Rainham Ramblings

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.