Category Archives: East Coker

Remembering my Return to East Coker

The Lost Family – Part 3

I do not know when he first visited East Coker in search of his ancestors, or how often he came here, but I do know that his last visit was in the late summer of 1939, when he took some photographs of the village and the church, and it must have been then that he gathered the impressions that he later set down in the poem “East Coker”.

Address given by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis in tribute to T. S. Eliot at the memorial service and unveiling of a memorial plaque at St Michael’s church, East Coker, 26th September 1965

St Michael's East Coker St Michael’s Church, East Coker, burial site of T.S. Eliot’s ashes

This last post of the year will focus on the final part of the introduction to my family story, edited for a memoir writing competition. In October’s blog post (see The Lost Family – Part 1), I began by outlining the background to my quest, detailing my experience of working as a probate genealogist or so-called heir hunter in London in the 1980s. Last month (see The Lost Family – Part 2) I turned to the more recent past, when an unknown photograph of my father as a boy reignited my interest in researching my paternal family history, sending me to East Coker in Somerset, where my father had lived as a wartime evacuee. This month I will complete the trilogy by describing the serendipitous meeting with my father’s schoolfriend, Alan Cornelius, the man who took the photograph of his boyhood friends in Coker Woods one spring day in 1944.

As previously, I’ll also be updating the story with current recollections of the events I recount, as well as the additional knowledge gained in the last few years during my struggle to create a coherent narrative from my genealogical quest. This will hopefully inspire some readers to chronicle their own family research, perhaps including their personal responses to the stories they uncover along the way.

The Lost Family: Part 3

East Coker is a place that has mostly won the battle to preserve its rural charms, mainly due to the Eliot connection, and has few modern buildings or street lights. Visitors come to see the deep lanes, the open fields, the houses of grey stone and the hollyhocks that aim too high. It is even said that Eliot based part of his poem on the 1876 Friedrich Gerstäcker tale of the mysterious community of Germelshausen, where the population had been cursed by the pope and were only allowed to come out of the earth for one day of revelry every hundred years. There is a strange a feeling of liminality when entering the village through the ancient sunken lanes that resemble tunnels into another world. And it is not difficult to imagine that the place is haunted by the spectre of an earlier time, which can only be faintly glimpsed at certain moments.

And the deep lane insists on the direction into the village*: I have arrived in East Coker several times over the years – once on foot over the fields and woods from Yeovil Junction Station, another time arriving ‘the back way’ through Burton Cross, where my father lived during the war on Burton Farm. But whatever road or path I take, it always seems a surprise to come across the village: East Coker gives the impression of being hidden away – both in time and place. This is almost like a metaphor for my own genealogical research, an endeavour which sometimes feels akin to glimpsing through a door which has opened slightly onto another world, only for it to close again when you try to push through to the other side.

After a reader contacted me about my East Coker post, I learned that the deep lane shuttered with branches* was also called a holloway – or hollow way (derived from the Old English ‘hola weg’). Having very little experience of travelling along such sunken lanes it came as a surprise to enter the village along such a route. Perhaps it also reminded me of the road to Dunure in Ayrshire, the seaside village close to our home where our family spent many days in summer. Although not technically a holloway (which are characteristic of Southern England due to the geology of the landscape), it gave the same feeling of entering another world, which was made even more exciting to me by the sound of branches whipping against our Austin 1100 (see Looking Back).

* From East Coker, by T.S. Eliot

The morning I met Alan Cornelius – the old man who’d taken the photograph in Coker Woods on that Whit Monday over sixty years ago – the village was looking its time-warped best. The jaunty union-jack bunting strung up between the thatched houses in the main street hung still in the mid-summer air, and the sounds of hay stooking cut across the yellow fields. The Helyar Arms was preparing for its first customers, and the church was alive with the bustle of middle-aged women setting the final touches to the arrangements for the flower festival.

Flower Festival in St Michael's Church

By noon the cow parsley in the hedgerows was wilting in the heat, and the exhibition in the village hall was coming to a close. ‘We called those long wooden sticks ‘staves’ back then,’ Alan Cornelius said, as he packed away his own copy of ‘my’ photograph amongst his other WW2 memorabilia. ‘And we were off to fight the enemy in the woods.’ He shook his head and smiled.

Among all the other bits and pieces on his stall that the younger visitors to the exhibition found so fascinating, was a copy of his childhood diary. The short, scribbled entries illustrated just how exciting the war could seem to a thirteen-year-old boy. There were numerous descriptions of long bike rides spent searching for incendiaries in the surrounding fields, building model aeroplanes bought from a shop in Yeovil, watching out for enemy aircraft, visiting the local Westland Aircraft Factory (where Lysanders or ‘Lizzies’ were built).

One diary entry triggered a particular memory for Alan Cornelius: ‘Early on in the war, a bomb fell on a nearby farm, killing a bull. Your dad said this was abominable. It was typical of him. He always was a sharp one.’ I thought back to how my father always used to make up limericks and nonsense rhymes, and imagined him honing this skill amongst his peers. He’d come to the village with his mother and baby brother, not as part of a school group, so a sense of humour and aptitude for word play might have eased the path to acceptance by his new classmates.

My aunt was the first in the family to arrive in East Coker when war broke out, ending up there with part of her all-girls grammar school in Camberwell. Yet, while my aunt was sent to Somerset, my father was initially evacuated with his local primary school to Leatherhead in Surrey where he was billeted alongside other children with a Mormon family. Years later, he remembered them chiefly for the fact that they watered down the milk and gave their charges the cast-off bicycles of the junior members of the Kennedy clan. (Joseph Kennedy – then American ambassador to Great Britain – had stayed in a house in nearby Headley during the first year of the war, before being forced to resign in November 1940). I like to imagine my father cycling to school on J.F.K’s old bicycle, and sometimes wonder if that was the source of my parents’ on-going joke that our family and the Kennedys shared a series of (near) parallel death dates. In an uncanny twist of fate, my father was to eventually die in January 1995, several hours before Rose Kennedy did.

True as I’m riding this bicycle: My father used to say this a great deal, something which delighted and annoyed the rest of the family in equal measure. For several years I thought it was ‘Trew’s riding this bicycle’, or words to that effect (another of my father’s favourite expressions). However, it was a while before I finally learnt what he was actually saying – and more importantly, what it meant. He used the phrase whenever he was pressed about the veracity of the stories he told, so that in the end we could never know what had really happened and what was made up (a trait he shared with his brother). Possibly this was a way for my father to avoid having to go deeper into certain topics or give away too many personal details, something he hated doing. So for most of his life, none of us – including my mother- knew much about his background. However, as I mentioned last month, ‘fact is often stranger than fiction’, and I think my father secretly enjoyed the absurdity of recounting the kind of story which sounds as if it could be made up but was in fact actually true.

Of course, once the 1939 register was available for consultation (and even then I had to wait a couple of years until the redacted names of those who might still be alive were released) I saw that so much of what he’d remembered had actually happened. My father had stayed with a large Russian-American Mormon family not far from the Kennedy’s home. I came to the conclusion that if these facts were true, then why not the bicycle story. There are many people I know (myself included) who might have dined out on such an anecdote for years, but although a good raconteur, my father shied away from the limelight. My mother now admits she wished she’d questioned him more about his past, and I often wonder if that is the main reason why my London family genealogy was so compelling. From an early age I always associated the Skelton family with an unknown – but possibly romantic – backstory. In contrast, I felt (erroneously, I realise now) that I knew a great deal about the Scottish side of my family, removing their mystery for me.

Within a year, my father was back in London – like many families the ‘phoney war’ had lulled them into a false sense of security – with my grandparents omitting to tell my aunt, lest she also wanted to return home. My father remembered the constant trips to the air raid shelter (always when he was setting out his lead soldiers), so this would have been in the autumn of 1940, when the bombing started in earnest. Having only recently moved the family from a dilapidated Victorian terrace in Brixton to a modern, cottage-style semi on the Bloomfield Hall Estate in West Norwood, my poor grandmother must have despaired at ever being able to create the comfortable family home she craved.

One inauspicious afternoon, my father arrived back from school to find my grandfather standing at the end of their road, suitcases at his feet, saying that their house had taken a hit and they would be ‘going away’. It is one of the very few things I remember my father telling us about that period in his life – apart from the spectacle of watching the Crystal Palace burn down from his upstairs bedroom window in the old family house in Denmark Road, so I realise it must have been an important memory.

Crystal_Palace_fire_1936 Crystal Palace Fire, November, 1936

A Blazing Arch of Lucid Glass: The voiceover accompanying this Pathé newsreel clip above illuminates (no pun intended!) both the iconic status of this building and the horrific drama of the fire which destroyed it. In 1936 the Crystal Palace was already 85 years old, and yet next year (2021) marks a further 85 years since it burned to the ground in such a dramatic way. So just as there are still people alive today who remember the terrible conflagration which lit up the sky over South London and could be seen for miles around, there must have been old people then who could recall the wonder of the new glass building in Hyde Park, perhaps even having seen the exotic exhibits on display during The Great Exhibition in 1861.

However, by the time my father saw the smoke and flames rising above Sydenham Hill the Crystal Palace was certainly not the exalted place it had once been, with the surrounding gardens popular places for working class families to gather on Sundays. My aunt recalls the whole family going there to watch the motor racing which took place in the grounds from 1927, a fact that surprised me at the time but proved to be correct. The actual building had several uses over the years – there were the popular Saturday music concerts, and it even housed the Imperial War Museum for a few years in the 1920s. However, historians agree that by the end of the 19th century, the Crystal Palace’s best days were over.

As a family historian, I am interested in the fact that the Crystal Palace and gardens links the two unknown sides of my family: both the ‘struggling’ and the wealthy. The former branch of the family (from which I descend) may or may not have visited the Great Exhibition (an event which cut through the classes as long as one could afford the one shilling entrance fee) but they certainly took advantage of the building’s relocation to South London to enjoy their Sunday downtime. Some of the wealthier side of the family – the ‘undiscovered’ branch – were actually involved in The Great Exhibition itself, with James William Skelton’s in-laws (the Sleath family) winning an award for their glass eyes (see Artificial Limbs on Curious Plans).

When the newly dubbed Sleath-Skelton family took up residence in The Avenue in Dulwich, they were only a stone’s throw from the Crystal Palace, which had moved there from Hyde Park only a few years previously. Then the glass building and its surrounding grounds was seen as a neighbourhood attraction which brought the railway to this rural outpost. But as the century moved to its end, the area filled up with the new railway commuters and rows of terraced housing began to march over the fields, gobbling up the market gardens and dairy fields, and in the process attracting more of those who were seeking cheaper housing. This was how my great-grandparents ended up in the area (in nearby Romanny Road) for a few years in the late 19th century, and again in 1938 when my grandparents moved to a new house on the Bloomfield Estate, a place they all loved. The concept of the interwar cottage estate particularly interests me, and there is some fascinating information about the ones in Lambeth at the excellent Municipal Dreams blog here.

P1030886 (2) My grandparents’ house on the Bloomfield Estate, today

In the end, my grandmother took her two boys to Somerset to join their older sister in a bid to keep them all together, while my grandfather stayed in London working as a tram conductor at the Camberwell depot, a reserved occupation, although as a veteran of the Great War, he was too old to serve again. My aunt later told me that this was not an easy time for my grandmother: in her first billet she stayed with a woman who treated her like her own personal skivvy. This must have been galling to a mature mother of three, but she eventually found a more convivial place for the family in a cottage at Burton Farm, where the Dunning family lived. And this was the place where my father retained strong memories of helping out on the farm with the other children – and which gave him his lifelong love of the British countryside.

BUR_COT Burton Farm Cottage, East Coker, today

The more I heard from Alan Cornelius about life in East Coker during the war, the more I realised that evacuation to the village would not necessarily have been a hardship. Most of the villagers appeared to have made a great effort to integrate the evacuees, and many of the youngsters were pleased to welcome the newcomers to their clubs and dances. As my father’s old schoolfriend pointed out to me himself: What adolescent hasn’t rejoiced at the injection of new ‘talent’ into their midst?

It is never too soon to start asking questions: Like many evacuees, including several in East Coker, my aunt actually married her childhood village sweetheart. Jack Boucher, was an older and ‘cooler’ local lad who also featured in the 1944 Whitsun Monday photograph. Even as an old man, Alan Cornelius remembered him well, writing in his unpublished memoirs: Our 1940s equivalent of ‘The Fonz’ was a young man several years our senior. He was a natural leader in everything that the youth of the day rated as important. He then listed my uncle’s achievements on the sporting field as well as describing his prowess at organising youth entertainments, going on to say: I rarely saw him idle his time away, and he undoubtedly set a high standard for all the other lads around him.

I was lucky enough to meet up with my uncle again (after many years) in 2005 on my first visit to East Coker, and wish I’d asked him more about his upbringing in the village. Sadly it would be the last time I’d see him, and just like the passing of Alan Cornelius it underscored for me how important it was to talk to those who held the memories of the past. And yet there is still this part of me which is reticent to ask too much – perhaps after having a father who did not like to talk about his childhood I’m afraid to upset or offend elderly friends and relatives. I sometimes wonder now if I’ll ever see my aunt again, and wish I had not been so cavalier about my ageing relatives in my youth, particularly when I was first carrying out family research in the mid-80s and early 90s.

The photograph below shows the East Coker Boys Club, taken in 1944 at Coker Court. My father is in the front row, far left (kneeling) and Alan Cornelius and Jack Boucher are also in the front row, 3rd and 2nd from the right, respectively. In his memoirs, Alan wrote: Over the last few years of the war, there were some twenty of us, but the core group were no more than eight, with others moving in and out for a variety of reasons.

East Coker Boys Club East Coker Boys’ Club, 1944

Despite the charms of East Coker, for the rest of his life my father was to wonder what direction his life’s trajectory might have taken had he been able to attend the prestigious James Alleyne’s School in Dulwich. He remembered the smart uniform which had already been bought, and the sense of life about to begin; but the war sent him off spinning in another direction, away from his scholarship studies. East Coker, however, kept him rooted during a time of great upheaval. And he was, I believe, always grateful for that.

The Incidental Genealogist, December, 2020

The Lost Family – Part 2

4 Replies

The amateur ‘snapshots’ surviving in today’s collections most often date from the 1910s onwards, when more families took up photography. Visual clues such as dress details and any vehicles in the scene can often aid close dating.

Jayne Shrimpton, Tracing Your Ancestors Through Family Photographs (2014)

P1070475 (2) My Skelton Grandparents, Hayling Island, 1950s

This month I will be continuing with my family story as I edit the first 5,000 words of A London Family for a memoir writing competition. In October’s blog post (see The Lost Family – Part 1), I began by outlining the background to my quest, focusing on my experience of working as a probate genealogist or so-called heir hunter in London in the 1980s. Now I turn to the more recent past, when an unknown photograph of my father as a boy reignited my interest in researching my paternal family history.

Just as I did last month, I will also be commenting on both the editing process and my own response to my earliest chapters, given that I can now look back on the beginnings of the project with the hindsight from over a decade of carrying out my second wave of genealogical research. Writing the monthly blog chapters has forced me to distil facts, choose an angle, and try to make each post a standalone narrative, which enabled me to make some sort of sense of my quest from the very beginning. This was definitely preferable to simply conducting the bulk of the research first, even if it did mean I sometimes had to revisit old ground as the project progressed. However, while I feel this gave the narrative a pleasing circular structure which meant new readers could come on board at any time, it remains to be seen how successfull I will be at turning the story into a more traditional book-length narrative. It will certainly be an interesting process, and one which I hope will improve my writing and editing skills.

The Lost Family: Part 2

I’m not being entirely truthful when I say I did not have any photographs of my paternal family. Some years after my father died, my mother came across a handful of old snapshots in a battered leather wallet at the back of a drawer, one of which was recognisably a small black-and-white image of my English grandparents flanking their first car (a retirement treat) on a day trip to Hayling Island in the late 1950s. All the other photos were disappointingly of unknown friends and work colleagues, but one of the pictures fascinated me in particular. It was the only hand-coloured one in the collection, and showed five boys under a tree, relaxed and grinning at an unknown photographer, long pointed sticks in their hands. On the reverse, in faded blue ink, was written: Expedition to East Coker Woods, Whit Monday 1944. It was not difficult to locate my father (to the far right) and my future uncle (through marriage) behind him.

Coker Woods

The Uncanny Art: I’ve included this iconic photograph of my father and his friends in many of the posts over the years because I find it a very powerful image, particularly as it is responsible for all my recent genealogical research and writing to date. Not only do I feel it has a slightly otherwordly quality to it (the hand colouring is possibly the reason for this), but it was this image that encouraged my interest in the cultural theory of photography. This led me to read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and On Photography by Susan Sonntag (amongst other texts), illustrating that family history is a wide-ranging subject that if tackled with an open mind can bring its own intellectual rewards. Exploring these side-shoots has been one of the most fascinating aspects of the project and something which I certainly would not have done to the same extent had I not also been constructing a narrative around the topics that might interest other researchers (see Those Ghostly Traces).

From the date (my father was born in 1928) I knew the boys were all teenagers, but their old-fashioned clothes and obvious pleasure in their bank holiday outing made them seem much younger. In fact, such was the incongruity of the image that I was instantly reminded of Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, set in 1943, where a group of children, played by adults, set off to play in the Forest of Dean, with tragic consequences. I’d even watched that film with my father, who was normally averse to anything by Dennis Potter.

That picture must have been taken when Dad was an evacuee my mother explained. He was sent to Somerset during the war. I think his mother’s family originally came from there.

But wasn’t the town called Yeovil – not East Coker? I remembered the name because my father had occasionally mentioned his wartime years there. When I was young he told me about collecting newts in jam jars, about raiding birds’ nests for eggs (of which he was later ashamed), about hunting for shrapnel in the lanes. Later he added other tales to his repertoire: the dances in the village hall, drinking scrumpy straight from the farmer’s barrel, shooting rabbits. But when I asked my father where exactly this place was, all he said was that it was called Yeovil. To my Scottish ears, the strange name sounded like the kind of mythical English village of perpetual idyllic summers, where hollyhocks and sunflowers towered high above the inhabitants, and children were free to run through woods and fields and lanes.

cottage Thatched Cottages in East Coker

A Lost Eden: As I’ve mentioned before, growing up in Scotland with an English father meant that, although I felt very much Scottish, part of me was fascinated with the idea of London and the south of England, where my Skelton relatives all lived. As a child I loved the glamour of the capital, so it is not surprising that I headed there to live and work after graduating in 1984. But I was also entranced with the idea of the mythical West Country, especially as on family trips ‘down south’ to see our English cousins I always delighted in the very exotic looking thatched cottages with their colourful gardens. A visit to the White Horse in Berkshire – while not technically in the West Country – only added to the sense that there was something mysterious about the landscape. In contrast I felt that Scotland was too harsh, cold and wet for my liking (I have since revised my opinion) and that I really should have grown up in a village like East Coker. It is no surprise that as a teenager I devoured the novels of Thomas Hardy and loved to visit the nearby countryside when I lived in London, even if only to walk in the green belt near to my first flat in North London (see A Rose in Holly Park).

I pulled out the old AA drivers’ map circa 1988 that had little use in a family of non-drivers in the 21^st century. Once I located Yeovil it wasn’t that difficult to find the Cokers (East, West and North – where was South?) standing to the south-west of Yeovil like sentries. But there was something about the name that seemed vaguely familiar. It niggled at me for days before I later came across the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name – part of the Four Quartets. I thought it strange that my father, who loved poetry, had never bothered to tell me about the village and its link to Eliot, particularly when I had studied the writer so intensively in my final years of school.

As we were growing up, my father had given us an eclectic mix of poetry books, from Seamus Heaney’s North to Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, and he must have been aware of the connection Eliot had to East Coker. Although the poem had first been issued in pamphlet form by Faber and Faber in 1940 (then reprinted several times, such was its popularity), the Four Quartets was not published until several years later, so my father would certainly have heard about the poem at some point. It was almost as if he’d never wanted us to know the exact location of the place which had taken away so much with one hand (his home in London; his coveted scholarship to the posh school in Dulwich), but had bestowed gifts with the other (love and respect for nature; an appreciation and understanding of the British countryside).

P1050432

Four Quartets: I first came across T.S. Eliot when I studied The Journey of the Magi while preparing for my English exams. Despite being entranced by the poem, I do remember that this was also the catalyst for my decision not to study English literature. Class time was short, and it was not possible to question the images and language of the poem ourselves, given that we had less than a year to prepare for our final exams. Cramming was the order of the day. However, I could not stop wondering whether Eliot would have even agreed with Brodie’s Notes explanations of the symbolism he used in the poem.

Reading Eliot as a mature adult is an altogether different experience, and each time I pick up the Four Quartets I see something else in the work. East Coker, in particular, is a fascinating journey into Eliot’s state of mind at midlife at the outbreak of war. He first visited the village in 1936 when on a pilgrimage to his ancestral home – Andrew Eliot had left East Coker for America around 1650 – and later requested his ashes be buried in St Michael’s church in the village. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his celebrated biography of Eliot: It was the final dramatic, but telling, gesture.

Eliot’s long interest in Buddhism is clearly evident in the poem, yet it was not until a few years ago that I realised to how great an extent. While travelling in Japan one summer I came across a little-visited hillside temple in Kyoto on the banks of the Hozu-Gawa river. A flight of steep stone stairs led up to the building and at the top was a small viewing hall which afforded good views of the city and surrounding countryside. As well as containing binoculars for this purpose the room also had some strategically placed reading material in both Japanese and English. There were the usual crudely published pamphlets, concerned with the history of the temple and information about its founder, but also some photocopied sheets of Buddhist poetry.

Temple View

I picked up a couple and began reading – before I realised with a sudden shock of recognition how close they were to the Four Quartets in rhythm, language and meaning. Poems such as The Song of Zazen and The Heart Sutra had clearly been very influential on Eliot, who had always incorporated ideas from other sources into his work. Eliot himself once said that Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. But whatever you may think about Eliot’s ‘appropriation’, these Buddhist poems certainly gave me a deeper understanding of the Four Quartets and the eternal message of redemption contained within.

A few weeks later I came across the on-line version of the East Coker Newsletter while searching for more information about the village. An announcement proclaimed that a weekend of special events to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of VE and VJ Day had been organised for the second weekend in July. This seemed to resonate with my own plans to visit, and I knew then that I had to make the trip.

East Coker Commemorations

What I couldn’t have foreseen is that the date of my first visit to East Coker would forever become linked in my mind with the London bombings. That weekend was due to be hot, and as my mother and I boarded our flight from Edinburgh on the morning of July 7^thwe were oblivious to the horrific events unfolding in the capital. But the news soon filtered through, and in the end we were unable to leave our luggage to look around Bristol as planned, so took the next west-bound train and ate our limp picnic in the stuffy compartment while the ticket collector nervously prowled the corridors, checking and re-checking for any stray bags. As we watched the lush West Country scenery slip past it was hard to imagine the scenes of carnage in the capital – just as it must have been difficult for those who moved from London to the countryside for the duration of the war to envisage the destruction of the Blitz.

An auspicious date: When I first wrote about visiting East Coker on the 7th of July 2005, I omitted to mention the London bombings as it had not really impacted on our visit, as terrible as the terrorist attacks were. I also found it difficult to weave the two events together but felt instinctively that by not mentioning the attacks it was somehow disrespectful to those who had been affected by them. I thought long and hard about this, then remembered the situation in the train with luggage, and saw that as a way of connecting the bombings with the story of the evacuees.

This is probably one of the most challenging aspects about writing non-fiction – trying to create a coherent narrative from disparate events. It also emphasises how important it is to be aware of the external environment at key moments in a family’s history and how this can impact on individuals. It could be something as simple as checking the weather on an ancestor’s wedding day (I was able to do this for my great-great grandfather’s wedding in 1823), to understanding the contemporary political and legal system, and how this affected the citizens of a country or a region.

Yet after everything I’d expected from the ancient-sounding name, Yeovil seemed an unprepossessing place. Disaffected youths roamed the bland post-war shopping centre beside the bus station, and there was a feeling the market town had seen better days. I was beginning to wonder if we were in for a similar disappointment with East Coker. After all, it had been my father who’d always said we should never go back anywhere. He himself had returned in the 1980s and was saddened by the changes to the village, and reluctant to talk about the experience. But I consoled myself with the thought that, as we had no memories of the place, whatever we might see or experience would be a revelation to us.

From Yeovil we caught a local bus to East Coker, travelling the way some of the evacuees might have come on September 1^st, 1939. Before long, a cast iron signpost, of the kind seldom seen nowadays, pointed us in the direction of East Coker. The bus suddenly veered off down a narrow lane which sank deeper into the surrounding land the farther we travelled along it. Snake-like roots of ancient hedgerows protruded from the sandy soil, while above us the tree canopy shut out most of the late afternoon sun. Then we rounded an unexpected corner and came into the village: a place that looked as if it should not – could not – belong in the twenty-first century.

East Coker Holloway ‘Holloway’ on the approach to East Coker

From those first impressions (the patriotic red, white and blue bunting strung up across the main road between the thatched cottages; the alms houses by the church; the hayricks in the fields), to later, more personal information (so this is the farm where Dad once lived; this is the hall where he first went dancing; this is the church where he carved his name in the vestry), we gradually learnt about the modern-day village and its shadowy wartime predecessor. Walking across the damp fields at dusk towards the warm light of the pub on that first evening, it was almost possible to imagine that the past might still exist in some ghostly form alongside the present.

In the heat of the following day on a sunken footpath which led through the woods to the old priory, I lay down, head to the red soil, and heard the drum of distant hooves and the click of mid-summer insects. For those few seconds it felt as if the earth was struggling to gather up the momentum to move backwards, to reveal something to me – until the shouts of children in the playing fields broke through the thick afternoon air.

East Coker Footpath Footpath to Naish Priory

That weekend I finally met the boy who’d taken the photograph in the woods on Whitsun Monday over sixty years previously. He was manning one of the stalls in the village hall war exhibition, and his table was a jumble of WW2 paraphernalia: old ration books, bits of home guard uniform, various pieces of ammunition. Part of his collection was dedicated to the story of the relationship between the local children and the evacuees.

It was there I saw it. Amongst the letters and diaries and various bits and bobs of printed memorabilia, was my own photograph, but in black-and-white, and mounted in a crude wooden frame. Not trusting myself to speak, I reached into my bag, pulled out my hand-coloured version and passed it across the table, watching the old man’s face twitch as he struggled to work out the connection.

Stranger Than Fiction: There’s a hackneyed saying that life is stranger than fiction, which must be dispiriting for fiction writers who are trying to curb their enthusiasm for coincidence and serendipity. But on that that day when I met Alan Cornelius, I felt that I’d slipped between the pages of a novel and that anything could happen. I suppose in some kind of novel I might have ended up falling in love with his youngest son; although this being real life, I never met his sons who, like myself, are all relatively happily married. However, I did meet one of his granddaughters the following year when I went to visit him at his home. She arrived with some courgettes for him from her parents’ garden, although this might have just been a reason to look in on him. For he was already ill with the cancer that would soon take his life, and sadly this was the first and last time I ever got to talk to him at length. That was the day he gave me a copy of part of his unfinished manuscript about his childhood, and I felt very honoured to be entrusted with his memories.

In the blog I have quoted at length from his reminiscences about the ‘vacuees (as he called them) but removed this from the manuscript. One of the joys of blogging is that you are not restricted by traditional publishing conventions, and I felt very much that his story should be told in his own words. As an ex local councillor, Alan Cornelius was also very interested in discussing politics and we had a very lively couple of hours together talking about all and sundry (including his military badge collection). It sometimes feels disrespectful to focus on the past when ‘interviewing’ those who can shed light on family history as they are often just as involved with the present as we are. I was aware of this, too, when I went to visit my aunt last summer. Although she could bring my father’s childhood to life just by looking at an old photograph, she was also very much living in the moment.

It was then I learnt about that day out in the woods. A moment of late childhood, hanging high and free above the dark shadow cast by the war, and caught on camera like a dragonfly in ether for the dissection of future generations.

To be continued . . .

The Incidental Genealogist, November 2020

We Are At War

1 Reply

Hindsight can mess with history to a fatal degree, and we are lucky to have such passionately argued and reliably frank correctives as these.

Simon Garfield, We Are At War (2005)

We Are At War

Military epithets abound to describe our present situation, putting many of us (regardless of our age) in mind of World War Two and the so-called ‘blitz spirit’. But it can almost be harder to deal with this unseen and unknown contagious enemy than one realised in flesh and blood. And as our current prime minister recently discovered to his cost, showing no fear in the face of this invisible fiend is neither heroic nor sensible. What is needed now is often the exact opposite of that which was expected from the population eighty years ago. No wonder our initial national response to this pandemic was (at worst) chaotic and (at best) mixed!

Yet, during this strange period I’ve been reflecting on what it must have been like to live through the long years of the Second World War, which are only just still within living memory. This is not to denigrate the wars since that have taken place on foreign soil, but simply because WW2 was the last major conflict that my London family went through together, the memories of which have been passed on to future generations through their stories and anecdotes. As my own research has shown, those experiences often were different from the perception we usually have of everyone pulling together as one, with a communal mindset. Our blitz-spirit-soaked nostalgia for this era, kept alive in films and books and political rhetoric, seems rather naive when we consider that – just like today – it was a case of ordinary people trying to get by, with their very ordinary reactions to their individual situations. Some did heroic deeds, others stole and lied; and in between this, there was a wide continuum of human behaviour (with many moving up and down this invisible line as the war went wearily on).

It was the persistent idea that there was nothing extra to add to the narrative of WW2 studies which prompted writer Simon Garfield to initially focus on Britain’s post-war period while undertaking research at the archives of the Mass-Observation Project, housed at the University of Sussex. This resulted in the first of three books based on extracts from some of the diaries kept by ordinary people from the period 1939-48 (although the project actually started in 1937 and lasted for much longer).

Our Hidden Lives

The first book Our Hidden Lives (Ebury, 2004), focused on the three years immediately following the war, up until the birth of the National Health Service in 1948. However, while reading through the wartime diary entries, Garfield realised that much of what had been recorded during the conflict did in fact shine a light on some of the hitherto undocumented experiences of ordinary citizens. So, just like the time-jumping Star Wars trilogy (as Garfield himself says in his website), the second book, entitled We Are At War (Ebury, 2005), moves backwards to cover the period shortly before the outbreak of war and up to the start of the blitz in autumn 1940 (the so-called phoney war), while the third book deals with the period from then on until the end of the war.

It is in this final book, entitled Private Battles (Ebury, 2007), that Garfield lays to rest the idea that everyone was working together for the common good throughout the war period. He points out that: The diarists writing here – by no means a representative sample of the country’s mood, but nonetheless a valuable snapshot of it – describe a wartime Britain we may be a little unfamiliar with. Displays of genuine camaraderie and the Blitz/Dunkirk spirit of legend are matched by acts of selfishness and expressions of spite. Usually these are the result of the daily grind: beating someone else to the rationed fruit or shoes, feeling resentful about the lack of support when fire-watching. But there is a deeper malaise too, a belief that the war is not being prosecuted well and that those in power do not understand the prolonged suffering of the less privileged. Churchill is by turns revered, mocked and scolded, his ministers treated with equal parts respect and disdain.

Private Battles

For me this was perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the diaries: the fact that many of the writers (and their family members, friends and colleagues) expressed opinions that seemed startlingly out of line with the perceived notion of how the population thought and behaved during wartime. Some have the odd sympathy with the Nazi party and express anti-semitic tendencies, others (on the left and right) want to play their part in creating a new and better world order. All are critical of the government at some point. As one diarist succinctly points out: The trouble is that we foolishly expect our war ministers to be supermen. Another describes the theft of a much-needed (and hard to come by) torch, while a neighbour of one diarist is fined £15 for ‘causing dismay’ by spreading rumours that the BBC was not being truthful in its reporting of events. And all this played out against a background of humdrum events – regular trips to the cinema, moaning about the entertainment on the wireless, borrowing books from the library – I Married A German by Madelaine Kent (an English woman’s account of living in Nazi Germany before WWII) seemed to be popular with the female diarists. The identity of Lord Haw Haw is a much discussed subject.

Many of the issues that currently face us – such as fear of an unknown future, worries about financial security and concerns about mental and physical well-being haunt the pages of these three books, in particular the first one (in terms of chronology), We are at War. This volume documents the vacillating moods of the diarists as they receive and react to the official – and unofficial – news updates in the early months of the war. As Garfield states in the introduction: We join the diarists at a time of uncertainty, but we leave them at a time of resolve.

Some of the concerns of the protagonists may seem strange or comical in retrospect – but just like the old-fashioned language they use* (How the devil/blazes? etc.), it feels disrespectful to mock them in any way, as we in our turn will also be found outdated in thought and speech by future generations. Many of the diarists write about things that would seem racist or sexist today, a reminder to us of what society deems acceptable or not can change so rapidly. Some expressions appear to have picked up their negative connotations during war time. The diarists frequently refer to the Japanese as the ‘Japs’, yet I remember admonishing my Scottish grandmother for this pejorative term when we discussed my upcoming teaching position in Tokyo in 1991. As can be seen from reading the diary entries, war and other major crises do not only create new expressions or bring certain ones into prominence (the current term ‘ramp up’ springs to mind), but also change the meaning of words.

*I was interested to note that one diarist describes the term ‘slacks’ being a more polite form for trousers – a word my father used frequently, but rarely heard now (conjuring up, to my mind, visions of sleazy 70s loungewear).

From reading the diaries it becomes clear that the greatest worry that hung over the heads of all the protagonists was the uncertainty, along with the restrictions to their liberty. As one diarist mentions: Though these events determine our future we have no control over them. We live from day to day in a kind of resigned doubtfulness unable to make plans for more than a month ahead. These are of course things that also make our current situation so troubling. It is now easier to put ourselves into the heads of our wartime ancestors and understand better their fears and worries and frustrations, alongside the feeling that they had no choice but to trust in a government which they did not always believe was following the best course of action. There was concern that if they spoke out against the government they were being disloyal and undermining the war effort (as well as receiving a fine), yet most also realised that in a functioning democracy it was incumbent on the country’s citizens to always remain questioning and vigilant.

For my English grandparents, separated from each other through the evacuation as well as the reserved occupation of my grandfather (a cavalry veteran of WW1 – see Portrait of my Grandfather as a Soldier – and a Lambeth tram conductor*), it was undoubtedly a stressful time. And to think that it lasted for almost six years – with the effects being felt into the next decade, not to mention the lifelong implications of mental and physical wartime deprivations. All his life, my father wondered how things would have turned out for him had the war not prevented him from taking up the scholarship to Alleyne’s School in Dulwich. The smart new uniform which had been bought for my 11-year old father was never to be worn and he spent the rest of his school years in East Coker (see East Coker), attending the local school in Yeovil. In between these two events, there had been a brief stay in Leatherhead in Surrey, living with other evacuees with the acting president of the Mormon Church in the UK, the Russian-Greek emigré Andre Konstantin Anastasiou and his family. This was where my father – according to my mother – was given President Kennedy’s cast-off bicycle to use. (Joseph Kennedy had lived nearby in his role as the American Ambassador from 1938-40).

*One diarist writes in October 1939: I asked a bus conductor, ‘What will you chaps do in an air raid?’ ‘We’ve been told to leave the bus and make for the nearest shelter. We should have lists of the shelters but we haven’t got them yet.’

Kennedy Family, London 1938

Kennedy Family, London 1938

While all this sounds fascinating and worthy of the kind of dinner party anecdote my father would have never wanted to indulge in (hating dinner parties, in any case), I don’t think he was particularly happy there. Consequently it must have been a relief when it was finally decided that he and his younger brother should follow his mother to East Coker to join his older sister, who’d been evacuated there with the Camberwell School for Girls on the 1st of September at the outbreak of war. She was already half-way through her grammar school education at the time and billeted with a local family, and thus it would have made sense not to disrupt her education.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons my father never got on as well with his sister as he did with his younger brother. There might have been some resentment that she was able to complete her scholarship education, while his was never even allowed to begin. On a recent visit to my aunt (see Return to East Coker) it was brought home to me how very much she resembled my father – and her own father – she was, so it was inevitable there would be personality clashes between two bright, strong-willed siblings whose lives had been overturned by the outbreak of war. Sometimes I wonder how my motherly grandmother survived those headstrong family members, but at least she had her baby boy, my uncle, who seemed to be the one who was ‘easiest’ to parent. As my aunt tellingly remarked: although they all missed their father (who visited them from London every six weeks), day-to-day life was often easier without him!

Alleyn's School in 1922

What Might Have Been, Alleyn’s School (1922)

Recently I have been interested to read about how the current situation has changed the dynamics of our relationships with others. While most people obviously miss close contact with friends and family members, some relish the chance to be free of social and familial obligations. For many (health issues notwithstanding) there seems to be an uneasy mix of both these feelings, just as there might have been during wartime. In my own family, it would appear that after the war my grandfather never continued the relationships with his Skelton siblings (to the relief of my grandmother), which was one of the reasons I knew so little about my London family initially. Although my father had many cousins on his father’s side, it was only my aunt who was able to fondly remember them all from having been a regular visitor at their home in Thornton Heath before the war.

I very much wish that someone in my own family had recorded their thoughts and feelings (wartime or not) as carefully as the diarists in Simon Garfield’s trilogy. One of my favourite characters was Maggie Joy Blunt – a pseudonym for the writer Jean Lucey Pratt and the only one to appear in all three books. It emerged that I wasn’t the only one who particularly looked forward to reading her descriptions, but that many readers also wanted to find out more about her. Therefore I was delighted when a few years later Garfield finally gained permission from her niece to edit and publish Pratt’s own extensive private diaries (which spanned over sixty years), resulting in the book A Notable Woman, published by Canongate in 2015.

A Notable Woman

The psychologist, Julia Shaw, writing recently in the Guardian newspaper emphasises in her article entitled Lockdown is distorting our memories but there are ways to gain control (link to full article here) that it is imperative to keep a diary if you really want to remember your experiences accurately. She points out that: The one thing that almost every memory scientist repeats ad nauseum is this: if there are moments in your life that you want to preserve for posterity, write them down. Now. Assume that no matter how emotional, or interesting, or historic your experiences during the coronavirus lockdown are, you will forget them. Recording these memories outside your brain is the only way to truly keep them safe.

2020 Diary

As the Mass-Observation Project is currently asking for volunteers to write up their experiences of living through the 2020 pandemic in order to help the social historians of the future (see link here for details), could this be the year for some of us to play a part in living history? Even if we only keep a diary for ourselves in these strange and unsettling times, we never know who might find it useful eighty years hence.

The Incidental Genealogist, May 2020

Return to East Coker

3 Replies

T.S.Eliot, East Coker (1940)

Signpost to Naish Priory in the woods at Burton, East Coker

It was not a particularly auspicious weekend weather-wise when I travelled to Somerset with my cousin last month. We had arranged to meet up with our elderly aunt on the Saturday of our long weekend in the West Country, and so decided it would make sense to look around East Coker the day before our planned visit. This would allow my cousin to see the places that I hoped my aunt would still be able to describe to us from her memories of the wartime evacuation, and make the experience more meaningful.

Thus it was a cool, wet and blustery Friday afternoon when we arrived in the village – not what I’d intended at all. My first visit in July 2005 (see East Coker) had certainly been influenced by the good weather and I’d wanted my cousin to have the same initial impression. However, fortified with tea and cakes from the National Trust café after our trip to nearby Montecute House, and sporting the matching bucket hats we’d purchased in Sherborne the day previously, we decided there was nothing to stop us exploring the village in the wind and rain. And maybe it would even clear up later, we told ourselves rather optimistically. (It didn’t).

A lucky coincidence saw us approaching East Coker by way of the sunken lanes I’d already described to my cousin. I’m not quite sure how much Sandra appreciated having to squeeze her car by a number of large vehicles exiting the village, but she certainly agreed with me that it was an ‘exciting’ way to arrive. It also brought home why the new Keyford housing estate is slated to be situated near the Dorchester Road at the far end of the village. Those pesky narrow lanes effectively sealed off the other part of East Coker (where our fathers had lived with our aunt and grandmother during WW2) from further development, and thankfully could not be widened due to planning regulations.

HOLLOW LANE.JPG A sunken lane on the approach to East Coker

We soon passed the old hamlet of Burton and the end of Burton Lane (which led to the farmhouse cottage where the Skeltons had lived for the duration of the war). We had, however, already decided to head straight for the heart of the village (what had once been called Up Coker), and park by the alms houses next to the church. Not only did this mean we could start our walk by viewing the impressive St Michael’s, with its T. S. Eliot memorial, but it also gave me the opportunity to show my cousin the first cottage in which our grandmother was billeted (West Wells), and where I was told she’d only stayed for a short time as she’d been unhappy about being made to ‘feel like a skivvy’ by the woman of the house.

ALMSHOUSES The 17th century alms houses by the church

A wedding rehearsal in the church meant we only had time for a cursory look around, and I was glad that I’d had the chance to attend a Sunday service with my mother on our first visit back in 2005. It was on that July morning that I felt the sense of the community that pervades the place, as well as delighting in the Englishness of the service, which was so different from my memories of attending the Church of Scotland in my youth.

Conscious of the worsening weather, we did not stop for a drink in the Helyar Arms as planned (called The New Inn until 1948), but headed past the pub and along the road leading to Sutton Bingham – once a scattered village and now a reservoir, whose medieval church with pre-reformation wall paintings had been preserved. My mother and I had visited the church on that first trip, and had wondered at the homes which had disappeared. My father would have known the village (where there had been a railway station, closed in the early 60s, but not as part of the reservoir development), and it must have been an uncanny experience for him to return to the area and see that great expanse of water where once there were farmhouses and fields.

COKER MARSH ROAD.JPG Cottages at Coker Marsh

In the end we only got halfway up the road before heavy rain halted us in our tracks. However, it was enough to give Sandra a feel for this part of the village – called Coker Marsh – and where our uncle’s extended family (the Bouchers) had lived in one of the stone cottages which lined the road. Walking back the same way towards the church, I noticed a small stream running along the left-hand side of the road which, judging from the stone channel in which it ran, looked like it might have once had a purpose beyond just taking away runoff water. The remains of a cress bed? I could not remember it from my earlier visits, but wondered whether this was because it had been dried up previously. This made me think about other aspects of the village I might have missed, or forgotten about, and I realised that although I generally prefer to explore places on my own, by showing Sandra around East Coker I was strengthening my own mental map of the area.

BACK LANE.JPG Wild Flowers in Back Lane

Although we missed out on the very charming footpath up Back Lane – which my aunt later told us was one where she would go with our uncle before they were married and wanted some privacy – I did, however, convince Sandra to park up at North Coker and walk along the road to Burton Cross. This meant that we were able to admire the stone cottages, many with thatched roofs, and their bright and blowsy, albeit rain-soaked, gardens. We passed by what had once been the shop and post office, a sad reminder of how little of these services remain in rural locations. On my first visit in 2005 it had still been trading and my mother and I had been grateful to be able to purchase snacks and a newspaper. No doubt my father would have spent any hard-earned pocket money there – as had most of the village children throughout the years – as well as in the small shop next to the pub, which had long since closed. And I pictured him scampering along the road, after having helped out with the harvest or haymaking, wondering whether to spend his precious farthings and ha’pennies on liquorice or boiled sweets.

Looking down Burton Lane from the road end today

On this visit, I was more conscious of the modern houses which flanked the lane, looking shabbier now that previously. And I could swear that a couple of newbuilds had popped up between them in the once generous gardens, giving the lane a more hemmed-in feel. In contrast, the original cottages nearer the road-end appeared even more attractive next to their characterless suburban-looking neighbours. Yet I was aware that to have lived there once would have meant putting up with cold and damp and darkness for a good part of the year.

As Sandra is particularly interested in old buildings (but still wants to live in a modern one), I had little difficulty in persuading her to take the sandy track which ran by the chapel towards Culliver’s Grave (the name of a field) and at a crossroads in the woods turns off to Naish Priory. This 14^th century Grade 1 listed building is now a private home, and although it was never a true priory, it did once have religious connections. It is, however, a remarkable survivor from the period with a price tag only the super-wealthy can afford. Currently it’s owned by the local conservative MP and arch-brexiteer, banker Marcus Fysh, which may explain the number of EU flags draped over the front gates of several more modest houses in the village!

NAISH Side view of Naish Priory

The following afternoon, when I told my aunt of our trip to the priory through the woods, she explained that this was the way she’d walked from the farm cottage to pick up the school bus to Yeovil (a 1920s charabanc brought out of retirement for the evacuees). Although it did not seem like much of a short cut, I’m sure there was a good reason for my aunt to use this trail, rather than take the road. Perhaps she’d simply wanted to avoid someone (such as the farmer who was rather touchy-feely) or had enjoyed the lonely track, which she’d undertaken in all weathers.

Asking someone at an advanced age about their reminiscences is obviously something which needs to be handled sensitively, and I was conscious of the fact that it felt just as important for us to talk to our aunt about the present as the past. Luckily Sandra – who knew our older English cousins much better than I did – was able to supply that side of the conversation. While she browsed through photographs of a recent family wedding, I showed my aunt some of the old family photographs I’d accumulated over the years. Most of these she could remember, as either I’d sent her copies in the post or she’d been the one to furnish me with the originals. However, viewing them together was a completely different experience. Each image released a most astounding array of sharp memories, as if the photograph had been taken yesterday. For example, a great-uncle I’d never known (my grandmother’s beloved older brother) was described by my aunt for the first time as being ‘pompous’. Even as a boy you can see it in the way he looks!

Sometimes I just had to catch my breath and listen carefully as my aunt described such momentous events as The Crystal Palace burning down in a relatively matter-of-fact way: Mother called us to the window and said there must be a huge fire going on somewhere over South London. We did not know then that it was the great Crystal Palace where we went to listen to bands on a Sunday. My aunt then told us about the car races in the grounds of the Crystal Palace that my grandparents took them to watch. The car racing at Sydenham was something I had not known about, and seemed a strange thing for a young family to do. But then when reading more about it afterwards, I discovered that these were really popular events, which in the 1930s would have perhaps fascinated a wider variety of people.

Crystal_Palace_fire_1936 Crystal Palace burning down, November 30th, 1936

And so it was that the afternoon continued in a most delightful fashion, my aunt moving lightly from the present to the past, depending on the topic of conversation, her face a range of flickering emotions. Shafts of late summer light from the garden fell through the open stable door of my aunt’s tiny 18^th century cottage lighting up her features, which, as Sandra remarked later, made her look like Nana and Grandad rolled into one person. Behind my aunt on the wall, a clock ticked ominously, making me aware of the limited hours we had – and not just on that afternoon. It was one of those rare moments (or rather a collection of moments, strung together like delicate fairy lights illuminating the dark) where it seems that time has ceased to exist in normal terms. I felt as if we had almost slid into another world: one in which we could glide between 1929 and 2019 with ease, summoning up ghosts along the way.

Another photograph of my aunt and father in fancy dress brought back a memory of a party at school. My aunt explained that my grandmother had been so delighted with the sight of her two children all dressed up in their costumes (number three was yet to be born) that they went straight from their junior school in nearby Crawford Street to a local photographer’s studio in their outfits. And that slightly superior-looking smile on her face? Well her Pierrot suit had been specially made for her, whereas my father had just had to contend with what he could find in the dressing up box.

P1070488 (3).JPG My aunt and father in fancy dress c1933

Our Cocker Spaniel, Jet, 1974-1982

My aunt, however, does not suffer fools gladly (just like my grandfather and father) and certainly could not simply be described as some sweet old lady siting in a rocking chair waiting for her relatives to visit. One of the reasons I had not seen so much of her over the years is that she and my father did not always have the easiest of relationships. He found her bossy; she found him difficult. But their younger brother (Sandra’s father) was the adored baby of the family who kept the infrequent family reunions going throughout the years. My last memory of my aunt on that Saturday afternoon is of her standing in her front garden as we prepared to take our leave (with promises to return in a few months) jabbing at the twisted trunk an old wisteria tree with one of her walking sticks. She was annoyed with the fact that while she wanted the tree cut down to let in more light, her neighbours wanted it to remain. This was because the old wisteria’s spreading branches also decorated the facades of their own cottages, added value to the homes.

Coker Woods.png The photograph of my father (right) with friends, East Coker 1944

Since returning from my visit to Somerset, I’ve been rereading Abigail Shepherd’s informative and entertaining book about East Coker, discovering facts I’d previously missed or forgotten about, and tying in some of the stories my aunt told us about (such as Queen Mary’s visit to Mrs Dorothy Walker-Heneage at Coker Court in 1941) with the reminiscences outlined in the book. As East Coker: A Village Album was first published in 1997, many of those interviewed are no longer alive today to tell their tales, including my father’s friend, Alan Cornelius, who as a teenager had taken the group photograph in the local woods with his father’s Box Brownie.

I’m glad that I was finally able to meet Alan Cornelius, and learn about his wartime boyhood experiences, and am grateful for the copy of his (unpublished) notes on the subject of the ‘vacuees. By chance, my aunt told me last month that one wartime Christmas the only electric bulb they possessed in their small farm cottage gave up the ghost, prompting her mother to ask her to go to the Cornelius household to see if they had a spare. Of course, my aunt being my aunt simply put her foot down and refused to go out begging for a lightbulb on Christmas Day, and so the family had to celebrate in candlelight. Which sounds as if it might have been wonderful for everyone but my poor grandmother!

A VILLAGE ALBUM

Today marks the day 80 years ago when my aunt and father were evacuated with their respective schools: my aunt to East Coker with Charles Edward Brook School for Girls in Camberwell, and my father to Leatherhead in Surrey with his school. However, only a few months later my grandmother was able to move to East Coker with her youngest son and bring the three children together under one roof, while my grandfather continued to work in London. For a fourteen year old like my aunt, the evacuation seemed more like an adventure away from the restrictions of her parents, in particular my grandfather, who could be a rather strict father.

The Incidental Genealogist, September 2019

A Tale of Two Villages

The Memory Thief

4 Replies

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot, East Coker (1940)

Happy New Year! 2018 marks the third year of A London Family, and I now have almost thirty posts, or chapters, devoted to my genealogical quest – well over 100,000 words, and certainly more than enough for a full-length book on the subject. Nevertheless, I intend to continue with my project until the end of 2019, finishing with the discovery of the Ur-Skeltons in the Yorkshire Dales, and a surprise piece of information which highlights some of the issues involved in following a patrilinear family history.

There are, however, still plenty of exciting tales to come before then: including the third and final part of the story of the life and times of Herbert Sleath, as well as sea voyages to exotic destinations, and the requisite untimely deaths in which such adventures often ended. But as the demands of the festive season are currently impinging rather disproportionately upon my free time, I have decided to revisit the catalyst that reawakened my interest in family history: namely the discovery of the previously unseen photograph of my teenage father and his friends (including my future uncle) in Coker Wood in 1944.

I initially wrote about this event in 2007 – two years after first visiting the Somerset village of East Coker with my mother (and with a copy of the photograph in my bag). Ten years ago I was studying part-time for an MA in creative writing, and wanted to incorporate the story into a fictional piece of work. This was part of a larger project on the Freudian idea of ‘the uncanny‘ in literature, a concept which, although notoriously difficult to define, had begun to intrigue me. Around that time I also became aware of the close connection between photography and ‘the uncanny’, a topic explored obliquely by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida, and which I discussed in an earlier post (see Those Ghostly Traces).

This story set within the tale which follows is one that readers may remember from my first blog posts. In those two chapters (see In my Beginning is my End and East Coker), I expanded the narrative of the original text, adding the background details and information required by the factual nature of the posts. But for those who have not yet read the initial chapters, or who are happy to take a return journey to Eliot’s village of open fields and deep lanes (albeit on a slightly circuitous route), then this creative offering is for you.

THE MEMORY THIEF (2007)

The rain fell relentlessly over the Bodensee. It spat down onto the bare heads of the children who played on the upper deck of the ferry while their parents watched from the fuggy warmth of the restaurant. It drove away the last of the tourists buying coffee and ices on the oleander-lined promenade. It splattered onto the shiny metal roofs of the vehicles on the car deck, washing away the dust of the Autobahn and the sins of carbon monoxide emissions.

I huddled in my parka on the bench at the back of the ferry and watched the harbour slip behind us as we nudged out into the open water with a renegade hoot. The lake hissed and roiled, the metres sliding between us and the German Zoll. Soon those metres would add up to the kilometres that would propel us into another country entirely. That was where home was now. For better or worse I had settled in a small town on the Swiss side of the lake. A place of two seasons: foggy or sunny; a place where the snow seldom fell, and bananas and palms slept uneasily throughout the long, dark winter, encased in hessian sacking.

We were heading for the foggy season. The lakeside cafés would soon be pulling in their outdoor furniture, and the ubiquitous window-box geraniums would be replaced with pumpkins – later, festive pine cone wreaths. Then I would make this journey again in reverse, laden down with cheese and chocolate and handmade candles from the Christmas markets. But in between those two trips was a whole semester of teaching and marking and lesson preparation, while the endless rhythm of shopping and cooking and cleaning hummed away in the background like a badly-tuned radio which was impossible to turn off. I tried instead to think of the positive things about the cold season: meals by the log fire with friends; the Italian marroni sellers in the old town; the scarlet leaves on the Japanese maple at the top of the lane; the winter clothes in boxes in the attic just waiting to be rediscovered.

My thoughts were interrupted by a woman walking past on unsteady legs who stopped to ask for directions to the toilets. I pointed her down to the lower deck, and she stumbled wordlessly towards the metal stairs, her sparse hennaed hair fluffing up around her face in the wind. A purple-nosed man in a sludge-green boiled wool jacket caught my eye and looked away. Something cold and hard settled low on my stomach. Ach, ja, I heard someone say. Self-important lips smacked shut. A low, rumbling laugh. A belch and the sound of a beer glass cracking onto a Formica table top. I looked over the railing down at the water. This grey, foam-flecked lake would be my substitute sea for the next few months. But seagulls would never chase the ferries on twisting wings, their rackety calls splicing the air; and seals would never lurk underneath the shifting waves, their worried old man’s heads bobbing up sporadically above the waterline.

As we headed out across the Bodensee, the rain became heavier, and I reluctantly picked up my bag and entered the restaurant. Orders of bratwurst and potato salad and Weizenbier were being carried aloft by the serving staff, and I ducked into the first available seat at the table near the door. In the centre of the table a round of pretzels hung on a wooden tree, looking like a game of hoopla on a fairground stall. I looped off the topmost one and bit into it. A large crystal of salt dissolved against my tongue, and I immediately called out to a passing waiter and ordered a beer.

The man sitting opposite me put down his Frankfurter Allgemein with an attention-seeking rustle and raised his head. Sweat beaded his forehead and trickled down craggy tributaries to the twin dams of his bushy eyebrows. He looked similar to the actor who played the retired Black Forest detective in the TV series I often watched on Monday nights. But then he extended his right hand across the table top, and I knew as soon as he clasped his four fingers around my five that he was someone else entirely.

Dr Killian Fuchs. Professor für Psychologie in die Rorschacher Hochschule. Und sie sind Frau Skelton – die Engländerin die auch bei uns arbeitet?

Ja, das stimmt. Aber bin keine Engländerin, komm’ aus Schottland.

Ah, ha. Scotland. One of my favourite places. He leant forward, his words piercing the damp air with his stale, peppermint-sweet breath. Have you just come from there?

Sort of.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry. I have also been in my home town – Duisburg. Do you know it?

I shook my head.

Perhaps you are feeling homesick, like me. But it will pass, as it always does.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up. Fahrkarten, bitte. The ticket collector in his peaked cap stood beside us. I reached for the inside pocket of my jacket for my travel documents and pulled out the plastic wallet that contained my passport, identity card, travel pass and remaining euros.

A very good idea, Dr Fuchs said, once the conductor was satisfied with validity of our travel cards. He pointed to the zip-lock wallet. If you fell overboard, the authorities would be able to quickly identify you.

I smiled perfunctorily and busied myself fiddling with my documents, slipping them one by one back into the wallet. As I did so, a photograph fell onto the table, picture side up. Before I could catch it, Dr Fuchs splayed out his good hand and grasped the photo as it slid towards the edge of the table.

May I have a look? It seems to be hand coloured – a technique I’m particularly interested in for various reasons.

It is hand coloured – by my father, actually. But I don’t think there was much technique to it. He was just a boy when he did it.

Dr Fuchs reached for a pair of heavy-looking reading glasses on a chain around his neck. He pushed them up over his nose and peered down at the photo, angling it into the light. Eventually he turned it over and read the faint pencilled inscription on the back: Expedition to Coker Wood, Whit-Monday, 1944.

Is your father in this photograph?

Yes. He’s the one on the right. A friend of his took it. I just found out recently.

So your father told you about the photograph?

No. My mother and I found it some years after he died. All we knew was that he’d been evacuated to Somerset from London during the Blitz. He spent most of the war there, living on a farm.

Dr Fuchs handed me back the photograph and fumbled in the top pocket of his tweed jacket. He drew out an outsize handkerchief and rubbed at his forehead. Sorry, my dear. A touch of the flu, I shouldn’t wonder. It always gets me this time of the year. I see you have almost finished your beer. Would you care to join me in a hot drink?’

As we sipped at our Ovalmaltines, Dr Fuchs explained that as a child he too had gone to stay with his grandparents in the German countryside towards the end of the war. He had very few memories of that time, apart from those he had later constructed for himself from the photographs taken by visiting relatives. It was this subject to which he was returning for his final work: the link between family memories and photography. It was to be his lasting contribution to the field, after having retired from teaching. In several weeks he would join his youngest daughter in New Zealand’s Bay Of Islands, where he hoped to buy a small house which overlooked the ocean.

But now I’d very much like to hear more about your photograph.

There isn’t really a story, I’m afraid.

Dr Fuchs leaned over and patted me on the arm. I will be the judge of that. But please, will you excuse me for one moment. He tapped the side of his nose. I have to pay a visit.

When he returned, his jacket was buttoned up tightly, revealing what looked like the bulge of a tobacco tin or a packet of cigarettes in his inside left pocket. The stairs to the lower deck had obviously overexerted him and he squeezed back into his seat, face flushed, hands trembling slightly.

I explained what I knew of the photograph, but as I talked Dr Fuchs seemed slightly distracted, raising his right hand to his heart, as if assuring himself it was continuing to beat. At one point I stopped and asked if he was feeling alright – I thought I could hear a faint mechanical whirring noise – but he just batted away my concerns and urged me to continue.

And this is more or less the story I told him.

When I was a child I used to beg my father to tell me about the time he’d spent as a young evacuee in the English West country. Eventually he would relent and tell me about collecting newts in jam jars, about raiding birds’ nests for eggs, about hunting for shrapnel in the lanes. As I grew up, he added other tales to his repertoire: the dances in the village hall, drinking scrumpy straight from the farmer’s barrel, shooting rabbits. For some reason I never thought to ask him the name of this wonderful village. To me it was a mythical place of perpetual summer, where hollyhocks and sunflowers towered high above the inhabitants, and children were free to run through woods and fields and lanes. When later I asked my father where this village was, he told me it was near Yeovil. Such an alien-looking name must surely have been that magical place of his boyhood!

After my father died, my mother found some photographs of him hidden in an old leather wallet he had once used. One of the photographs had been taken in Somerset, in the village I assumed to be Yeovil. It wasn’t until I inspected the back of the photograph that I discovered it had been taken in a place called Coker Wood. The name ‘Coker’ niggled at me for days before I thought to check it on the internet. (You have to remember, this was in the late nineties). It was there I came across the Eliot poem, East Coker – part of the Four Quartets – and decided that one day I had to make the pilgrimage.

I waited until this summer so I could travel down by train from Scotland with my mother. It was the day the bombs went off in London: the seventh of July. We had chosen that weekend as it was the local celebrations for the 60^th anniversary of the end of the war, and the East Coker on-line newsletter promised a day of special events ‘commemorating VE and VJ Day’.

East Coker Commemorations

It was a hot day, and as news filtered through about the London bombings the staff at each station became increasingly vigilant. In the end we were unable to leave our suitcases anywhere to break up our journey, and did not stop to look round Bristol as we’d intended. From Yeovil we caught a local bus to East Coker, travelling the way the first evacuees would have come on September 1^st, 1939. At the outskirts of Yeovil – to my mind, an unprepossessing market town – a wrought iron signpost (of the kind seldom seen nowadays) pointed us in the direction of East Coker. The bus veered off down a narrow lane which seemed to sink deeper into the surrounding land the further we travelled along it. Snake-like roots of ancient hedgerows protruded from the sandy soil, while above us the canopy shut out most of the late afternoon sun. Then we rounded an unexpected corner and came into the centre of the village: a village that looked as if it should not – could not – belong in the twenty-first century.

From those first impressions (the patriotic red, white and blue bunting strung up across the road between the thatched cottages; the alms houses by the church; the hayricks in the fields) to later, more concrete information (so this is the farm where Dad once lived; this is the hall where he went dancing; this is the church he was forced to attend), we gradually learnt about the modern-day village and its shadowy wartime predecessor. Walking across the damp fields at dusk towards the warm light of the pub on that first evening, it was almost possible to imagine that the past might still exist in some ghostly form alongside the present. And in the heat of the following day, on a sunken footpath which led from the farm through the woods to the old priory, I lay down, head to the cool soil, and heard the drum of distant hooves and the click of mid-summer insects. For those few seconds it felt as if the earth was struggling to gather up the momentum to move backwards, to reveal something to me – until the shouts of children in the playing fields broke through the thick afternoon air.

East Coker -Path

Later that day we finally met Alan Cornelius – the old man who had taken the photograph in the woods on Whitsun Monday over sixty years previously. He was manning one of the stalls in the village hall WW2 exhibition, and his table was a jumble of WW2 paraphernalia: old ration books, bits of home guard uniform, various pieces of ammunition. One part of his collection was dedicated to the story of the relationship between the local children and the evacuees – and amongst the letters and photos we saw our own photograph mounted in a crude wooden frame. And it was then we learnt the story of that day out in the woods. A moment of late childhood, hanging high and free above the dark shadow of the war, but caught like a dragonfly in ether for the dissection of future generations.

The ferry was now negotiating the narrow entrance to the harbour on the Swiss side of the lake. I was anxious not to miss my connecting train home, and made my excuses to Dr Fuchs as I gathered my possessions around me. For a moment he sat completely still, eyes blinking in the bright glare of a sudden shaft of sunlight which broke through the clouds. Then he stood up and left the table with little more than a nod and handshake. It was only then I noticed he had no luggage of his own – save for a small leather shoulder bag.

The last time I saw him was at the Swiss Zoll. I turned to give him a wave but he’d been stopped by one of the customs’ officers and was showing him the contents of his bag. A flash of something metallic caught my eye but I could not afford to dawdle – the local train was already in the port railway station and my husband would be waiting for me at the other end.

Since then two more summers have passed, and I have yet to return to East Coker, despite my original intentions. It is almost as if I dare not build further on the foundations of the flimsy house of my memory. Who knows which stone might send the whole edifice tumbling down? And even the lost image of my father’s grinning face – forever framed in Alan Cornelius’ father’s Kodak Brownie – has become almost impossible to recall.

Coker Wood 1944 (3)

In Eliot’s Village

I went to Eliot’s village and stood, quite still,

In a hollow, earthy lane,

Like you might have done

Over sixty years ago now,

When Eliot’s Quartets were fresh and new

And yet to be dissected.

The hall, the house, the pub all stand

– the woods, the stiles, the awkward paths.

I know you never wanted to return

So I went in your place.

And found a sadder-sweetness there

Amongst the mid-summer haying.

Happy New Year! The Incidental Genealogist, January 2018

Of Lost Toys and Mothers

7 Replies

A family without secrets is rare indeed. People who live in families make every effort to keep certain things concealed from the rest of the world, and at times from each other as well. Things will be lied about, or simply never mentioned. Sometimes family secrets are so deeply buried that they elude the conscious awareness even of those most closely involved. From the involuntary amnesias of repression to the wilful forgetting of matters it might be less than convenient to recall, secrets inhabit the borderlands of memory.

Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995)

When I was a child, a vague sense of my father’s feelings of wartime ‘rootlessness’ was communicated to me by his reluctance to talk about his own childhood, and even to put names to the places where he’d lived. And he in turn was possibly affected by the silences kept by his parents about their own unsettled beginnings, which were marked by death and poverty – particularly in the case of my grandfather.

The theory of transgenerational ‘haunting’ (or cryptonomy) described by the psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, may provide one answer for these silences. They believe that the hidden traumas of previous generations can affect the lives of their descendants, and that this knowledge is passed on through what is hidden or not said, rather than what is implicitly stated. The 2^nd World War was certainly an uncanny time in history, being haunted by memories of the previous – and relatively recent – conflict, and would have revived negative memories for those who had lived through that time. It was only when I was older that I began to appreciate the fact that, like many of those born in the latter half of the 19^th century, my grandparents had lived through two long periods of war, something which must have impacted on their lives in various ways.

Years later when my father returned to visit East Coker (where he was evacuated during the war: see In my Beginning is my End), he was disappointed and saddened by the experience and did not want to talk about it. The lane which led to Burton farm – once a dirt track with one or two cottages – was now graced by a row of detached suburban-style houses, while the original village centre had expanded outwards to swallow other nearby lanes and hamlets. This does not detract from the intact feeling of the place for the modern visitor, but would represent major changes to someone who had waited almost half a century to return. Like his father before him, who did not recognise post-war Brixton, he could not easily reconcile this version of a more ‘sanitised’ East Coker with the one he had kept in his memory. And devoid of the people he had once known, the place might have given off the eerie feeling of being a simulacrum of the village he had once called home.

The Day They Took the Children

It was around this time that I, perhaps thoughtlessly, gave my father a book detailing the personal childhood experiences of the evacuation (The Day They Took the Children by Ben Wicks), thinking it would be something in which he might be interested. Later I discovered that he had put it away, unread. The children’s evacuation had exerted a fascination for me ever since I’d watched the 1974 children’s BBC drama Carrie’s War, (based on the book by Nina Bawden), and I had always regarded it as something exciting – almost wishing I could have experienced it for myself, despite the hardships the story portrayed. And in some way my father’s time in Somerset had become entwined with those thoughts of escape and adventure.

One thing which happened at the time of the evacuation which I had heard about was the story of the lost toys. Growing up in a household full of practically every plaything I could reasonably wish for, this tale has always seemed especially poignant. Pieced together from shared memories, it concerns the day, relatively early on in the war, when my grandfather brought some of the furniture and belongings from the bombed house in West Norwood down to Somerset, travelling from the railway station in a pony and trap. When the children knew that their father was bringing their cherished possessions from the old house, they were in a great state of excitement at seeing their father and being reunited with their favourite things again. Alas, it was not to be. None of their toys were among the objects on the cart, including my father’s beloved fort and my aunt’s dolls’ house, both of which I believe had been made for them by my grandfather, who had a gift for working with wood. It turned out that Sidney had stored some of their belongings with relatives in Norwood with whom he had eventually quarrelled, and he had never been able to go back to fetch these items.

I often wonder what happened to those toys – which were no doubt greatly loved at a time when children had few playthings. I remember once when I was staying with my Scottish grandmother after she had been widowed, and my mother had helped her clear out a cupboard built into the floor of the cloakroom in the hall (or lobby press, as we called it). This had always been my grandfather’s domain (being dark and dusty and full of spiders), and when my mother took it upon herself to rummage about in the space she found a cornucopia of old toys, many of which she’d been bequeathed from older relatives, including a china doll bought in France during WW1, a metal spinning top, and a couple of strange wooden objects we had to be taught how to use! This also spurred my Scottish grandmother to reminisce about her favourite childhood games – including the metal hoops that she and her siblings played with in the street (which seem to be the ubiquitous image of turn of the century childhood). I vowed then that I would never let my favourite childhood toys languish in an attic or basement space.

So it is little wonder that the one possession my father still had from his childhood was tucked away at the back of his section in my parents’ wardrobe, thus taking on a magical significance in my eyes. It was a book of fairy tales which had been given to him for Good Work and Conduct in 1936 while a pupil at Crawford Road School, situated round the corner from the house in Denmark Rd. It seemed strange to me then for an adult to keep a children’s book hidden away like that, and the moment our parents’ backs were turned my sister and I used to sneak the book out of the wardrobe, revisiting our particular favourite stories again and again. We enjoyed being spooked by the graphic descriptions of evil deeds and the accompanying evocative line drawings. Blue Beard and his Seven Wives was one story of which I never tired – and I would reread with relish the descriptions of the forbidden closet where Blue Beard’s ex-wives’ bodies were plastered against the walls. And as children we believed that the book had been hidden in order to protect us from reading about such horrific events.

Eventually it ended up in the hall bookcase – the pages had been so badly smeared with grease from our cake-eating fingers that there was little point in keeping it away from us any longer. But we were never admonished for ‘defacing’ the book (I had even scribbled over the dedication), whose first owner had kept in immaculate condition. Maybe there was a sense of liberation from the past when two living and irreverent children found joy anew in the gruesome tales? Thankfully the book survived intact, in part due to its special status, while its counterpart (my mother’s fairy tale book) at our McKay grandparents’ house did not.

This book was possibly my father’s link to his stable pre-war childhood – and had probably been a prized possession in a house that had few books (even as adults my parents never collected books in the same way my sister and I do, although we were certainly given plenty as children). This period in my father’s childhood seemed to have created the strongest memories, many of which I only know through my mother. I learned that the family had once had a pet dog called Ronnie, and had kept hens for a while; that Sidney rose early on cold mornings to light the fire before the family stirred, and that he could turn his hand to almost anything: he grew vegetables, made things from wood, and knitted intricate patterned woollens (a skill he had learned in the army).

The Swing that Grandad Skelton Made, 1968

Grandad (Sidney) Skelton looking for some DIY jobs to do: Ayr, 1967

For her part, my grandmother, Edith, was a very motherly woman who fussed over her brood to an extent that my father eventually found claustrophobic: the very fact that she kept them all together during the war is testament to her desire to give them a continued sense of family. In short, both my grandparents dedicated themselves to raising their three children, trying (perhaps even unconsciously) to give them the safe childhood that they themselves had lacked.

We know already that Edith lost her father at a relatively young age, and had also to move from her childhood home to less salubrious surroundings (see I Remember, I Remember), but what of Sidney? When I was doing my initial research in those far-away, pre-internet days I only had access to the census up until 1891, but once I was able to continue my search I had both the 1901 and 1911 census at my disposal. This data in turn threw up more avenues of research in the form of birth, marriages and death certificates, which in turn created more leads (such is the nature of genealogical research). Parish records – particularly for the London area – were now on-line, and school and workhouse registers could be viewed at the London Metropolitan Archives – before many of them eventually also became digitalised. And so it was that I was able to find out more about my grandfather’s beginnings.

It seems that Sidney Skelton was born on February 12^th 1892 in part of a multi-occupancy house which the family rented at 78, Cator Street in Peckham (near the Old Kent Road and the now long-gone Surrey Canal). He was the fifth child to a working-class couple in their early thirties – his father Arthur was a journeyman bootmaker. (This meant he had served an apprenticeship but had not reached the level of master where he could hire apprentices). Arthur Skelton had named his son after his younger brother – who had inadvertently also been christened Arthur (!) but was known as Sidney.

A handful of well-preserved original houses in Cator Street today

From the various records I consulted, the Skeltons appear to have led a precarious existence: as their family grew, Arthur and his wife Elizabeth (neé Holton) were constantly moving around Lambeth in the search for cheaper rents and employment (often renting two rooms for the whole family). In contrast to most of their siblings, Arthur and Elizabeth seem to have been a rather feckless pair. They had met as teenagers in Kennington where they’d lived in adjoining streets, and married soon after, when Elizabeth was six month’s pregnant with their first child, Arthur jnr. Elizabeth had no education and was unable to write, while Arthur snr. had grown up not really knowing his father, who had been 60 when he was born. Arthur snr. was, like his own son Sidney was to be, also the fifth child of six: in his case he was the product of a long-term relationship between a middle-aged widower and a teenage single mother. His mother (who was in her thirties when widowed by her 67 year old husband of 3 years) eventually had to go out to work in order to support the family, and Arthur left school at the age of 10 (as was normal in those days) and started work as a milk boy.

In June 1895, when my grandfather was three, the family (who had already moved several times since his birth) were now living in Daniels Rd, Nunhead opposite the famous cemetery. At around this time Charles Booth described the street (which was built in 1863) as 2 story houses, flush with sidewalk; broken windows occasional; numerous and noisy children: a low standard street; difficult to say what the people do for a living, but some work as labourers in the adjacent cemetery, others as builders’ labourers etc. Broken windows seemed to be a relatively common feature of the area – Booth’s notes for the neighbouring Nunhead Grove mention that A small boys’ battle was raging while we were in this street, with stones flying about unpleasantly, but apparently no damage done. One of the common complaints of this section is that of boys who break a window instead of cutting an enemy’s eye open.

It was while living at Nunhead that Sidney’s mother Elizabeth was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital with Cirrhosis of the Liver and Jaundice. She died on the charity ward there, several weeks later. We do not know what caused this illness – whether she had contracted a hepatitis infection or had been imbibing to escape the privations of her life. Unfortunately, the impressive looking, red leather Death Book from St Thomas’s, which I consulted in the LMA, did not give me any more details. Soon after his mother died, little Sidney (who even as an old man gave the impression that he had never quite developed into his full height) was sent to the local school with his siblings – possibly because there was no one now at home to look after him. However, the following year (1896) Arthur married a neighbouring widow (Harriet Pushman) who had several children of her own, necessitating yet another house move.

What really saddened me was when I discovered that some of Sidney’s experiences had actually closely mirrored (albeit in different circumstances) one set of his grandchildren, who, over seventy years later, were themselves left motherless at a vulnerable age. This made me curious as to why he had never told any of the family about the loss of his own mother. Had he in fact even remembered the event? When it came to his grandchildren, Sidney played a major role in helping them and their father come to terms with their situation – but he was also adamant that his grandson should learn to stand on his own two feet. With hindsight it would seem that (whether consciously or not) Sidney wanted him to deal with his loss in the same stoical way as he had no doubt done, having had little choice in the matter. I often wonder what it would have been like for such a young child to have suddenly gained not only a new step-mother, but also a collection of step-siblings near to him in age. (His oldest brother, Arthur, eventually went on to marry his step-sister, Harriet, both of whom were named after their respective parents).

There is, however, a sad post-script to this story. Several months ago I came across the records of the baptism of another little boy who was born to an Arthur and Elizabeth Skelton of Daniels Rd in Nunhead. I would appear that he was ‘one of ours’. Yet why had I never heard of this child? My father’s family had always assumed that Sidney was the last of the brood. But it turned out that Elizabeth had actually given birth to one more child at the age of 35, a year before she succumbed to her illness. A boy called Frederick Edward. So what had become of him? Some more research soon revealed the horrible truth: he had died alongside his mother at St. Thomas’s from Rickets (3 months) and Marasmus (in other words, severe malnutrition) at the age of 7 months. It seemed that no-one in the family had ever known of this little fellow’s existence: an infant who would not have been allowed to lose his life in the London of today.

It is perhaps the death of Frederick which makes me (rightly or wrongly) judge Arthur and Elizabeth harshly. Was Elizabeth an alcoholic who was unable to care properly for her children? Was Arthur already in a relationship with Harriet Pushman before Elizabeth’s demise? Were they actually both unfit to be parents?

Some things we will never know, and it is perhaps better so. But the idea that the repressed memory of such events may find their way down through the generations in different ways is certainly appealing. And there is yet one more twist to this tale. The night my grandfather died (and before we received the news in Scotland, as we had no telephone at the time) my father – who was by no means given to flights of fancy – awoke to find his father standing at the bottom of the bed, smoothing down the coverlet. It seems that even as Sidney was leaving this world, he was trying to let his children know that he still wanted to take care of them.

The Incidental Genealogist, February 2016

East Coker

6 Replies

What is the late November doing

With the disturbance of the spring

And creatures of the summer heat,

And snowdrops writhing under feet

And hollyhocks that aim too high

Red into grey and tumble down

Late roses filled with early snow?

T.S. Eliot, East Coker (1940)

East Coker is a place that has mostly won the battle to preserve its rural charms, mainly due to the Eliot connection, and still has few modern buildings or street lights. Visitors come to see the “deep lanes”, “the open fields”, the houses of “grey stone” and the “hollyhocks that aim too high”. It has even been said that Eliot based part of his poem on the 1876 Friedrich Gerstäcker tale of the mysterious community of Germelshausen, where the population had been cursed by the pope and were only allowed to come out of the earth for one day of revelry every hundred years. There is certainly a feeling of liminality when entering the village through the ancient lanes that resemble tunnels into another world. And it is not too difficult to imagine that the place is haunted by the spectre of an earlier time which can only be faintly glimpsed at certain moments.

The morning I met Alan Cornelius – the old man who had taken the photograph in Coker woods on that Whit Monday over sixty years ago (see In my Beginning is my End) – the village was looking its time-warped best. The jaunty, red, white and blue bunting strung up between the thatched houses in the main street hung still in the mid-summer air, and the sounds of hay stooking cut across the yellow fields. The Helyar Arms was preparing for its first customers, and the church was alive with the bustle of middle-aged women setting the final touches to the arrangements in St Michael’s Church flower festival.

St Michael’s and All Saints, East Coker

By noon the cow parsley in the hedgerows was wilting in the heat, and the exhibition in the village hall was coming to a close. We called those long wooden sticks ‘staves’ back then Alan Cornelius said, as he packed away his black-and white copy of ‘my’ photograph amongst his other WW2 memorabilia. And we were off to fight the enemy in the woods. He shook his head. It seems like a lifetime ago now!

Among all the other bits and pieces on his stall that the younger visitors to the exhibition found so fascinating, was a copy of his childhood diary. The short, scribbled entries illustrated just how exciting the war could seem to a thirteen year old boy. There were numerous descriptions of long bike rides searching for incendiaries in the surrounding fields, building model aeroplanes bought from a shop in Yeovil, watching out for enemy aircraft, visiting the local Westland Aircraft Factory (where Lysanders or ‘Lizzies’ were built).

One diary entry triggered a particular memory for Alan Cornelius which made me smile: Early on in the war a bomb fell on a nearby farm, killing a bull. Your dad said this was ‘abominable’. It was typical of him. He always was a sharp one. I thought back to how my father used to make up limericks and nonsense rhymes when we were young, and could imagine him honing this skill amongst his peers. He had arrived in the village with his mother and baby brother as a ‘lone’ evacuee, not as part of a school group, so a sense of humour and an aptitude for word play might have eased the path to acceptance by his new classmates.

My aunt was actually the first in the family to be sent to East Coker when war broke out, being evacuated with part of her school, and was the reason my father finally ended up in the village. Alan Cornelius described this event in his unpublished memoirs as such:

The pupils of the Charles Edward Brooke School for Girls in Camberwell had left their school at 8am on the morning of Friday September 1^st, and after a train journey of over four hours from Waterloo to Yeovil Town Station via the Junction, arrived at the reception centre in the Yeovil Liberal Hall in the early afternoon. Here they were divided into ‘Village Groups’, and the East Coker contingent arrived at the village hall sometime around 4pm, resplendent in felt hats, uniforms and badges, and with school staff, house mothers and an air of genteel respectability which most foster parents found very acceptable and in stark contrast to the primary school children from Battersea who had preceded them by some hours. Even so, there was still the air of a cattle market over the business of placements in foster homes.

Children from the Charles Edward Brooke (girls) School boarding trams in Camberwell New Road. The children are to be taken to Waterloo station for evacuation, 1939. (1998/36461) (c) London Transport Museum

Click here to read a personal account of evacuation from the Charles Edward Brooke School, (which coincidentally was recorded on the day I first visited East Coker).

While my aunt was sent to Somerset, my father was initially evacuated with the local Gipsy Hill primary school to Leatherhead in Surrey. There he was billeted alongside other children with a Mormon family whom he remembered chiefly for the fact that they gave their charges the cast-off bicycles of the junior members of the Kennedy clan. (Joseph Kennedy – then American ambassador to Great Britain – had stayed in a house in nearby Headley during the first year of the war, before being forced to resign in November 1940). I like to imagine my father cycling to school on J.F.K’s old bicycle, and sometimes wonder if that was the catalyst to my parents’ on-going joke that our family and the Kennedys shared a series of (near) parallel death dates. In an uncanny twist of fate, my father was to eventually die in January 1995, several hours before Rose Kennedy did.

Within a year, my father was back home in West Norwood – like many London families the ‘phoney war’ had lulled them into a false sense of security – with my grandparents omitting to tell my aunt, lest she want to return too. My father remembered the constant trips to the air raid shelter (seemingly always when he was in the middle of a setting out his lead soldiers), so this would have been in the autumn of 1940, around the time that the bombing started in earnest. Having only recently moved the family from a dilapidated Victorian terrace in Brixton to a modern, cottage-style semi on the Bloomfield Hall Estate, my poor grandmother must have despaired at ever being able to create the comfortable home she craved!

One inauspicious afternoon, my father arrived back home from school to find my grandfather standing at the end of their road, a couple of battered suitcases at his feet, telling him that their house had taken a hit and they would be ‘going away’ (the London bomb maps shows the area was heavily shelled during this period). It is one of the very few things I ever remember my father telling us about that period in his life – apart from the spectacle of watching The Crystal Palace burn down from his upstairs bedroom window in the old house in Denmark Road.

In the end, my grandmother took my father and his brother to Somerset to join their older sister in a bid to keep her children together, while my grandfather stayed in London working as a tram conductor out of the Camberwell depot. From my aunt, I know that this was not an easy time for my grandmother: in her first billet she stayed with a woman who lived in a cottage opposite the church, and who treated her like her own personal skivvy. This must have been galling to a mature mother of three who was used to being mistress of her own home, but she eventually found a more convivial place for the family in a cottage at Burton Farm, where the Dunning family lived. And this was the place where my father retained strong memories of helping out on the farm with the other children – and which gave him his lifelong love of the British countryside.

Burton Farm, East Coker (now a listed building) – Burton Cottage is on the far right.

Burton Cottage

The more I heard from Alan Cornelius about life in East Coker during the war, the more I realised that evacuation to the village would not necessarily have been a hardship – as long as the children were placed with a sympathetic household. The villagers appeared to have made a great effort to integrate the evacuees, and many of the youngsters were pleased to welcome the newcomers to their clubs and dances. What adolescent hasn’t rejoiced at the injection of new ‘talent’ into their midst? Alan Cornelius describes the impact of the arrival of the girls from the Charles Edward Brooke School thus:

The Primary school children (from Battersea) with the few parents that accompanied them, soon became bored with country life. With the ‘Phoney War’ extending into 1940 and seeing little reason to remain evacuated, they returned in ones and twos to their familiar life in the city. A few did come back when the Blitz started in earnest and their school in the Mission Church in Burton remained in operation until nearly the end of the war.

The Mission Church, Burton Lane, which my grandmother used to clean when it was used as a school.

The CEBS girls, however, settled down quickly, adjusted to the quiet country life and were much more concerned to complete their education with good School Certificates. Each day, coach loads of girls were bused in from the villages, and in the early days the local company of Barlow and Phillips used their rather ancient (even then) char-a-banc, a wide-bodied vehicle with a folding canvas roof and celluloid windows, on the East Coker run. A relic from the 1920s outings to the seaside, it produced much merriment with us ‘lads’, particularly if girls of our acquaintance were traveling in it. It didn’t take long for some of those to blossom into more fulsome friendships, although the village foster mothers were probably even more protective than their natural ones in guarding their charges from the amatory advances of the local youth.

The East Coker Boys Club,1944 at Coker Court

The ‘local youth’: East Coker Boys Club, 1944, at Coker Court. My father is on the far left (kneeling). Alan Cornelius is 3rd from the right (seated).

Despite the charms of East Coker, for the rest of his life my father was to wonder at what might have happened had he been able to take up his scholarship to attend the prestigious James Alleyne’s School in Dulwich. He remembered the smart uniform which had already been bought, and the sense of life about to begin; but the war sent him off spinning in another direction. East Coker, however, kept him rooted during a time of great upheaval and chaos. And he was, I believe, always grateful for that.

Western Gazette, July 15th 2005 (some factal inaccuracies)

Western Gazette, July 15th 2005 (some factual inaccuracies in regard to our story). Click on the image to read.

To be continued next month in I Remember, I Remember . . .

The Incidental Genealogist, November 2015

In my Beginning is my End

2 Replies

In my beginning is my end, in succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended

Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass

T.S. Eliot, East Coker (1940)

Perhaps I wasn’t being entirely truthful when I said last month that I did not have any photographs of my paternal family (see Begin Again). Some years after my father died, my mother came across a handful of old snapshots in a battered leather wallet, one of which was recognisably a small black and white picture of my English grandparents flanking their first car (a retirement treat) on a day trip to Hayling Island.

The other photographs, however, were disappointingly of unknown friends and colleagues. But one of the pictures fascinated me in particular. It was the only hand-coloured image in the collection, and showed five boys under a tree, relaxed and grinning at an unknown photographer, long pointed sticks in their hands. On the reverse was written in faded blue ink: Expedition to East Coker Woods, Whit Monday 1944. It was not difficult to locate my father (to the far right) and my future uncle (through marriage) behind him.

From the date (my father was born in 1928) I knew the boys were all most likely teenagers, but their old-fashioned clothes and obvious pleasure in their bank holiday outing made them seem much younger. In fact, such was the incongruity of the image that I was instantly reminded of Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills, set in 1943, where a group of children, played by adults, set off to play in the Forest of Dean, with tragic consequences. I had even watched that film with my father, who was normally averse to anything by Dennis Potter.

That must have been taken when Dad was an evacuee my mother explained. He was sent to Somerset. I think his mother’s family originally came from somewhere near there.

But wasn’t the place called Yeovil – not East Coker? I remembered the name because as a child my father had occasionally told me stories about the time he’d spent there during the war. He told me about collecting newts in jam jars, about raiding birds’ nests for eggs (something of which he was later ashamed), about hunting for shrapnel in the lanes. When I grew older, he added other tales to his repertoire: the dances in the village hall, drinking scrumpy straight from the farmer’s barrel, shooting rabbits. When I finally asked my father where this village was, all he said was that it was called Yeovil. To my Scottish ears the place sounded exactly like the kind of mythical English village of perpetual idyllic summers, where hollyhocks and sunflowers towered high above the inhabitants, and children were free to run through woods and fields and lanes.

I pulled out the AA drivers’ map circa 1988 that now had little use in a family of non-drivers. Once I located Yeovil it wasn’t that difficult to find the Cokers (East, West and North – where was South?) standing to the south-west of Yeovil like sentries. But there was something else about the name that seemed vaguely familiar. It niggled at me for days before I later came across the Eliot poem – part of the Four Quartets. I thought it strange that my father, who loved poetry, had never bothered to tell me about the village and its link to Eliot, particularly when I had studied the writer so intensively for my English ‘O Grade’ exam.

: My 1941, 1st edition, 5th impression – originally priced at one shilling.

As we were growing up, my father had given my sister and me an eclectic mix of poetry books, from Seamus Heaney’s North to Hillaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children, and he must have been aware of the connection Eliot had to East Coker. Although the poem had been first issued in pamphlet form by Faber and Faber in 1940 (and reprinted several times, such was its popularity), the Four Quartets was not published until several years later. So my father would have certainly heard about the poem at some point. It was almost as if he had never wanted us to know the exact location of the place which had taken away so much with one hand (his home in London; his coveted scholarship to the posh school in Dulwich), but had bestowed gifts with the other (love and respect for nature; an appreciation and understanding of the British countryside).

A few weeks later I came across the on-line East Coker Newsletter while trying to find out more information about the village. An announcement proclaimed that there would be special events set up to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of VE and VJ Day during the second weekend in July 2005. This seemed to resonate with my plans to visit, and I knew then that I had to make the trip.

What I couldn’t realise then is that the date of my first visit to East Coker would forever be linked in my mind with the London bombings. That weekend was due to be hot, and as my mother and I boarded our flight on the morning of July 7^th we were oblivious to the horrific events unfolding in the capital. But the news soon filtered through to us, and in the end we were unable to leave our luggage in the centre of Bristol to look round the city as we had planned, so we simply took the next west-bound train and ate our limp picnic in the stuffy compartment while the ticket collector nervously prowled the corridors, checking and re-checking for any stray luggage. As we watched the lush West Country scenery slip past, it was hard to imagine the scenes of carnage in the capital – just as it must have been difficult for those who moved from London to the countryside for the duration of the war to envisage the destruction of the Blitz.

After everything I’d expected from the ancient-sounding name, Yeovil seemed an unprepossessing place. Disaffected youths roamed the bland post-war shopping area around the bus station, and there was a feeling that the market town had seen better days. I was beginning to wonder if we were in for a similar disappointment with East Coker. After all, it had been my father who had always told us that we should never go back anywhere. He himself had returned in the 1980s and had been saddened with the changes to the village, and reluctant to talk about the experience. But I consoled myself with the thought that as we had no memories of the place ourselves, there was not the same degree of emotional involvement, and that whatever we might see or experience there would more than likely be a revelation to us.

From Yeovil we caught a local bus to East Coker, travelling the way some of the evacuees might have come on September 1^st, 1939. Before long a cast iron signpost – of the kind seldom seen nowadays – pointed us in the direction of East Coker. The bus suddenly veered off down a narrow lane which sunk deeper into the surrounding land the further we travelled along it. Snake-like roots of ancient hedgerows protruded from the sandy soil, while above us the canopy shut out most of the late afternoon sun. Then we rounded an unexpected corner and came into the centre of the village: a village that looked as if it should not – could not – belong in the twenty-first century.

: Sunken lanes and cast iron signposts around East Coker.

: Thatched Cottages in East Coker

And in the heat of the following day, on a sunken footpath which led from the farm through the woods to the old priory, I lay down, head to the red soil, and heard the drum of distant hooves and the click of mid-summer insects. For those few seconds it felt as if the earth was struggling to gather up the momentum to move backwards, to reveal something to me – until the shouts of children in the playing fields broke through the thick afternoon air.

: Public Footpath from Burton Lane to Naish Priory.

The following day we finally met the boy who had taken the photograph in the woods on Whitsun Monday over sixty years previously. He was manning one of the stalls in the village hall war exhibition, and his table was a jumble of WW2 paraphernalia: old ration books, bits of home guard uniform, various pieces of ammunition. One part of his collection was dedicated to the story of the relationship between the local children and the evacuees.

And there I saw it. Amongst the letters and diaries and various bits and bobs of printed memorabilia, was a copy of our own photograph in black and white, mounted in a crude wooden frame. Not trusting myself to speak, I reached into my bag and pulled out my hand-coloured version, and passed it across the table, watching the old man’s face twitch as he struggled to work out the connection.

To be continued next month in East Coker.

The Incidental Genealogist, October 2015

	The Incidental Genea… on Herbert Sleath – His Dec…
	Thomas Wilson on Herbert Sleath – His Dec…
	The Incidental Genea… on My Family Houses Through Time:…
	Lorna Shires on My Family Houses Through Time:…
	The Incidental Genea… on The Lost Boy on the Bendigo…

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: