WHAT DOES IT feel like to be a grandparent? Or a grandchild for that matter? I’ve been thinking about grandparents for weeks now, and it is a bit like being on a see-saw. As a grandchild I look back on my Victorian-born grandparents, but as a grandparent I look forward to my ten grandchildren, born from 1979 to 2006. So it is a two-headed process.
An only child, I grew up feeling deprived of family, uneasy as to what family meant, unsure that I had the right sort of family, much as I loved my parents. My best friend had lots of brothers and sisters, and grandparents living in an enormous house in the Sussex countryside. I stayed there once when I was nine, being driven down in an open Bentley, about seven of us, and the grandfather at the end of it was a huddle in a chair. I loved books about large happy families, wanted children, and when my children were grown up was so happy to have grandchildren. I still am.
So much is talked about Victorian family values, and looking at my own family I think much of it is guff. My father kept well away – and kept me away, too – from his family, though he did help them out quite a lot financially, and I know almost nothing about them. There are family values for you.
My mother’s parents were much more a part of my life. My grandmother Cecil Sowerby was born in London in 1866, the youngest of six girls and a boy, and I remember her telling me she was her father’s pet. Her father was very musical, had been a choirboy in the Temple Church in the City, and worked for Barclays Bank. She said all her other relations were botanists or conchologists. Her great-grandfather James Sowerby produced the 36-volume Sowerby’s English Botany, and there is a Sowerby’s Whale in the Natural History Museum in London. While my mother’s father, Arthur Dixon (an artist and jeweller), was in many ways a solitary man, Cecil certainly had a strong sense of family, which included parties, clothes, music, and enjoying company all her life.
As a child, Cecil spent some months in a Convent of the Sacred Heart School but hated it, and was allowed to come home. She trained as an artist, and as she had cousins in France her parents let her go to Paris to study. I never saw anything she had drawn or painted. Later, she was governess to Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, who remembered being taken by her to the British Museum.
What I remember is her belief. Cecil was always religious. She recalled going to chapel with her nurse, and in later life she joined the Society of Friends – Quakers – though she stipulated that she be allowed to continue to take communion in the Church of England. I don’t know if she ever did.
My grandfather Arthur Dixon was born in London in 1872, and went to the Slade School of Art at University College, London. I remember my uncle Charles describing to me the rush when Arthur’s paintings were being prepared for submission to the Royal Academy. I don’t know how often they were accepted. The oil paintings I saw were fairly conventional, touched by pre-Raphaelitism. There is at least one in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. I remember Cecil describing how before they were married in 1899, she and Arthur would, when travelling by tram, play chess together, only moving the pieces when the tram stopped. A few years after they married they left London and lived in Sussex with their two small children. She wrote in her Bible the date of birth of her daughter Elizabeth – my mother – and then of her son Charles, described as ‘first son’. There weren’t any more. Those Edwardian years sounded tranquil enough.
However, by the time I knew them my maternal grandparents were leading very separate lives in a house in Berkhamsted, a town well stocked with retired army and colonial service families. My grandparents were liberal, artistic; army people were not their sort of people. My question now is not what my grandparents were like, but why they were so distant from each other, which is not something I ever considered as a child. Separate bedrooms. It’s just the way it was.
Cecil stayed in the house, though made forays up to London to do voluntary social work somewhere in Bethnal Green. She also did embroidery, wool work on cotton or blankets, and some weaving for her own pleasure. A blanket Cecil embroidered has been used by her great-great-granddaughters, and one of them will inherit it. I never saw her read a book, and I think she irritated my mother, who was scholarly. But she was good-hearted and hospitable. When staying with my grandparents in 1939, I noticed that she had a very wide circle of friends, many of them very young, who would visit in the evening, to talk and sing round the piano. She was clearly popular.
Arthur had the studio at home, which was really a large wooden hut that half-filled the garden. You first had to telephone the studio from the house by cranking the handle of an intercom telephone arrangement to see if it was all right to visit. Cecil was never, ever, allowed in the studio, though Arthur’s good friends the Misses Ethel and Hope Henderson were. To get in you had to press down on a small piece of wood that was under the threshold and then the door would open. The first part of the studio contained two life-sized model figures on which clothes could be draped, and were usually covered in cotton sheeting. There was also a quarter-sized billiard table. Arthur played against himself and my mother claimed he cheated. The second and larger part beyond a dividing curtain contained a small easel, but mainly chests of shallow drawers with stones and rings and brooches in them, and a worktop with a Bunsen burner. The jewellery he made was firmly in the Arts and Crafts tradition, semi-precious stones set in oxidised silver. They are very distinctive and although not hallmarked I can easily recognise them and have twice been able to tell people who made their rings. Evelyn Waugh, writing in his 1918 diary clearly liked them too, as well as a dance in the house when Cecil played the piano. Arthur taught me how to make pendants and set stones, and was very patient. There was a bench covered in something embroidered by Cecil, and the unbound first editions of Bernard Shaw’s plays. It was a room that entranced me.
What did I mean to them? My grandmother fussed over me; I can see now she wanted to be loved, wanted demonstrative affection which on the whole she didn’t get from me. She wanted to be called Cecil, not Granny, because I had always called my grandfather Arthur, and I suspect she felt out of it. I feel sorry as a child for not really loving her. I did love Arthur, so did my mother, and he loved us back, always. But I don’t think he had a sense of family as something all-embracing, though I think Cecil probably did.
Still, I didn’t understand why they lived as they did until my mother got an inoperable cancer. She said then she had always meant to tell me the story of her life, and she began, but actually only told me the story, or part of the story, of her parents’ lives. And the separateness of two people who had a good deal in common – pacifists, vegetarians, frugal, true children of the Arts and Crafts era – became clear. Before the First World War, then living in a house designed by Cecil’s architect brother-in-law, Arthur fell in love with the woman next door. When it all came out, the next-door family moved. Divorce was ruled out because of the children, though they seemed to have known what was going on; my mother said she liked the woman concerned very much – at the time better than her own mother, is my guess – while her brother sided with his mother. So the family was split emotionally. How Arthur coped I’ve no idea. Cecil said it was the worst night of her life, and it took its toll of them all.
So, in my eighties, what is it like to be a grandparent now? I still feel sorry that I didn’t pay more attention to my grandparents when I was grown up. In contrast, I am slightly surprised, and immensely pleased, that our grandchildren send us emails, come and see us and bring their friends too. Most importantly, I see the lines of communication in the family widen, become more lateral, between parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins. Which is what I always hoped would happen.
Jean Loudon was born in 1926, evacuated during the war to Canada, and has a degree from King’s College, London. She is married to the medical historian and etcher Irvine Loudon, and has three surviving daughters, two sons, and ten grandchildren.