Wonderful Wales, here I come!

My Uncle Peter died today.

I had gone into the village to sort out various things to do with the church for this Sunday since both churchwardens will be away where I was told that the lead had been stripped off the village hall roof, so I checked and discovered that all the flashings had gone from the church roof too. This was not a good start to the day, and when I got back there was a phone message from my cousin Robbie to say that his dad had died in the early hours of the morning - the message was timed at 10 o'clock which with the eight hour time difference means that he had probably phoned within an hour.

Uncle Peter was a remarkable man. His proper name was Arthur Francis Huston because my great-grandfather was a man of strong opinions and when Nan, my grandmother and his daughter-in-law, said that she wanted to call her first born Peter he had declared that "every little street boy in Dublin is called Peter" (a fine comment from a man called Joseph!) and that "an eldest son should be named for his father" - hence Arthur. When she said that she would also like to name him for her favourite brother Frank, he was equally scathing about the use of diminutives - hence Francis. Anyway here he is as a baby and as a beautiful little boy -

When he was still a little boy he got TB and spent a long time in hospital lying on his back with a tubercular hip.

When it was at last clear that he would get well, although he was on crutches for some time and had a limp all his life, my grandparents decided that they could have another child and my mother was born. Here they are in the garden.

Mummy always said that he was a wonderful brother who always had time for his little sister, playing with her when she was small and allowing her to join in deep discussions with serious minded sixth-formers when she was still at primary school.

He went to Kings to train as a doctor, and despite further ill-health leading to his losing a kidney, he qualified and, in the aftermath of the second worold war which had taken so many of his contemporaries including his best friend Geoff, he served as an acting Lieutenant Colonel in UNRA dealing with refugees.

Back in civillian life he met Barbara
They became engaged, and were married on April 27th 1946. My cousin Shelagh was born in July 1947 to be followed at roughly two year intervals by Jackie, Richard, Patsy and Robbie.

The above show Shelagh, Jackie and Richard, then a truly dreadful photograph taken by my father in which I am the baby with my four cousins, my mother, their father and our grandmother, and finally Nan with seven grandchildren.

At this point Peter was 'head-hunted' and joined the brain-drain to America. After a time in New York and Atlantic City, they headed north to Canada where they settled in Regina, Saskatchewan. 'Settled' with Peter was never the defining word: while war was still waging there, he went to Vietnam to work in rehabilitating the young victims of war leaving their two grown-up daughters in Canada and taking the three younger children to Hong Kong. Peter acquired a medal from the President of South Vietnam for his work and Barbara acquired something else; she was spending some time in Hong Kong and some time working in an orphanage in Vietnam where she met and fell in love with Paul.

This is Paul who became their sixth child and third son. Back in Canada they decided that Paul needed a brother closer to him in age than the adult Rick and teenage Robbie, and so Philip, a Cambodian orphan, became son number four.

A few years later Uncle Peter was commissioned to do a study of crippling diseases in children in various places around the world, and they landed up in Bangladesh where Lili joined the family and evened up the son and daughter ratio to four apiece.

Back in Canada Peter had a hospital named after him 'Huston Heights', Barbara was ordained, and the number of grand-daughters began to grow - 6 by the time they celebrated their golden wedding. They had by then retired and settled on Gabriola Island BC though Barbara continued her work as a priest. Peter, who has always written poems became a published poet with a slim volume of his own rather than in collections from literary groups. (I will ask my cousins permission to blog a few of them.)

Here they are with their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren a day or so after their Golden Wedding. Yes, that is just the one family - since then Lili has added five children, Paul has added two, and their grand-daughters have also been very busy.

I blogged about their Diamond wedding in April 2006, and there are various pictures dotted about through my blogs.

After failing health for some time, Uncle Peter became very ill at the end of last month and went into hospital. With treatment he rallied sufficiently to go home, where he died peacefully surrounded by his family. These two pictures (lifted from the Extended Huston Family Group on Facebook) show him with Morgan, the latest addition to the family, and with Barbara in hospital on their 62nd wedding anniversary at the end of last month.

Most of my life Uncle Peter has lived far away in another continent and been only an occasional visitor, but he has always been a very strong presence in my life; I feel so grateful to have know him and very sorry for the next great-grandchild who will be born later this year and will never know his or her wonderful great-grandad.

Just an odd, and very sad coincidence: tomorrow I am heading off to Wales for a week - last time I went to Wales my Uncle Frans (Daddy's older brother) died the day before I went.

AGM last night - very long as it was the AGM followed by the ordinary meeting at which we elected (or re-elected in every case) the Chairman, Vice-Chairman, Responsible Financial Officer, Village Hall Representative, the people responsible for inspecting the two playgrounds and the Planning Sub-Committee. I'm on the last of these. I'm always quite happy to be Vice Chairman when my turn comes round, but we have all done at least one turn and there are two people who chair meetings really well so I have no ambitions and am happy to leave them to it.

The evening before Joe and I went to Brigg for the Archdeacon's Visitation where we were sworn in as Churchwardens.

Joe is thinking about an invitation to go back on the Village Hall Committee now it has a new chairman.

Well, despite my misgivings (see blog "Not in the Spirit of the Festival" Dec 4th 2007) I was overruled and Swallow took part.

Joe did a stirling job with his all day food, and there was a steady flow of visitors who spent a long time looking at my exhibition of photographs of 'Swallow People'. Local people were particularly interested, and several visitors found ancestors either in the photographs or in the registers, including Ian, the Rural Dean, who found his great-grandparents' (shotgun) wedding.

The weather smiled on us and people arrived to find tea tables set up both inside and outside the church.

We had photographs arranged along all the pews so that people could sit and examine them in comfort. I have now laminated copies of nearly all the pictures in the archive which means that we don't have to worry about them being handled.

Here two members of the Tomlinson clan, who farmed in Swallow for the best part of three centuries but have now all gone elsewhere, look at pictures of one of the two family farms (now lived in by my sister and her husband). Behind them are two montages of (mainly terrible) photos of Swallovians at a variety of village events - I seem to have caught nearly everyone either with a mouthful of food or with a glass of wine in hand - to which I shall add another . . .

And here is one of Pam's amazing cakes with the humbler offerings from the rest of us.
Although flowers were not a theme this year, several people had done flower arrangements

and Madge very successfully managed to combine a flower arrangement with the theme of the weekend with photgraphs of her 7 children, 15 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

We ended the weekend with Evensong. As usual with non-eucharistic services, the Anglicans were outnumbered by Methodists and Catholics. (Does this happen in other villages where the only village church is C of E, and members of other denominations normally have to travel to go to their own church so that they develop a sort of dual affiliation?) Richard, who took the service is a Methodist lay-preacher who is churchwarden at Nettleton Parish Church and has permission from the Bishop to take services in the Swallow Group, so we had a strong Methodist sermon to end our traditional Anglican Evensong in which the first lesson (Acts 2) had been read with great fervour by another non-conformist preacher.

Talking of varieties of Christianity there is a joke that the Catholic variety is centred on the Sacrament, the Protestant variety is centred on the Word, and the Anglican variety is centred on the . . . . . . collection. So, as a good Anglican, I am happy to tell you that the weekend made us over £350 - 75% up on last year.

I must teach around 5,000 to 6,000 children a year visiting the museum or on outreach worshops. I seldom learn their names, and only a few stick in my mind as individuals, but every now and then a child makes a lasting impression.

Today it was reported that a 12 year old boy from Scunthorpe had drowned while playing in a local lake. The photograph they showed was of an exceptionally beautiful child, and I think I recognise him as a little boy who came to the museum something over a year ago who was very eager with his answers and fascinated by everything. I remember remarking to one of the adult helpers who came with the group that it would pay to be in his gang when he took over the world: he was that sort of child, and you couldn't help feeling that he would make headline news one day. What a terrible pity that it should be so early and in such a way.

At the museum we give out evaluation sheets to every school party which comes in for a workshop or to which we go as an outreach. I'm not convinced that they ask the right questions, but that's another story.

Sometimes I think that it would be a good thing if we could do an evaluation of the schools. If we did this week's would have run thus:

Were the children well prepared? Yes
Were the children polite and helpful? Yes
Were the teachers properly organised? Yes
Had they made sure that all the adult helpers were properly briefed? Yes
Did they arrive on time? Nearly
Did they clear up after lunch? Yes, beautifully - not so much as a scrap of rubbish left
Have you any other comments?
Yes. one little girl called Bethany had the best manners of any child I have ever encountered. In coming forward to take her turn she said 'excuse me' to every child she had to squeeze past, and 'thank you' to each as s/he moved aside. At the end of her turn she thanked me for letting her help, and at the end of the workshop she came up to say thank you yet again.
I would also like to mention that. although the children were only five and six years old, not one of them had to be taken out of the workshop to visit the loo.

And do these wonderful children come from a 'good' school in a superior area? No, they come from a shabby old school in a relatively poor area of Grimsby.

I wrote recently about the sort of teacher who uses the fact that the school is in a poor area as an excuse for expecting nothing from the children, and therefore doing nothing himself. Suffice to say that nothing could be further from the truth in the case of this school, or - indeed - of the other Grimsby school I visited earlier in the week.

I have today received an email from Katy, the daughter of one of my cousins, about researching the family tree.

Among other things she wants to know about her great-grandfather. She is very lucky as she has good sources of memories of Grandad and Nan. For proper memories she could go to her two older aunts who would have been, I think, 7 and rising 9 when he died and should have some good substantial memories. Even better she can ask her grandparents while they are still there to ask - on a good day they should both have plenty to say.

However most interestingly to me her own mother Patsy - just one year my senior, and thus 2 when grandad died - has virtually identical memories to mine of being pushed in her pram, but set identifiably in her childhood hometown of Kingston-on-Thames. On the other hand, from the point of view of adding to her knowledge of family history, I don't suppose the news that her great-grandfather was inclined to take his baby grand-daughters out in their prams will set either the Thames or the Humber on fire.

I'm not a telephone user. I don't know why, because I'm really fond of conversation, but I don't initiate phone calls on the whole.

I have been a phone answerer all my life. By the time I was five or six I was politely giving the number and asking if I could help. A few years later I was taking messages rather than simply fetching the grown-up requested. So it isn't a phobia or anything like that, and I'm certainly not shy.

BUT I am so much not a phonecall maker that I find that I even have to look up my work number, and I can remember without prompting the number of just one of my close friends. Even in the village where I just have to remember the final three figures there are only about four numbers I have memorised (including my sister - the only family member whose number I don't have to look up). And no, it's not a memory problem either - I can remember things (including those numerically rather than verbally based) much more complicated than phone numbers.

My mobile remains off and in my car used only for "I'm late, don't worry" or "I'm in Morrisons/Tesco/Asda - is there anything you need?" There is no signal at home and I won't have it on when driving or at work.

Even when I do phone my calls tend to be short and businesslike rather than chatty.

Of course the fact that my father has always had a tendency to wander into the room tapping his watch and shaking his head, even when it was the person at the other end who initiated the call, may have something to do with this. He still does it even now we are on a scheme where evening annd weekend calls are free. He's great on turning off lights too, but so am I.

What brought this on? I wanted to phone one of my closest relatives, and I could only find the number from the address they left around ten years ago! So I emailed instead.

In a recent blog I wrote about my memories of being five years old. Some people find being able to remember in detail that far back amazing, so I thought I would go back a bit further.

It is dark, and I am carried out into a starkly black and white snow covered landscape. In the lamplight I see close to me the details of twigs coated in white frost or snow. I am handed down by the starchy one into the arms of the one who smells right.

The doors close and the car moves off. Lying on my back I can see when we move from the dark into a street in which there are pools of light from each shop. There are canopies in front of many of them with things stacked under them. The light is less vivid, and less all enveloping than that of the shopping streets we now know. The colours are muted. We move into dimmer light again, and the memory ends.

I asked my mother about this memory, and there is only one occasion that fits: I was six days old and being taken home from the maternity home.

There was hard, settled, frozen snow the February I was born.

My father's vehicle in those days was a fish lorry, but grandad lent him his car to take home his first grandchild, so this is the only time before I was a sitting up child that I travelled in a car. I must have travelled on my mother's lap many times in the lorry (children did in those days) but the angle of my view in this memory is completely wrong for that.

The logical route from the Croft Baker Maternity Home at the top end of Mill Road to our home in Prince's Road would have been down Trinity Road/Beacon Avenue past the cemetery and the Girls' Grammar School and on to Clee Road, but my memory shows Mill Road to St. Peter's Avenue with all its shops. Apparently not all of the obvious route was metalled road in those days, and - although my memory includes nothing of this and neither of my parents could recall either - we may have stopped to introduce me to Grandad, Nothernan, Uncle Steve and Auntie Clare who lived at the bottom end of Mill Road.

I also find the concentration of light and the muted colours of my memories interesting. I have since learned that babies are supposed only to see in monochrome at first. Most of my early memories are in glorious technicolor, and here they are not truly monochrome but more like an interim stage on one of those fades on a film from black and white to colour.

This is the earliest thing I can remember. I have several distinct memories of my maternal grandfather which must date from my first year as grandad died when I was fourteen months old.

I am in my pram and he is pushing me down Isaac's Hill on the far side from Princes' Road. As we turn to cross the road I can see the boards round the site where in a very few years time the Memorial Hall will be built.

I am in my pram again, and we are in the Dolphin Gardens to see the clock. My cousins Shelagh, Jackie and Richard, but not I think Patsy, are with us.
My memory gives no details of the clock beyond the fact that it was a clock although in my mind I have substituted a Hickory Dickory Dock clock from the Cleethorpes seafront illuminations. I am told that it was the Emmett Clock which on tour had reached Cleethorpes four years after its first appearance at the Festival of Britain. Unlike other memories here, this one is reinforced by a photograph.

I am in Nan's arms and she has carried me to the corner of Princes' Road to see the clock on the Electricity Showroom.
I have this memory from a toddling point of view as well, and I believe this little excursion was oft repeated. the clock is still there and the art deco building is now grade 2 listed.

I am in Nan's arms and she is holding the roses on the tall bushes in the garden for me to smell.
This too is oft repeated and reinforced by a photograph.

The house in Princes' Road - now in a sorry state of disrepair and with an overgrown hedge replacing Nan's roses.

I am toddling up Isaac's Hill beside Nan on the way to the library. I hold up my arms to be carried and she tells me that she can't carry me any more now she is an old lady of sixty-one.
Nan was sixty years and five days older than I, which means that any memories of being carried by her date to my first year and maybe a few months into my second.

I am with my cousins playing on a board floor in one room (a bedroom, I think) Jackie is trying hard with Patsy and me and entertaining us with a glove puppet monkey. Shelagh is reading a book. Richard is playing there too. The grown-ups are in another room on the other side of the front door. Everyone is sad and quiet.
I think that the location must be my uncle's and aunt's house (a plotlands timber building) on a field by the Thames with views (which I don't remember) of Hampton Court, and the occasion must be just before or after my grandfather's funeral.

My other memories of babyhood are mainly of scents and feelings. I can still remember the feeling of terry-towelling between my legs and the smell of urine mingled with Johnson's Baby Powder as the nappy is removed - a strange smell for nostalgia.

Talking about Johnson's Baby Powder reminds me of another repeated early memory: I am lying on my back on a flannelette sheet in big basket scales looking up at ranks of brown varnished shelves stacked with the goods of a chemist's shop and surrounded by a plethora of fascinating smells.
The shop I am pretty certain must be Broadburn’s at the top of St. Peter's Avenue, although my more conscious memories are of the expanded and modernised shop over the last fifty years.

By this time I am very much a walking talking baby, so I'll move on from babyhood to toddlerdom in a later blog.

In 'Anniversaries' a couple of blogs back I mentioned that my Uncle Peter was very ill in hospital.

Peter, after a career spent as a consultant physician, has a deep dislike of hospitals, and just a week later he is well enough to be released and is going home to be looked after by family.

As Uncle Peter (wearing his other hat as a poet) might say:
Old boots are tough,
But Peter is tougher;
Illness is rough,
But hospital's rougher.
I put this less than deathless verse in an email to Mary (my cousin Robbie's wife) who has been keeping me updated, and she has printed it up as a 'Welcome Home' banner.
Overnight Update from Mary Uncle Peter is home and loved the verse.

Auntie Barbara who was also in hospital was released earlier this week and may even let herself be looked after, breaking an exhausting lifetime habit of being the one doing the caring (which was probably the root of her problem in the first place).

They don't really do computers beyond word processing so won't see this, but love and best wishes to both of them.

This news was the climax of a really good day doing the Florence Nightingale workshop for the three year 2 classes at Signhills Infant School in Cleethorpes, where it seems that everybody from the smallest pupil to the head-teacher is happy, motivated and busy. This was my third visit, and I am always pleased to go back there.