An Old Family Tree Now Departed

An Old Family Tree Now Departed

I was a fifty-five vintage who arrived ten years late. The kids at secondary school Parents Evenings would mock and scorn “How old is your grandma?”

My father would tell me “We thought we were safe!” Mum was nearly forty-five when I arrived. Dad just a year older.  My older sister arrived just as the war was ending in 1945. 

My dad’s brother Sid endured the horrors of Dunkirk, but Dad stayed in the UK and met my mum in a Nottingham chip shop a few years after.  Looking back at there relationship I often wondered when the love had departed, or had it even arrived?  Single women today are far more empowered, but back then it must have been a lot different and perhaps mum had thought she had been ‘left on the shelf’ when the war broke out in 1939.

Rosemary, my big sister was lucky to have survived her first year.  She had to have an operation to close a lesion on her spine at one year old. She was a bright girl, but her Noonan’s Syndrome meant she stood out.  She never married and passed away in 1976 at the age of thirty-one.  Her premature departure meant she never made it as a bridesmaid when her little brother married in 1978.

My only surviving grandparent died when I was four and I don’t really remember her.  She arrived in the UK before the beginning of the 20^th century from Dusseldorf in Germany.  Her family owned a fair bit of property, but much changed for the family as WW1 approached.  She was born in 1867.  She married my grandfather just as Queen Victoria entered her final days.  Grandma saw the arrival of nine children.  Yet I felt I hardly knew my uncles and aunts as my late appearance meant many of them departed this mortal coil in my self-indulgent teens.  When I realised time was getting short to contact them many had made that final departure.

No one should ever marry or have children because of their age. Life is a choice and a God-given gift for us to freely choose, but do I regret not arriving earlier?  No, not really.  As the French say ‘Je ne regrette rien!’  My two children were born in my late twenties/early thirties.  My son is yet to marry and my thirty-five year old married daughter looks like she had chosen not to have a family, which I respect.  Grandchildren are not trophies to be conceived on a whim and I suspect that window has shut or departed.