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Muriel was the war baby
— the First World War, that is (called "The Great War" by everybody on both sides of my family).
She was born July 3rd 1917
— 78 years to the day before my own son Daniel. Grandad used to tell her he brought her back from France. ("Very clever people, they Frenchies.
Even the little ones can talk the language.") He called her his little bit of bliss, and "Bliss" became her nickname in the family.
We have always called her "Auntie Mu".Muriel married Fred Littlehales of Aston, Birmingham (home of the great English soccer club, Aston Villa). Fred's mother was Annie, Great-Aunt Leah's "by-blow"; so Mu and Fred were first cousins once removed. Fred (born June 5th, 1922) is thus my second cousin, as well as my uncle. If Mu and Fred had had any children, they would have been my first cousins, and also my second cousins once removed. This is the kind of thing that drives genealogists to suicide.1
Fred has red hair, from the sailor who seduced Great-Aunt Leah among the cowslips in some lane in Staffordshire, a century ago. As a child I was closer to Mu and Fred than to anyone else in my mother's family (or to anyone at all in my father's). Since about 1951 they have lived in a neat little row house at 31 Prestbury Road, in the Witton district of Birmingham.
Old Fred had a brother called Bert, who married a woman called Chris. Their son John, my Uncle Fred's cousin, is at least as close to Fred as his own brother Ron. John married a Yorkshire girl called Jean. They had a daughter, Mandy. I can remember John and Jean quite clearly. They lived in a large apartment in another district of Birmingham, and as if it was not sufficiently notable that they had a TV, their TV boasted a mauve plastic attachment over the screen, to magnify the picture. Jean gave me a puzzle toy, also of clear plastic: a stellated octahedron that came apart and had to be reassembled.
When Mandy was still an infant, Jean developed cancer. She proceeded to die a slow and hideous death, progressively deformed and disabled by various kinds of chemical and radiological treatments, all of which were new and poorly calibrated at that time (late 1950s). I remember Mu reporting at one point that all Jean's hair had fallen out. After her death, Mu and Fred helped John (who did not remarry) to raise Mandy. The girl regards them almost as parents, and has reciprocated with much kindness to them in their old age. She married a businessman, Gary Quirke. Gary and Mandy have two children: Simon (b. 1981) and Daniel (b. 1984).
All my time at Mu and Fred's I seem to have spent reading.
They are both great readers. They had little book stands so that they could read while eating
— a cardinal sin in my own house.
(Since leaving home I have never been without one of these reading aids.) Mu and Fred's is a quiet house. In my childhood they had no TV.
They had a radio, but did not listen to it much. Fred was at that time a science-fiction fan, and I caught it from him.
He had marvellous books: George Adamski's Flying Saucers Have Landed! and Immanuel Velikovsky's
When Worlds Collide, both great cult books of the early 1950s;
Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell's Conquest of Space with all those color paintings (originally done for
Life magazine) of the surfaces of the planets; Arthur C. Clarke's
The Exploration of Space, and a book of illustrations of events in British History.
When I stayed with them I used to go to the local municipal library in Birchfield Road, from which, by the age of about 12, I had borrowed and read all the science fiction books in stock.
I can remember the first
— it remained one of my favorites: Jonathan Burke's
Alien Landscapes. The other great literary attraction in Birmingham was at Auntie Annie's house (which, I now recall, had an air-raid shelter in the back garden--Birmingham was badly bombed in WW2). Fred's brother Ron had a complete collection of Richmal Crompton's "William" books — the adventures of a suburban English boy, William Brown, and his three friends.3 Auntie Annie let me borrow these; and by the time I went to grammar school,4 I had read the lot several times over.
1. A and B are first cousins if they have a grandparent in common; they are second cousins if they have a great-grandparent in common; and so on.
The children of my first cousins are first cousins once removed; the grandchildren of my first cousins are first cousins twice removed; and so on.
The great-great-grandchildren of my fifth cousins are my fifth cousins four times removed.
(And I, of course, am their fifth cousin four times removed. All these terms are symmetric.)
It's easy when you get the hang of it. I note, incidentally, how surprisingly quickly generations can get out of sync.
The Knowles children spanned twenty-five years just by themselves. In the generation of my own children there are seven first cousins descending from my father and from Rosie's parents: my brother Noel's boys, Robert and Peter; my sister Judith's children, Tessa and Marcus; Rosie's brother's little boy, Chiqian; and our own Nellie and Ollie.
Robert was born in December 1954; Ollie in July 1995
— a span of 40½ years!
My nephew Robert's grandchildren will be not much younger than my children
— their first cousins twice removed.
By the time you get down to third and fourth cousins, differences of a century in the same generation must be quite common.
2. It must have made a profit at some point. According to Muriel, Pop's brother and his wife, along with an unknown number of other relations, all lived at least partly from the proceeds of the shop, like the extended family of a Chinese mandarin.
3. There were 38 "William" books, though critical opinion (see, e.g., Philip Hensher in the London
Spectator of August 28, 1999) considers the first 20 to be much superior to what followed.
The books began as stories for mothers in the Ladies' Home Magazine; the first collection,
Just William, was published in 1922. The last came out sometime in the 1960s.
4. That is, by age 11¼. In England at that time you took a general intelligence test at around age 11.
Based on the result of this test you went to either grammar school, "technical" school
or "secondary modern." I attended Northampton School for Boys
— the local boys' grammar school
— from September 1956 to July 1963.