Sarah is 80 this year. She idolised my mum who, admittedly, was good with small children not her own. In any case, this was in the years when my mum was a Sunday School teacher and must have had child-amusing tricks up her sleeve.
Sarah is one of my long-lost cousins - found, as long-lost relatives so often are, through Ancestry.com. Hers is one of the mysterious faces which kept popping up anonymously in the ancient family albums. Sarah’s grandmother, Lily, was the sister of my grandmother, Daisy. When Lily’s daughter and grandchildren – Sarah and Derek - were evacuated from Tooting during the war, they crammed into a small end-terrace in Cheltenham Spa with my grandmother and mum. Sarah was then a very small child, and my mum a young teen.
Talking to Sarah is a revelation. Just like my mum, her mother and grandmother used to bang on endlessly about “The Mumbles” as if it were Manderley.
Mumbles (Welsh: Mwmbwls) is a headland on Swansea Bay with a couple of big rocky promontories just off it. Apparently a French sailor decided they looked like women’s breasts and so called them “Les Mamelles” - which in English mouths became “Mumbles”. There is, for me, a poignancy in the fact that both Sarah and I grew up with our mothers pining for a return to those Welsh breasts; to the place where their mothers and grandmothers had tucked their dresses in their knickers, been happy, had fun.
The Welsh connection is significant. Lily and Daisy came from a family of itinerant railway contractors, who moved around hoping for casual work as the railway was built. They lived in ramshackle wooden huts alongside the rail tracks. I don’t yet know how long they lived in Wales or how often they went to the Mumbles.
At some point, Daisy took to religion, and she may have been the only one of thirteen children to do so; I have yet to find out. Given the religious fervour in the chapels of Wales at that time, was Daisy perhaps recruited into a Sunday School, or taken off to services by a zealot? Lily, I have discovered, was free of religious fanaticism, and I have seen the pub she drank in just off Tooting Broadway. My father’s family were entirely teetotal and so was my mum. Strong liquor had never passed Daisy’s lips, although I have a sliver of memory that she had had a sip of sherry once in a blue moon.
Daisy contrived to “marry up” – we don’t yet know how. I wonder if religious fervour played a part: did she meet her husband Jack in a chapel? She was undoubtedly a striking beauty, and a catch in that respect; but Jack was handsome enough. Somehow Daisy went from the railway tracks in South Wales to the regency splendour of Cheltenham Spa, and how she revelled in it.
My mother, to general dismay, “married down”, although on the face of it my father was a Master Butcher with a van, a shop and an acre of land behind it. She walked into a trap, although I’d bet my mortgage that my mum ensnared my father in the first instance. Long in the tooth and on the shelf, they were both sent on a Christian Endeavour holiday by their respective families, my mother with a chaperone who probably engineered the match.
Once married, they were both stuck; in a cramped and dirty cottage, within easy grasping distance of both of their mothers.
In stark contrast, Sarah moved to Sutton, to the decent, clean house she still lives in, and wrote letters to my mum about her happy, normal life. My poor mum, aghast at her own fate, must have wondered – often – how it all went so wrong.
Another great blog, Jo. I love your opening, “Sarah is 80” – dropping us right in the middle of a story. Who is Sarah? What are you talking about? – and then you go on to explain it all. I note the very poignant second sentence saying your mum “was good with small children not her own”. There is a whole story behind that of her relationship with you and yours with her. It would be so easy to trip lightly over it to the main story – but it drew me back at the end.
The whole adventure of family history delving is fascinating. I’ve had almost nothing to do with my known cousins since childhood – in fact I’ve had much more to do and feel more in common with a cousin who is no blood relation at all, as he was adopted. Through online research I was introduced to a distant cousin with whom I didn’t have much in common at all – apart from family history hunting – but was introduced to a family story line quite different from my own, and given some photos showing tantalising family resemblances.
What wonderful photos – do you know who all the people are? When my mum died I found a photo album in the back of her wardrobe which I had never seen before. She must have grabbed it when her mother died. Fortunately I recognise some of the people in the photos, but by no means all. We really should annotate our own photo albums for our children!
Another great post. I loved the idea of the Mumbles and ‘pining for a return to those Welsh breasts’ and what knickers! Hilarious. I remember baggy school knickers for doing gym but you could have made 4 pairs out of those white ones. I do remember paddling with my dress tucked into my knickers but as the person on the left…we would never have been allowed to show them to the world- what a travesty that would have been.
I am so glad you have discovered more about the religious history and that not all the family were blighted/blessed with the same fervour. What a treat to find your cousin and fill in more of the puzzle. Like the others, I look forward to the next bulletin – great hook to draw us into wanting more….how did she react to those letters? Poor woman.
Another intriguing post, Jo. I especially loved the humour. Comparing Mumbles to Manderley made me laugh out loud. But on a more serious note, as other respondents have noted, it’s the way that lives are shaped by choices and societal forces like religious belief that is striking. It begs a lot of questions too, especially the ending. I look forward to more…
Such ramifications of who is better than who! And whether marriage helps you up or forces you down. And how the war affected family life. And what is the place or time that represents ‘happiness’. This is so full of the things that shape our lives and send us off in one direction or another.
I loved reading this, Jo. You’ve created not just a nostalgic view of your relatives but also about choices and consequences. I do wonder about your Mum’s thoughts as she opened another happy letter from Sarah!
This is so telling about the nuances of class and class mobility in England before the 60s. I wonder if Wales also offered an escape from those class identities. I am intrigued that your father was a master butcher. My father was also destined to become one and take over his father’s butcher’s shop in Scotland, where it still bear’s my grandfather’s name. .But after the war my father rebelled and fled first to hong Kong and then Australia. According to my mother, my father changed his name at her mothers insistence because she did not want her daughter married to somebody in trade, especially the butchers trade. However, some letters from my father suggests that this may not be the whole story. I do remember Getting very cross with my grandmother not long after my father died, because she lamented the fact that her daughter had married a lame duck, As she put it.
Just to add:
How fascinating to look at the ramifications of class and status for Lyn as well, and how your father, like my grandfather and Chile, escaped his destiny by migration. I loved the idea of the Mumbles as Manderley for Daisy, a place of dreams away from the drudgery.