It's been on my mind for some time to write about my family history
- snippets here and there, perhaps. And now, by coincidence, my
sponsor has asked me to think about this very thing. Here's as good a
place as any to work out what's important and what's not. So, from
time to time, this category will be used to collect, collate and gather
my thoughts.
I'm going to start with my grandfather. He's been around a lot
lately, one way and another. Footsteps on the landing, echoes in other
places.
He was a character, my grandfather. I can't say I ever knew him
particularly well, but by the time I got to know him at all he was
already an old man. I like to think it was me who christened him
Grumpy. Certainly it's only my sister and I who called him that.
When I was a little girl, first at boarding school, probably aged
about 6 or 7, I used to go to Granny and Grumpy's for exeat weekends.
Twice a term, we had exeats. And thence I would go. To Ticehurst in
E. Sussex. They lived together, then, in the Old Vicarage which is now
a home of some sort, I believe. It was a huge house. I remember an
imposing entrance hall, with a balcony landing (though that may well be
wrong) and a staircase sweeping down the right hand side. Grumpy had a
study to the left of the hall, and it was very much a private room -
intrusions were not welcomed and there was a thrill of naughtiness with
every step across the threshold. He was away a lot; it was mostly
Granny I was visiting. I suspect he may only have been in his 50s or
early 60s then, and may well have been in Kenya. But he may equally
have been much younger and visiting a girlfriend.
Anyway, the study had all sorts of things in it which thrilled and
chilled in equal measure. A tiger skin rug with the snarling head of
the beast. I remember its teeth and the roughness of its tongue and
the distinctly odd look of its glass eyes. Let me be clear; this was a
real tiger. It had been shot. I doubt it had been shot by Grumpy
himself, although it's possible; but I suspect his father, the General,
was the real culprit. There was a stool made from an elephant's foot.
Surprisingly bristly, and the toenails were slightly cracked. Poor
elephant. A letter opener made from what can only have been a very
newly hatched crocodile. There were other things, too. I vaguely
remember a zebra rug somewhere in the house, but I think that might
have been the living room. There were a trio of stools, all very low,
three legged and intricately beaded. They were tribal elders' stools,
and only men were allowed to sit on them; Grumpy would become irate - a
bellowing, roaring, tower of wrath - if a female bottom were ever found
in the vicinity of the stools. Granny used to let me sit on the floor
and use them as a table on which to balance my tea . I don't know if
he knew. They will have been tribal and from what I learnt of him
later they will have had great ceremonial significance. I can only
guess at the tribe (I'd guess either Kikuyu or Masai); and I won't even
stab at the significance.
I remember Grumpy smoking a pipe. Later, he was vehemently
anti-smoking and until recently I was quite sure I must have made this
up, but it turns out he may have smoked as a younger man.
The General, Grumpy and my father were all given the same forename.
So, to distinguish t'other from which, they used others. The General
was always referred to as the General (whether to his face or not I
have no idea, since he was long dead when I came along). Grumpy became
Bill and my father was Shuki.
As I say, I didn't know him well, but he's an imposing presence in
my life nonetheless. I used to dine out on stories of
my-grandfather-the-eccentric. And indeed he was, in later years. But
he was so much more than that, first.
He grew up in India. The General was an officer in the British Army
and we have pictures of elephant races at the Raja's palace; stories of
tiger hunting (hence the skin); and so on. I say Grumpy grew up there,
but in fact he was sent 'home' to England, to boarding school, at a
fairly early age. Preparatory school, I should imagine. I *think* his
mother, Ducky, returned to England too, to be with him, which shows an
element of feminine warmth which, sadly, wouldn't be a prevailing theme
in his life. He certainly went on to Cambridge where he studied
medicine, and at some point, obviously, he qualified as a doctor. I
have an obituary from the British Medical Journal, somewhere, which
details all this stuff.
He became interested in vaccination, generally, and tuberculosis in
particular, and TB was to be the theme of his working life. He was, I
believe, an extremely good doctor. I don't think he ever confused
himself with god; and he had a true compassion and generosity of spirit
- although he hid it well beneath a gruff exterior. He was passionate
about the things he believed in and, although I have no idea what his
politics were, I think back and see a true small L liberal in many of
the actions I know about.
His first wife, my biological grandmother, was a society debutante.
I'm not sure that her parents altogether approved of the match, but
since he was her second husband they perhaps didn't have much choice.
I think she hoped for a continuation of her glamorous life on the
London social scene with her dashing doctor husband - see how I'm
romanticising this? - but he was always restless, and they moved to
East Africa, where he travelled about, a kind of itinerant GP,
educating and encouraging vaccination programmes, and administering the
needle regularly. This was about the time of the White Mischief film,
and my father has memories - albeit dim - of many of the characters on
the edges of that story. There was a large British colonial community
in Kenya at the time, and my family was in Nakuru. One of Grumpy's
sisters was a teacher at a British girls' school (in Nairobi, I think),
and remains famous amongst its increasingly aged alumni. My
grandmother was alone often. I imagine a big house; I know there were
staff - at least a cook and a house boy and probably a garden boy too;
and an ayah for the children of whom there would eventually be two.
There are many stories from this time, most of which I am only half
conscious of. A tale in the BMJ obituary of Grumpy curing a remote
village of the plague by offering a shilling for every rat tail he was
brought. This simple remedy earned him the soubriquet of 'the rat
doctor' and many years later my uncle would be dining with members of
the Kenyan government, to find that the minister he was seated next to
was a child in the village at that time and remembered Grumpy as
something of a legend. He is also reputed to have treated Jomo
Kenyatta in prison during the time of the Mau Mau uprising. He was
certainly well regarded in Kenya, and returned there often even much
later in his life.
I've read a story, too, about a plane crash in the Sahara desert.
At some time after Grumpy's death, Dad briefly had his papers -
letters, diaries, newspaper clippings. The plane had been flying -
where? Across Africa? From the UK? I don't remember. But it must
have been in the early days of long(ish) distance flight. And it
crashed in the Sahara. There was the pilot, Grumpy, another man and a
woman who was a journalist, I think. They had to wait 3 or 4 days for
rescue, using the plane for shelter and carefully rationing the water
and biscuits they had.
All very exciting, but always without my grandmother. It's not
surprising she fell in love with someone else, really. I'll come back
to this, but it is one of the abiding sadnesses of my family history
that she left my father, his brother and their father and wasn't seen
again until I was nearly an adult. I grew up thinking she was to blame
for running off. It turns out, inevitably, not to have been so simple,
and blame if it is appropriate at all, should probably be fairly evenly
apportioned amongst the adults who were then involved, and who became
involved in the following couple of years.
Anyway, Grumpy remarried and his new wife (Granny) brought two of
her own children to the family. And then between them they had two
more.
I run out of stories for a long time, now. Until Ticehurst, in
fact. When they came back to England my father was already an adult,
all bar the shouting. He grew up and was educated in Kenya, and came
to live in England when he was 18.
At some point, after my visits to Ticehurst had been going on for a
number of years, I think, Grumpy left Granny. This made for a very
complicated life. She couldn't forgive him, and the entire family tied
itself in knots to keep from her the fact that we had all stayed in
touch with him. This is probably something else to come back to.
Grumpy lived with his girlfriend, who shared the same name as his
first wife (although as a child, I didn't know this - being only dimly
aware of a first wife). As a teenager, I visited them at exeats, too,
and lied to Granny about where I was going. In retirement, Grumpy
became almost deliberately eccentric, and although he was extremely
good company, he was also good story fodder. His partner's brother was
a farmer, and kept sheep and cows. At some point, Grumpy took on a
lamb who had been born with a twisted neck so that it looked
permanently over one shoulder and could only walk in circles. It was
destined not to live long, but under Grumpy's shelter it lived well for
a few years. It was called Sheepy and it was joined by a friend -
Boyo. Grumpy used to walk them on leads; Sheepy making circular
progress down the lane and Boyo bounding. A sheep is a surprisingly
strong animal, you know - not easy to train to leash! After a bout of
shingles, Grumpy was increasingly inclined to dress in a kikoy (an East
African sarong) or an old skirt of his partner's. This was later
topped by a jumper knitted from wool shorn from the sheep. The jumper
was always decorated with bits of twig and sheep shit - whether from
hedgerow adventures or because he didn't wash the wool before he spun
it was never entirely clear, but the latter makes for a better yarn
(groan. Sorry).
He was passionate about things. I was a child, and later a truly
self obsessed teenager, and I deeply regret that I don't know much
about the things about which he was impassioned. He bought some
woodland (because he thought a road was going to be built through it)
and he and his partner discovered badger setts and spent many summer
evenings in a shed they built there, watching badgers and drinking
wine. I later planted a tree there, with a poem buried at the roots,
to celebrate Moo's birth, and Grumpy used to give me updates on its
growth. He loved his sheep - at one stage, Boyo had foot rot and
Grumpy made him a set of leather wellies to keep his hoofs dry while
they recovered. Later, he also loved his cat, McCafferty, and a family
of ducks who used to court bereavement by nesting in the patio pot just
a whisker's twitch away from McCafferty's bed the other side of the
porch door.
He also loved women - often too well. But most of all, he loved his
children. And it is another defining sadness of my family that he was
almost entirely unable to express that love by any means other than
gruffness. He bore a great burden of guilt for separating his sons
from their mother; a guilt which he tried to alleviate towards the end
of his life by making contact with her to make amends. Sadly, I think
he caused as much damage to his (and her) later children as he repaired
for their earlier ones. I'm not sure that, living, he ever told his
sons how much he loved them, although he wrote it down in a letter they
received after his death.
He was a difficult, I should think almost an impossible man to live
with. Opinionated, stubborn, strong-willed, intelligent and downright
ornery. But I never had to live with him, and he's been with me often,
in the last few years, and I have felt his strength and his humour and
his wisdom, and I have been grateful for them all.
