expense has been minimal compared to a regular payment plan.  If this visit proves to be expensive, it will do no more than add to the fact that I'm living on my savings in any case.

Wednesday followed the pattern of Tuesday.  I had the vague notion of packing up my lunch and driving somewhere.  I couldn't decide where to go, though, and looking at one thing after another on line, being distracted this way and that ... hey presto! It was lunchtime again.  The realisation that I had effectively wasted a whole morning achieving absolutely nothing angered me.  I ate my lunch resolving that action had to be taken.  I have a car - with air conditioning - sitting outside costing a small fortune and going nowhere, while I was sitting inside, sweltering in the heat.  There was definitely an imbalance to life there!

The next two and a half hours were comparative bliss.  I just drove, making up my mind where as I went along.  Re-discovering roads that had been familiar in past times, I made my way first to Bedford and then out through Turvey towards Northampton.  I saw a sign for Wellingborough, and turned that way.  As I did so, a sort of circuit began to form in my mind.  If I were to turn right just before getting there, I should be able to get onto the A1 somewhere south of Brampton Hut (where the A14 crosses it).  

I recalled an assignment termed 'the Golden Key' that someone would be given most evenings for a period of some years when I was working.  Some drivers hated it; I quite enjoyed it both because it was familiar and, for the mileage involved, it was well-paid.  It also meant that I could get a meal out at one of a number of pubs on the way back.  It involved collecting goods from a distribution centre in Biggleswade, driving to Rushden armed with a (brass, not gold) key which would unlock a padlocked gate, allowing the goods to be unloaded in the consignee's yard, long after the staff had gone home.

I now covered that familiar route, albeit back to front, for I was now driving from Rushden to Biggleswade.  I decided that I would stop at Sainsbury's to get some fruit since I was passing, and as I emerged from the car to go into the store and met a 'wall of heat', it reminded me of the brief time I spent in California.  As I drove on home, the dashboard indicator of ambient temperature fluctuated between 34.5 and - a record for me - 36.0 degrees!  The remainder of the afternoon was just as oppressive, but the 85-mile shopping trip had dissipated the anger.  That said, I still needed a siesta before thinking about an evening meal.

Yesterday morning began darkly.  It was as dark at 8.30 am as at 8.30 pm the previous evening.  It wasn't long before the thunder began and the rain came.  The spell was broken and, although still warm, the air was much fresher and I could focus on doing something constructive with my time.  Who knows ... by next weekend there could be achievements!

A Medium Theme ... or, 'What's He On?'

I've written here before about dreams, how they can be linked to what's been going on in waking life, perhaps have something to offer about problems that have dominated my thinking or sometimes are so fanciful that they just have to be ignored completely.  I had one the other morning that was so real it had to be for some purpose; yet that purpose is beyond my imagining, so - for what it's worth - I offer it to you as a contrast to seemingly incessant stories from my family history researches.

I was watching a webinar ... perhaps part of a commercial art course?  Certainly it was something that I would not normally venture into, having no artistic ability at all.  The invisible lecturer provided a commentary to moving illustrations on my screen.  His main topic seemed to be page design, perhaps for an article in a magazine or professional journal.  He was talking about 'mediums', which I eventually understood to mean separate elements that could be brought together to produce the finished article.

He began by asking how many mediums to use, to provide interest without being too 'busy'.  He quickly drew out the conclusion that the ideal would be three.  The first medium would be something bold and expansive, a broad colour wash, or perhaps a picture ... something to form a background.  The second medium would essentially be a contrast to the first.  If the first medium was like sky - something solid and flat - introduce a row of hedges or trees; if it was a picture, add some people or a building, and so on.

The third medium was the text itself.  Here he went on to consider what fonts to use to match the subject, and the way certain fonts were appropriate e.g. for art deco themes, antiquities, etc., while it was important not to use others that were alien to what was being written about.  Above all was the need for balance between variety, suitability and being easy to read.

Having defined all these mediums and how they could be built on each other to make a worthy end-product, he suggested introducing variety.  Why not let your second medium take some of the text?  Maybe adapt the title of the piece or, leaving the title to stand prominently, pull out a few key words to act as a 'strap line' to explain what was being written about.  He suggested it was rather like a sub-editor would pick out a phrase from the next paragraph to act as a sub-heading, simply to break up an otherwise solid page of text and make the page visually attractive.

'Let the letters themselves play with each other,' he said.  And he brought out one example after another of how this could be done, making the uprights of p's, l's and d's form part of the picture, using an o as a ball, and so on.  He also spoke of lost opportunities, where an element of humour or sauciness could have been introduced, if appropriate, to add to the reader's enjoyment or, perhaps, to spark initial interest.

Hence his final example was a piece promoting a range of professional clothing for ladies.  The skirts of these garments were sufficiently generous to drape naturally, curtain-like, between knees accidentally spread apart when seated, to avoid inadvertent exposure of lingerie.  The picture he produced was of the House of Commons, where ladies seated behind the front bench were wearing the product.  He moved the words 'professional clothing', so that one of the o's was placed neatly between a lady's knees and then replaced the letter with an archery target indicating that, with this garment, nothing untoward was visible.

At this point I awoke, with the detail clear in my mind and wondered what I could do with it.  My skills are definitely with words rather than pictures!  The best I could do was to lay it before you, dear reader, to amuse, confuse or simply be disregarded with a sympathetic smile, to await the next post.  Meanwhile, if you are of the persuasion for handwritten letters - I believe they still exist - why not let your letters play with each other and surprise your friends!