A Preliminary Sketch of My Mother

Today would have been my mother's 102nd birthday. Thankfully, it wasn't; she died, already irretrievably lost in the dark, haunted cellars of dementia, back in 2007. To be honest, it was a massive relief all round; not what you're supposed to say, but... I've been meaning to write about her for some time, but our relationship was ... complicated. The fact is that she was complicated; I've never quite known where to start. So perhaps if I start somewhere completely different, I might by indirection find direction out, as that idiot Polonius put it. Here we go:

Back in the 1980s there was excitement about the potential of so-called "expert systems"; that is, interactive computer programmes that were essentially a flow-chart of the decisions an expert would make in response to a carefully constructed set of questions. Typically, these would be broken down into "yes-no" questions that led through a decision-tree to a single final answer, such as a medical diagnosis or the selection of an engine part. As always, the underlying motive was to save money by employing fewer actual experts. I tried writing a couple myself, primarily as exercises in developing my programming skills, and quickly realised their limitations (this was in the days of MS-DOS and text-only displays). The fact is that genuine expert knowledge, especially when backed up by experience and judgement, is incredibly hard to render into simplistic decisions without constructing something impossibly convoluted. "Yes, but...", "Hmm, maybe", or "How much can you afford?" are not easy to bend into clear logical choices.

One of the most successful of these early "natural language" programs was, in fact, a complete fraud. Based on ELIZA, developed at MIT in the 1960s, someone constructed a counselling system that simply mirrored the user's input back to them in the form of open, non-directional questions of the sort used by counsellors and psychiatrists, having scanned the input for a range of significant keywords in order to incorporate them into the question, typically: "So, tell me more about your [mother]?" Apparently, people found the opportunity to talk exclusively about themselves and their worries to an entirely passive listener quite therapeutic. Which is hardly surprising, I suppose, this being the MO of most therapy. Plus, of course, it didn't charge £50 per hour.

Today, everyone is getting justifiably anxious about that more sophisticated descendant of the expert system, so-called "artificial intelligence", or – more accurately but less sensationally – "large language models", which in the end are simply software packages built onto immense source databases that are very good indeed at, for example, sticking words and phrases together to offer a simulacrum of language and thus the illusion of an "intelligence" behind the verbal collage. I read that some people are even using AI for fortune-telling. Which probably tells you more about fortune-telling than about AI.

But, since you ask (that was you, wasn't it?), I'm now going to tell you more about my mother. You don't have to listen, of course, I'm really just talking to myself. If someone else's family history is not your thing, feel free to leave the room.

A little preliminary family history is necessary.

My maternal grandfather Thomas was born illegitimate in Liverpool in 1893, abandoned by his mother as a newborn, and grew up along with his older brother James in an establishment for pauper children and the "unparented", the so-called Fazakerley Cottage Homes. It sounds cosy, but must have been pretty grim. The boys were trained to be either gardeners or musicians; Tom got the former, and Jim got the latter, joining a cavalry regiment as a trumpeter. World War One came along; Tom was conscripted as a private into the Royal Engineers, and Jim's regiment, the 7th Dragoons, shipped out from their base in India to France, along with their horses. Both survived (not sure about the horses).

It was always a mystery to me how Liverpudlian Tom had ended up in rural North Hertfordshire to marry a local girl, Ivy, in 1918, until I discovered that the Royal Engineers had maintained a depot in the market town of Hitchin during the war. Doubtless he had either passed through or been stationed there. The couple settled locally, initially lodging above a "beer house", The Seven Stars in the village of Charlton, sharing a few rooms with a number of other members of Ivy's family: her mother, step-father, and four other children. Tom found work in the cement works at Arlesey.

My grandmother Ivy's family was complicated, as rural families seem often to be. Her mother Eliza and father Herbert had met as servants at the local "big house", Hitchin Priory. But, as was the invariable custom in those days, marriage meant they could no longer work as servants, so Herbert became a labourer in a Hitchin brewery. Eliza, a devout Baptist, washed bodies in the local chapel. Unfortunately, after just a few years of marriage and two children, Herbert was killed in a dray accident in 1903, when Ivy was six. Eliza re-married, and Ivy and brother Herbert grew up alongside four step-siblings and a half-sister in a succession of villages along the Hertfordshire-Bedfordshire border.

My mother Edith was born in Charlton in 1923, the second of two daughters, into this typically confusing rural labouring-class crowd of relatives. I doubt anyone ever took the trouble to explain the intricacies of the several intersecting family trees: everyone was just an "aunt", "uncle", or "cousin". It took me, equipped with all the resources of the Web, quite some time to disentangle.

For whatever reasons, Mum was always fairly reticent about her early life. I have a collection of fragments that she let drop over the years, but no clear narrative. For example, I know she had a kitten that was killed by a neighbour's greyhounds. She hinted at occasional explosive, possibly violent outbursts between her parents. She mentioned several times occasional visits from a mysterious and posh "Granny Hay", which I'm pretty sure must either have been some kind of follow-up from her father's time in the Cottage Homes, or from a family in Altrincham that had fostered him for a few years before his military service in WW1. [1]

She would walk to school several miles into Hitchin and back every day. She was no scholar, but seems to have won some kind of prize there that may have resulted in a trip abroad, possibly to Belgium. I have a battered souvenir book – handed out to all local schoolchildren by Hitchin Urban District Council upon the accession to the throne of George VI in 1937 – with a label inscribed with her name. She left school that same year, aged fourteen, to find work. The rent paid from her first pay-packet, a few silver sixpences, was kept in a decorative metal eggcup on a sideboard by my grandparents; I used to take them out to admire on Sunday visits, and they were eventually left to me.

Edith was an attractive auburn-haired girl, and worked as a telephonist in the Hitchin engineering firm, Geo. W. King, where my father Douglas, a Letchworth boy, was also employed. Doug, who like his father played drums, had joined a local dance band that played a circuit of the North Herts village halls and pubs and one night found himself in Pirton, Edie's village, where a tentative relationship began. She can only have been fifteen or sixteen years old.

Not long after, however, Douglas was called up for military service as part of the cohort of men who were twenty-one in 1939 – the so-called Militia – and was overseas for most of the six years of war, from Dunkirk to Burma via the Western Desert, but the two of them kept up an increasingly affectionate correspondence. It seems that at one point during his time in the desert Doug became depressed about his chances of survival, and wrote to tell Edie to forget about him; luckily for me, she didn't.

In 1943 she joined up herself, serving in the ATS. She rose to the rank of sergeant in the 155th "mixed" (i.e. men and women) Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment (Battery 531), operating 5.25" anti-aircraft guns on the English east coast. Later in the war she was posted overseas herself: to Antwerp, as part of the defence of the city and port against constant bombardment by V1 and V2 rockets. This must have been an extraordinary experience for a 22-year old woman from a quiet rural backwater, but then I suppose the same might be said for anyone who saw active service abroad in that war. It is a matter of regret to me that I could never persuade her to write a memoir of these early years similar to the one I eventually managed to extract from my father. Her reticence in this regard was typical, however: she was always quite "tightly wrapped", as they say, and a lot of Dad's energy over the subsequent decades went into protecting her from the world's rough edges.

So Douglas eventually returned home to England from Burma on VE Day – 8th May 1945 – and they were married, both still in uniform, later that same month. For some years they lived with Edith's parents in the village of Pirton, where my sister was born in 1946, then in the 1950s they moved to Stevenage New Town which is where I finally come into the picture; a full eight years after my sister, although whether by accident or design I don't know and never thought to ask. 

At which point, obviously, my complicated relationship with my complicated mother finally begins.

But, look, it seems our session time is over, so the rest will have to wait until next time. Will you take cash, card, or a cheque?

[To be continued, probably...]

1. The Haigh family (pronounced "hay" by some, apparently) were involved in the supervision of the West Derby Union, who ran Liverpool's workhouses, cottage homes, etc.