memories of a heatwave

I like books which anchor themselves to a particular time or place, not to describe it but to set it as the background and then use it as a kind of metaphor for what happens in the story. One such was by Tim Lott, who is brilliant, and it was set in 1987 and called "Rumours of a Hurricane". I missed the hurricane in England because, er, I was in South Korea that autumn. Which is a story of its own, and one I will tell. I have some tales to tell about the hurricane though too. If you haven't read that book, do, it's worth it.

The book I have just finished reading is by Maggie O'Farrell (the first of hers I have read) and it is called "Instructions for a Heatwave". It is a good novel about a family in crisis, or rather a family with secrets, as all families are, and how the secrets come out when one or more members breaks the circle of silence. It is set in London, but also Ireland and New York City, in the summer of the Great Heatwave of 1976. The characters, an Irish family uprooted and transplanted and dislocated, all of them in their various ways in crisis, are unforgettable. I would not be at all surprised to find this become a TV mini-series of the kind that has people discussing the boxed set.

Maggie O'Farrell was four in 1976, and so cannot really remember that summer. I was 22, and can. It was a hot summer like no other, and there has not been one like it in England since, although 2003 came close. It was a summer before desk fans and air conditioning, when it was normal for women, especially those past their first youth, to wear polyester dresses on a daily basis. Men did not wear shorts in public then as they often do now.

I was pregnant that summer, with my first child, a Fire Dragon in the Chinese horoscope, born in October in a year of change. Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned - no one at the time knew why - Mao Zedong died, and a great earthquake in China killed many thousands. Taking water without permission became a criminal offence in England under the Drought Act 1976. It didn't rain between Easter and August Bank Holiday - or that is how I remember it. We lived in Bath then, and the river was so low that some of us walked across the river on the lip of Pulteney Weir. I was wearing an orange and yellow cotton dress. This is what it was like.

Solitude

Zolitude is a place in Riga, Latvia

This year I have spent a great deal of time alone. I have never minded my own company, and over the years have been happy, for instance, to go to the cinema alone if I couldn't find anyone else who wanted to see the film I had chosen. I don't feel lonely doing that. When I was young I didn't have much understanding of or sympathy with girls who said "I can't go to that, I've got no one to go with". But of course, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

I have almost never lived alone in my life. I left home at 18 and went to university, where I lived in halls ("living in college" as we called it then where I went, in Durham). Just before I finished university my father died suddenly and unexpectedly, and I went "home" for the summer. And then got married, as did my two siblings soon afterwards. There's bound to have been a connection, but none of us has felt like exploring it over the years. We had two children each. My marriage and my sister's ended after some years (we did try), and my brother's has lasted, with some hiccups. Then I did live alone for a little while, but not exactly. My son lived with me, and by the time he went back to his father, at fifteen, significant other and I were setting up home together. We have lived together ever since, and have been married for 14 years. Now, significant other works in the UK every summer (we live in France) and this year was away for nearly three months. He is away again, for only ten days this time, teaching a half-term intensive course. And yes, I have been lonely. What to do about it? Not turn down invitations to go out, is most of the answer. I have been doing that too often in recent times, because I am usually happy at home in the evenings, reading and writing and so on. Today I am going to the cinema with a new friend, and this is a Good Thing.

Loneliness among old people is a great problem, at least in this Western world. I know old people who are cheerful, friendly and sociable. But they are in the minority. Health problems may cause some of them to be negative, but talk of symptoms can be a kind of hobby too, and one that does no good. My uncle, in his eighties, has hobbies, such as model plane flying - he used to go fishing too and he was part of a dance club, all people of similar age. He has had some quite serious health problems recently, but has remained positive and cheerful. I saw him two weeks ago at a family wedding, that of his grandson, and he was very much the laughing raconteur - he had his moment on the dance floor too. My mother, on the other hand, whose health is not bad, is relentlessly negative - but let's not go there.

Most of us don't have to be lonely. Some old people say they are lonely because their families never visit them. I say to them - maybe your family would visit you more if you were more positive when you did see them.

Let's think about preventing loneliness. Human beings are designed to live in groups. The others in those groups may not these days share our actual household, but we need the contact they give us. If we don't have it, we are likely to become bitter and negative. Don't let it happen to you, as I am determined it will not happen to me.

Roy McPherson

Island Road, Barrow, where Roy lived

Roy, on right, pictured at my grandmother's funeral in 2002

was a man who was born and spent his whole life in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (previously Lancashire).  Like almost all Barrow men he worked in the Vickers shipyards.  He never married, and lived all his life in the parental home on Barrow Island. Roy was my father's cousin, the only child of my paternal grandmother's older sister Winnie.  He was exactly a year younger than my father (they had the same birthday).  Roy died on 12th November this year, at the age of 81.  Part of my family's history passed away with him, so I wanted to remember him here.  I was rather fond of Roy, and sometimes used to send him postcards from places I had been.  But although part of my roots are in Barrow, and I have been there regularly all my life, ever since my grandmother used to take me there when I was a small child, I have never lived there, and my grandparents and the generation of great-aunts and uncles I knew as a child have all gone now.  So I cannot do better than reproduce below the eulogy given at Roy's funeral by his cousin's husband Eddie,  which I appreciated for its gentleness and humour.

Roy Henderson McPherson was born in Risedale Maternity Home Barrow on 20^th April 1931, the only child of Albert (Mac) and Winnie McPherson, and soon went home to 20 Island Road, where Roy would continue to live for the whole of his 81 years.

After attending school, Roy started work in Boots the Chemist but after only a short while was accepted for an apprenticeship as a shipwright with Vickers Armstrong’s. Because of his protected employment status, National Service was deferred until Roy eventually joined the Army in 1952. Roy served in Egypt about the time of the ‘Suez Crisis’. After being demobbed from the military, Roy resumed at the shipyard where his was to remain for the rest of his working life.

In his spare time Roy was quite physically active. He enjoyed cycling and travelled many miles in company with his friends.

Roy also played rugby with Furness Rugby Union Club and after his playing career ended he took up the whistle and refereed local matches as part of the Furness Rugby Union Referees Society. Roy rose to be a referee assessor and was the appointments secretary for the Society. He was rewarded for this work by being appointed a Life Member of the Society.

Roy enjoyed travelling and as well as holidays in Europe with friends, Roy visited his cousin Win and her husband Ted in Africa and also visited another cousin, Pat, in Malta.

Roy was always well dressed and loved looking at the latest men’s clothing in Marks & Spencer and Mister Mr, sometimes travelling to Morecambe to have suits or jackets made to measure at a bespoke tailor.

Roy was very devoted to his mother and when we start to tidy his house we found his mum’s dressing gown and hair net still hanging on a hook on the back of her bedroom door, even though it is 25 years since she passed away

Roy also enjoyed his food and was a very good customer of the food section in Marks & Spencer and was on first name terms with many of the staff. He also enjoyed going out for meals and would always say yes if asked to join in a birthday or other celebration.

Roy took an interest in current affairs and recently much has been in the papers and on TV about same sex marriage. One day during his recent stay in hospital he asked me ‘In these relationships between two men how do they decide which one does the woman’s bits?’ I was wondering how to answer when in all innocence Roy added ‘You know the washing up, cooking and ironing’. That saved me being embarrassed at having to answer what I thought was the question.

When his cousin Win Mills returned to live in Barrow, following death of her husband Ted, Roy became very close to her. The pair would talk on the phone once or twice each day and it was a great loss to Roy when Win passed away earlier this year.

Roy will be greatly missed by his family, neighbours and his many friends. He was a generous, kind and gentle man, of which there are very few about today.

the complications of modern life, 2

I am going to spend Christmas with my mother this year, in Cornwall, just the two of us.  And why not?  My new grandchild (did I mention that?) is due on 2nd January, and I am determined to be there at the time of the birth.  So, I'll stay on after Christmas until the baby comes.  Simple, huh?  Not really.  Not if you do not live in the UK and are not rolling in money.  Book a flight now, no-show if the baby comes late, get a late ticket?  Expensive, that.  Book Eurostar and buy the insurance so get refunded if do not travel then?  Still have to get expensive late ticket and wait for refund.  Plays havoc with the cash flow.  What would you do?

the complications of modern life

I bought my mother a Kindle.  And she likes it, and reads on it.  But she has no Amazon account, and refuses to go on line (mysterious) so the Kindle is still mine.  Upside of that: she can read books I already own.  Downside: I live in France, my brother lives in the US, my mother lives in the UK.  Neither my brother nor I has a payment card with a UK billing address, I do not have a US one, and he does not have a French one.  You can see what's coming, can't you?  I am only allowed to shop on amazon.fr or amazon.com, and am not allowed to buy digital products from the latter.  My brother is not allowed to buy digital products from the former.  Neither of us can do so from amazon.co.uk.  So the only way we have found for him to get my mother a Kindle book is for him to send me a gift certificate, which I can use to buy myself a (physical) product from amazon.com, in compensation for ME buying mother the book.  Which is from him.  And in fact I have to buy it for myself and put it on her Kindle. There may be something I am not getting here.  Maybe.  Whatever happened to globalisation?  I was all in favour of that, and am still waiting for it to happen. 

Beatrice Mead

Her family name was Johnson, and it was said that her family were connected with a family both rich and louche - the Rollwrights of Ebury Street Westminster.  There was a remembered scene in which two aunts, or maybe older cousins, who had left the family home and who wore make-up and furs (this would be about 1904) and who were said to be actresses, appeared at a family occasion:  there was an altercation, and rings were pulled off and thrown into the fireplace, possibly because of an inheritance.  This memory is as told to me by my grandmother, also Beatrice Mead, who witnessed something like this as a small child.  The elder Beatrice, as has been said, came from a family which had (perhaps) fallen on hard times.  She married a man named Mead, who owned, it was said,  several pubs in south London.  Quite soon they had a son, George, but after that the babies, who arrived annually, turned blue and died within hours of birth. It is likely that Beatrice was blood group rhesus negative, so the first child was rhesus positive and the antibodies in her blood killed the later ones.  At that time nobody knew about this.  A few years later another child was born and survived, named Beatrice too.  She was my maternal grandmother, and was rhesus negative, which is presumably why she survived.  Later, fourteen years later, a sister, Doris, known as Doll, and later still a brother, Fred.

Mr Mead, my great-grandfather, drank away the money and lost the pubs, it was said.  He did not live to a great age.  Beatrice Mead, his widow, known as Gran, became the matriarch of the family, and through the 1920s and 30s, as the men of the family joined the army, came back, lost their jobs, found new ones and lost them again in the Depression, it was to her house they came.  Everyone was taken in, and had a place to stay.  Children slept on window sills and underneath curtains: young men ironed shirts in the sitting-room; cousins formed alliances and told stories on Saturday nights as the men drank light ale and the older ones played cards.  The younger Beatrice, always known as Sissy to her family, married Leonard Thomas, of a Welsh family, whose brothers were lay preachers.  They were my maternal grandparents.  They had four children.  The firstborn, Lenny, died at the age of four from complications of mastitis.  Two years later their first daughter, Patricia, was born, in 1928, followed by Betty in 1930 and Tony in 1936.  All four looked exactly like their father.  Patricia was my mother, born in south London and married to my father, John Griffiths, in north-west London in 1952.  I was born in 1954, my brother Paul in 1955 and my sister Sara in 1959, all of us in South Ruislip, north-west London.

Beatrice Mead the younger (who was Mrs Thomas by then of course), known to us as Granny, lived a walk away when we were small and was often in our house.  We loved her very much.  She had fierce blue eyes and a fighting spirit that she used in defence of her family her whole life - although she could be critical of her grandchildren, no-one else was allowed to be.  She was bemused by the marriage of her youngest and favourite child, Tony, to a Norwegian woman, my Auntie Inger, a laughing blue-eyed Scandinavian, and his departure to live in Norway in 1962, where he remains.  They had one child, Stephen, my youngest cousin, who is the only blond in my maternal family.

Beatrice senior, our Gran, lived with Granny at the time of my earliest memories.  I was afraid of her.  I was her eldest great-grandchild, and so should have been best placed to understand, but I didn't really.  Gran's behaviour was strange.  She growled and muttered.  One time she stood between us cousins and the television we were watching and said "These children and their filthy talk, they've got to get out!"  I knew our talk wasn't filthy, but I didn't know what to say.  The others kept their eyes firmly on the television screen.  In those days nobody talked about dementia.  I remember my father using the words "going senile".    Then, when I was about seven, Granny had a new flat, and she and Grandad were there.  We used to love going to visit them.  We had Christmas there more than once.  Later, Granny came to live with us, after Grandad died.  But Gran died only some years after that, when I was thirteen.  She was ninety-six.  And I found out only recently that, probably soon after the "filthy talk" incident, Gran had been "put away".  Granny went to visit her every week, sometimes accompanied by my mother.  Aunt Doll, her younger daughter, would not go, after the first time, the place was horrible, she said.  And, it seems, it was horrible.

I remember Gran from when I was little, and I remember when she died, when I was thirteen, but I had, and have, no memory of her in the intervening years, the ones when she was put away,  She was at Granny's house, then she wasn't.

I put this to my mother, very recently.

She said, "You children never asked about her."

am I English?

here I am shamelessly plundering the Normster (Norman Geras), who is (a) much cleverer than I am and (b) not English (he was born in what was then Rhodesia).  He notes that various politicians and others (Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband) have been urging us to be proud of being English.  One of them is a quarter American and the other of east European Jewish heritage I believe, and they are both English.  So what, I hear you cry, and so, to some extent, do I.  Norm also notes that others (Dan Hodges, for example, of whom I am rather a fan) take issue with this, and say that while they themselves are English there is no particular marker that they can identify for their Englishness.  I am not surprised that I am more inclined to ponder my own Englishness now that i have lived for almost five years outside England, and, worse still, in the land of the old enemy, France.  I wonder if Norm ponders on his identity as an African.  If he does, he doesn't do it publicly.  And I share the difficulty in finding a marker for my (or anyone else's) Englishness. The first time I ran a training workshop for a multi-national group of lawyers I was gently told off by the training supervisor who observed it: she said "You started on time, as the English do, but that meant that most of them missed the beginning".  A difficult one for me, that.  Norm takes issue with the "no marker for Englishness" brigade as follows:  Their case seems to be one of these three:

(1) no national identity of any kind is coherent or real;

(2) national identity is coherent and real for all other putative cases (being Brazilian, being French etc) except Englishness;

(3) national identities are real for some putative cases but not for others, and Englishness falls into the latter category.

and he demolishes those three premises very effectively.  But where does that leave us?  One of my grandfathers was Welsh and the other Scottish.  The Celtic part of my heritage is real to me.  But I was born in England, as both my parents were, and grew up and lived most of my life there.  I will probably not die there, but that is not the important bit.


What I suppose I believe is that there is no one marker for Englishness.  I'll support England against France tomorrow.  In a pub, which is in my view the proper place to watch football.  I drink Proper Tea.  When I was asked to serve tea recently at a tea party I was congratulated on my assuredness in handling teapots.  "But I've been doing it all my life!" I said.  My earliest memories are of my grandmother pouring tea.  I still put hot water in the pot first, and then throw it away,  as she did,  even if I am using (whisper it not) tea bags.  But there are plenty of English people who never do any of this.


I am sorry that St. George's Day parades are such a rarity.  I think Jerusalem should be the English anthem because , not despite of the fact that, it is an old socialist hymn.  When my granddaughter is my age she will have some memories (I hope) of me and things I did.  They will be part of her own marker of identity.  But maybe not of Englishness.

data storage

I've been musing about this lately.  It all started when my aunt died, in February, and my sister and I spent a couple of days in her house, which had been my grandmother's house before it was hers, going through photographs and papers.  This inspired me, because there were so many photographs which could not be dated, nor the people in them identified, to go through the several boxes of printed photographs I have, which are not in albums and which date from before I was born up to about 2006, when my photography became exclusively digital.  So I have been doing some of this every day, writing the dates if I am sure of them, and identifying the people.  Getting rid of a lot of rubbish photos at the same time.  They will go into albums eventually.  Should have done this years ago, and do not want anyone else to have to do it when I am gone.  A great many photographs on CDs too, from about 2002 to 2006, and I am going through those and putting them into iPhoto, so they are stored in the cloud.

Then I went to see my mother in April - she has recently moved to a semi-sheltered place, and she needed help in sorting out her possessions.  A lot of photographs there too, on paper, but she can sort those out herself, and largely has done so.  She did a university degree in her sixties, and has a lot of notes from then, on paper.  She didn't use a computer at that time, but she had some floppy disks with the notes.  I had to throw those away, as there is no way to have access to the data on them any more.  She had a couple of those disposable cameras, unused, which I took away and gave to my granddaughter.  Who was most interested in them (she is four) but wanted to know how you look at the photos on the camera, and was amazed to be told that you can't, you have to take the camera somewhere and the people give you the photos on paper - and you have to PAY for them.  If you can even still do that.

We also have a whole bunch of VHS tapes and a functioning video player, and now have to start the process of converting them to DVD, if possible.  Although watching films on DVD has probably had its day.  There will be no more hardware.

So I guess what is important is to be alert.  If the data you have, and want to keep, are stored in a form which is going out of use, then convert them to something which is accessible.  You might  have to do this several times in a lifetime, and for all I know that process is going to speed up.

Microfiche, anyone?

Hitchens on Kipling

Christopher Hitchens' writing has the gift, among others, of making me think again about writers I have read, and wanting to read some I have not.  Like many children of my generation I read, or had read to me, Kipling's "Jungle Book" and "Just So Stories", but did not really read him other than that.  And his reputation is not a good one, these days.  But Kipling was all-get-out interesting, as Hitchens shows us.  He praised Indians as equal human beings, not a fashionable view in his time and milieu, but opposed independence.  Hitchens notes that in the first fourteen years of the twentieth century British politics was almost completely remade by the forces of organised labour, Irish nationalism, and female suffrage.  This, I suspect, is right, and Kipling understood it as few others did.  He cites here George Dangerfield "The Strange Death of Liberal England", published in 1935.  Which I have not read, but surely must one day soon.  Hitchens notes too that as a boy he saw bound volumes of Kipling in his school library, with a left-handed swastika on the covers, and as I was informed in the comments on a previous post this was not uncommon before 1939 - but Kipling insisted in the mid-1930s that the symbol be removed from all editions of his work, in which too he was ahead of his time.

I have posted previously about this symbol, as I found it on a book given as a Sunday school prize to my late great-uncle Ridley, always known as Tigs, when I recently helped begin to clear my aunt's house after she died in February this year.  Another thing we found was a diary that Tigs kept of a trip he made to southern Africa, by sea, in 1959.  This is being serialised as the Tigs' Trip blog, and you can read it here.  Fascinating social history.

now here's a thing

and a symbol you do not see often these days.  Or not outside a Jewish cemetery anyway.  Regular readers will know that at the end of February I went to my aunt's funeral in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria (if you press me to be more specific, Walney Island) - my aunt was my father's sister, and I appropriated this book from her house, which had been my grandmother's house.  The book, as the label shows, was given as a Sunday school prize in 1925.  The recipient was my grandmother's younger brother Ridley, always known as Tigs.  Tigs was always thought to be "the clever one" of my great-grandmother's rather large brood, and certainly he worked in the drawing office rather than in a manual job in the shipyards in Barrow (Vickers in those days, the whole family lived in what is still known as Vickerstown).  Tigs never married.  The family story was that he was dropped down the stairs as a baby by one of his older sisters, and was "never the same" after that. In fact the most likely scenario is that he had a tubercular spine.  I remember him as small and crookbacked.  He died in the 1970s, having been cared for in his last years by a sister, not my grandmother, her younger sister Hilda, widowed by then.  In those days people like him could not marry.  We are still going through family photographs, and a photograph of Tigs will be found and shown in due course.

His story is one to be told elsewhere.  For now, the book.  I haven't read it properly, but have looked through it.  It is a cruel story.  But even in my childhood in the 1950s children's stories were cruel - Enid Blyton, anyone?  In the days of this book they didn't put the date of publication in the book, so you  couldn't be sure.  But it was published not that long before 1925 it seems.  I notice that the author is female, and that the main character is a feisty young girl, whose father often says to her that he would tan her hide, or similar, if she was a boy.  But anyway, it was given to a boy as a Sunday school prize.  Tigs lived all his life in the family house in Buller Street, Vickerstown, my great-grandparents' home, because he did not marry, and presumably when he died and the house was cleared my grandmother somehow acquired some stuff. And there this book still was, all this time later.  And now I am blogging about it.

Readers, I know you wonder, why the swastika on the cover?  The short answer is that I have no idea.  In the 1920s in England, what did a swastika mean?  We know that it is in fact a Hindu symbol from the Aryans of north India, which is why it was appropriated in the way it was in Europe in the 1930s.  Incidentally, what we now think of as the Star of David is also a symbol with that heritage.  Apparently you can, in some places in India, see a Star of David and a swastika together as a joint emblem.  This to me is culturally mysterious.  As is the cover of this book.  The details inside the book give very few clues.

If you are knowledgeable about these matters, please comment.  Googling these things really does not help very much.

Win

Her name was Winifred, always known as Winnie or Win,  She was named for her aunt Winnie, whose full name, confusingly, was Wilhelmina.  She was born in 1926 on Walney Island, off the shipbuilding town of Barrow in Furness.  Her parents were not married when she was born - the banns had been called for their wedding, but aunt Wilhelmina had persuaded her mother to call the wedding off, and her father was not seen again.  The gentle fiction was preserved that Win was the youngest of her grandmother's large brood, not an uncommon situation in the industrial towns of the early 20th century.  Win's mother Margaret left Walney and Barrow for London three years later, having secured a ring on her finger as her means of escape, in the arms of a Scottish carpenter called Jim Griffiths.  Win stayed behind.

Margaret and Jim were my grandparents.  My father, born in London in 1930, was their only child.  Years later Win came to live with them, when she was in her late teens, putting my father's nose for ever out of joint.  But Win never quite got over what she saw as her mother's abandonment of her.  So she never liked her stepfather Jim, this making her possibly the only person in the world who did not.  Jim was a drinker, with a great shock of thick hair and a wicked sense of humour.  My father inherited both (the hair and the humour).  I got just the hair.  I think Win, my aunt, felt that her mother had been taken away from her.  She never discussed this, as far as I knew, as families did not in those days.  She and my father, her half-brother, were never on good terms.  My father died young, in 1975, at one of the regular times when he and Win were not on speaking terms.  So there was a sadness and a kind of emptiness at the heart of my father's family.  I did not understand this when I was a child, but I felt it.  I was in my twenties before I understood it.  My father never mentioned it.  There were a lot of silences in the family.

Win's mother Margaret had escaped Barrow and her background, and was a working woman in London, a GPO telephonist most of her life, and a cinema usherette.  Win herself married the boy who lived next door to Jim and Margaret, and they soon emigrated, to what was then Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.  Win's husband Ted was a civil servant, who became the curator of one of Africa's most important museums, something his class and background would never have allowed him to do if he had stayed in the UK.  They had no children.  But they had escaped their family and their background, and I think they were happy, living what to me was an impossibly exotic life in Africa, a continent I did not visit until the new century.  Win and Ted came to hold the views you might expect of those living a British colonial life - they moved south as "Africanisation" took hold with the end of the colonial era, and Win at least was a great supporter of Ian Smith in the Rhodesia years.  They were never really to know what became of Zimbabwe later.  They ended their African life in South Africa, where they moved after apartheid ended.  Ted died there, of prostate cancer I believe, and Win moved back to the UK to live with her mother, by then retired and back home on Walney Island, Jim having died at the age of 90.

During their African life Win and Ted came back to visit about every two or three years, for a few weeks at a time.  As time went on my brother and I grew to have fun with them.  Win was always good fun.  We looked forward to their visits.  Because (perhaps) she had no children, Win made us three, her nephew and two nieces, feel special and cherished.  And we laughed.  Always, always, we laughed.

In 1971, with one of the numerous changes in post-colonial Africa, Win and Ted thought they would move back to the UK.  They came, and they stayed a year.  I was seventeen.  My brother sixteen.  We discussed African politics furiously, with the callow certainties of youth.  During that year Win bought a raincoat.  As well you might.  It was (from memory) quite a stylish trenchcoat, belted and buckled.  My brother and I called it her "neocolonialist fascist mac" and she wore that moniker with pride.  They couldn't settle in the UK.  I was told by other family members that Ted had thought there were too many black people in the UK for them to be able to settle.  Go figure.  They had come from Africa.  They went back there, to live the life they had been comfortable living for so very long.

Win's last years were spent in Barrow in Furness, living with her mother, and then alone after her mother was admitted to residential care, and then died in 2002.  She had gone back to her roots.  But her relationship with her mother never settled.  As it never had.

Win died last week, after suffering several strokes.  I had not been in contact with her for nine years, after a complication of my grandmother's will which meant that my mother was done out of some money.  But I liked her.  I always did.  Despite the neocolonialist mac, and the neocolonialist views.

The white Africans, which is what Win and Ted became, are not remembered now.  But perhaps they should be.  Unfashionable as they are.

On Saturday I go back to Barrow, for the first time in nine years, to Win's funeral and to help do what I can to sort out her possessions, and maybe some of my grandmother's, maybe even some memories of my father which are kept there. I'll be in my grandmother's house,  and I'll say goodbye to part of my family, and part of my life.

I'll always, always remember how we laughed, Aunty Win.

Goodbye, Aunty Win.