Monday, January 24, 2011
Family history again
Following on from my last post, there are still many things that I don't understand about my family history. If I had been less reticent, less afraid of upsetting my mother, I could have asked more questions, and perhaps learned more. My grandmother, aunt and uncle, all of whom could perhaps have helped fill in the gaps, were always careful to deflect my questions and tell me I should ask my mother. My mother, when questioned about aspects of her years in Ireland, would talk for hours about the dances she went to, the friends she made, the wonderful times they all enjoyed, but would shy away of talking about her husband, my father. Often she would burst into tears, saying it was all too upsetting to go over unhappy memories, and leave the room. When you're a child, you catch on quickly and learn not to make your mother cry, so I stopped asking. For years, I was never interested and it didn't matter.
In my teens, I became interested in girls and started smoking. Both of these things encouraged a certain degree of secretiveness on my part; the smoking because I was only 14 and the girls because my mother was excessively prim and prissy about sex and was also a snob - she would not have approved of several of my choices of girlfriend (or girls who I aspired to make my girlfriend - strangely, my chat-up lines didn't always work) and, although we ourselves lived in a Council flat, was dead against me going out with girls who lived in Council flats.
In my teens, I became interested in girls and started smoking. Both of these things encouraged a certain degree of secretiveness on my part; the smoking because I was only 14 and the girls because my mother was excessively prim and prissy about sex and was also a snob - she would not have approved of several of my choices of girlfriend (or girls who I aspired to make my girlfriend - strangely, my chat-up lines didn't always work) and, although we ourselves lived in a Council flat, was dead against me going out with girls who lived in Council flats.
Monday, January 03, 2011
Christmas Books and where that leads to...
All the family know that I'm an avid reader. I'm not so bad now - when I was younger and the children were small, there were days when I'd very selfishly shut myself away in an invisibly-walled cubicle containing me, my armchair and a book. Ironically, now I'm retired and in theory have all the time in the world, I seem to spend less time reading. Possibly that's because I now have the internet (I don't mean I've just got Internet access, I've been using t'Internet since 1990, but it wasn't so exciting then) and I find that it suits me more to go online and do stuff, none of which is of any great importance and can be broken off and resumed after the inevitable interruptions have gone away, than to try and create that soundproof bubble necessary to concentrated reading.
I am circumlocuting again. I got some really nice books at Christmas. My tastes in SF are fairly well-known to my family, and current publishing trends do not deliver hard SF of the type I relish in sufficient quantities to keep me satisfied, so the choice of Christmas books is often limited to those at the fantasy end of the spectrum that I can stomach. As it turns out, this isn't many. Discount the dungeons-and-dragons type novels, the crude Tolkien imitations, the faux-Harry Potter epics, and there isn't much that I would bother with. Enter Stephen Donaldson, author of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever". I started reading his first (and at the time, as we thought, only) trilogy in the early 1980's. It transpired that the story didn't end with book three, and there followed years in which we hung on the appearance of books four, five and six. The "we" in this case were us and our good friends from our Chelmsford days, who moved to Cheshire a little while after we moved to Kent, and with whom we kept in close touch for many years. We swapped the books back and forth and discussed them at length. To be honest, by the end of book six, we'd have cheerfully grabbed Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, by the throat and shouted at him "For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!" We were all disappointed that Donaldson had still not provided a satisfying conclusion to the epic at the end of book six, and by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement we moved on, determined not to let the obviously long-term-planned financial targets of a canny American literature graduate spoil our enjoyment of the genre any further.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I got yet another Thomas Covenant tome at Christmas. And I was genuinely surprised at how pleased I was to get it. I'd gone years thinking that I wouldn't ever read another Donaldson novel, because I felt he was just manipulating the readership into buying yet another book, just like Dickens did all those years ago with his part-works. And yet, here I was on Christmas morning, in Spain, amidst the grand-children and Lego and wrapping paper, with a silly grin on my face and a genuine sense of delight, like finding an old friend in an unfamiliar place.
Needless to say, the feeling didn't last. I've just read, in another biography, of which perhaps more later, of a man and woman who drifted apart in their late teens and then met again in their thirties, each hopeful that the feelings that they'd had for each other as teenagers could be re-kindled into proper adult emotions and lasting feelings. Nah, it was never going to work. So it was with me and Donaldson; he betrayed my trust when I was younger and I thought it was worth giving him another chance after all these years, but it just wasn't to be. I got about 40 pages in when I was gripped with the overwhelming desire to grab Thomas Covenant by the throat and, once again, scream at him ""For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!"
Thus it was that I put aside the umpteenth Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, and turned to the other books I had been given. There was Terry Wogan's 2001 autobiography "Is it me?", Valerie Grove's 2007 biography of John Mortimer, and a biography of Barack Obama.
Wogan was pure candy-floss, but very diverting and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and ended up wishing I'd paid more attention to him when he was on the radio and TV a lot more than he is now. Like a lot of people, I think I'd got a bit blase about him and felt that he was always on, so I never bothered to watch/listen.
So, then - Obama next, or Mortimer. Mortimer, I think, on the basis that I liked a lot of his columns in the papers years ago, I'm naturally a small-L lefty-liberal (not the Nick Clegg-style Tory-disguised-as-LibDem Liberal, thank you very much!), verging towards Socialist/Communist, and I'd admired his advocacy on behalf of stuff like the Oz Schoolkids case and various other censorship cases back in the '70's and '80's. Part way through, enjoying the description of some of the antics of his ancestors, I had a sudden hankering to resume my search for my ancestors. This coincided, oddly enough, with a notice in the Births, Marriages & Deaths columns of "The Times" of the death of a distant relative on the Irish side, the 6th Baronet Keane, from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. He was 102, which I found very encouraging....
That evening I went on to the Irish Government Health Department website (I know, it's contrary, since they have a General Registers Office, with a website, but you can't look up stuff on there and you can't order copy certificates either!) and started another search for my father's records. Before you think "We were right all those years - he IS a bastard!", let me tell you that I know my father's name. It's on my birth certificate. However, everything that I was told about him when I was young doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of someone who spent a career as a cynical, suspicious, disbelieving toe-rag of an Internal Auditor. And the sad thing is, there's no-one around now to ask, to find out the truth.
I was told that my father was the illegitimate son of a member of the wealthy, titled and well-regarded Keane family, who owned a bacon factory in Cappoquin, near Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. His mother, a servant, was supposed to have enjoyed a dalliance with a member of the family and got in the family way. She was shuttled off to somewhere else to have the child, possibly at a place called Ennistmon, and may have been involved in his upbringing; in any event, in the version of the story I was told, she was never mentioned again. The child, my father, was granted an allowance and eventually lived in England, in Chingford, where he met my mother, Ethel Osborn, a seamstress, sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's. My aunt told my wife, in an apparently unguarded moment, that he'd had a very thick Irish accent and was much older than my mother. I was always told that he died in 1947, the year of my birth, at the age of 47, meaning that he was born in 1900. My searches in 2005 led me to the conclusion that the only person who could possibly have been my father, the only man called Terence Francis Keane, was born in 1890 in Ennistmon. This would have made him 21 years older than my mother, rather than 10 years older, as I had always been told. Maybe my mother, already smarting under the disapproval of her sister and parents, tried to minimise the difference in their ages, who knows? As for his dying in 1947, when I paid the Irish GRO to search for his death certificate they came up blank.
It was this that prompted Mary and me go to Ireland in 2005, for a brief stay in Dublin to access the records at the GRO research room. This was where we found the Ennistmon-born Terence Francis Keane, the only one we could find with a birth within 30 years of the date we sought. More intriguingly, the only death we found for the same name was in 1972, two years after our marriage and just after the birth of our son. Could my mother have told me less than the truth? Yes, without a doubt.
Our searches for a Marriage Certificate for Terence Francis Keane drew a blank in Ireland, as they did for Ethel Teresa Osborn. Ok, so they must have married in England. Odd, though, because my aunt had hinted that no-one had gone to the wedding - surely, if they met in Chingford, just a few miles from where my mother lived with my grand-parents in Tottenham, if they hadn't married in Ireland wouldn't they have married locally? And, if they married locally, why did no-one go to the wedding? So, back in England, we went to the Family Records Centre, in Middleton Street, Islington, to look for a record of marriage. Again, no luck. Very odd.
My mother always told me that she came back to England in 1947 after the death of my father and, after living with my grandmother, now widowed (my grandfather, Harry Osborn, died two days before I was born, which was why I was named after him), met up with Patrick (Paddy) Attridge, an ex-serviceman whose family had lived near the Keane's in Ireland in the 1930's and 1040's. My mother and Paddy married and moved into a flat above a wet fish shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham.
Much later, I found, among my mother's effects, a Catholic prayer book in which was inscribed, inside the front cover, the Latin tag "Omnia Vincit Amor", meaning "Love Conquers All". This was dated 1942, many years before my mother was supposed to have re-met Paddy.
Paddy's story was equally interesting - he was born in 1908, one of 22 (TWENTY-TWO!!!!) children, some of whom were "Irish twins", in other words they were two children born in the same year but not at the same time, just ten or eleven months apart. He was born in 1908 and in 1929, when he would have been 21, he went to the USA. He worked at various jobs, including bar work during Prohibition, and at one point in the late 1930's was approached to act as Fred Astaire's camera double - he did bear a striking resemblance - but he turned this down. In 1939 he decided to return to England to enlist in the British Army, a strange decision for an Irishman living in America, and embarked on the "SS Georgic" (I can still remember the suitcase, with its stickers, being in the back of the big wardrobe) back to England. He was sent to the Isle of Wight and was a crucial element of the island's defences, marching up and down with a broom handle over his shoulder in imitation of a rifle. He eventually was attached to the Royal Artillery and joined 8th Army ("The Desert Rats") in North Africa, on a 25-pounder unit, with which he remained for most of the war. He fought at El Alamein, was invalided back to Alexandria with pneumonia, then rejoined his unit (minus most of his possessions and trophies which had been stolen by the Egyptian medical orderlies) for the campaign that ended up on the Italian mainland. He fought at Monte Cassino, which he only ever once talked about as being "hellish", and ended up in Greece as part of the occupying force at the end of the war. When the War ended, the Greek Communists, who had provided most of the impetus to resist the German/Italian occupation, decided that things were not to be the same as they had been before hostilities, led a well-armed campaign to decide on the form of the next government. British troops were used to keep the peace between warring factions, and were then obviously targets for both sides. Paddy always bore the scar of a bullet that nicked the bridge of his nose on its way to fatally enter the head of his his patrol partner, with whom he had thus far survived the war. I've never known the name of this man, but from Paddy's occasional mentions of this part of his war experiences (and there were very few of those) I feel that he had a great attachment to him.
He had an abiding respect for the Ghurkas, who he said had saved his life and that of his comrades many times. In the North African Desert the Ghurkas were employed as perimeter sentries (among other things) and they used to eschew the usual static guarding duties, preferring to roam about in the dark. Paddy said that they used to creep up on sentries and feel their ankles - so softly that the sentry never knew they were even within a hundred yards - and then if the sentry was wearing British Army webbing gaiters they would move on. If, on the other hand, they were wearing German Afrika Corps leather-suede boots,or officer issue leather full boots, the Ghurka kukri would slash their throat and they would bleed their life out on the sand. Any German encroachement into the British lines would be met with similar treatment.
When we went as a family to the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) in about 1981, on an Open Day, I watched an unarmed combat display by a unit of the Ghurka Rifles. It brought tears to my eyes as I remembered Paddy's tales of the Ghurkas alongside whom he'd fought.
I am circumlocuting again. I got some really nice books at Christmas. My tastes in SF are fairly well-known to my family, and current publishing trends do not deliver hard SF of the type I relish in sufficient quantities to keep me satisfied, so the choice of Christmas books is often limited to those at the fantasy end of the spectrum that I can stomach. As it turns out, this isn't many. Discount the dungeons-and-dragons type novels, the crude Tolkien imitations, the faux-Harry Potter epics, and there isn't much that I would bother with. Enter Stephen Donaldson, author of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever". I started reading his first (and at the time, as we thought, only) trilogy in the early 1980's. It transpired that the story didn't end with book three, and there followed years in which we hung on the appearance of books four, five and six. The "we" in this case were us and our good friends from our Chelmsford days, who moved to Cheshire a little while after we moved to Kent, and with whom we kept in close touch for many years. We swapped the books back and forth and discussed them at length. To be honest, by the end of book six, we'd have cheerfully grabbed Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, by the throat and shouted at him "For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!" We were all disappointed that Donaldson had still not provided a satisfying conclusion to the epic at the end of book six, and by a sort of unspoken mutual agreement we moved on, determined not to let the obviously long-term-planned financial targets of a canny American literature graduate spoil our enjoyment of the genre any further.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I got yet another Thomas Covenant tome at Christmas. And I was genuinely surprised at how pleased I was to get it. I'd gone years thinking that I wouldn't ever read another Donaldson novel, because I felt he was just manipulating the readership into buying yet another book, just like Dickens did all those years ago with his part-works. And yet, here I was on Christmas morning, in Spain, amidst the grand-children and Lego and wrapping paper, with a silly grin on my face and a genuine sense of delight, like finding an old friend in an unfamiliar place.
Needless to say, the feeling didn't last. I've just read, in another biography, of which perhaps more later, of a man and woman who drifted apart in their late teens and then met again in their thirties, each hopeful that the feelings that they'd had for each other as teenagers could be re-kindled into proper adult emotions and lasting feelings. Nah, it was never going to work. So it was with me and Donaldson; he betrayed my trust when I was younger and I thought it was worth giving him another chance after all these years, but it just wasn't to be. I got about 40 pages in when I was gripped with the overwhelming desire to grab Thomas Covenant by the throat and, once again, scream at him ""For ****'s sake, get a bloody grip and start behaving like a man!!!!"
Thus it was that I put aside the umpteenth Chronicle of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever, and turned to the other books I had been given. There was Terry Wogan's 2001 autobiography "Is it me?", Valerie Grove's 2007 biography of John Mortimer, and a biography of Barack Obama.
Wogan was pure candy-floss, but very diverting and amusing. I thoroughly enjoyed it and ended up wishing I'd paid more attention to him when he was on the radio and TV a lot more than he is now. Like a lot of people, I think I'd got a bit blase about him and felt that he was always on, so I never bothered to watch/listen.
So, then - Obama next, or Mortimer. Mortimer, I think, on the basis that I liked a lot of his columns in the papers years ago, I'm naturally a small-L lefty-liberal (not the Nick Clegg-style Tory-disguised-as-LibDem Liberal, thank you very much!), verging towards Socialist/Communist, and I'd admired his advocacy on behalf of stuff like the Oz Schoolkids case and various other censorship cases back in the '70's and '80's. Part way through, enjoying the description of some of the antics of his ancestors, I had a sudden hankering to resume my search for my ancestors. This coincided, oddly enough, with a notice in the Births, Marriages & Deaths columns of "The Times" of the death of a distant relative on the Irish side, the 6th Baronet Keane, from Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. He was 102, which I found very encouraging....
That evening I went on to the Irish Government Health Department website (I know, it's contrary, since they have a General Registers Office, with a website, but you can't look up stuff on there and you can't order copy certificates either!) and started another search for my father's records. Before you think "We were right all those years - he IS a bastard!", let me tell you that I know my father's name. It's on my birth certificate. However, everything that I was told about him when I was young doesn't hold up under the scrutiny of someone who spent a career as a cynical, suspicious, disbelieving toe-rag of an Internal Auditor. And the sad thing is, there's no-one around now to ask, to find out the truth.
I was told that my father was the illegitimate son of a member of the wealthy, titled and well-regarded Keane family, who owned a bacon factory in Cappoquin, near Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. His mother, a servant, was supposed to have enjoyed a dalliance with a member of the family and got in the family way. She was shuttled off to somewhere else to have the child, possibly at a place called Ennistmon, and may have been involved in his upbringing; in any event, in the version of the story I was told, she was never mentioned again. The child, my father, was granted an allowance and eventually lived in England, in Chingford, where he met my mother, Ethel Osborn, a seamstress, sometime in the late 1920's or early 1930's. My aunt told my wife, in an apparently unguarded moment, that he'd had a very thick Irish accent and was much older than my mother. I was always told that he died in 1947, the year of my birth, at the age of 47, meaning that he was born in 1900. My searches in 2005 led me to the conclusion that the only person who could possibly have been my father, the only man called Terence Francis Keane, was born in 1890 in Ennistmon. This would have made him 21 years older than my mother, rather than 10 years older, as I had always been told. Maybe my mother, already smarting under the disapproval of her sister and parents, tried to minimise the difference in their ages, who knows? As for his dying in 1947, when I paid the Irish GRO to search for his death certificate they came up blank.
It was this that prompted Mary and me go to Ireland in 2005, for a brief stay in Dublin to access the records at the GRO research room. This was where we found the Ennistmon-born Terence Francis Keane, the only one we could find with a birth within 30 years of the date we sought. More intriguingly, the only death we found for the same name was in 1972, two years after our marriage and just after the birth of our son. Could my mother have told me less than the truth? Yes, without a doubt.
Our searches for a Marriage Certificate for Terence Francis Keane drew a blank in Ireland, as they did for Ethel Teresa Osborn. Ok, so they must have married in England. Odd, though, because my aunt had hinted that no-one had gone to the wedding - surely, if they met in Chingford, just a few miles from where my mother lived with my grand-parents in Tottenham, if they hadn't married in Ireland wouldn't they have married locally? And, if they married locally, why did no-one go to the wedding? So, back in England, we went to the Family Records Centre, in Middleton Street, Islington, to look for a record of marriage. Again, no luck. Very odd.
My mother always told me that she came back to England in 1947 after the death of my father and, after living with my grandmother, now widowed (my grandfather, Harry Osborn, died two days before I was born, which was why I was named after him), met up with Patrick (Paddy) Attridge, an ex-serviceman whose family had lived near the Keane's in Ireland in the 1930's and 1040's. My mother and Paddy married and moved into a flat above a wet fish shop in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham.
Much later, I found, among my mother's effects, a Catholic prayer book in which was inscribed, inside the front cover, the Latin tag "Omnia Vincit Amor", meaning "Love Conquers All". This was dated 1942, many years before my mother was supposed to have re-met Paddy.
Paddy's story was equally interesting - he was born in 1908, one of 22 (TWENTY-TWO!!!!) children, some of whom were "Irish twins", in other words they were two children born in the same year but not at the same time, just ten or eleven months apart. He was born in 1908 and in 1929, when he would have been 21, he went to the USA. He worked at various jobs, including bar work during Prohibition, and at one point in the late 1930's was approached to act as Fred Astaire's camera double - he did bear a striking resemblance - but he turned this down. In 1939 he decided to return to England to enlist in the British Army, a strange decision for an Irishman living in America, and embarked on the "SS Georgic" (I can still remember the suitcase, with its stickers, being in the back of the big wardrobe) back to England. He was sent to the Isle of Wight and was a crucial element of the island's defences, marching up and down with a broom handle over his shoulder in imitation of a rifle. He eventually was attached to the Royal Artillery and joined 8th Army ("The Desert Rats") in North Africa, on a 25-pounder unit, with which he remained for most of the war. He fought at El Alamein, was invalided back to Alexandria with pneumonia, then rejoined his unit (minus most of his possessions and trophies which had been stolen by the Egyptian medical orderlies) for the campaign that ended up on the Italian mainland. He fought at Monte Cassino, which he only ever once talked about as being "hellish", and ended up in Greece as part of the occupying force at the end of the war. When the War ended, the Greek Communists, who had provided most of the impetus to resist the German/Italian occupation, decided that things were not to be the same as they had been before hostilities, led a well-armed campaign to decide on the form of the next government. British troops were used to keep the peace between warring factions, and were then obviously targets for both sides. Paddy always bore the scar of a bullet that nicked the bridge of his nose on its way to fatally enter the head of his his patrol partner, with whom he had thus far survived the war. I've never known the name of this man, but from Paddy's occasional mentions of this part of his war experiences (and there were very few of those) I feel that he had a great attachment to him.
He had an abiding respect for the Ghurkas, who he said had saved his life and that of his comrades many times. In the North African Desert the Ghurkas were employed as perimeter sentries (among other things) and they used to eschew the usual static guarding duties, preferring to roam about in the dark. Paddy said that they used to creep up on sentries and feel their ankles - so softly that the sentry never knew they were even within a hundred yards - and then if the sentry was wearing British Army webbing gaiters they would move on. If, on the other hand, they were wearing German Afrika Corps leather-suede boots,or officer issue leather full boots, the Ghurka kukri would slash their throat and they would bleed their life out on the sand. Any German encroachement into the British lines would be met with similar treatment.
When we went as a family to the Royal School of Military Engineering (RSME) in about 1981, on an Open Day, I watched an unarmed combat display by a unit of the Ghurka Rifles. It brought tears to my eyes as I remembered Paddy's tales of the Ghurkas alongside whom he'd fought.
