by Ben Graff
How Brave Helen Was
6th April 1966
Dear Mr and Mrs Graff and Colin,
We have been to the hospital and learned the sad news of Helen. May we express our sympathy to you all at this time.
We know there is little that we can say that can be of consolation to you and hope that you will find a measure of comfort in each other.
We came to know how brave Helen was and we had a great admiration as well as liking for her. We prayed with you all that she might get well.
We have thought so often of you since we heard the news and hope that before very long you will be able to look back on the happier times and without the sadness that must be with you now.
Wishing you both long life.
Our kind regards to you all.
Yours sincerely
Chris and Francis
How Much More We Miss
4th April 1966
Dear Mr & Mrs Graff,
It is with deep regret that I have heard the news of your sad loss, and I wish to extend to you my deepest sympathy, along with Helen’s other friends from the office.
You must have been wondering why I had not been to see Helen, but this was due to the fact that I have had disc pressure in my back, and have not found it easy moving, for which I have had to attend Hospital. It was very remiss of me not to have written, which I now very much regret and I can only apologise for this.
Whilst writing Mr Harris has requested me to ask if it would be possible for us to visit you as he has to settle up with you. He has suggested Sunday, 17th April sometime in the afternoon if this would be alright with you. Perhaps when you are feeling up to it you could let me know about this.
Once again, I extend my sympathy for I know how you must be feeling as we all realise how much more we miss Helen now.
Yours sincerely
(illegible).
Martin’s Journal –
My Mother’s Family
So this is the dusty bit of this work – stories about my mother’s family, many of whom will be known to only a few, if any, of those who read this. I see now how it all happens. We live, we die. We are remembered and then we are forgotten.
I look at my fellow patients and cannot help but wonder how long it will be until both they, and indeed I, are no longer remembered. Writing things down prolongs things and this is why I want to tell these stories about that side of the family, as there is nobody else left to do so. I hope you will indulge me.
They were an eccentric and eclectic group of hard-working, hard drinkers who were originally from Dorset and Wiltshire. I am convinced that Thomas Hardy knew my ancestors and may well have based characters in his novels on them, although I am not saying which. Some of his books were all too close to home, the people too recognisable from the stories that were handed down to me. I am not surprised they provided plenty of material.
Perhaps we should start with the remarkable story of Jack, my mother’s brother. Jack was at college doing a course in engineering and usually returned home at weekends. On this particular weekend, sometime in 1911 I think, he had his dinner as usual and then said that he had better go upstairs to pack.
“Going away for the weekend?” queried his father.
“No,” said Jack casually, “I am leaving for Australia tomorrow.”
This was the first the family had heard of it! In those days, of course, Australia was several weeks’ journey by ship. Jack already had several cousins in Australia. They had been given grants of land, providing they cleared it and developed it for farming. Today those Sydney-based farms are hugely successful and all the relatives involved have become very wealthy. Other worlds, other choices.
Jack left home promising faithfully to write frequently. His family never heard a word. I always find it strange that people can turn away from their family, but this was how it was with him. It transpired that he was actually working as an engine driver on the railways in the years before war broke out. Then in 1917 my mother received a telegram from the War Office stating that Jack was dying in a military hospital and was asking for her.
He had lost a leg, blown off by a shell while fighting in France with Australian forces. My mother, who was of course a registered nurse, left me with my grandparents and travelled to the hospital. Jack, who was very weak, took my mother’s hand.
“Wonderful of you to come, sis; just hold my hand while I die.”
My mother in her usual forthright fashion said, “You are not going to die, Jack, not now that I am here.”
Whether she had any doubts, which she hid, I do not know. My guess is not, but who can tell? Few doubted her strength of purpose when she had made her mind up about something.
She marched off to the commander’s office. The secretary who tried to intercept her was swept imperiously to one side. She showed the commanding officer the telegram, then announced that she would nurse her brother herself until he was out of danger.
She did not go to bed for the first two nights, remaining with him constantly. I sometimes think to this vigil now. It is of a kind that has played out all through history, the bedside attendance, outcome uncertain. Things capable of either turning for the better or the dramatically worse with the strengthening or weakening of a heartbeat, the rise or fall of a temperature, the depths of the night always the time of most danger.
But it came to pass that he lived and came to see my mother before he was repatriated to Australia. It was a very moving sight.
“Sis, you are the most wonderful woman in the world,” he told her. “You saved my life, and I will never forget you as long as I live. We will never be out of touch with each other again, I promise you; I will write to you every month.”
She never saw or heard a word from him again.
I cannot explain this. He was not a letter writer, that much is clear. Perhaps he just became preoccupied with his own affairs, lost track of the rolling years and then finally thought it was too late. Who can say?
I never heard my mother comment on his lack of communication; I do not know if she was hurt by it or not, albeit it would be easy to imagine that she must have been. Although, in the moment of their lives where he needed her most, she was there for him and able to make a difference, and I hope that counted for something with her.
Through others, we did hear some of his story from a distance. Apparently when Jack returned to Australia he got a job on a vast cattle station and before long he married the owner’s daughter. He prospered well into his seventies and died a very wealthy man.
My mother’s youngest sister, Dorothy, contracted TB when at college. That was in the 1920s when there was no known cure for TB other than fresh air. There was a big TB hospital at Ventnor, where the botanical gardens are now, but the best place was considered to be Switzerland, and Dorothy was sent there to be cured and ended up marrying Harry Warket, a German Swiss who owned a fabulous beauty salon in Geneva.
Sadly, Dorothy’s health deteriorated, and her sister Lily, a London-trained children’s nurse, went to look after her, but unfortunately Dorothy was not as lucky as Jack had been and she was destined to die young.
Afterwards, Lily married her brother-in-law and had two daughters, Sonia and Erica. When the children were seven and five, the marriage broke up, and Lily returned to her native Dorset to bring up the girls on her own while working as a housekeeper to a widower farmer.
My parents were seriously considering adopting Sonia, not just as a matter of family duty but also because they had always wanted a daughter. Before anything definite had been decided, Harry came to England to visit his family. By now he had gone bankrupt and was no longer living in Switzerland, having moved to Germany to work for his sister’s husband. When he left to return to Germany, he took Sonia with him for a holiday. It was August 1939!
War broke out, and all contact with Sonia was lost. After the war,
Lily wrote to her ex-husband’s last known address, but there was no reply. Years went by, with Lily grieving for her lost daughter. Then Erica had the bright idea of calling at the Swiss Embassy in London to see if they could find her sister.
In a matter of days they came up with an address in Germany. Sonia had married a German, Yanz Wreade, and was the private secretary to the managing director of a large organisation.
Overjoyed, Erica flew to Germany, arriving unannounced on the front doorstep. The door opened. “Yes, what do you want?”
Erica said, “Sonia, it’s me, your sister.”
“I can see who you are,” said Sonia. “All these years, you and Mum have not bothered about me, so why have you come now?”
Fortunately Erica was able to convince her that they had both been broken-hearted, and all between them was well. Separations and reunions, a misunderstanding rectified, another tiny crack created by the war ultimately smoothed over.
A year or two later I met Sonia for the first time. Erica is so typically a West Country farmer’s daughter, and there was her sister, a beautiful, elegant, very continental lady, very much her father’s girl. When the war broke out, Harry joined the German army, leaving Sonia at a convent to be cared for by nuns. After the war, he married again and went to live in Australia. Sonia told her he was always very kind, but there was no warmth in their relationship, a mistake made, as it is all too easy to do.
The family believed at first that Harry had suffered great hardship in the army, serving on the Russian front. It later transpired that he had been a staff officer based in Berlin. Staff officers are not famous for suffering hardship. He owed his position largely to the fact that he spoke most European languages fluently, and it was because of this ability that the Russians kept him on in his job after they occupied the city.
Erica married a man called Phillip Hodge, a boatbuilder in Eastmouth. When I first met Phillip he was such a quiet man, who said little and suffered from depression. When he had a bit of a breakdown a psychiatrist decided he was in the wrong occupation and that he should have been an accountant! The family regarded the advice with derision. The advice was seen as being typical from a profession where the doctors were obviously wealthier than their patients. That said, and I do not recall precisely how this came about, Phillip did in point of fact go on to train as an accountant. Today he is a happy man with a lovely wit, and is a most amusing companion. He and Erica live happily together but have no children.
When Sonia and Erica are together they speak French. Although Sonia grew up speaking English to her mother and was at school in England for two or three years, she had almost forgotten her mother language. It is funny how it is possible to become separated even from something as fundamental to you as your own language; truly nothing is really secure.
The youngest of my mother’s family, Bill, was fifteen years of age when he joined the army in 1915. He’d said he was eighteen. He fought in the Middle East, and survived. Later he leased Hath Farm near Semley: a romantic stone house with a narrow flag-stoned garden facing the farmyard, and a large garden in the rear. It had no electricity or running water, and was set on a long hillside.
The house was haunted, a terrible murder having been committed on the main staircase. I always used the back stairs to go to the bedroom that was mine for a number of years; the main staircase was as if it had an invisible force field around it. Mainly invisible at any rate. Hugh and I had many holidays there, being wakened in the very early morning by the sound of cows being brought into the yard for milking just underneath our bedroom window, but I was never quite able to shake the thought of all that had occurred.
The house continued to be ill-fated. Bill married a pretty, bubbly lady called Phyllis and they had a baby daughter called Joy. In the ’20s, before the discovery of antibiotics, Joy developed pneumonia and died. They never had another child.
Bill was a hard-working powerful man, difficult, as all the family are, but capable of considerable charm when it suited him. He was a keen fox-hunting man, out as often as possible with the South and West hunt, and a fearless point-to-point rider.
When Hugh and I arrived to stay at the farm, we travelled by train, disembarking at Semley station. We would walk across the footbridge and out onto the road, where Jack would be waiting with his milk cart; Jack was a real hero of ours and we always felt safe in his friendly hands. The farm was about fifteen miles from the station, the road winding through often common land, then up a steeply-wooded hillside to the farm. It was a daily thrill to take the milk to the station.
Once the afternoon milking was over, Jack and my uncle would load the churns onto the two-wheeled cart, then we would pile in. Jack would flap the reins and the horse would set off at a smart trot. A few yards from the farmhouse the hill became very steep indeed, and the horse would go faster than ever. We were always terrified that he would come down and there would an almighty wreck with us in the middle of it, then we would start to ease as the hill became a gentle slope. It may well have been a miracle, but the horse never did fall.
Sadly there was another horse that did. In 1934 Bill was out exercising one of his hunters when it tripped on a loose wire and came crashing down. Bill, wearing only a soft cap on his head, sustained a fractured skull and died a couple of hours later. We were all stunned by this terrible turn of events. Phyllis, totally shattered, came to Ryde to stay with us for several weeks, then when she returned to the farm to settle up the affairs I went with her and stayed for three weeks. Perhaps some houses are best avoided after all.
The farm was taken over by John Abbot: a little older than me, but a fellow old boy of F.G.S. His wife was the sister of one of my beloved friends. During my visits to Shaftesbury I used to call at Hath Farm from time to time.
Only about three years after my uncle’s death, John Abbott died in a car accident. His widow stayed on and subsequently married again. Her second husband died soon afterwards of a brain tumour. The old house was living up to its reputation!
A few years ago I went down the narrow lane and parked in the wide space near the farm entrance. There was a lady working in the courtyard garden, so I introduced myself and was invited in for a drink with her husband.
They had removed the Victorian-tiled surround, revealing a large open fireplace. They had also stripped out the cupboards in the hall that had enclosed a stone wall, and they had done a similar job on the staircase.
I thought to the horrors that I knew of and those that had been passed down from others. Despite the hospitality and the air of calm that seemed to prevail in the moment, I was glad to drink my tea and be gone again.
One Time Abroad
First time abroad, first aeroplane, our big trip has long been planned and now it is here. We fly from Birmingham, just the four of us, to Paris. I had been desperate to go, but as soon as we are on our way I want to turn back. It is all very different to the Isle of Wight and Bognor. Alien.
While we are still on the tarmac Matt and I have eaten the sweets that are meant to stop our ears popping on take-off, and as a result both feel sick. Mum is a slightly nervous flyer, but Dad has shut himself off from all of it and is walled into his seat with his newspaper. He has the air of the experienced, seasoned traveller, which of course he is, as well as that of a somewhat exasperated father, which he also is.
England pulls at me throughout. Ian Botham has been recalled to the England cricket team. Graeme Hick has been dropped. Botham takes an early wicket and hits the winning runs. I listen through my transistor radio’s headpiece as we trudge around the city, with its heat and noise and sense of otherness, remembering earlier years on the Island when we marvelled as Botham hit sixes while we paddled at the Solent’s edge. I am present and not present. It is partly my age I suppose. Wherever I am these days I instinctively want to be somewhere else.
The sense of indifference all cities radiate towards those who enter them is pa
rticularly strong. I think it was Henry Miller who described how impossible it was to make a friend in Paris, and while I didn’t know those lines then, I somehow sensed them. But I’d only been to London a handful of times at that point, so perhaps I wasn’t well placed to judge how big cities really work, if they do at all – their utter indifference is not personal.
I struggled to see beyond what I could literally see. The Paris of writers and artists was in my future reading, not the here and now, and I would not have been open to it if it was. I just see a tangle of language and traffic and people who walk with a sense of purpose that I envy, their way forward more obvious to them than mine is to me.
My mother asks a lady for directions in French and is disappointed when the reply comes in English.
“That wouldn’t have happened once,” she says softly.
The woman is a few years younger than she is and more glamorously dressed. She has a certain confidence and I can sense Mum thinking to something as she walks away, but I can’t quite read what.
We take a riverboat down the Seine. The water smells, and the couple sat in front of us argue loudly in German. The headphones for the commentary don’t work properly. We visit art galleries and then the Catacombs, walking past row after row of piled-up skeletons, glad to emerge blinking into the sunlight, different from them and relieved at the thought.
I can’t eat the food. No meat to a French restaurant seems to translate as ham. But we find a place that can make a plain omelette and I insist we go there after that. We are always pleased when the waiter recognises us and is welcoming: a veneer of familiarity in a strange city.
Dad lets us sip his beer. Mum frets about where we are going to stock up on more bottled water. I’m not actually even sure that I like omelettes especially, but I have long since recognised that this is as good as it is going to get.