My parents married late in
life. Although my mother had remained unmarried
up to that point, my father had been a widower.
With his first wife, he
had raised a family. Their five children
had all left the nest before the first Mrs. Roger Temple died.
A year or two later he met
my mother, they fell in love, and history was made.
By a strange quirk of
fate, I entered the world on my parent’s first wedding anniversary. No siblings followed in the succeeding years.
I have only vague memories
of my dad; he died when I was four.
Shortly before my eighth
birthday, a visitor called. Mother gave
me the choice of playing in the garden or my room – I chose the garden.
The garden at Ozleworth is
a fair size, and I ran down to a favourite spot where I could do as I pleased
without kicking up the lawn or disturbing the rhododendrons and such.
A climbing frame and
swing, which had once been closer to the conservatory, was now down there, as
were various balls, bats, toy guns, and bikes.
Invariably my dogs would have followed me.
I remained at play for
some time before hunger took me back to the house.
‘You don’t remember me’,
said the visitor smiling. She was of an
age similar to my mum’s.
She was my aunt Marilyn,
my mum’s elder sister. She had called to
break the news that their younger sister Joan had died.
Until that time, I had
assumed that mother and I were the only family we had. I was aware that my father had another family
before my birth, but I assumed they had followed their parents to the grave;
they did not visit, for instance; and mother seldom spoke of them.
The idea of a living
relative and hints that there may be more was something new and exciting for me. I became curious, which mother found tiresome
and perhaps painful, for although she would usually reply in a bright and
breezy manner, she would occasionally pause with a look of mild irritation in
her eye.
Eventually she sent me to
my room with a plate of sandwiches and a beaker of juice.
A few days later mother
travelled down to Bristol for Joan’s funeral.
She returned in a sombre mood shortly before my bedtime.
I was already in my
pyjamas. Mrs. Cooper who had came up
from the village to sit with me, told me to kiss mother good night and ushered
me off to bed.
‘Let him stay and have a quiet mug of chocolate while you and I
have a tipple or tea’, mother said.
I curled up on the sofa
while the two women busied themselves in the kitchen, mother making tea, and
Mrs. Cooper popping a pizza in the oven.
The tea they drank was
“Granny Cooper’s recipe”, granny Cooper being Mrs. Cooper’s mother-in-law, who
had laced liberally her tea with gin.
They brought the tea and
chocolate in on a tray and settled themselves in armchairs close to the fire,
where, at first, they spoke in murmurs.
If I remained quiet, it was
likely that they would forget I was there, enabling me to remain up beyond my
bedtime. Once I had drank my chocolate,
I feigned sleep.
They must have glanced my
way or came over before they slipped out to get their pizza, but they soon
returned with their trays and continued their gossip in slightly louder tones.
Aunt Joan had been younger
than mum by five years. She had always
been wild. She had brothers closer her
age and had been a tomboy up to the time she started secondary school, where
she fell in with a new crowd and became a Mod.
According to mum, Aunt
Joan became a ‘right mare’. Because she
was the youngest of the daughters, she had been too often allowed her own way. It was reckoned that because the daughters
had only been spanked or slapped by their parents rather than flogged, belted
or battered into next week, like most children of the day, the girls had been
spoilt – particularly Joan, who, according to her grandmother, had been ‘born
with a smirk on her face’.
Despite the prevailing
permissive attitudes, Joan had to
marry; and her future husband had to
get over a black eye from her dad, and a hiding from his own dad into the bargain.
Although being humble
factory workers, mother found her new in-laws rather nice, honest, hardworking
people who deserved their son as much as her own parents deserved her wayward
sister. However, their father, who was
‘no better than he ought to be’, was embarrassed slightly by the connection.
Mum’s brother-in-law
insisted to the family that he was a ‘market trader’; however, granddad
insisted his son-in-law was just a ‘barrow boy – and not even jumped-up at
that’.
Despite the irony, for a
short while, granddad turned his back on his wayward daughter completely when
she decided to stand by her man following his arrest for possession of drugs.
Clarke, for that was his
name, was a shady character. He could get all manner of goods ‘wholesale’
or otherwise. Granddad refused Christmas
and birthday presents from him for ‘fear of arrest for receiving or dealing in
stolen goods’.
Granddad often made the
idle threat of calling social services to remove his grandchildren from the
bosom of their parents. It came as
little surprise to him to learn that as teenagers his grandchildren were more
‘off the rails’ than their own parents had ever been. Two of the young Clarkes’ ended up in borstal;
and at least one of the daughters, the second eldest, embraced enthusiastically
the loose morals of the age.
Mrs. Cooper rose to make
herself more comfortable. She felt
slightly unsteady on her feet.
‘Stay the night’, mother
suggested, ‘you go and refresh yourself, and I’ll put him to bed and make us
another pot of tea’.
Mother approached the sofa
to stir me from my feigned sleep, and so ended the tale of the life and times
of Aunt Joan Clarke.
