Monday October 4th
I have much kinder memories of my mother and her Cousin Phillip who was close to her age. He was one of the sons of her many older sisters and today there would be non-judgmental vocabulary to describe him. ‘Our Phillip’, as he was known in the family, was deemed not quick enough to work for anyone outside the family and so he rode his bicycle throughout Oxford doing errands for family and visiting when he wasn’t busy. He would arrive on his black bicycle and our mother would make him welcome and sit him in the kitchen with a piece of homemade cake, probably just out of the oven, and a warm smile. She would ask him for all the family gossip and, knowing her, probably gave him some money to do something for her that wasn’t necessary.
These were the times when family members who weren’t ‘quite right in the head’, as it was then described, were happily absorbed into the family at large. Children out of wedlock, sisters with lovers whose husbands were missing because of the war, were included too. While social norms today appear to be far more tolerant, is there still the assumption that family will protect and care for you?
I am certain that my mother’s large family was as dysfunctional as any other but there certainly seemed an assumption that they would take care of each other. Until it came to my sister and I and our father’s death. My sister Marguerite and I have talked about this and have come to the conclusion that my mother broke the silent but golden rule. She married out of her class and raised two uppity daughters, at least as far as her family were concerned. None of them came to help when her husband died at a young age, they urged her to put her daughters in an orphanage and move on.
