I'm off to Kells, To see the Bells

Today it has been squally and wet in London - as if the weather has given up any pretense that it is summer and decided to embrace autumn a month early this year.

It was distinctly squally in work as well.  The news that auditors are coming in next week always has a very dispiriting effect on people.

I have been thinking today about my paternal grandfather who died long before I was born.  My father talked very little about him and much of what I've learned comes from my mother, who knew him only briefly, and from one or two of my aunts and uncles.

He was a "gentleman" witty, fond  of rhymes.  He sometimes read the "Manchester Guardian" and considered it the only English newspaper worth looking at.  He was born and died in the same house and only had two siblings - one a priest and the other a doctor.  He inherited the family business which included a pub.  Not the best inheritance for a man who, as my Australian uncle said, "was too fond of the grog".  He was involved in the civil war and was jailed on a prison boat.  He married my grandmother when she was still a teenager and fathered at least 12 children, nine of whom grew up to adulthood.

When I was at home a couple of weeks ago I visited my aunt who, like my grandfather, has lived in the same house all her life.  She's now eighty and still has very sharp memories of her childhood. She began talking about her father and told me how when they were young  a woman came to the house to do washing.  The woman's name was Elizabeth.  It amused my grandfather to always address her as "my dashing, splashing Lizzie" The joke, my aunt explained, was that Elizabeth "may have been splashing but she certainly wasn't dashing. She wouldn't have said boo to a goose."

My aunt then began to recite poems which my grandfather had written - funny, satirical ditties several notches above doggerel which had  been written about real events, many of them involving his own family.  One, she told me I wouldn't understand, as it was written about a Protestant man who, due to a complicated matrimonial difficulty, was required to spend the night sleeping in their boiler house.  The  poem was written in dialect, "the way Protestants speak" and it was true I could only understand about half of it.  For the first time ever I began to believe that Ulster-Scots might actually exist as a separate dialect.

I am hoping that my sister or one of my cousins, will have the wit to record my aunt as it would be such a loss if none of us in fifty years time could sit and regale the next generations with stories of a man dead long before any of us were born.

(I blushed when I read this.)

Comments

[fifi]

You have such a wonderfully interesting family history. I have noone to tell me such stories, possibly because they have all been blurred on purpose.

When I read that blog post about you it made me wish I had read it myself. In fact i think I will have a go myself. Yes.

[ganching]

Well all families have stories - if you don't know the old ones then I guess you need to make sure you create some yourself.

[IOD]

love the photo

[IOD]

..and the words! Great writing, keep going please

[ganching]

Thank you IOD.