Thomas
Nowadays, I don’t have very close contact with my family. I write occasionally to my father and mother, and I hear news from my brother. Sometimes I get a letter from my grandmother as well. Also, occasionally, we telephone each other.
I haven’t felt such a close part of the family unit since my mother and father got divorced. They’ve been divorced about for eleven years now. I’m 25, by the way, so when they were divorced, I was 14, and from this age I started to get my independence, started to live my own life a little bit.
When I was younger, though, the family atmosphere was mostly very happy. I remember going away with my parents for trips in the country, in the park. We had a dog, who was called Badger, for the first 12 years of my life, and for a couple of years after that we had another dog, who was called Meg. We used to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning to go to a local park to watch the sun coming up. The parks were very big in the area where I was born, which was on the edge of the city, so one side of the village went into the city and the other side of the village went into the countryside, and in the direction of the countryside there was a huge park, called Bradgate Park, where I used to go with mum and dad, and my little brother.
During my early childhood, I spent almost all of my time with my mother. She taught us things and of course cooked for us, and played with us all day, when we were at home. When we went to school, of course, things were different as well, but my first close connection was really with my mother. However, when she left, when I was 14, this changed and my relationship with my father became stronger. Things were never the same after the family broke up, really. I suppose we were quite a nuclear family in our own way before that, quite an isolated family. We were rarely visited by friends of the family. Sometimes we would see a few people, but they weren’t very sociable, really, and my father still isn’t. However, I used to have friends over to stay and go out with and I stayed with my friends sometimes, and so I had a lot of contact with other children’s parents when I was younger. Also, of course, I spent a lot of time with my brother in my growing years. My brother being younger than me, a lot of the time, I must admit, I saw him as a bit of an annoyance, saw him as being in the way, and we didn’t get on so well a lot of the time, but, of course, we spent a lot of time together in the summer holidays and we used to play together. Sometimes, often actually, it would end up with quarrelling or fighting, but maybe that’s usual for young children brought up in this kind of society.
Every other week, or sometimes every week, we could go at the weekend to stay with my grandmother, who we called Nanna. My grandmother’s really lovely. She never stops making tea. Every 15 minutes of the day, she comes into the room with a big pot of tea and says: “Would you like a nice cup of tea?” She seems to spend half of her life in the kitchen cooking things for when people come to visit her. Now, she’s getting a little bit older, and I think she doesn’t do as much as she did, but she is a really wonderful person. She takes care of the elderly neighbours around her, visits them frequently, and for some of them who can’t really walk or get help, she goes and fetches the shopping. She always has pets, as well. Every time we went to visit her, my Nanna had a little bird in the corner of the room, in a cage, and she used to talk to it and talk to it. She’s had several, and they come and go, but some of them could really talk very well – some of them not so well, which was a bit disappointing for her, but she still loved them very much, anyway. Also, I’ve heard that she now has a rabbit in the garden, which I haven’t seen but I’d really like to. At my grandmother’s, my brother and I used to read, play and watch television. My grandma used to play with us a little bit, but I think she didn’t have as much idea of how to play with children as my mother did. She used to look after us very well, though. She loved us very much, in fact.
My other grandmother, who is my grandmother on my father’s side (my father’s mother), also had a broken marriage. She divorced my grandfather before I was born, so I never saw them together. Occasionally, we used to go and visit her. Our relationship with her was always a bit strained. Our family always used to see her as being a little bit crazy, a bit of a crackpot or something like that. Over the last few years, I’ve visited her a few times and I get on very well with her now, because we have something in common, which is our Christian religion. My father was never in the least religious and he used to see her as a bit of an oddball. I feel sorry for her really. I think she is very lovely.
I never met my mother’s father, he died before I was born, but I knew my father’s father when I was smaller. After he split up with his wife he lived together with his sister, who was my great aunt. She never married, or even had a boyfriend as far as I know. She was really an old spinster. They lived a very, very routine life. Every time we went to see them exactly the same things would happen. Every day of their life seemed to be the same. They would wake up, and then my great aunt would make the breakfast, bring it in to my grandfather, my grandfather would read the paper until a certain time, when he would listen to something on the radio, etc, etc.
My grandfather was an interesting man for me. He had a very big garden, and he used to keep bees, which was fascinating. I think, fourteen beehives, as I remember. When we were at school, one time I organized for our class to go to visit him and watch him working with his bees in the garden, which was very interesting for the other children as well. Of course, we always had supplies of fresh honey because of this.
I remember the smell in their house was a little bit old and musty. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but there was some atmosphere in their house which was like nothing had changed for thirty years. It was very strange for us, as children to go round the old rooms, looking at the pictures on the walls, pictures of old relatives. I remember my grandfather had a big picture of Queen Victoria on his wall. Maybe nothing changed since Queen Victoria’s time, I’m not sure!
My great aunt was a very good musician. She had a piano, and she was the leading second violinist in the city orchestra, which was the Leicester Philharmonic. She spent much of her time practising for concerts.
I think that my musical ability comes from that side of the family, really, because she’s the only member of the older generation of our family who was really known to be musical. As I said, she was a very talented violinist. She always used to encourage me a lot with my music, and to take me to classical music concerts. I remember we went to see Handel’s Messiah, Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. I enjoyed it very much and I really gained a deep love of classical music from her.
I have only one aunt, who is the sister of my father. We always had a very good relationship with them (my aunt, my uncle and their children), although we rarely went to see them, only once a year, maybe at Christmas to exchange presents. I remember that they always gave us very expensive presents and made sure we had a very nice time. Whenever we went to visit them, we would be filled up with cakes and sweets, and given little presents, so we used to like to go to see them, as children.
I think my father is just not the sociable type, and it’s not because he dislikes them that he doesn’t keep a close relationship with his family. Maybe he is just a bit of loner, really.
My aunt and her husband have four children, who are all married now, and they have children, so my aunt and my uncle are grandparents now, which makes me a sort of uncle to a lot of little children, who I haven’t met many times, and I don’t even know the names of.
Nowadays my father and mother both have new partners. My father has a nice girlfriend, who he is planning to move into a new house with. He’s lived in the same house for my whole life, but they are both planning to sell up and go to live further out in the countryside, in a very beautiful place, the Peak district, which is a little bit north of where I was born.