Snapshot: A glimpse of a once wealthy background
Earlier this year, visiting my mother, 94, and father, 92, I went for an afternoon walk with my father, Shirley – Shir – on Birkdale dunes, near Southport. We stopped to take a selfie much to my father’s amusement when I explained what a selfie was. When we got home we discussed some photographs he keeps in what had been his father’s desk, which I had never seen before. A number were portraits of his mother, Ruby – a beautiful young woman – taken in about 1910. He also had contracts between his father, Thomas Allan Edwardes, and mother hiring her as a comedienne.
Further photographs emerged of my grandfather, my father with his two brothers, the family with a large car in 1926, my father in a school photograph at Hollingbury preparatory school and even a brochure from a cruise company when they had a family holiday. He also talked of holidays in the south of France. All this suggested a once wealthy background that I had been unaware of. What had happened?
My father explained that his father had gone bankrupt after buying a theatre in Ipswich in the 1930s. A quick search suggested that it was likely to have been the Lyceum, but the shame of bankruptcy seemed insufficient to account for this secret history.
The contracts told a more likely reason because on them my grandmother’s maiden name was Emmerson and my grandfather’s Edwardes yet we are all surnamed Allen, an alteration of my grandfather’s middle name Allan. The likely explanation is that my father was born outside of marriage, my grandfather had originally hired my grandmother to work in his theatres but then went on to have three sons with her. He was much older than her, possibly 20 years older. Why did they not marry? Did my grandfather have another “legitimate” family that we know nothing about?
A selfie has led to more questions about my family history than I could have imagined. My mother, Kathleen, is 94 and she and my father will celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary in November.
Chris Allen
Playlist: Hypnotic, haunting – our start to uni life
Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush
“Do you want to hear about the deal that I’m making? You, it’s you and me”
In August 1985, my twin brother, Ashok, and I had got our A-level results and secured our university places – me in Manchester, he at Aston. The term did not start till October so now we faced the first September we could remember without having to go to school. Wow! Such was the routine of school in those days that it was slightly disorientating, but very exciting. No more getting up early, no more bus journeys and no more homework. School wasn’t just out for summer, it was out for ever.
It felt exciting to be moving on into the unknown.
We listened to a lot of music during our school days and the radio was always on. We were heavily influenced by our older brother, Minto, who was six years older. He influenced us in many ways but we had our separate identities in the things we liked – he was very much Monty Python, Patrick Troughton and Joy Division – we were Not the Nine O’Olock News, Tom Baker and the Smiths.
But it was Minto’s love of music that made the biggest impact on us – listening to John Peel’s show and the wonderful Festive 50 at Christmas with a splattering of new wave and punk – the Jam, Police, Clash, Buzzcocks, Stranglers, Specials and other less well known bands. Even the name of the bands sound exciting and dangerous.
Growing up in Birmingham in the late 1970s, there were not many Bengali/Indian kids who were into punk, but we were immersed in the punk/new wave music scene during 1977 to 1985 – the glory years of music and our later years of school.
It was during that summer of 1985, a friend of ours, Marcel Das, who was into heavy metal and rock music, gave us a copy of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.
There was something about the song. The haunting, soothing vocals, the drum beat, hypnotic sound – even the lyrics were odd. I did not understand the words, I just loved the music and thought it was odd with its amazing drum beat and Banshee-like vocals – I took it on a cassette with me to university and listened to it as well as other bands of the time – Lloyd Cole, Style Council, the Smiths. But it was Running Up That Hill that stood out.
September and October blended into each other and within the blink of an eye, I had become a student and was enjoying everything about university and the new found freedom and friendships.
Recently I talked to my twin about Kate Bush and that song. We have similar but independent memories but we both associate it with the start of university. For Ashock and myself, this is the “portal” song between the end of our school days and the beginning of university.
Uttom Chowdhury
We love to eat: My mother’s fresh samphire with lime
Ingredients
A bagful of samphire
Olive oil
Wedges of lime and lemon
Warm ciabatta
Steam the samphire for eight minutes, then drizzle with olive oil. Serve with ciabatta or wholem eal bread and butter if preferred.
Our annual visit to family on the north Norfolk coast coincides with the samphire season. The vibrant green vegetable, a cross between asparagus and seaweed, grows wild on the salt marshes until September.
But you can’t make your teenage son and daughter wander up and down the mudflats of Heacham, when they’d rather be eating chips and competing on the pitch and putt.
The easiest way is to keep an eye out for bags left outside the homes of locals, dropping cash into the honesty box to avoid paying £10 a kilo in Hunstanton.
It’s a delicacy chefs can’t get enough of. It goes on and off the menu as samphire seekers scour the coast. I had my first taste at the Rose and Crown, Snettisham. Served with wholemeal bread and butter it was succulent and delicious.
Norfolk opinion is divided on how long to cook it for. We like it steamed for eight minutes, as above. Our son and daughter’s gran has taught them how to eat it. Dangling it from their fingers, they strip off the delicate lime green stems with their teeth! We like it with a squeeze of lemon and lime but no salt. It already carries the tang of The Wash, with undercurrents of the North Sea.
Sarah Lee
