Here Are My Three Grandfathers (3)

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. 

 

3.

And this is my Grandpa, Francis Sydney Holmes, here with me in my Launceston back yard – Mum’s stepfather, the only father she knew, the only Grandpa I knew, and more than enough. See how happy I look to be with him here!

He took me for walks, pointing out birds and insects, naming trees and flowers, showing me how to see. Birthdays and Christmases he gave me books: Dickens, the Brontes, Dumas.... He wrote me many letters – sadly, none kept – not as to a child, but an equal intellect.

The orchards were in Spreyton, near Devonport. In family gatherings at The Orchard House, my brother and cousins and I would fall asleep by the fire, listening to old family tales and reminiscences, until we were carried to bed. Daytimes we explored the bush. When I was very little I rode on the foot of the draught-horse, gentle Horace, hugging his leg.

Grandpa left me his Remington typewriter. (Everyone knew I would be a writer.) And he left money towards my tertiary education. He did that for all his grand-daughters. Parents, he said, if they must choose, would favour sons.

My father’s father gave me poetry, passing it along in the genes (my Dad had them too). 

My mother’s father gave me my Celtic heritage, the love of craggy rocks and rushing rivers, mountains, and Scotch thistles. When I finally visited Scotland, I suddenly understood. (Surely this heritage also enhanced the magic which came through the maternal line.)

My Grandpa (FSH, as he signed his many letters – not only to me but correspondents all over the world) gave me himself. And so much more. Gave me myself. Gave me the world.

Part 1 and Part 2 appear in previous posts.

I'm sharing this with Poets and Storytellers United via Friday Writings #53.

Here Are My Three Grandfathers (2)

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.

Here Are My Three Grandfathers (1)

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. 

1. 

When I was born, my father’s father, handsome John Thomas Robinson (Jack) wrote a poem for me, in pencil on a scrap of paper. I’m 83 now, and I still have it.

I had a Grandpa on hand, my mother's 'Pater'. This one, over on 'The Mainland', was my Daddy's father, so I called him 'Grandpa Daddy'.

He never crossed Bass Strait to visit us. By the time we crossed it, he’d left Grandma and gone off to live with some other woman. All six of the seven children still alive supported their mother. (Who never would hear a bad word said about him, even then.)

I thought that he and his brother built the Warburton pub. But no, that was his father (of the same name, my great-grandfather) and his uncle.

He – my grandfather – was for ten years Mayor of Flinders Island, where the youngest four of the seven children were born. He had a farm there, and worked hard, but it failed. Later he worked in Wonthaggi….

While they lived on the Island, he successfully represented its interests to the Tasmanian Government, to set up a much-needed regular ferry service from Launceston.

He was spoken of as a popular, sociable man. I heard that he liked to dance and sing. He was famous for liking the drink – too much! Grandma became a staunch member of The Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which is probably not to be wondered at. 

He didn’t live long enough for me to grow up and meet him. 

That’s his wedding picture, holding a glove – perhaps the one she removed to receive the ring. 

I edited Grandma out of this copy. (She was very pretty then…)

Part 2 and Part 3 appear in the following posts.

Sharing with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #51 where the prompt is to write about the number three. But doing all this in one post would be too long for the P&SU guidelines. You can read the others now if you feel so inclined, or wait until I share them on future Fridays.

Footsteps

I walk in the footsteps of an old self – mine – retracing that strange and painful journey. I pause at certain places … linger … look long. I don’t plan to make this journey again. 

It’s a pilgrimage. 

If, when I began, I thought it merely a revisiting, a ‘trip down memory lane’ (how blithe that sounds!) – by now I intend completion. 

I have been reluctant to let you go. I wanted to tell our story. The saddest story, yes, but also beautiful. I can’t. It sounds just like hundreds of others, when told. I perceive it’s not meant to be revealed – not in its every detail. It was ours alone to live, to know. That was enough reason for it to be! I only want to tell it now to preserve it, but that’s a false and foolish goal. 

We lived, we met, we loved, you died. I walk again, deliberately, in the footsteps of my journey with you, where our paths intersected, entangled…. 

I reach

that final crossroad 

holding

one last gaze –

your blue eyes

Tanka for a dead man

I can’t draw, but

I let my pen wander 

across the page

while I think of you, and

the lines flow gracefully

*********

poems

reminiscences

dreams –

I watch myself writing

letters to a dead man

*********

your notebooks –

old lines that linger 

to show me

you not only loved me

you listened and heard

*********

we quoted

from certain poems 

certain lines –

in ways that made them

secret messages

The Dream Is Always

The dream is always of you,

my obsession, fixation: sad

love, lost love, past love, true…

Are dreams a defence against going mad?

Well, to live sometimes there

in that far, irrecoverable past,

is better, perhaps, than nowhere

to seek you, being always lost.

To seek you, being always lost, 

is better, perhaps, than nowhere

in that far, irrecoverable past –

but well to live, sometimes, there.

Are dreams a defence against going mad?

Love, lost love, past love, true …

my obsession, fixation – the sad

dream is always of you.