They told me that John
Harris, my grandfather on my mother’s side, was tall and strikingly handsome,
with brown wavy hair and Delft blue eyes. They said women found him witty and
charming. They also agreed that he was a blackguard, a rake and womanizer.
He may well have been as mesmerizingly
good-looking and charming as they all claimed, but there’s no doubt that, in
the British lingo of those days, he was also a cad and a bounder. He married my
grandmother, May Twitchen in the 1880s, and bought a big, elegant house in the
city of Winchester a dozen or so miles from England’s South Coast. Here she delivered him seven children – Margot;
John; Elna; Issie; Kate; John; Peace, my mother, and Andrew. Not long after
Andrew was born, John Harris senior deserted the family, leaving them not a
penny, and they never saw him again.
Remarkably, John Harris’s father, a
wealthy man of some standing in the city, came to the rescue. He was fond of
May and her children, and must also have been publicly shamed by his son’s behavior.
He, and his estate when he died, provided enough money to support May for the
rest of her long life, and to raise all seven children, educating them at
private schools.
May was a fine, tall and graceful
woman. When I was small she seemed possibly regal, sitting as though in state,
all dressed in black like a widowed queen holding court. Most women born at the
end of the 19th Century had not been prepared to make their own way in life and
earn a living. May was a competent painter in oils and watercolors, an
accomplished cathedral organist and piano player and even, later in her life,
published an acceptable novella based largely on her own story.
Life was an ordeal for May and her
family. Three years after her husband deserted her, Andrew, who was born deaf,
was run over and killed by a runaway horse and carriage. By that time the
family had left the Winchester house and moved to a more cramped and humble home
in Broadstairs, a seaside resort on the South East Coast where, on a clear day,
you could see across the twenty or so miles of the English Channel to France.
A decade or so after she and the
family were abandoned, May became a Catholic with the fervor and devotion that
only converts seem to achieve. Margot, her oldest child, followed her into the
church, as did Kate and Peace. Catholicism bestowed an almost saintly calm and benevolence
on May, but Margot’s new religiosity spawned a blend of dogmatism and a
disagreeable bigotry. Some people felt
that her personality was transformed not so much as a result of her change of
faith as the tragic end of a love affair, when she fell for a young infantry officer
who died in the trenches in Flanders during World War I Flanders. She never
married, and for the rest of her working life looked after two wealthy spinster
sisters in a nearby village as their companion and chauffeur. When they died
they left her a modest pension.
I never met John and his family, who
was no more than a whispered topic of conversation in the family by the time I
was old enough to take notice. He worked all the way to the top in the Civil
Service at the British Passport Office headquarters in London, and married a
woman named Winifred. They had a son, Ian, and shortly afterward John, following
his father’s example, left Winifred for another, younger woman. He turned his
back on his mother and his five remaining siblings, and they never saw or heard
of him again.
Elna, christened Eleanor, had polio (then
called ‘infantile paralysis’) as a teenager, and spent most of her fifty odd
years on a contraption like a gurney. She was a kindly, affectionate and
remarkably brave and lovable person, with a mane of beautiful auburn hair and a
sad smile. I never saw her stand on her feet, and she died shortly before her
mother in the mid-1940s.
Then there was Issie (Isobel), a
plain, bespectacled, bone thin, indomitably cheerful woman. She was an avid reader, had an infectious
giggle and an unexpectedly bawdy sense of humor. It was her burden for decades
to look after her mother and Elna who, because of her disability, had no choice
but to lie down for the rest of her life. After Elna and her mother died, Issie
bought a pretty flint-stone cottage, looking forward to a long and
well-deserved rest in retirement. For a year or two her garden, with its flintstone
walls, was a riot of color, alive with bees and butterflies. She spent her days
working voluntarily for the ancient 11th Century church next door,
and developed a talent, envied by her friends and neighbors, for discovering valuable
antiques at rummage sales in surrounding villages.
Isabel’s peace was shattered when
Margot, after her employers died, decided to move into her sister’s cottage. As
her mother had done in her own home, Margaret took to her bed and her rosary beads,
making no effort to help with the chores. The other sisters likened this to an invasion
of a sparrow’s nest by an overfed cuckoo. Soon, Issie, by now frail and in her
sixties, died from a heart attack. It is no stretch of the imagination to
believe that her death was at least accelerated by her everlasting journeys up
and down the steep stairs in response to her older sister’s demands, and to her
daily rounds of shopping, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, darning and
mending, not to mention the gardening.
Kate was a husky-voiced, strikingly
handsome woman, with bold black eyes that were the downfall of many suitors.
During the first war, at least two years before the law allowed, she left home
and worked in an armaments plant, wearing rubber boots and up to her shins in
water, making artillery shells. Between the wars she made a career of nursing,
and in World War II was a colonel as the matron of a hospital ship on the
Irrawaddi River in Burma. She was in her forties when she married an RAF wing-commander,
who turned out in peacetime to be an abusive drunk. In the closing years of
their lives, she and my mother, both widows, found themselves back overlooking
the sea at Broadstairs where they had spent their youth together. They were close
neighbors and inseparable friends, and Kate died in the late 1970s, followed not
long after by Peace.
My mother was a kindly, warm and serene
woman, with laughing eyes and a ready laugh. She was named Peace because she
was born on the day in 1901 when Britain signed the peace treaty after the
South African War with the Boers. By the
time my mother was twenty-one, none of May’s five daughters were married, and they
all lived with their mother in the house at Broadstairs. Little wonder that, thirty-six years later,
while we were walking together, she confessed that her main reason for marrying
my father had been to escape from the suffocating atmosphere of that sorority
of spinsters.
Peace was the last survivor of that
generation. In some ways, her married life turned out to be lonelier than if
she’d stayed with her family. While she and my father were fond enough of each
other, he was a much older, kindly but cautious and none-too-ambitious man.
Theirs was a passionless marriage that lasted thirty-one years until he died in
1958 at the age of seventy. She lived for about thirty more years in her house
by the sea before she herself died in the 1980s, at 89.
There was indeed something tragic
about May Harris, and the largely unfulfilled lives of my mother and that
assembly of aunts. Between them all, the six sisters and their brother John
brought only three children into the world. How different might the story have been
had May and her husband John stayed together? But asking “What if?” is a futile
exercise. Life deals us a hand of cards, and we have no choice but to play it
as best we can.
oo0oo
