Memories of the early 1960’s – landmark days and the passage of time

January 1965

While some of my earliest memories are vivid and detailed, most are very vaguely fixed in time. Once I started school, dates began to mean something to me. My days were ordered into week days, weekends, months and years interspersed with long school holidays. There were also a few landmark events, dates that will never be forgotten. 

The first actual date I can recall is 9 January 1965. It was a day of endings and beginnings and it all started at a bird show. My dad kept birds, we had an aviary at the bottom of our garden and a brick building, the bird room, where he kept canaries. He was the chairman of the Hampshire Caged Birds Society and, from an early age, bird shows were part of my life.

This particular show was on Southampton Common as far as I can tell. Truthfully, I remember nothing special about the show. No doubt there was a lot of wandering around looking at birds in cages. My favourites were always the budgies and mynah birds because they could often speak. What I do remember is Mother being called away half way through lunch. It was unheard of for her to leave me with anyone other than Alex, Pappy or Dad but, on this day, she hurried off with hardly a backward glance, leaving me with one of Dad’s friends. Strangely, I don’t remember being overly worried at being left at a long table covered in a white cloth with people I didn’t know all that well.

It was much later, when I was back at home, that I found out why I’d been abandoned so hastily. Alex had been taken to hospital to have a baby! Of course I had no idea what having a baby entailed and, until then, had not even known there was going to be a baby.

Usually a new baby is a cause for celebration but something else had happened while Mother was at the hospital. After she’d visited with Alex and her new born baby boy, she’d gone to another part of the hospital to visit Nannie and tell her the good news. Whether I’d known Nannie was in hospital is a mystery. Probably not because, in our house, things like that were kept from the children. In fact, what little information I gleaned about the whole thing came from the adult conversation going on around me. Little bits of it stay with me still.
“I think she was hanging on for the new baby.”
“She said her legs were cold. I got her another blanket but it didn’t make any difference. It was as if they were already dead.”
Somehow I put all the scraps of information together and realised my lovely Nannie had died on the same day I became and auntie. It was my first experience of death and I’m not sure I really grasped the finality of it at the time.

Despite the certainty of Nannie’s death, no one had thought to prepare me for it. Unbeknown to my five year old self, Nannie had been suffering with cancer of the cervix. In those days there was no routine screening and cancer of any kind was almost always a death sentence. Like an evil spell, the word was rarely spoken aloud, certainly not in our house. Sadly, it would not be my last encounter with this terrible disease or with the death of a close family member from it.

Having a new nephew almost certainly stopped me dwelling too much on losing a grandparent. Being told I was an auntie felt very strange. In my mind a auntie was an adult like Auntie Winnie and Auntie Gwyn but I was a child. It didn’t make sense. Until that moment I hadn’t really even thought of Alex as my sister, she was just Alex who lived with us and then got married and didn’t live with us any more. Suddenly I realised not only did I have a sister but now I also had a nephew.

There is a very vivid memory of meeting this new nephew for the first time. He was so small it was hard to believe he was real. Some of my dolls were larger. His  name was John and he was all wrapped up in a lacy white banket. I was even allowed to hold him, albeit very briefly and with strict instructions to “mind his head.” Mostly I remember his sweet baby smell and the fuzzy down of blonde hair on his head.

My next experience of death was at a distance. Someone famous, called Winston Churchill had died. Who he was was a mystery but, from the conversations going on around me, I realised he had something to do with the war. Pappy and Dad had both fought in the war, that much I did know, although, back then, I don’t think I knew there had been two World War’s, or even what a war really was. Whoever he was and whatever he’d done there seemed to be a big fuss over his funeral.

On Saturday 30 January there was a respectful hush over our house. Despite Nannie’s death I had no idea what funeral was or even any thoughts on what happend to people when they died. While my family sat in silence I laid on the living room floor. I vividly remember the blue and red patterned rug, a warm island in the centre of the dark green Lino, and being in front of a roaring coal fire half watching the little black and white television in the corner of the room. What I recall is crowds of people in the streets, a procession of men in uniform and a carriage carrying a box draped in a flag. This, Pappy said, was history. Mother said she couldn’t believe such a small coffin could carry such a huge man.

It would be many years before I understood what I’d seen but I have never forgotten those grainy black and white images and will always somehow associate them with Nannie and my little nephew John.

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