E-Book, Englisch, 398 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-85683-420-2
Verlag: Shepheard Walwyn (Publishers) Ltd
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
John Symons spent the first two years of his life in India and the next sixteen in Cornwall and Devonshire. He was educated at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London. He has worked for many years as an executive and life coach, and as an adjudicator in management and staff disputes. He lives in East Sussex.
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3 Florence Louisa and William DAD WAS BORN in December 1901. He was the only son and the eldest child in the family. My Auntie Florrie, named after their mother, and the first of six sisters, was born a couple of years later. It was she who helped me to build up a picture of their life. I had been too young to take it all in properly when Dad was alive and well. Auntie Florrie lived longer than the others and she was in good health almost to the end of her ninety-one years. In the 1980s and 1990s, as her life began to draw to a close, I used to travel down from London and visit her at Heamoor, only a hundred yards from Wesley Rock Chapel, where her parents were married. She lived in Wesley Street quietly with her youngest son, Coulson, in the well-built stone cottage that had come to her through her late husband, Charlie Paul. The Pauls had lived in the area for generations and the family’s building firm had built the houses in that street late in the nineteenth century when, for a while, they were quite prosperous. The sleeper from Paddington used to arrive at Penzance, at the end of the line, by about 8 o’clock. I would take a taxi and call in at a florist’s shop to buy Auntie Florrie some freesias or anemones, and then, at no. 3 Wesley Street, she would give me a Cornish welcome and a grand breakfast of eggs and bacon and fried bread. Wearing a long apron over her cardigan and tweed skirt, she wielded her frying pan and fish-slice boisterously. She stood straight for her years. Her thick grey hair, her quiet smile, the shape and angle of her forehead and her dark, blue-grey eyes spoke to me of Dad, and I dare to believe that, in some way, I made his presence real for her. Then we got down to business. Sitting at the kitchen table by the fireplace with paper and pencil, we would roam over what she remembered of her family’s life. Coulson would stay on the edge of this, listening with interest to parts of the conversation, never making his presence and keen attention too obvious to his mother, moving in and out of the kitchen, sometimes going for a while into the back yard where red pelargoniums and other bright flowers grew strongly in carefully tended pots. Once Coulson told me that, whenever he asked Auntie Florrie about the family, she used to say, ‘Why do you want to know about that? You never know what you might find out if you ask questions like that!’ But with me she was always at ease and open in talking about the family. She seemed to delight in passing on to her only brother’s elder son what she, among the living, alone now knew. Often she seemed to sense in advance the questions I was about to ask, particularly when the matter was sad, and then we would shed a few quiet tears together, but just as often we laughed at stories from the past. Perhaps we both knew that time was short; the years were running out. We were talking just in the nick of time. At the end of the morning I would gather all my papers into my briefcase and Auntie Florrie would take out of the oven three of her goldenbrown Cornish pasties. No one made better pasties, my mother told me. Coulson would join us. And then I would be away, usually for another twelve months, on the train heading for London. I owe Auntie Florrie so much. Like Auntie Florrie, Dad loved and revered their mother, Florence Louisa and their father, William. Mum also told me that Dad’s mother had been a wonderful woman to whom he was devoted, but if Dad himself said anything to me about them, it must have been when I was too young to take it in. William and his father John Hocking Symons, and their ancestors, had lived in the far west of Cornwall and worked the seas around Newlyn, or laboured on the land there, for all of the nineteenth century, and probably for many centuries before that. It is a surprise that, by contrast, John Hocking’s wife Peace and her family came from the industrial towns of Batley and Dewsbury, just south of Bradford and Leeds in Yorkshire. How John Hocking and Peace met, I do not know. Peace’s parents may have originated in Hull, Whitby or Scarborough, or one of the other fishing towns and villages on the east coast of England, and worked there until the industrial revolution drew them to the West Riding of Yorkshire. Probably, in the mid-1860s, John Hocking visited the east coast and for a while worked on the fishing fleet at Scarborough – that is what his grandchildren believed – when the fishing was bad in the western seas off Newlyn. He moved inland to Mirfield and married, but his first wife died only two years later of tuberculosis, ‘phthisis’ in the medical language of those days. They had no children. John Hocking stayed on in the Mirfield area, working at an iron foundry, and in due course he met Peace there. They married in 1875. Their first son Frank was born in Mirfield in West Yorkshire in 1876, but, by the time that William, the second son and my grandfather, was born in 1879 they were living in Penzance. In 1881 the Census records that the family, by then with a third son, Ernest, was living in Jack Lane in Newlyn. Twenty years later at the time of the Census in April 1901 John Hocking was still working as a fisherman, but he was no longer fit. His three eldest sons, by then twenty-four, twenty-two and twenty years old, were all fishermen, and perhaps they joked with him that he had been at sea too long – even on land he seemed to keep his sea legs and to sway unsteadily. That was not because of drink. The Wesleyan, teetotal influence was strong in Newlyn. John Hocking and Peace and their family were Methodists. Perhaps the young men thought that the same thing would happen to them if they stayed at sea for too long. Had not their grandfather, Frank, ended up like that, working as a labourer on the land at the end of his life, after so many years at sea, until he died of malaria? So, like his father before him, John Hocking sorted out and cleaned the nets on the quayside and left the fishing to his three eldest boys. The youngest, Alfred, was only twelve years old, in his last year at school. Alfred was the last child in John Hocking and Peace’s family. By the turn of 1901, when Queen Victoria died and, in the last moments of her life, sensed the presence of her consort Prince Albert and called out to him on her way to be reunited with him after so many years of widowhood, William had met Florence Louisa. Later that year they married. Florence Louisa’s background was much less settled than William’s. The marriage certificate in August 1901 gives her full name as Florence Louisa Groves. She was twenty years old. No father is mentioned in her line in the certificate, which just reads: ‘Florence Louisa Groves. 20 years. Spinster. Residence at time of marriage – Marine Place, Penzance.’ No ‘rank or profession’ is listed. The 1901 Census shows that in April that year Florence Louisa was living alone at 26 Back Marine Terrace. It states that she was nineteen years old and was working as a charwoman, but, seeing the family photograph taken in November 1914, someone said to me, ‘You can see that she was a lady.’ I can. Like Dad, I too have come to love Florence Louisa for what she did and suffered; for what she was – for her loyalty and courage. Perhaps you will see what I mean. Florence Louisa and William both signed the register after their wedding service, but John Hocking Symons, William’s father (profession: ‘Fisherman retired’), one of the witnesses of their marriage, made his mark with a cross. His hand was now too unsteady to write. Twenty-six years earlier he had been able to write his signature on his own marriage certificate, whereas Peace had made her mark with a cross. Towards the end of her life Auntie Florrie told me that it was because she was born on the day of the Helston Floral or ‘Furry’ Dance, – 8th May – that their mother was named Florence. Auntie Florrie also told me that Florence Louisa’s mother was called Susie and that she died not long before her daughter’s wedding. She was giving me clues so that, one day, I could find out more for myself. Although memories in a family of coincidences like that often prove to be good evidence and a sound guide, there is no trace of a birth certificate for Florence Louisa Groves. All my efforts to find her birth in the records, civil, church and chapel, proved futile. One day I explained the problem to the supervisor of the local registry in Penzance. After searching the original documents, she told me that, although there was no birth recorded for a Florence Louisa Groves on 8th May 1881, there was a Florence Louisa Saundry, born to a Susan Saundry in Penzance (Madron) on that day. And then there was a death certificate for a Susan Saundry on the 10th of February 1900, reported by an ‘F. Saundry’ of 3 Marine Place. The likelihood that this ‘F. Saundry’ was the same person as Florence Louisa Groves, who married William Symons, is borne out by an entry in the 1891 Census. This shows, lodging in two rooms at 9 Cornwall Terrace, Penzance (close to Marine Place): ‘Susan S. Groves, lodger, single, 41 years, retired housekeeper, b. St. Columb Minor; and Florence L. Groves, daughter 9, scholar, b. Penzance.’ The dry, dusty documents make it all too clear that Florence Louisa had a hard start in life. For, according to the birth certificate, she was born in Penzance Union Workhouse at Madron. Dad’s beloved mother was born in a workhouse. How this happened, it is impossible to say. The records now available show that Susan...
