Last Easter weekend was pretty incredible. I went to see Mum in Sussex on Good Friday, and to break the repetitive questioning and cigarette smoking (her) I suggested we clear some drawers she's always complaining about. It's always good for us to engage in something together, and I also knew that it might reveal some new photos or diaries previously undiscovered.
Sure enough, I came home with a bunch of photos to scan. One of them was a copy of an image taken in the twenties (above). Written on the back were the details 'Epcombs, South End, Garsington. Wheeler family home, built by grandfather.' This would be my mother's grandfather, my great-grandfather. My mother Jennifer, now 83, was born in 1926 and adopted shortly afterwards. In 1980, she discovered her birth mother Elsie, living in Rose Hill, Oxford.
I posted this story on Flickr:
This is the family (above) my mother discovered when she was 50. The Wheeler family of Oxford. Elsie Margaret Wheeler (centre, back) was her real mother. Single, and in service to a wealthy family in Kensington, London, when she found herself pregnant, she was forced to put the child up for adoption. It was 1926. Her employers supported her through this process, and although this sounds somewhat benevolent, there is a distinct possiblity that her sister's employer was the father. The Robert Altman movie Gosford Park presents a similar story. My great aunt's employer was a well-known socialite and her husband was known for his 'glad eye' for the female staff. My grandmother would go and help her sister out from time to time. Apparently, my mother was adopted from the Surrey orphanage that many of his illegitimate offspring were sent to. This comes on good authority from one of their biographers, with whom my mother has spoken on several occasions.
Unhappily adopted, my mother spent her early years feeling lonely and insecure. When her adoptive mother gave birth to a son, my mother's feelings of alienation increased. My adoptive grandmother was a fierce woman, talented, intellectual and artistic, bisexual. A far cry from my mother's blood mother, simple, caring and uneducated. My mother was often giving a few shillings to leave the house while my grandmother entertained her lesbian lover who lived across the street, while my gentle but ineffectual grandfather was out at work. Sent to work in a hospital kitchen when in her mid-teens, my mother embarked on her independent life.
In the late seventies, married to my father and with her daughter in her late teens, my mother spotted a personal ad in the Daily Telegraph which stated 'researcher seeks information to the whereabouts of Elsie Margaret Wheeler' as if by freak chance. The 'researcher' that answered the phone was in fact a younger brother my mother had no idea she had. Nor he she. Together, they set out to find Elsie. Peter, my uncle (also unhappy in his adoption) had been searching for years, a search that took him by letter and telephone around the world, with no result.
Probably two years later, the search had them back in Oxford. Elsie was in her eighties and living less than 5 miles from where she was born. The social services weren't set up to mediate the introduction of the estranged parent and children, so Jenny (my mother) and Peter decided to visit her for themselves. Arriving at her small council flat, they introduced themselves as bringing information from the family for whom she worked after she left the Morells. Inviting them in for tea, Elsie enjoyed chatting and sharing information with two people who were obviously well informed. After a while, my mother asked 'do you know who I am?' Elsie gazed at her intently for a few moments. The mist of decades evaporated and she realised it was her daughter. Aghast, she then looked at Peter and asked weakly 'then, who are you..?' For the most part, happy relationships ensued. Peter perhaps wanted too much after too long from Elsie and Jenny, and I fear, was disappointed. My mother maintained a gentle and fond relationship with Elsie until she died in her mid-nineties.
I came home from Mum's with several valuable photographs which I scanned. The first of Mum in her early thirties looking beautiful on a hillock of daisies, very different to the frail, thin figure she has become. For the first time, I felt an acute sense of my childlessness. No-one will delight in finding these pictures as I do, once I'm gone. They may end up destroyed or in a box in some thrift store somewhere, or at a car boot sale. The continuum will be broken, with no way to maintain it. Momentarily, I considered IVF at 51.
I had a premature meeting with grief, at the thought of losing my Mum even though our turbulent relationship has meant that I've sometimes thought that life would be easier without her.
I decided to find the house in the photograph. Oxford is only an hour away. So on Easter monday, we (me and Martin, my partner) parked up in Garsington and went for a walk through the village. The weather was beautiful and we were really happy to be out in the country for a change. We passed the crumbly majesty that is Garsington Manor and walked along South End to find my ancestor's family home the last house in the village.
On the way back we stopped by the Manor (where my great-aunt Bertha worked) and rang the doorbell, hoping to be able to look round the beautiful grounds. I explained to the current owner, Rosalind Ingrams, my reasons for calling. She kindly invited us in to meet her family and the grandson of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Lady Ottoline and her husband Philip, had owned Garsington Manor during the time my great-aunt had worked there.
Really, an amazing day, walking in the footsteps of Elsie and Bertha.
But the best was yet to come.
When I got home, posted on the Flickr page of Epcombs, was a message from some relatives I knew nothing of. It appears that they had been doing their own research, had hit a Google search on my grandma's name and found my archive pictures on Flickr. On the same day I went to Garsington.
I now know that my great-aunt Annie had a son, Percy, who is 91 and living only minutes from Garsington. His son-in-law had found my photos on Flickr and told Percy who was incredulous at this discovery. I will be visiting him in a couple of weeks to see his photo collection and to learn about my grandmother from someone who knew her very well and can fill in details of her life I could only dream of having access to.
So this is really the point of starting this blog, to record all this as I go along, and to share it with anyone who finds all this stuff as fascinating as I do.
