Grandparents by Gil McNeil

Author:Gil McNeil [Sarah Brown and Gil McNeil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2013-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

Family Values

Jean Loudon

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.

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