Love is both the devil and the angel; we crave it and we fear it. One thing is for sure: none of us can control it and very few of us escape its clutches entirely. Love can also refresh a family dynamic: just when everyone is settled in roles, along comes someone from outside and stirs up the pot. It’s no coincidence that some of the greatest stories start with either a wedding or a funeral. Drama lurks where the relationship order is disrupted; watching how the sand settles is where the fun lies.
Let us look back at our story so far. We’ve witnessed the lives of Joyce/Mona, secluded in the wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, and then the Branson family, not of the landed aristocracy themselves but at ease in the world of shooting parties, stately homes and servants. We’ve followed Ted through six enriching and shattering years of war; having been undoubtedly respected as a soldier then finding himself, at twenty-nine, unqualified and unemployable.
We’ve also had an insight into the lives of the Jenkins family, with their emphasis on education rather than material possessions: Granny Dock with her athletic prowess and competitive, restless spirit, and well-to-do Rupert, his confidence crushed by the First World War. And then, of course, young Eve, a product of the two of them, neither shackled by her class nor defined by her education, and utterly unafraid of what lay ahead.
As children, we loved hearing the story of how our parents first met. It was nothing particularly extraordinary, just a day when the gods were smiling down, with both of them in the right place at the right time and open to making connections.
Eve was helping a friend at a drinks party while resting between trips to South America. She was standing behind the bar at the far end of the room when she saw Ted enter. She was immediately attracted to him, with his cheerful demeanour, thick blond hair and graceful posture. One of the many letters of condolence we received after Dad’s death, sixty-five years later, stated rather touchingly that ‘When you talked to Ted at a drinks party, you could be sure of three things: that he would make you laugh, that he’d tell you something that you didn’t already know and that you would leave feeling better about yourself.’ I’m sure that was as true back then as it would be for the rest of his life.
Eve grabbed a tray of nibbles, wove her way through the throng and, walking up to him, popped a cocktail sausage in his mouth, saying, ‘The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.’
And she was right – Ted was instantly smitten. He invited her to the theatre, making the error of choosing the hit musical of the time, Bless the Bride. Sitting in the front row of the stalls, he couldn’t work out why the cast kept glancing down at them, at one point even checking to see if his flies were undone. During the interval, Eve had to admit that she knew the show quite well, having been in its chorus during the war.
It’s hard to imagine how ingrained the class system was in post-war Britain. Such thinking wasn’t necessarily motivated by snobbery; it was simply regarded as the natural order of things. Unless you were living on the fringes of society, conventional thinking emphasised the importance of maintaining the status quo by ensuring everyone knew where they stood. A month or two after their first meeting, Ted invited Eve to Bradfield Hall for the weekend to meet his family. Blinded by love, he was oblivious to how his parents would perceive his new treasure, but the reality was that everything he was attracted to about Eve – her spontaneity, her classlessness – was designed to horrify them.
The weekend was a disaster. Eve had never been to such a grand house and looked to Ted for reassurance as they wound their way along the long drive and were welcomed by the butler. She didn’t meet Sir George and Lady Branson until she entered the drawing room for drinks before dinner that evening, and their polite coldness was apparent from the beginning. It seemed that all their questions were traps, intended to expose her lack of education and humble origins. Poor Ted did his best to keep everyone’s spirits buoyant, but his sister Joyce, forever under her mother’s thumb, barely said a word all through dinner. The only saving grace was dear Uncle Bill, who gave Eve encouraging winks across the table when the going got particularly tough.
Wendy and Joe arrived the following morning along with their two young children, Michael and Jill, who offered plenty of distraction. Wendy and Eve instantly bonded, both feeling the weight of Sir George and Lady B’s disapproval, Wendy helped Eve see the funny side of everything. She was thrilled to discover that Eve was even more hopeless at the English language than she was, and on Sunday took great pleasure in her in-laws’ reaction when she told them what had happened in church that morning.
‘After the service was over,’ explained Wendy, ‘Ted wanted to show Eve around the church so we all stayed behind for a little tour. Reverend Appleyard was full of information, telling us the history of the windows and various brasses. He invited Eve to follow him up the steep pulpit steps so he could show her his pride and joy, the medieval oak-carved lectern. When they got down from the pulpit, Eve shook the vicar by the hand and said, “Thank you for showing us around your church, Reverend – I particularly enjoyed seeing your beautiful rectum!”’ The Branson seniors were not amused.
My parents’ courtship was interrupted by Eve’s long trips to South America, and before long both of them began to hate the weeks of separation. They’d found their match; Eve called Ted her Prince Charming, and was utterly in love. However, each time they went to stay at Bradfield, his parents reminded Ted of his dire financial position and told him they had no intention of helping him set up a family home. They bewailed the fact that he wasn’t interested in marrying the wealthy heiress Wanda Whittington, who clearly had a soft spot for their blue-eyed but impoverished son.
As ever, Wendy came to Eve’s rescue and boosted her flagging confidence. ‘Oh Evie,’ she would say. ‘Don’t worry – those old fuddy-duddies may want Ted to marry a solid Suffolk Punch, but you’ll win out in the end. He’s found his Palomino filly.’
Ted convinced Eve to give up her job as an air hostess. Planes were dropping out of the sky; it seemed suicidal to continue. With no income and a certain amount of trepidation about his future career, he proposed to Eve. Blind with love and full of youthful optimism, they were married on 14 October 1949.
Ted knew that his final law exam results would be issued while he and Eve were away on honeymoon in Majorca. Hoping to add an extra sprinkle of magic to their fairy-tale romance, he asked his father to ring him with his results. ‘Are you sure you really want me to disturb your honeymoon?’ his father asked anxiously.
‘Yes please, Dad,’ Ted confidently replied. His father did as he had been asked and called his son on opening the envelope. The young couple returned to London to face an uncertain future, for Ted had failed.
Eve recalled her happy summer in Shamley Green during the war and they managed to find and buy a workman’s cottage in the village, overlooking the cricket pitch. It was in an atrocious state of disrepair, with ceilings so low that Ted couldn’t stand up in any of the rooms, and the floors were so rotten that he had to tiptoe around with his head bent low, like Fagin out to pick a pocket or two. Nowadays it would be condemned but happily, health and safety laws didn’t exist back then. Ted enjoyed the fact that he could lie in the bath while changing the electrical fuses.
Before the mid-1960s, conception was an ever-present danger. Eve discovered she was pregnant only a few weeks after returning from Majorca – a doctor had issued her with a Dutch cap and given her sticky instructions on how to use it, but something had failed. With no qualifications and Ted still unable to earn, it dawned on them that until his career was up and running Eve would have to be the family provider. Across the village green, an elderly man called Sir Philip Gibbs lent her a garage, where she began to give after-school ballet lessons, an ill-fated attempt to bring in a steady income.
The young couple plucked up the courage to tell Sir George and Lady Branson about the baby’s imminent arrival. Aware that this news might not go down well, Ted suggested that they drive up to Suffolk to deliver it in person. It crossed my mind that Mum might have been exaggerating when she wrote of her in-laws’ reaction – she described how she overheard them saying to Ted, ‘We told you not to marry that flibbertigibbet,’ and how she walked around the garden sobbing her heart out and being consoled by her desperate husband. However, her misery was confirmed to me when cousin Michael, who was a young boy at the time, recalled hearing his parents Joe and Wendy, who were also at Bradfield Hall that weekend, threatening to leave if George and Mona carried on being so beastly to Eve. Mum said that their reaction to her pregnancy made her only more determined to succeed.
Apart from the misery of his exam retakes, Ted and Eve spent a busy few months preparing for their first child. They couldn’t afford a car and so drove around on a motorbike with Eve, her belly becoming more swollen by the week, bobbing along in the sidecar. A gang of friends came to help them lower the floors of the cottage and replace the ancient wiring, rendering their home habitable for their new arrival.
Rationing wasn’t to end for another four years, so they had to supplement their paltry meat allowance by breeding rabbits in hutches in the back garden, and they would also swap the meat for eggs. Eve loved to grow vegetables – nothing exotic, but plenty of perpetual spinach and potatoes. Their dream almost came to a sudden end one day. Always preparing for a rainy day, they’d been hoarding petrol in old cider bottles in a drawer in the kitchen – why in the kitchen, goodness only knows! Early one summer morning, heavily pregnant and sleepy after a restless night, Eve padded downstairs to boil the kettle for a cup of tea. She lit a match and whoosh, the petrol vapour in the drawer ignited. Eve screamed for Ted, who rushed in and opened the drawer, managing to slam it closed again just as a bottle exploded. A microsecond later and both of them would have been covered in burning petrol and shards of glass.
As the baby’s due date loomed, Ted was feeling under pressure. The stress of trying to pass his wretched Bar exams while simultaneously restoring the cottage caused an enormous boil to erupt on his cheek. Oh dear – the folly of a little knowledge. He decided to draw the poison from it by pouring boiling water into a cider bottle and holding the mouth of the bottle against the offending boil, understanding that as the water cooled it would reduce in volume, creating a vacuum that gently lanced the boil. His cheek was duly sucked further and further into the bottle, until it was stuck and dangling from his face. He then had to lie with his head on the kitchen table and cover himself with a towel, while Eve gleefully tried to shatter the bottle with a hammer. When the bottle was eventually smashed and the vacuum was released, Ted’s boil had turned into a bulbous angry purple egg protruding inches from his face. Eve went into labour there and then.
In truth, Mona Branson was sensitive to the couple’s plight. She was at pains not to indulge her son, but she couldn’t stand by and see the little family struggle so. When she paid them a visit to see her new grandson Richard, she quietly slipped Ted some cash so he could build a garden shed for his wife’s new venture – Eve was going into the fancy goods business.
The following years were exhausting, but idyllic. We can follow the family’s progress by looking at the photographs. At first there are plenty of black and white snaps of baby Richard, forever beaming his toothy smile. Four years later, the now-colour images include his sister Lindy – always pretty, but even back then her smile was more tentative than her boisterous brother’s. Eve, petite and with no signs of weight gain from her pregnancies, stands with a dancer’s posture in 1950s frocks, staring straight into the lens with her chin down, ever the starlet. There aren’t so many photos of Dad, who was always behind the camera, indulging his hobby. If Eve ever took a photo of Ted, he inevitably looked relaxed, a pipe hanging from the side of his mouth and his eyes twinkling. There are photos of their ‘Bumpety-bump’ car, an ageing Austin Traveller complete with running boards and an oak finish that would just about manage the trip to Devon and back for their summer holiday with Granny and Granddaddy.
While scavenging for scraps of the past that would give me an insight into their real lives, not the smiling-in-photographs lives of Rupert and Dock, I found a piece of typescript. Rupert had been an in-patient at St Thomas’s when it was commemorating its four hundredth anniversary, having had the then-shattering operation of having his prostate removed. He was asked to write about one small facet of hospital life. Apart from his childhood poem, these are the only words I have from my gentle grandfather’s pen:
Vespers
It is evening, two minutes to eight o’clock, and visitors to the ward, having seen their relatives and friends and left their gifts of flowers and fruit, are leaving silently and quickly.
A red screen is placed by a probationer nurse in its warning position covering the glass swing doors, a signal to all passing outside that the ward is now attending to its own affairs. One after the other the lights over the beds are put out by the patients themselves, and an unusual hush seems to spread along both sides of the long room. Apart from two lamps, heavily shaded with green baize, above sister’s desk and the medicine cupboard, one bright light only remains above the table in the centre.
Outside, at the far end, beyond the long vista of darkened beds, can be seen through the windows and over the stone balcony, the swiftly running river, dark and forbidding, and beyond the faint tracery outline of the building of the Mother of Parliaments, with rows of bright lights reflected in the hurrying waters below, suggesting that another late sitting is in progress.
In the ward, the nurses, still looking as dainty and fresh as when they came on duty many hours before, hurriedly complete whatever they are engaged in, and then silently gather around the screen and the end beds of the ward.
Across the river, the Nation’s clock commences to sound its warning of the approaching hour, and on the first echoing clang of eight, a slim figure, dressed in the darkest of blue under her snow-white apron, with lace cap and bow – sister, beloved by all – slips quietly through the doors and passed like a wraith through the semi-darkness to the centre table.
As if by a signal, all the nurses kneel down towards her – the beautiful colouring in their lovely faces, the white aprons and the irregular grouping against the background of the dimly lit scarlet screen and green shaded lights form a picture both exquisite and unforgettable.
Then in absolute silence can be heard sister’s sweet voice leading the saying of the Lord’s Prayer – a short pause and then, clear as a bell, come the words of that most comforting of evening prayers: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from the perils and dangers of this night, for the Love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ.’
A short valedictory prayer and then: ‘Good night, everybody.’ These restful words, such a fitting ending, seem to carry with them in their simple sincerity a special message of comfort and encouragement to all those who still have a long road to travel before rejoining the busy world outside. It is over. Some of the lights reappear. Duties are resumed, but in a rather quieter tempo, for in a surgical ward the nurse’s work never ceases, day or night.