How little we know about our own family during our and their lifetime. When they are dead we somehow want to know more and regret not having questioned enough.
We are not even sure about the origins of my mother’s mother. We seem sure that she was Irish, perhaps a farmer’s daughter or even a hairdresser. Whatever, she was a beauty, somewhere meeting my grandfather who, at the time, must have been a budding surgeon at St Thomas’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, in London.
As a boy I recall being with her at our Silchester home when she was titled (lots of “m’Lady” and your “Ladyship” from Constance our country-bred live-in maid), always dressed in black, very grand and widowed - her husband, Sir Frederick Hewitt, having died as a famous anaesthetist some years earlier.
She left two tangible items about which I will write in a bit.
I know that we were all a little on edge when she came to stay. And “James, to the inceneraria” I recall her saying to me when I was disposing of some rubbish or other.
One day I had earlier shot or snared a rabbit and returned to deal with it at home. When Granny saw the animal she rolled up her grand sleeves, paunched, skinned and cut up the creature to be ready for the pot. We were aghast. Did this indicate that her upbringing in Ireland was in a farmer’s or butcher’s household? We don’t know.
War came and went. When walking on the pavement with my mother in London’s Soho were some surly-looking youths were standing. She brushed them aside, saying: “aside scum”. They stood aside.
I then lived in two small Council rooms in Pimlico, offered to me when discharged from the RAF with TB, and Granny at that time was a permanent resident in a room at the Regent Palace Hotel, Piccadilly.
I would invite her for the lunch she always enjoyed of smoked haddock cooked in milk and butter. She had a good appetite, so I gave her plenty, and I never disagreed with her. So we got on well.
At this time I was at art school and had a strikingly beautiful Anglo-Indian student as a girlfriend. My cousin, John Scott, fell for her and wanted to marry her. I was delighted.
As his mother, who had lived in India at the time of the Raj, and Granny, who thought the marriage to be quite inappropriate (I heard “the touch of the tar brush”mentioned) contrived to breakup the liaison.
John Scott, a party-loving Scottish army officer and personable fellow who, like me, took the easy path, now had adversaries and, although he was his grandmother’s favourite grandson came under her critical influence.
She told him: “John, if you marry this girl I will not leave you the money I had in mind but only the interest on it”. He decided against the marriage.
When Granny died, he, like the rest of the grandchildren received a paltry sum each. She was never going to do otherwise. So we laughed to think that John had lost his girl for the price of a weekly chocolate bar.
As I have mentioned, Granny left two tangible items of her life that I know about. The first was a jewel that seems to change hands around the family. One day, a niece’s son told us that this particular piece of a diamond E set in purple enamel and surrounded by larger diamonds was a jewel that King Edward VII gave to either his mistresses or mothers of his children.
Now Edward VII enjoyed the company of pretty ladies, and Granny was much in Court Circles. She had three children, my aunt, whose first husband was one of those Raj soldiers who became a Brigadier, my mother, who married an athletic but wounded officer of the ’14-’18 war (my father), and Wyndham.
Wyndham was a King’s Scholar at Eton, raced cars, was a rally driver, married several times (mostly to Parisian models) and lived mainly and grandly in France. He looked uncommonly like King Edward VII.
Wyn was often in trouble, a brilliant engineer, and sent to Australia to return as flight engineer to Kingsford Smith who, in his Avro 10, tri motor aeroplane was the first to deliver Christmas mail from Sydney to Croydon Aerodrome in 1931 after a record-braking (17 days) journey with an all Australian crew. (Wyndham, being English, was photographed leaving the aircraft but barely mentioned.)
The second item left by Granny is a gold-topped palmyra cane given to Grandfather, we think, from some eastern potentate as thanks for anaesthetic services.
The gold top is engraved with Sir Frederic’s name and another, Tommy Nottingham. We can only surmise that Mr Nottingham was a close friend of Grandma’s after her husbands death.
My wife, Margreet, now uses the cane for exercises to help integrate a shoulder replacement joint.
In Granny’s hotel room hung a piece of velvet on which were pinned favours for charities of good deeds that are pinned on you when you donate to their collection boxes. So she was always prepared and at no expense when leaving her room each day to walk up Regent Street to her bank where the doorman would provide her with a copy of The Times for her to read there.
She also volunteered her services to charity organisations were she sold donated trinkets - some of which possibly ended up in her room.
I cannot recall how she died in her old age, but I do remember a bus mentioned and a strong wind.
