A Family Celebration

 98 not out!

The Baker and McMullin families
Putney, June 18th 2017

It is March 8th, 2023 and we are in Putney, south west London.  My aunt, Eve, reclines on a sofa, a blanket across her knees.  The room is full of vases of cut flowers.  Cards are arranged on the mantelpiece and on the table.  A large fish tank contains a silent chorus of colour, choreographed to spell out Happy Birthday in the imagination.  The television lights a corner by the fireplace, subtitles misspelling the news.  My cousin, Nick, brings a telephone to his mother: “It’s Mark….”  Eve listens and speaks.  Another cousin, Sarah, explains to me that this was Isobel (her long-departed sister)’s partner, who regularly keeps in touch. 

Eve at 98

 

My aunt, Eve, was born on March 8^th 1925, in a bungalow on Arnakal tea estate, at Vanderperiyar, 3,000 feet up in the Cardamon Hills in Kerala, southern India.  She was the third child of the family, my mother, Anna, being the second, just two years older.  Robert had been the firstborn, in 1921, and Peter was to be the last, in 1927.

Eve and Peter with their father, Major Robert McMullin
Arnakal, India, 1933

 

Of these four, Eve is the survivor; all the others, including their partners, with the exception of Adrienne, Robert’s wife, who was born in 1934 and who lives in Toronto, Canada, have now passed on.

 

Peter and Eve, Arnakal

None of this will matter to anyone outside our family circle.  Indeed, it doesn’t matter much at all, but I am happy my aunt survives and I celebrate the warmth of relationships.  If we turn our back on our nearest, then how can we care for others? And this human world is bad enough without any further loss of love.

 

Eve’s life is to be celebrated.  It isn’t over, yet, but it has run a fine course, bringing light and life to others.  And it is remarkable how alive some of Eve’s memories still are.  In the course of my brief stay that morning we talked about her mother, who I did just know when I was little, and about coming to England as a child, and going to school, with her sister, my mother.  She even recalled the name of the school, Storrington, in Eastbourne, where the two of them were boarders.  

Eve and Anna, c 1938?

 

After their father had brought the family home from India, he set up a Silver Fox farm at Robertsbridge, in Sussex, and the two girls would make their way by train to the school in Essex.  On the way through London, Eve still recalls, they might pass a little time at the newsreel cinema (I think I remember them as Jaceys, showing Pathe News) in one of the rail termini in the city.  I know this to be true as my mother also told me this years ago, but it is remarkable that such experience is still there to be related in Eve’s mind, and she cannot have been much more than eleven at the time, some 85 years ago. 

Eve at Pean's Farm

 

Eve wasn’t very happy at school as she was homesick and missed the gardens and the house at Arnakal where she had spent the first nine years of her life. In later life she wrote a book, The Tea Planter’s Children, all about her experiences there, which is still available. In her introduction to this she wrote that, All four of us, the Tea Planter’s Children, have always looked back on our life at Arnakal as a time of great happiness, and tranquillity. For our parents, too, it was the happiest time of their lives.

 

Peter and Eve, c 1941

Yes, Eve was literate, and an integral part of her life was a writers’ group, which she organised, and she was an artist, and became an excellent potter, producing beautiful glazed ceramic plates, cups, jugs and bowls some of which are still among my treasured possessions.  For years she exhibited annually with a friend and had her own kiln.

One of Eve's creations

For all her immediate family, the Second World War interrupted their lives and the four young people served in various ways. Although she was only 14 when the war broke out, Eve spent time after leaving school (which she remembers was evacuated to Devon) in the WAAF, as my mother did.  Then, after the war was over, she met Wilfred Baker, a friend of her brother Peter from University, and in the summer of 1951, they married.

Eve and their lovely Tansy
c late '50s

 

Wilfred was a businessman, and developed an import/export business in optical equipment.  For many years this was successful and their life together moved from a modest house (whose basement rooms flooded in heavy rain) in Holland Park, to a more substantial house near Portobello Road, to a fine big house in Putney, where I joined the family for a while as their interior decorator.  They also had a holiday cottage in Mayo, not far from a branch of our Irish family who lived in Westport (the McMullin family had had property in Sligo, but this is now lost).

Eve and Wilfred on their Golden Wedding, 2016

 

There were five children, three girls and two boys, and there was always a buzz about the place.  I had grown up with two brothers, and I enjoyed staying with my cousins.  I also enjoyed going for drinks with Wilfred, sometimes at the Grapes near Aldgate, where he had an office, sometimes at Gordon’s Wine Bar near Embankment Gardens, and more often at the Spread Eagle in Wandsworth.  Wilfred was excellent company, even though he quite often forgot to carry cash....

 

The house was alive, and there were always people coming and going.  The children had their talents, with Isobel taking after her father as a serious pianist.  Chris was a fine artist, and was for a time one of the original puppet makers for Spitting Image.  Sarah went from a teaching degree to work for the National Theatre, before moving to Italy as a professional artist.  Jenny was, and is, a great cook and Nick developed his skills as a carpenter.

 

Unfortunately, however, Wilfred’s business partner let him down, and they had to downsize, twice, over the years when he should have been able to retire comfortably.  Separately he developed Vascular Dementia, and at his death in 2017, Eve had to manage some difficult finances, but, as ever, she carried on, keeping her head, as she had done earlier when Isobel died, and later when Chris passed away.  

 

Taking in lodgers, and keeping a tight hold on the purse strings, Eve came through, and she was always warm and welcoming whenever I visited her.  And she was full of reminiscences and her bright memory shone to illuminate my interests in family history.  Even now, today, her 98th birthday, she remembers her mother, who was private secretary to Anna Pavlova in London before her marriage, and corrects me on details from a lifetime ago.

Eve and Anna's last meeting

 

Although she is weak and thin now, and depends on social workers, family and lodgers a great deal, her voice is still clear, with an unaffected accent that I believe carries a hint of Ireland and a touch of India and which breaks into a smiling laugh every now and then.  Old age can be a terrible thing, but Eve is weathering that storm, for now, and she gives hope to those who feel old before their time.  She engages with people and with life and always has done.  I left as Lauren, one of her eight grandchildren, arrived to pay her respects (and there are also three great grandchildren, so far....)  

Succeeding generations will remember Eve with great affection, love and gratitude for the part she has played in all our lives.  She did need to be reminded that it was her 98th birthday, and then she chuckled as if she didn’t quite believe it......

 

 

 

London 9 - From Kew to Putney

Down by the riverside.....


  

 
KEW GARDEN

A poem in two Cantos, 1767

HAIL to the fpot, where Britain's laurel fprings
With item renewed, and rears its growth to heaven ;
What moral beauties, in their claffic robe
Tranfparent, thus in regal ftate exprefs'd,
With fweet benevolence enchant my foul ?
What new creation rifes to my view ?
Where niggard nature every boon denied;
Where earth and water, with ungenial bent,
To form and tafte, and order feem'd averfe.
What powerful Fiat call'd this Eden forth,
Like that firft paradife from chaos form'd,
And o'er the wafte a beauteous world bid rife? 

& fo on & fo forth

by Henry Jones, an Irishman

whose drunken habits, indolence, coarse manners, and arrogant temper disgusted most of his patrons (according to Wikipedia)

On the finest day this winter I chanced to find myself at the gates of Kew Garden.  My plan was to stroll through the gardens and then take the Thames Path to Putney, but there was an obstacle.  A lady of Irish origin, who I want to call Maeve, wished to extort £14 from me for the pleasure of perambulating dans les jardins!  And this was the discounted price. 

And what, pray, do these parterres offer which merits more funds than my journey here from deepest Hertfordshire?

Well,  she said,  there's three hundred acres...

Madame, we have at least that many acres in Hertfordshire!

It's what they charge.....  They're doing a lot of work....

I realised that my options were to pay or not to pay, as so often is the case, these days.  Where's the healthy art of bargaining gone?  Had I known at that point that winter had denuded all but the most evergreen of trees and that precious few plants flower at this time of year, and, most especially, had I been informed that the Temperate House, a place that chimed with the sense of New Year Resolution that fired me at that particular point in time, was CLOSED (fermé, geschlossen, chiuso per restauro) then I would really have fought for a further discount.  But, gentle reader, I am but a meek soul, conditioned by a lifetime of bureaucracy to respect minions behind glass, and so, I paid.

And then, Lo, what did I behold?  Something akin to a Hobbit (an Hobbit?) was helping itself to Holly Berries, as if this was a public park!

I rest my angst.....

At least the Palm House, the first and greatest wrought iron and hand blown glass construction in the world, a grounded airship, half deflated, stranded like a whale..... was open, and so, temporarily, my hopes were raised.

Even though it seemed to have been appropriated by a crèche.....

And then, the mortal blow, the Temperate House, far larger than the Palm House, a gleaming steamer of the line, though some years younger, closed, as I said.  Chiuso per restauro!  Agh!  I should have read the small print on their website:

The Waterlily House is now closed until April 2014.
Kew Palace and the Royal Kitchens, Queen Charlotte's Cottage are now closed until 29 March 2014.
The Temperate House and the Evolution House are now closed for a major restoration project. The anticipated completion date for the project is summer 2018

I have only myself to kick!  But how can they justify the entrance fee?

 

Anyway, it is a lovely day, and my friend and I make the most of the scenery:

Canada Geese water-skiing,

Aeroplanes stuck in the trees,

and Pochard (eyed up by a lusty Mallard) enjoying the Chinese Lanterns.

And then, with William Empson, once famed for decorating the bar of the Star and Garter close by the Arts Tower in Sheffield University, in mind, we leave the Gardens to the likes of Thom Gunn, in order to watch the Fuller's Griffin Brewery, Chiswick, float past on the high tide.

Note on Local Flora

There is a tree native in Turkestan,
Or further east towards the Tree of Heaven,
Whose cold hard cones, not being wards to time,
Will leave their mother only for good cause;
Will ripen only in a forest fire;
Wait, to be fathered as was Bacchus once,
Through men's long lives, that image of time's end.
I knew the Phoenix was a vegetable.
So Semele desired her deity
As this in Kew thirsts for the Red Dawn.

by William Empson



Fuller's Red Dawn, the Griffin Brewery at Chiswick

 

As Fuller's state on their website, Cultures define themselves heavily through their food and drink. There is nothing more British than beer and Fuller’s is acutely aware and protective of its place in British life.  I am not sure that the same can be said of Budweiser (of St Louis and Newark), especially since the American Eagle can be seen in this photograph to be warding off complaints from the Budweiser Budvarís beers [which] are brewed only in one place in the world, at the Budweiser Budvar brewery in Cesk.....  And neither of these companies belong on the Thames in the Stag Brewery at Mortlake, where Watney Combe and Reid brewed from 1889 (having moved from Victoria) until Scottish Courage leased the premises to Anheuser-Busch Europe Ltd, who have recently announced that, having planned to close it, they will keep it open until 2014, at least...... 

What was it Empson said, in the Star and Garter, about seven types of ambiguity?

Anyway, we move on.  Leaving poetry behind, we stumble on serious music and the origins of the Royal Ballet, no less, at Edris Stannus (aka Dame Ninette de Valois, 6 June 1898 – 8 March 2001, an Irish/Englishwoman from Wicklow)'s bijou riverside cottage in Barnes.  And only a few doors down,

lived Gustav Holst (Gustavus Theodore von Holst: 21 September 1874 – 25 May 1934, an Englishman from Cheltenham), from 1905 to his death music master at St Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith.

The two no doubt coincided, and one can imagine them enjoying the likes of Humphrey Lyttleton and Ronnie Scott, or the adolescent Rolling Stones, in the music room at the Bull (or Bull's Head to the precious), though sadly Holst predeceased them all.

The current management have spruced the place up since I was last there (well that was some forty years ago), purging the residue of fifty years of Zoot Money and Phil Seaman, though they still allow in the odd soul brother (see below, smile please) and keep the jazz traditions going with polyglot bar staff and exquisite sausage rolls..... 

 

In the meantime, Holst's girls still catch crabs down by the riverside, here seen training outside William Morris's home,



And pairs lay down their heavy loads against the flow not far from

Craven Cottage, the home of Fulham FC, a place to put on your long white robe, yessir.....



The Thames path, puddled and weedy in places, allows for exercise, or contemplation, for heirs, and for Gracies.  At times, such as in this inclement season, it floods (notably at Chiswick, where you park on Chiswick Mall at your peril; or at Mortlake, where an alternative route is signposted; and the northern banks and islands, such as Chiswick Eyot, are ripped and strewn by high tides and heavy rains).  But the sunken cottages behind the newer banks, and the views across the powerful stream, are unspoiled and bright in the unfiltered light.  Uncluttered air enfolds you, and whatever the weather the way is there to follow.  Unencumbered.....

Of course, some people could have started earlier,

And others could have made more of an effort to be sociable,

And still others could have spared the time of day, perhaps....

But, when all is dead and sunny, the rather wonderful thing is that the space is free and each is to his, or her, own.  As Putney approaches and a pint at the Bricklayer's Arms, Waterman Street, beckons (in preference to the Star and Garter where one just might get involved with William Empson and his dyspepsia) my rancour at Kew's entrance charges has worn off, and the afternoon's sense of wandering with a river that Ratty and Mole enjoyed so much in The Wind in the Willows, has taken over. 

I am going to lay down my sword and shield.  I am not going to study war no more..... 

 Gonna meet my loving mother.....

Down by the Riverside,

Down by the riverside....

Mahalia Jackson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eiwb67-TMd0