Every picture tells a story

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I recently changed the look of my blog. Some of you may even have spotted that I've put a new picture at the top. I'd like to think that one or two of you might even have paused to wonder what the picture was, or where and when it was taken.

Well, hey I can answer all of those questions.

It was taken at precisely 9.55 am on 29th August this year. I know that because I took it, and for those of you who haven't already worked it out, it's a picture of the front room in our house in Shoreham. I took it on the day we decided to move the furniture around and swap our dining room for our living room. I wanted a reminder of how the room had looked before we changed it.

I liked how it looked - a bit old-fashioned, a bit friendly and a bit sunny and bright, so I added it to the blog.  Then I took another, closer, look and I realised why it was so right to have this as my blog picture. There are one or two things pictured here that might seem a little bit familiar, and so with your kind indulgence, I'd like to take you on a walk around our front room.

The table is where we do all our writing. It's where Philip and I sit, laptop to laptop when we're blogging and tweeting and reading and commenting. If you look closely, you'll see a shiny bulldog clip - I manage to leave one lying around every time I work from home. It drives Philip mad. For once we've tidied away the laptops, but the piled up notebooks are a clue to what goes on and the scattered place-mats are my indispensable writing aids - there's very little I can do without regular cups of tea. I have absolutely no idea why there is a wooden clothes peg on the table.

The chairs don't match. We don't have any that do, just a penchant for collecting odd bentwood chairs from other people's houses. Philip's rucksack sits on the nearest one. It's been on a few journeys with us, most recently to Paris. Behind the other chair you can see a grey lever-arched file, stuffed full of papers. That's my mum's letters - I've mentioned them here before.

Just above the file of letters, there's a hook on the wall. It's supposed to hold tie-backs for the curtains. What it's actually holding is a string of red onions from our allotment. It's not easy, in a very small house, to find places to hang your onions...
If you could see out of the window, there's a beautiful white weather-boarded house just across the road, and behind that are the allotments, just a stone's throw away, close enough to nip home and collect a couple of mugs of tea to take back, reward for a hard hour's digging and weeding.

In the corner of the room is a white cupboard. It's where the electricity meter and the fuse box live, the place we go to, groping through the dark, when a light bulb blows and trips the safety switch. It's the 'safe place' where we pile up all our important papers, and it doubles up as the games cupboard - where the scrabble set is piled up with the old jigsaws and my dad's electronic chess game.

There are a number of pictures on top of the cupboard - one of me and Philip sitting on a bench on our wedding day, another of me with my daughters. Hanging on the wall above is a picture of a washing line. It's a photo Philip took in the garden of our last house - It was a strange place to live, an old gatekeepers lodge, which was awkwardly shaped and always freezing cold, but it was the house where Philip and I first lived together, so this photo is a fondly kept reminder. In the corner of the cupboard on the right-hand side is a small picture, taken over 20 years ago when Megan was a baby. It's too small for anyone to make anything out in it - but that's ok - I know how  adorable Megan was and how very long my hair was then...

If you squint a bit you might be able to make out a shiny silver cup - that's the trophy we won last year from the Shoreham Allotments Association for 'most improved plot'. It's the only time in my life that my name has been engraved on a trophy. Behind that there's a small kettle. You might well ask why there's a kettle sitting among the wedding photo's and next to the allotment trophy. Well it's almost a trophy too. We found it while walking through the woods up on the hill. It was more than a bit black and dirty then, but we brought it home like treasure trove and it cleaned up a treat.

To the left of the white cupboard is the fireplace. On top of it you might just be able to make out some small white stones. Whenever we go to a beach I like to bring back a pebble or two - these were from our trip to Cyprus last year.  I love that we can have real fires. The central heating is great when you get up for work in the morning, but the red glowing warmth, and the crackle and hiss of a log fire take some beating. Philip prides himself on the quality of his fire-making, a skill he learned from his Grandda, and I've been grateful for that skill many times.

There's probably not much else to tell you about the picture. We didn't choose the curtains, or the mirror above the fire - they came with the house, which we rent, but they are also very much part of the room and the house that we've grown to love.  And of course, at the top of my blog you can only see half of the room.  Until we swapped the rooms around, the opposite wall was the place for Philip's record cupboard - but that's another story all of its own.

My mother's letters #2 - Edith's story

A while ago I wrote here about my mother's thirty-year correspondence with members of our family in Australia. I'm still working my way through the file, which holds copies of all the letters, papers and mementoes she's kept in that time. Today, tucked into one of many plastic wallets, I found a transcript of some notes taken by a man called Maurice Hugh Pointing during a visit to see his cousin Edith Frances Payne in 1951. On one side of paper, he had summed up a period of life spanning more than half a century, encompassing alcoholism, war, death, fortune and misfortune, with the odd passing reference to unsuitable marriage and behaviour. I'm not sure I've understood all the links between different incidents and people, but it does seem to me that there’s a whole book in just that one sheet of A4.

Edith’s story

Edith Frances Payne was born in 1880, the second of Joseph and Popsy Payne’s four children.

Joseph Payne was a Commercial Traveller for a soap firm. It wasn't a successful enterprise. When the firm went bust, the family placed themselves at the mercy of Grandma Pointing (Popsy’s mother) and her sister Elizabeth, and went to live with them at their home ‘Capuchin Lodge’ in Winchelsea.

When Aunt Elizabeth died in 1903, she left £200 each to Grandma, Popsy and Joseph.  Joseph drank Popsy’s share (presumably in addition to his own). Shortly afterwards, when the family moved to a new house in Rye, he was admitted to a home for inebriates.

Edith’s brother Harold was killed in the First World War. The insurance money paid out on his death was enough to buy ‘Rosslyn’ the house they had previously been renting in Rye.

Edith’s sister Alice died just before Christmas in 1949. Alice had been a Governess, working with a number of families, before taking in pupils at Rosslyn. Alongside the money earned by Alice as a governess, and whatever Edith generated through needlework, the family income was supplemented to the sum of about £220 a year from an inheritance bequeathed to them by an old lady they had ‘been kind to’.

Their brother Herbert had been a piano-tuner. He was still alive in 1951, but living in a 'home for Aged Folk'. He was separated from his wife Gertrude, whom Edith deemed ‘not suitable’. Herbert and Gertrude had four children, and although Edith thought they too were ‘not very suitable’, the three surviving children were destined to be the beneficiaries of her will.

In 1951 when Edith, aged 71, talked about her memories to her cousin Maurice High Pointing, she was still living at Rosslyn in Rye, but she had weak knees and couldn’t walk without help.

I haven’t worked through enough of Mum's letters to understand what relation any of these people are to me.  I know that my Grandfather, Mum’s Dad, was called Roy Payne, so this must somehow be a link to his family. But what strikes me most is how a family history can be summed up in a few bald lines. By reading a couple of totally dispassionate paragraphs, I've discovered that my ancestry includes a failed salesman who turned to drink, a young man who went to war and never returned, and various 'not suitable' family members. There's no hint there of the heartache that Joseph must have caused his family, or the difficulties those women must have encountered and overcome to move away, build a new life and keep going. Though I'm a little disappointed that I haven't yet found any statesmen or poet laureates among my forebears, I'd like to think I can at least recognise a familiar female trait of resistant persistence.

My mother's letters

'Perhaps you could do something with these' said my mum a few weeks ago as she handed over a bulging lever-arch file. The file looks pretty much like the sort you see gathering dust in an old-fashioned solicitors office - grey-marl, with metallic corners. The arches a bit warped through struggling to hold the contents together for many years. Inside are maybe fifty clear plastic wallets, each containing several sheets of yellowing, stiffening paper.
Mum is a genealogist. For as long as I can remember, and way before the days of computer aided internet searching, she has spent hours and days tracking down the roots and branches of our family tree. Some mothers make patchwork quilts, my mum pieces together birth, death and marriage certificates, church registers, and old gravestones to build a picture of who she is and where she came from.
Many years ago she discovered a connection to Australia and since 1987 she has been writing regular letters to these distant cousins. The label on the spine of the file rather formally describes it:

PAT WHEELER

CORRESPONDENCE WITH POINTING FAMILIES

(ALL CONNECTED FAMILY) 

Inside is an absolute treasure. Three letters in I was hooked. I'm still slowly and carefully picking my way through the rest.
For over twenty years, she has saved not only the letters received from Australia and photocopies of those she sent herself, but copies of all the bits and pieces of evidence she's found along the way. Family charts, birth certificates, copies of wills and testaments. Where she couldn't photocopy the evidence, she's reproduced it by hand - my favourite so far is an extract from the shipping list of the 'Jerusalem' - the boat on which my ancestors Joshua and Albert Pointing emigrated to Australia in 1881, with 619 other brave travellers for the price of sixteen pounds and sixteen shillings each.
I am genuinely honoured that mum has chosen to share these letters with me. I am delighted at what they contain and what I am gradually finding out - not only the formal family connections and fading evidence, but all the everyday bits of gossip and family news that my mum has captured and shared, as she and our Australian family have grown closer together over the years.
I'm also a little daunted. Mum wants me to 'do something' with them. She shows enormous faith in my far-from-developed writing abilities and I desperately want to repay that trust with something worthwhile. In time, I may share some of the letters on this blog, I may even try to weave a story around and through them. For now, I'm just reading and wondering.