With the birth of my grandchild this year, it is little wonder my mind drifts to the long passage of time through the immutable past to where my grandparents were born in the north of England and then beyond that, to great grandparents, and theirs, throughout time. One day I will be a great great great great and given our propensity to record every aspect of our lives, I presume there will be more left of me than my antecedents, who left little record of who they were.
Worthy Watts, my great great Grandfather, and his wife Rose, in their Sunday best in front of a manor house in the West Country, UK
There is an Eliza, who was a laundress with suds on her arms, crying with joy at the pleasure of an unexpected visit from her children years after they had moved to follow the work created by the railways. There's another whose first husband died and left her with three babes under three, and remarried to have more, something my grandfather didn't know and that I discovered following breadcrumb trails of censuses and birth certificates. I found the house she lived in as a housekeeper in 1820, but not graves, as she was too poor, and it was only those with a bit of money that could afford the gravestones. There are two war memorials with two great great uncles who died in the Great War. Edwards, Alberts, Elizas and Florences, Worthys and Charles adorn the family tree. Little Ned is at the end of it, tiny and blinking in futuristic sunlight.
When my father held Ned for the first time, I cried. The sheer miracle of them both being alive at the same time was extraordinary. His father is long gone, and so little known of that branch. He was Slovenian, and we don't know anything about the family he left behind to come to Australia with my Nana, her buried in a coastal cemetery I never visit, though think of her often. How traumatising the second Great war must have been on the migrants of this country that left behind so much.
When I married an Englishman I ended up living not six miles from where my Granddad was born. It was mere coincidence. I thought he was from Yorkshire. His thick accent told that story. He would sing the unofficial Yorkshire anthem, about being on Ilkly Moor without a hat, and catching your death of cold.
But he was born near Bath, the family moving to Sheffield as his Dad got a job on the railways. I used to look across the green fields of that country and imagined my old kin travelling along the same country lanes, woods and ridgelines. I drank a pint at a pub where a great relative would be bundled into his cart drunk at closing, the horse's rump slapped so it would trot down the hill home, or so an old story goes.
Granddad Fred as a boy in Derbyshire, UK
There was a very strong sense of those ghosts calling me to my ancestral home.
My grandfather had six children and he couldn't make a single one marry an Englishman. For that he loved Jamie without ever having met him. He never would, as he died with dementia two years after his beloved Betty died unexpectedly. Dear Fred could not abide life without her. In many ways I married one much like my Grandfather, as my husband is as hopelessly devoted to me as he was to my grandmother. He thought she was beautiful until she died, grey hair and wrinkles and all. We would laugh at him for his undying affection. She could do no wrong. Both of them longed for England, as my own man does now. Homesickness can last a lifetime.
Grandma Betty with her Mum, who died at 40
Hearing I was going to be married, he wrote me a letter. It is the only letter I have kept. Tossed are the tied together packages of writing from an old boyfriend, memories I need not keep. Burnt are the ones with secrets best kept. Lost are boxes from childhood, or discarded in a desire to leave no trace of that old identity that is mere baggage for me now. But Fred's letter is folded and placed with old photographs and a few items of memorabilia.
In his spidery handwriting, shaky with age and grief, he begins by speaking of grandma, and how he misses her so and that life is not as good without her, and that he is lonely. He seems to check himself then, and writes that he hopes that I am enjoying life in Somerset. The shift to the third and last paragraph are mere well wishes for myself and my soon to be husband, and he imagines he will be a fine one indeed since, like him and all the best men, he hails from England.
And then he is gone, a scant page and a half of love and he is a ghost now. A Frederick George sketched on a family tree somewhere in the future and people wondering who he was and what he was like. With his children old now and dying one by one, his stories disappear with him and gather them as I may, they are grains of sand pouring from my hands, unable to be held.
I can still hear his voice in my head singing On Ilkly Moor Baht'at.
'Then we shall ha' to bury thee, on Ilkla Moor baht 'at' he sings. 'Then the worms will come eat thee 'oop'.
Ain't that the truth.
On Ilkley Moor Baht'at
Wheear 'as ta bin sin ah saw thee?
On Ilkla Moor baht'at
Tha's been a cooartin' Mary Jane
Tha's bahn t'catch thi death o'cowd
Then we shall ha' to bury thee
On Ilkla Moor baht 'at
Then t'worms'll come and eat thee oop
Then ducks'll coom and eat oop t'worms
Then we shall go an' ate oop ducks
Then we shall all 'ave etten thee
On Ilkla Moor baht'at
That's wheer we get us o'ahn back
On Ilkla Moor baht'at
With Love,
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