Susannah married a man who was a Bad Lot. He was a miner. He beat her and she ran away from him, taking both her daughters with her. In those days it was the running away that was considered a disgrace, not the beating, so she left her daughters Gwendolen and Olwen with Auntie Syl and went off to London to go into service. Auntie Gwennie grew up to be appalling, and to marry Uncle Ted and have two daughters and five grandchildren who were, to hear her talk about them, so perfect you couldn’t help but hate them. Auntie Olwen became a nurse, and lived with another nurse, Auntie Ethel, from the nineteen-thirties on. They were just like a married couple and everyone treated them like one.
Sarah married a clergyman called Augustus Thomas. This was a social step up for her. They met when he was a curate in St. Fagans, which was our local church, but they married when he acquired a living on the Gower, near Swansea. He took Sarah off there, and there she had a son, also called Augustus, but always known as Gus, who his father brought back to Auntie Syl to bring up after poor Sarah died. Uncle Gus was a hero in the war, and he married an English nurse called Esther who didn’t like any of us. He was my grandmother’s favourite cousin, and she never saw as much of him as she’d have liked.
Shulamith married Matthew Evans, who was a miner. She was my grandmother’s mother, and she was a teacher before she married, like her mother before her. It was actually illegal to be a proper teacher after you were married, but it was all right to keep a Dame School where the children came to learn in your house. She had a baby who died, and then my grandmother, Rebecca, and then died herself.
Sidney kept a draper’s shop in the village, and later became Mayor. He married a woman called Florence, who died giving birth to Auntie Flossie. Auntie Flossie herself had three children and then her husband died of the Black Death, which he caught from a rat. Auntie Flossie then went back to teaching and gave her children to Auntie Syl as a new generation to bring up, so my cousin Pip, who was only six years older than me, born in 1958, was the last of Sylvia’s babies, when the first of them, Auntie Gwennie, was already sixty, born in 1898.
You’d think there was a terrible lot of dying going on, and you’d be right, but they were Victorians, and they didn’t have antibiotics or much in the way of sanitation and they only just had the germ theory of disease. However, I think in a way they must have been sickly, because you’ve only got to look at the Phelps family to see the difference. I’ll write about them another day. My Auntie Florrie, my grandfather’s sister, blamed it on all the education the Terises went in for. I don’t see how it can have killed them—and Auntie Syl, who was as educated as any of them, lived into her eighties. I remember her.
It seems so more complicated written down than it really is. Maybe I ought to draw a diagram. But it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to remember who these people are. All I really want to say about them is that when you belong to a big family like that, where you know everyone and you know all the stories about everyone, even the stories that happened long before you were born, and everyone knows who you are and knows the stories about you, then you are never just Mor but “Luke and Becky’s Mor” or “Luke Phelps’s granddaughters.” And also, when you need someone, someone will be there for you. It might not be your parents, or even your grandparents, but if you have a catastrophic need for someone to bring you up, someone will step in, the way Auntie Syl did. But she was dead before my grandmother died, and when I needed someone, somehow that net of family that I counted on to be there for me, the way you might bounce down to a trampoline, disappeared, and instead of bouncing back I hit the ground hard. They wouldn’t admit what was wrong with my mother, and they’d have had to do that to help me. And once I had to use social services to get away from her, they couldn’t do anything, because to social services an auntie you have known all your life is nobody compared to a father you haven’t even met.
He has a family too.
TUESDAY 2ND OCTOBER 1979
Actually, James Tiptree, Jr.’s Warm Worlds and Otherwise gives The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Vol II a run for its money. I’d say the Le Guin is still ahead, but it’s not as clear-cut as I thought it was. The other two books in the package from my father today are both Zelazny. I haven’t started them yet. Creatures of Light and Darkness was awfully peculiar.
THURSDAY 4TH OCTOBER 1979
Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon are absolutely brill. I’ve done nothing but read them for the last two days. The concept of Shadow is amazing, and the Trumps too, but what makes them so good is Corwin’s voice. I have to read more Zelazny.