In Praise of Sharpe

I have been pondering what to write about today and had actually half completed a rather morbid blog about ISIS, as I have been reading increasingly depressing articles all week about Islamic State's aims, methods and beliefs.

However, I have decided instead to confess one of my current guilty pleasures.  Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels.  I am completely addicted and have spent more of my Audible credits on them than anything else.  I have also bought a load of them on my Kindle.  Just because they were on sale - I had actually listened to the stories already.  Oh dear.

They are wonderful escapism.  I never really watched the Sean Bean television version.  And I am glad not to have done so because I have so enjoyed them when discovering them now.  Rupert Farley who narrates the series is fantastic.  Doing the ironing has never been so exciting!

 

I have always loved historical fiction.  Not the Georgette Heyer kind though.  The more dashing and exciting, the better.  I think I have previously mentioned the Dennis Wheatley Roger Brook series as a favourite as well.  The Sharpe novels are formulaic but the character is so strong.  He is a bit like a Napoleonic A-Team member - he always finds a way out or something to use as a weapon.  And he always gets the girl.  You can't help but be drawn in, against your better judgement and knowing that Sharpe will be victorious whatever.

 

When I started listening to the initial novels, I did so because I was interested in the research that Bernard Cornwell must have done to write such detailed descriptions of life in a British regiment in India at the beginning of the eighteenth century.  I have traced ancestors to similar regiments.  However, like any addiction, it didn't stop there and I am now half way through the series.

 

The other reason for my 'confession' is that yesterday, in a Mothers' Day miracle, I was left alone long enough whilst in the bath to read Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift.  The title was obviously perfect for the day but the length of the story even more so.  Around one hundred and thirty pages.  Enough to read the whole thing before I was completely freezing and wrinkled in the bath.  (A glass of fizz helped.)

 

The book is completely captivating and it touched on some of my favourite 'issues' in this blog.  How small changes in decisions could affect our lives and those of our descendants.  What things actually feel like - Swift's writing is very emotional.  I cannot recommend the book highly enough.  But one aspect of Jane, the main character, which struck a chord that I had never even considered was her preference for what was then (1920s) thought of as 'boys' literature.  Treasure Island, Kidnapped, etc.  I do remember reading stuff like Judy Blume and 'girl' classics like Little Women or Anne of Green Gables.  But I think I related more to the adventurous characters.  Jo was my favourite in Little Women.  And I definitely liked the 'boy' stuff as mentioned above.

 

I don't remember being pushed at such stories but there must be something from my childhood and/or in my own character.  My mother and I are still drawn to the same books.  In fact I sent her books for Mothers' Day!

 

So next on my agenda is making sure I am writing strong characters.  Not just reading about them.

Is the Future Bright?

For various reasons, I didn’t sleep well or long enough last night.  Too much chocolate, too many episodes of Father Ted (RIP FrankKelly/Father Jack) and too much looking at The Oscars on Twitter when I woke up at four in the morning.

The Oscars completely fascinate me.  I love film and have a membership for my local independent cinema (you can take your wine into the screening, what’s not to love?).  I also do love fashion but Oscars ‘fashion’ is a whole other ballgame.  Not so much fashion as a gigantic advertising exercise. 

You long for Bjork and her swan costume to turn up again.  Just to see the expressions on their faces.

But my purpose for adding my not-very-big-oar to the Oscars chatter is to wonder about how we reached this level of global recognition of an unelected (relatively) few.  That is not to take away from the winners’ achievements at all.  Merely to think how far we have come in a hundred years.

I am in the process of writing a piece about ‘the future’.  The brief says will it be better or worse, tell us in a story.  Now, I do love science fiction but when I brainstormed (well, more pondered over a cuppa) a list of what might be considered better or worse, I was quite appalled to find that the ‘worse’ list seemed, to me, to be more likely to happen.  It was all global warming (and yes, I did see Leonardo DiCaprio’s Oscars speech live, thanks Insomnia), global war, rich/poor divide stuff.  Global peace, food and water for all, etc on the ‘better’ list seemed pretty unachievable.  And I am usually a glass half full kind of person.  Some things – like ‘no work’ – seemed like they could go either way.

But when I looked back – something I much prefer to do, hence the genealogy obsession – I could see how very unlikely our current situation would have seemed a hundred years ago.  1916.  The First World War was raging, manned flight was barely ten years old, the movies existed but silently, no Russian Revolution yet.  On and on, ad infinitum.

2016 and I am lying in bed watching a live awards ceremony over five thousand miles away on my ‘phone’ (which I use for reading, writing, listening, taking photos, shopping, general communication but rarely phoning).

Do you remember ‘Gulf War Vision’ in the 1990s?  When war was first properly shown live on television?  Watching bombs fall?  How long would the First World War have actually lasted if everyone could have seen what was going on?

So February 2116.  Where will we be?  Will we still be ‘alone’ in the universe?  Will we finally have worked out how to walk around in space ships like we have been able to do in movies for the last fifty years?  Will Leonardo’s predictions of global catastrophe have come true?  Will the Oscars ceremony have stretched to a two day love-in?

I want to finish this post with the old ‘answers on a postcard’ line but that is so last century.  Comments below please?!

 

 

The Story of Tilly Brockless

 

 

 

One of my guilty viewing pleasures has been, since its beginning, Mr Selfridge.  It is complete escapism.  A soap-ish storyline, gorgeous period fashion, a glamorous cast.   I generally don't watch soaps but dress them up as historical pieces and I am a sucker for it.  Downton Abbey, Mr Selfridge.  Bring 'em on.  Nice glass of wine and a box of Maltesers and I'm happy for an hour.

 

However, there is a storyline in the current series of Mr Selfridge which has fascinated me.  There is a new dressmaker named Tilly Brockless.  She is Afro-Caribbean and in London in the 1920s.  A marvel with a needle and a frock, Miss Brockless is recruited thanks to her eye for fashion - she has no references - and is then put to work in a room underneath Selfridges (by the looks of it) with a team of white machinist girls.

 

The character has appeared in most episodes this series.  Always stoically enduring casual bullying which seems clearly related to her difference in skin colour from her colleagues.  In last Friday's episode (spoiler alert) she was sacked, thanks to her supervisor.  And I am very curious to see if that is the end of the story of Miss Brockless.  I do hope not.  However, the programme makers do not seem to have valued this side story as much as I would have hoped.  In fact, I have found it quite impossible this morning to find an internet image of the actress Mimi Ndiweni, who plays Miss Brockless, in costume/on set for the show.  There are plenty of stills from the current series but none of Tilly Brockless.  Hence, I include, above, a beautiful publicity shot of Mimi Ndiweni.

 

The storyline has shown just how accepted such bullying and racism was at that time.  The worrying thing is, despite legislation, it still goes on.  And racism is endemic.  On social media this week, a girl in the US posted a copy of a letter from her father in which he told her that he would never forgive her affair with a black man and that a half black was a terrible thing.  Now, this family are in Texas.  But once the piece went viral, the item received as many similar threats as those made by the father as it did supportive comments.  Somehow, it seems people feel it okay to be racist in such forums.  They cannot indulge in the streets or in workplaces so much.  But they can join in with online situations. 

 

I really want to see how the writers of Mr Selfridge resolve Miss Brockless's storyline.  I will be very disappointed if her sacking is the end of her appearance in the series.  I think more could have been made of the character, her significance and the actress playing her. 

The House on the Lake

Well thanks to a sick dog, many (very welcome!) visitors and school holidays (already doing my head in), I haven't had much time to think of a proper post this week.  Not that many of my posts are 'proper' really.

 

So as I have previously done, I am going to recommend something in the meantime and leave you to investigate.  The above picture shows a holiday house in Germany.  It is the subject of a fantastic book called The House on the Lake by Thomas Harding and I have just finished listening to it on Audible (my favourite way of trying to get through a few more of my endless 'to read' list - I even listen whilst doing the supermarket shopping).

 

The author has a personal connection with the house but he has managed to weave the story of Germany's last hundred years or so very skilfully into the history of the building.  As I said on Twitter this week, I did not know how woeful my post-war German history knowledge was until I listened to this book!  It is excellent and has left me wanting to know more.

 

It also ties nicely into a topic which I have mentioned a few times since I started this blog.  That of the everyday history around us and its effect on our ancestors.  In our buildings and landscape.  I always wonder what buildings have seen.  Not just stately homes but ordinary homes.  For example, the Victorian houses owned by York friends which flooded at Christmas.  Imagine if they could tell of previous floods.  Imagine the many people who must have suffered the same but who had no access to floodlines, to emergency services, to dehumidifiers, etc.

 

So The House on the Lake is on a matter close to my research heart.  Give it a try if you have a chance.

 

There are extra photos at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06sgxjc although you can no longer listen on BBC iPlayer. 

 

I downloaded the book at http://www.audible.co.uk/

Numbering

 

Something very exciting has happened.  I have won a competition to have a DNA test!  No, not on Jeremy Kyle.  I entered a competition run by the marvellous Families In British India Society (FIBIS) before Christmas.  You had to write a piece about why a DNA test might be useful for your family history research.  And I have won one of the three places!

Now, clearly this is a niche subject to be excited about but just indulge me for a moment.  It hopefully means that I can narrow down which part of India my direct ancestors were from.  There are also questions over a number of Irish connections (ironic, given I have married into a large Irish family) and over the parentage of a great great great grandmother.  I wrote about all of these things for my entry and I have been offered a Family Finder test.  A kit is on its way!  How amazing and bizarre.  Let's hope there are no nasty surprises... Nothing anyone hasn't mentioned in the last forty or so years...  I will keep you posted - unless it is really embarrassing, obviously.

 

*    *    *

So I got that news last night and wanted to share the news.  However, I did plan to write about numbers today. A very good friend was (whisper it) fifty last week.  She does not look fifty.  Far from it.  But she is quite fed up about this milestone.  She says it feels very different to forty and no amount of reminders of the amazing fifty plus celebrities there are these days can cheer her up.  And I do see her point.  I haven't reached it yet but fifty years on the planet is quite something.

What would it have been like, though, in the days when fifty was properly old?  England, for example, in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.  When it was quite an achievement to have survived childhood, giving birth, dangerous employment.  There would be the same physical changes presumably but little knowledge of how to ease them.  And for the lower classes, there would be the ever present need to earn a living despite the ageing process.  Or the workhouse (or worse) awaited.

There are, of course, many awful cases of people in developed countries dying at young ages still.  Only the other week, I posted about cancer and diabetes and other diseases.  However, in general, a person reaching their fiftieth birthday in a developed country can reasonably expect at least another twenty years on Earth. 

What is very wrong with Planet Earth, though, is the number of human beings for whom fifty is still an incredible achievement and the number for whom fifty is not a time to look forward.  Life expectancy is very uneven amongst our race.  Fifty should not be a scary number for any of us.

Making a Date

 

 

This weekend has been quite a contrast to the last.  Last weekend we were dealing with the first anniversary of my father-in-law's death.  This weekend, we had a welcome happy event.  A belated party for my mother's seventieth birthday.  It was a lovely evening.  Fourteen of us at a gorgeous Italian restaurant.  Three generations - in-laws, step-relations, grandchildren, children, siblings.  So many relationships amongst the group.

And as we travelled home, nursing a bit of a hangover I must admit (praise the Lord for Diet Coke), I thought about how little time my children have spent with my aunts, uncles and cousins.  My mother is one of four.  Three sisters and a brother.  I am one of ten cousins.  We live all over the country and since the death of my grandmother twelve years ago, I don't think we have managed a date where every single person has made it along.

But my children really enjoyed meeting my aunts and uncles at the dinner party.  My daughter was particularly interested in meeting my mother's elder sister and her husband as they had memories of being children during the second world war.  This was a topic of hers last year and she has not lost her enthusiasm for information about it.  Her own grandparents were either too young or in Ireland and did not have a great deal to share with her.  So once she had got over her (pretend!) shyness, there was a lot of chatter.

So my 2016 resolution - typically a month late - is to organise a happy get-together for my mother's family.  My granddad died at seventy one.  My aunt was saying last night that she was sure he would have lived longer if he had gone to a doctor years earlier.  He should have had, at the least, drugs to deal with hardened arteries but most probably a heart bypass.  I have no fear that his children will not visit doctors but their ages are now in the seventies.

And this, combined with January's list of celebrities who have died at similar ages, brings it home that we should spend more time together.  Just for the hell of it rather than because something awful has happened.  There also needs to be a major exchange of information.  I have previously whittered on in blog posts about making sure that you pump all available aged relations for family history snippets before it is too late.  Well, I will be organising a lovely get together. But with questionnaires to fill in as you enter and no exit until you have completed it...

 

PS  you can still vote for my first creative writing piece at www.kishboo.co.uk

Adolescent Angst

 

On my family tree there are some people who were clearly forced to grow up very quickly.  On every family tree, in fact, there will be ancestors who married young, joined the army young, died of horrible diseases after childhood's blighted with illness.  The ones which stand out on mine are a couple of Anglo-Indian girls who married at 13 or 14 and a pair of brothers who, having lost both parents, were sent, in their early teens, into the army via music scholarships.  Both stayed in the army all of their lives, although only one died in middle age.

 

And now, as I struggle with the beginning of the teenage years for my eldest child, I have begun to question how such ancestors - and the millions like them - managed to begin adult lives so early.  I have been reading quite a lot of articles about teenagers.  My son is a good lad on the whole but there has been that very definite Harry Enfield-esque shift in his manner and attitude.  And, joy, it is only going to get worse.

 

One of the arguments around teenage psychology is about to what extent the 'teenager' is a modern invention.  Some believe that there was no such thing until the 1950s.  That young people went from childhood to dressing like their parents, getting jobs and settling down with nothing in between.  No experimentation, no rebellion.

 

However, the biological and cognitive changes in children between around twelve and seventeen are substantial and surely these cannot be a modern 'invention'.  The changes in their mental abilities during this period are very important for their future lives.  There are all sorts of huge life changes to deal with - all linked to their increasing independence.  And thanks to all of this, they are particularly vulnerable to abuse by others or of substances.

 

So how did our teenage ancestors cope with marriage, work, etc?  Modern Western children could not marry at 13 even if it was legal.  Most are still far too dependent on adults and far too immature in general - despite their attempts to have us believe otherwise via social media!  For example, for my above-mentioned ancestors, I am assuming the girls that married at thirteen then had to run households.  They did not make fantastically wealthy matches and then sit around chatting all day.  My kids can barely keep track of their pocket money or remember to feed the dog!  Actually, maybe despite the faux maturity projected on instagram, etc, possibly we have made teenagers less able to cope.  They are never completely out of contact with us, we drive them everywhere and we agonise over their every grade.

 

I think the 'teenager' definitely is an invention in terms of the recognition, by 1950s advertisers, of the huge marketing potential of the age group.  However, I do think that humans must always have had the attitudes, insecurities and frustrations during this period of their lives.  One of the biggest problems which Marie Antoinette had when she arrived in France, aged 14, to marry the heir to the throne was her own immaturity, capriciousness and tactlessness.   Quite the teen queen.

 

My issue now is how to deal with  these changes, these attitudes without losing communication with my son.  I know it is a phase and I know it will pass.  I just wish I knew when.  To quote Harry Enfield's Kevin, 'It's SO UNFAIR!'

PS my fiction writing efforts are continuing.  My first ever proper short story has been published on Kishboo e-magazine.  If you have a chance, please do read it and vote if you enjoy it!  It has an Anglo-Indian theme, in keeping with my family history interests!

Family Diseases Tree

So this week before writing, I looked back at what I wrote this time last year.  Sadly, a great deal of it was connected with the death of my own father-in-law and it is not an easy readback.  However, in some ways, it seems like far longer than a year ago.  My mother- and brother-in-law have not coped well with the loss.  Well, he was not coping before that really and if you looked at previous posts, you will know of the alcoholism which has consumed him.

 

We have lurched from crisis to crisis in the last twelve months.  Culminating in  my mother-in-law being hospital herself on the anniversary this week.  She broke her arm in a fall.  The fall was caused by a diabetic low.  The diabetic low, the doctors now think, was caused by early dementia.  She is not remembering what she has eaten/taken or when (it was even discovered last month that she had, for reasons best known to herself, thrown away the emergency injections from the fridge).  Quite a chain of events but one which it has taken many near misses to diagnose.  Falls without actually breaking anything.  Being found unconscious due to the diabetes but being brought round just in time.  Many incidents of slightly odd behaviour that we hoped were just age rather than the degenerative dementia.  So we start the second year with a whole new scenario but one with which, due to her location in western Ireland, we are struggling to assist.

 

Actually, both diabetes and dementia run in her family.  (Although for years, when my husband mentioned diabetes being passed down, she denied this!)  So what did the generations before do?  Close ranks and keep the person at home if it was dementia?  Just find a person unconscious on the floor when it came to diabetes?  My mother-in-law was born in 1933.  It was only around ten years prior to that when the first clinical diabetes treatment was made, although apparently there has been an awareness of diabetes symptoms since the times of ancient Greece.  (see Wikipedia for more information).  Dementia, of course, still has no effective treatment.

 

This is what the World Health Organisation website says:

 

Noncommunicable [by which they mean non-infectious] diseases were responsible for 68% of all deaths globally in 2012, up from 60% in 2000. The 4 main NCDs are cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic lung diseases. Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutrition conditions collectively were responsible for 23% of global deaths, and injuries caused 9% of all deaths...

 

...In high-income countries, 7 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. People predominantly die of chronic diseases: cardiovascular diseases, cancers, dementia, chronic obstructive lung disease or diabetes. Lower respiratory infections remain the only leading infectious cause of death. Only 1 in every 100 deaths is among children under 15 years.

 

I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that at least one of my mother-in-law's grandparents had diabetes.  Her mother was born at the turn of the century and developed the disease.  A number of her siblings - of which there were around a dozen - have succumbed to it.  Or to dementia.  (Or both).

 

So in that family alone, there is over 120 years of diabetic history.  And they may be classed as having lived in a high income country but their own family background was, quite frankly, very poor.  Subsistence farming.  Plain food.  Few treats.  It is genetic.

 

More should be done to research these 'non-communicable diseases'.  The sad deaths of David Bowie and Alan Rickman in recent days have once again shone a light on the lack of treatments for some cancers.  President Obama has promised a push to 'beat cancer'.  But it is not just cancer that needs to be tackled.  We are encouraging developing countries to catch the high income countries up.  So it follows that we are storing up a future of increases in these causes of death.  Only recently, I heard a piece about how breast cancer research funding will only really take off when the world's biggest population - China - begins to see the effects of its modernisation on its people's health.  No-one wishes for another human to be ill.  We should not be waiting for these shifts to happen.  These diseases should not need to be trailing through centuries of family health.

Concise Descriptions

Well, week two of my resolution  to write every week.  Made it by the skin of my teeth!  I have had a subject in mind for a couple of days but just have not put fingertips to keyboard.  [End of excuses]

Anyway, it relates to last week's subject, Herbert Wason Major.  In continuing to attempt to solve the mystery of his provenance, I came across an army record for a Herbert Wason Major.  The dates all tie in so it may well be him.  However, what really caught my eye for the blog was the reasons given for discharge.  The record was not a personal record for him, more a list of soldiers discharged from that regiment and the reasons why.  It is from the 1870s and goodness, you would not get away with the reasons they used these days...

To give a few excamples:  'Old Age';  'Inefficient'; 'Worthless'.

And I began to imagine if we could use such descriptions in public service discharges today...

Quangos, MPs, civil servants, spin doctors.  And don't get people started on the Environment Agency or the local councils.  The list is endless.  To say nothing of the private sector. 

Of course things are so much better and fairer now.  But back then, they could dismiss someone's career of choice with a one word answer.  Chapter and verse for reasons?  Warnings?  Suspensions?  Why bother with all that!  Maybe these soldiers had been warned, reprimanded, penalised before their discharges but those one word descriptions do make for hilarious reading.  The words used as 'reasons' are repeated for different men too, which makes one wonder what the army's definition of "inefficient' or 'worthless' actually was.

If I ever get any time, I intend to look into some random discharge records and see if this habit was peculiar to this regiment.  Somehow, and rather sadly, I doubt it.

So long, Napoleon

 

 

So. I had pretty much given up on my blog.  Not on writing.  Or family tree stuff.  I just felt I had nothing sufficiently interesting to say and no time to think.  But it is a New Year.  With new goals and intentions.

 

And one of mine is to post once a week.  To give me a break from my attempts at longer pieces. I also have a renewed interest in my family tree (I will explain shortly) and I am hoping to stick to regular times for all of my writing so this blog commitment will help give structure.  I hope.

 

Anyway, the renewed genealogy interest has come in the form of a most annoying piece of news.

 

One of my most prized family discoveries had been my four times great grandfather, Solomon Major.  He joined the 66th Regiment of Foot in 1805 and in 1817, in Bengal, he produced (as ever, no sign of a mother on the paperwork, indicating illegitimacy) a son named Robert Clement Major.    Solomon left India in 1817 and his regiment were sent to St Helena to guard Napoleon.  A fact which, as an obsessive history reader, I loved.  (I ignored his abandonment of Robert and subsequent English marriage!)

 

But...  The Ancestry website very 'helpfully' leaves you links to items which may be of interest.  When I looked last week, for the first time in ages, there was a link to someone who had included the Majors on their tree.  But theirs looked very different to mine.

 

Now, I have blogged before about the wariness with which one should approach information from other people's trees (my own mother was dead and buried in America according to one Ancestry tree!).  However, I was really interested in this Major tree because that family is a real brickwall for me.  My great grandfather Frederick Clement Major did not leave India after Partition and we do not even have a date of death for him.  Other than his parents' names, his grandfather Robert and Solomon, I have very little.

 

But this new tree's Robert Clement Major had many children, one of whom was apparently Herbert Wason Major, Frederick Clement's father (come on, keep up!).  After fruitless digging, I posted a query about these extra siblings on Rootschat.com (an excellent source of help).  And after a number of replies, the whole top of my Major tree - including the treasured discovery of Solomon and Napoleon - is now thrust into doubt. 

 

So to cut a long and boring story short, I think Solomon as a wonderful family tale may be gone.  It looks increasingly like my Robert Clement Major should actually be a Robert Clement Major from the British Army.  He was born and raised in Barbados (!), married Mary (also from Barbados) and then lived all over the world before settling in England.  His children were born at various postings and his Herbert Wason was born in Jersey in 1853.  There is an army record for Herbert showing his resignation from his lieutenancy in 1876.  This would probably fit with his eventual Police profession in India.  Ex-military men often found employment in the Empire's police forces apparently.  It is the Wason bit which bothers me.  I have wondered if it was mis-transcribed before but I don't think so.  It is clearly written on a number of original sources and is just so unusual.  There is also record of connection between Wasons and Majors in Barbados.

 

The 1881 census is quite definite that Robert Clement was born in Barbados but there was definitely a Robert Clement born in Bengal in 1817.  At the moment, I can't prove either of these connections one way or the other.  But I reckon Herbert Wason might be the key.  His son, my great grandfather Frederick Clement, was very definitely Anglo Indian. If the newly discovered Herbert married an Anglo Indian then that accounts for Frederick's 'caste' , for want of a better word.  And there goes the Napoleonic dream. Bother.  Or other words.