Family secrets

Two old carrier bags at the back of the cupboard I’d not noticed before. I dragged them out to see what was in them. It was old letters from the war and sepia photographs, hundreds of them. Detritus from Uncle Jack, whom we looked after in his last years when he couldn’t remember anything and took to the bottle. Uncle Jack was my grandfather’s brother. (My grandfather died of a brain tumour long before I was born.)

I sat down and looked at the photographs and read some of the letters. The majority were from Uncle Jack’s mother, my great-grandmother, whom he adored. In them she tells her son all the family news and about how she longs for the day when the family is reunited.

Uncle Jack was in the Royal Artillery. He would have received these letters first in North Africa (‘We were up and down that desert like bloody yo-yos’) and after that in Italy. That was Uncle Jack’s life, basically: fighting Nazis all over the world and commuting to and from the bank. He never married. He lived with his dear old Mum, looking after her till she died in the house in which he was born.

All the male ancestors on my father’s side of the family were solidly lower-middle class. They all lived in Ilford, Essex, in modest houses of similar design. They all drank at the Beehive pub and the Conservative Club. They all enjoyed playing or watching football and cricket. And they were all said to get a bit nasty when they’d had a drink and sometimes raise their fists to their wives. ‘Born in a tram line, the lot of them,’ my grandmother used to say contemptuously.