As the Queen passed away I am sure I was not the only one reflecting on her generation and our parents /grandparents lives. As it happens my mum was in hospital with an infection prior to the Queen’s death and very confused. She’s actually a republican (in the “not a royalist sense”) but she was talking about the Queen and how lovely she was to her, when she lived in Buckingham palace, as a Lady-in-waiting. (She didn’t). I think the fixation on the Queen is because there are few people alive who have lived through that time. She was a fixture and a point of continuity even for those who are not Monarchists and who fundamentally disagree with the idea of such inherited privilege, in a putative democracy.
She also very agitated about the war, and wars in general and annoyed that she had been forcibly married off to a German soldier during the war (she wasn’t ). Because she is 93 we all wondered if this was it but, just like when she got COVID, she seems to have shrugged it off and is due to be discharged, home, where she still lives, alone.
She was in her early teens during the war, the youngest of seven children; living at home with her widowed mother and siblings. She lost two brothers in the war and I am named after one of them, her favourite, Patrick. I was due on St Patrick’s day but turned up two days early, the first and last time I was early, or on time, for anything.
There will be an exhaustive, and exhausting, number of column inches devoted to the late Queen but what about the lives of those other nonagenarians, when they pass? In many ways their lives are more extraordinary.
My parents were both working class and Irish Diaspora. I only found out a couple of years ago that my mum’s mum was pregnant when she came over from Ireland. She was only 16 and her future husband was much older. They would marry and she would have 7 children before he died, when he was 37 and my mum was only six months old. She was what passed for spoilt in those days. She also had a beautiful singing voice and was heavily into amateur dramatics. This is her in Desert Song.
This is a record my mum made recently discovered by my sister. 👇
She was considered to be “on the shelf” in her early thirties after a broken engagement in her twenties. The man involved had been “running around” with another girl, while mum had been staying home and saving up for her “bottom drawer”; a term used for a woman setting things aside for her married life. Unfortunately the fiancé was less interested in her bottom drawer than he was in the bottom in his lady friend’s drawers.
She met my dad, a confirmed batchelor, approaching 40. He had returned to Yorkshire after spending the post war years enjoying his freedom; living first in post war Germany and then working as a lumberjack in Vancouver, before travelling to the United States. His war had seen him captured at the Normandy beach landings and spending the rest of incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp: Fallingbostel. He did talk about those years but always minimised his experience because my mum’s brother had been detained in a Japanese Prisoner of War Camp; he had been half-starved and had to be sent to a relatives farm, in Ireland to be fattened up. If oppression Olympics had been a thing, you could say he had less points than my Uncle.
This is a picture of prisoners in Fallingbostel which illustrates it was no picnic.
Within 9 years my parents would have seven children, with a surprise number 8 when Dad was in his fifties. I was number 6. They would live in a two roomed house with an outside toilet across the road. While living there my Dad worked nights and built a house during the day. Mum would manage kids and picking up building supplies as well as her singing gigs.
I would be three when we moved into our four bedroom bungalow which took three years to finish and they names Deo Gratia. (Thanks be to God).
I could write a book, publishers feel free to get in touch, but, be warned, I don’t know their preferred pronouns though I could hazard a guess at their sexes.