Yes, I had three grandfathers. Two I never met. One was an army officer in British India. One was a drunk and a poet.
The third was a Yorkshireman, and became an orchardist. He brought his family – my Nana, my Uncle Ian, my Mum and my Aunty Frankie – out to Tasmania. Where I was born.
2.
My mother’s father, The Colonel (I never heard him called anything else) was Hugh Maclean Halliday, born in Bengal. And buried there, dead at 54, among First World War casualties – listed as a ‘supernumerary, unattached’. A less than brilliant student at school in England, and not good at the soldiering either – but destined for it by family tradition – his position was clerical before the War.
That’s him on the beach, in his army shorts and solar topee.
He never knew about me. He died in 1920. I was born in 1939.
Nor about my brother, his other grandchild, born in 1943. (He had one legitimate son, old records tell us, who married but never had children.)
He told my dark-skinned Nana he had a wife back home in a mental hospital. Hearing the story, I thought ‘home’ must mean Scotland. But maybe not. His wife too, I learn from those old records, was born in India, into another of those British families there for generations.
Mum told me that when she was young, Nana regularly urged her,
'It's time to write a letter to the Colonel. Let him know how you're getting on at school. Tell him about the good marks you got.'
She dutifully did, but she found it puzzling. She didn’t understand, then, that he was her father.
Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #52.
Part 1 appears in the previous post, Part 3 in the following post.