Many young men went off to fight in the Army: the second Boer Campaign began in 1899 and the Great War in 1914. Something caused ‘Uncle Vic’ Heaver to get his age short by three years at his army medical in 1915, perhaps the intimate medical inspections? One youth was recorded as having a mole on the left side of his foreskin (or was it a four on the left side of his moleskin?). Ted Britten on the other hand bulked out his age to escape Dad and to fight in the Boer War. He ended up in Canada a long way from his autocratic father. Another young blood with a cantankerous parent was Sam Portch. When he joined the Wiltshire Yeomanry he too determined to fight the Boers. He took his own horse plus one of his father’s all the way to South Africa. Dad was furious. . . I am missing an awful lot of relatives who appear in the census or in the family bible and then nothing further is known of them. I have tentatively identified some as ‘black sheep’ but haven’t managed to catch them at it, as it were.
Is there any truth in the existence of the spirit world? “My grandmother was a great believer in the spirit world”, writes Geoff Norris, “and often told the story of how, on the day before the telegram arrived announcing brother Jim Broad’s death [in the Great War], his photograph slid slowly, very slowly down the wall. There’s spooky for you. When I was about 12 years old or so, I was with her on a District Line train from Hornchurch, where we lived, when a woman sitting opposite kept staring at her – then came across and said ‘I have a message from Alfred. He says you must beware of stairs.’ Alfred, of course was my deceased grandfather and this episode caused great agitation. A week or so later my grandmother fell down the stairs at the station and broke a hip. Sarah [herself] lived into her nineties.”
In a family photograph, young Martha Taylor looks absolutely terrified of life. She is 16 and has her brother’s hand upon her shoulder. She had just lost her grandfather and this loss may have changed her. In two years she married a Shropshire miner down at Gelligaer and began a peripatetic life which took in a medieval border-town and a burgeoning steel village. The misery she felt at 16 did enact itself on her family – just not in her lifetime. Perhaps it was this that gave her the foreboding.
gwinowan 