Winnie
Funeral tribute 2.12.16 to my mother Winifred Ivy Holt born Adkins
The Book of Common Prayer specifies that a Tribute should be short, but I have permission for mine to be a little longer than usual because my mother had five siblings, and she, the second eldest, is the last to die, and so I thought I’d say something about them as a family. The spouses have passed away too, except for Alan’s wife Antoinette, who because of the spread of the family is a generation younger than my mum.
The siblings were Albert, often called Elb; Winifred, called Winnie or Win; Eva, known as Eve or Evie; Raylar - a name which Nanny Clara took from a tombstone – known as Ray; Sylvia, called Sylv or Sylvie; and Alan, a name chosen by my mum, and she was firm that it was not to be shortened to Al. The surname was Adkins.
The siblings were close despite numerous separations in their childhood.
Some of these separations were wartime evacuations. My mum was evacuated to Guildford with Sylvie, who cried every day to go home, which they did after a few months, to find Nanny by herself except for toddler Alan, and not well enough to cope with him. My mum was always half a mother to the two youngest, Sylvie and Alan.
They were also separated because of illnesses which in those days were treated by long stays in hospital. In particular, my mum had two bouts of rheumatic fever, which in those days was followed by a whole year in bed – initially, tied down. When she got up she had to learn to walk again. Sometimes Albert was in the hospital too, in Queen Mary’s Carshalton; he must have recovered sooner from the fever, because he used to sneak out of the boys’ ward and wave through the window at my mum. She got up to mischief too, as soon as she could walk again; she got out of the ward into the grounds, and ate some laburnum seeds, which are poisonous. Fortunately she was in the right place to have her stomach pumped.
I mention this episode as it was one of several brushes my mum had with severe illness if not death. For example, as a child she was thrown by a boy into a swimming pool and was thought to have drowned; when she was fourteen, a boy stuffed a firework down her blouse, which left a very large scar; when she was twenty-nine, and Raymond was three and I was a baby, she had polio, and only recovered the use of her left arm through intensive physiotherapy; she had to have a hysterectomy when she was forty-one, and she was given penicillin to which she was allergic, and again, she was in a coma and nearly died; at sixty-nine she had a heart valve replacement, and had to take warfarin, an excess of which in 2003 caused an extensive brain haemorrhage from which it was said she would die or be mentally affected, but she recovered entirely; and in 2013 she fell downstairs and broke an arm and a leg and had to have a very risky operation, one of numerous operations, for example, she had to have injections in the eye to arrest wet macular degeneration – quite a common operation now, but unpleasant. This isn’t an exhaustive list – Raymond’s birth was a saga in itself – but you get the idea. She certainly exceeded the Queen Mary’s doctors’ prediction that her heart was so weak that she wouldn’t live beyond thirty.
At first, at school, Winnie and Albert, who was a year and a half the elder, were in the same class; he said, “I did alright, but your mum – she was always very clever.” Then their hearts were found to be faulty, and they went to schools for the physically handicapped. The pupils were allowed no exertion and had to lie down in the afternoon. They weren’t supposed to do exams, but a teacher entered my mum at the earliest possible age, fourteen, for a Borough of Wandsworth scholarship for two years of further education. Everyone was astonished when she was on the list of winners, and the grant was so generous, as grants were in those days, that Nanny Clara was unable to insist that she should start to earn straight away.
This brings me to something I’ve always wondered about. You know, very, very few people speak and write perfect English, and yet my mum did. She was a very fluent writer of cracking letters, personal ones, and to officialdom, for example about Raymond’s provision, and as a founder member and mover of the Abbotsleigh Road Residents’ Association. How did she learn this? There was never a book in the household. Nanny and Grandad were barely literate. They spoke strong Cockney, with expressions you don’t hear now. Newspapers sometimes appeared, but these were for Albert as he lounged in bed or armchair; if my mum looked at one, she was told, “You can put that down and do something useful.” Once she borrowed a book from a friend – it was wonderful, Mummy thought, to have your own book – but Nanny Clara said, “You can give that back.”
Mummy made up for lost time when she was older. One attraction of my dad was that he was an avid reader of classic literature; for example, he read Love’s Labour’s Lost for pleasure, linguistically the most difficult of Shakespeare’s works, but the more obscure the reference, the better he liked it; but then he took my mum and me to see it, and then we enjoyed it too. My mum and dad were both Dickens enthusiasts, my mum having a Dickens always on the go until her eyesight became too bad. They loved reading out the Cockney speeches.
My mum did have one source, if not of correct English, then at least of a love for its use. Grandad was a great storyteller, and being a taxi driver he had a fund of anecdotes about people who’d been “in ve ba’ o’ me cab”. In those days, only wealthy people took a taxi, and mostly in the West End, so there was a better chance of getting a passenger who was well-known or striking in some way. When Grandad came home late at night, my mum crept out of the bed she shared with Eve, fetched his supper, and was rewarded by stories of the night’s events. She was very much her father’s daughter. All six siblings were the very definition of histrionic, that is, they told stories, at times with a little too much drama.
When they were in their twenties and thirties, Alan and my mum joined a drama group, and they gave performances which live still in my mind; my mum, for example, gave a stand-out performance as one of the witches in Macbeth, and she was renowned for her comic entrances – at her first few lines, a ripple of amusement went around the audience, and I would think, “She’s got ‘em – I knew she would”. Then they were too busy earning a living to carry on, but they sometimes talked of making a comeback.
I took part in some productions, and in the company’s tableaux on floats for parades; and my mum coached me expertly for school acting and production. It was brought home to me what a deep respect both my parents had for classic acting, of stage and silver screen, when I at one time thought of some career in the theatre; I thought they’d say it was too risky, but no; they were very pleased at the idea - I think they thought, “Royal Shakespeare Company, here she comes”. In the end I chose museum work, and they were happy with that. But it struck me that, beyond the events of their lives, so much of the spice of their lives, so much of what they were, lived within their sensitivity to language and in their openness to imagination, expression, performance.
Returning to the scholarship: my mum trained as a private secretary, and got jobs as PA to directors – she always earned more than my dad, despite his public school education.
And where was Nanny in all this? Mostly being ill herself, and having more children than was good for her (she had seven – her first child and first husband died of tuberculosis). My mum looked after siblings and house. Queen Mary’s doctors had pronounced that Albert and Winnie had weak hearts, my mum’s being the worse. But Elb was the eldest son. He could spend the evening scattering food and newspaper around the only armchair; Nanny pointed; my mum cleared up.
All the siblings loved a bit of wheeling and dealing. Ray was very good; he could put on bluff matiness for men – he kept the Cockney accent - and debonair charm for the ladies. Sylvie, it has to be said, tended to lapse into giggles by the end of her sales pitch. (If you want to hear her voice and laugh, listen to Sophie.) They clocked up many hours of shop work, my mum as a church fund-raiser – bring-and-buy sales, jumble sales - the rest at some stage as professionals. Albert and Alan set up a sales business together, and Ray set up shops in Tooting, at first relying upon voluntary help from my Dad, who had just retired. The siblings enjoyed it, both front of house – customers -- and moving money. They enjoyed talk about all kinds of finance – at which point, my father and I switched off. Albert and my mum swapped investment tips until they were quite old, Ceefax being a great help with this.
My mum also loved Pitman’s shorthand, and she was able to correct books on this, and follow a speaker at any speed. Pitman’s had a magazine in shorthand, including Parliamentary reports using something called double contraction, and she wrote to them with corrections.
These interests came to the fore when my mum reached her forties and became a lecturer in commerce at South Thames College. In those days it was still just possible to get a teaching job without being qualified. However, as soon as she began teaching she began studying, and she gained Royal Society of Arts teacher’s certificates in a number of subjects. Our household could be noisy, with my father’s playing of the piano and records, and Raymond’s whooping and chanting – which he did much more then - so Mummy often sat in her car for marking and studying, and I used to peep out to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep in the car. She pioneered wordprocessing at the College, writing an introductory booklet for staff and students, and she became Head of Commerce at the Putney branch as it was then.
My mum’s car was pioneering for her; she learnt to drive with difficulty but determination. My dad never learnt, and I only learnt in my forties, so we depended on her driving for the programme with Raymond.
My mum’s other great interest was gardening. Again, this was entirely unnurtured in the East End and Wandsworth flats of her childhood. It was my father’s idea to buy a house with an enormous garden so that he could continue growing food as he’d done as a prisoner of war. However, he wasn’t bothered about flowers. My mum set to, and she won prizes in the Wandsworth In Bloom competition. In 1987 she won not only best private front garden but best in all the categories in the Borough – schools, hospitals, pubs and so on. Passers-by still talk of her brilliant displays, and I say, “I’m doing my best”.
My mum was her mother’s daughter in one respect. Grandad counted himself a Catholic because he’d been to a Catholic school in the East End, but he never went to church. Nanny, health and babies allowing, went to Church of England services, and she had a simple but strong faith. When my mum and dad moved from Tooting to Abbotsleigh Road, when she was thirty, my mum joined St. Alban’s church, and she was a keen church member for sixty-two years. She worked hard as a fund raiser, especially when the old church in Fayland Avenue was found to be structurally unsound and a new one had to be built here. Only yesterday I found her carefully preserved service sheet from the dedication of this new church.
My mum’s faith helped her when she had to accept that my brother Raymond is severely autistic. He was diagnosed when he was six, at the Maudsley Hospital, part of King’s College London. We’ve been glad to participate in their research projects into autism, including DNA analysis, ever since.
When Raymond was seventeen, he moved to care at St. Ebba’s Hospital at Epsom, but my parents had him home at the weekend and took him for an outing mid-week.
My mum had an immensely busy schedule: work, study, big garden, house, church, Raymond, me no doubt, and my dad left all organisation and money matters to her, and she and my dad, who’d met at a tennis club, for many years somehow found time for a game of tennis every week. Her heart was forgotten as she went with my dad on his very long walks, in central London, tracing local history, and in the Surrey countryside. She followed him in his many artistic interests.
Then we had to take care of my father through his years of Alzheimer’s. I can’t believe it’s nearly nineteen years since he died. He seems to be with us still.
In 1975, Alan and his wife Antoinette had come to live in our Road, forming a happy extra link with them and their children, Sinead, Sophie and Claudia, the youngest grandchildren of George and Clara. My mum took Alan’s death very hard, as we all did. Every time she saw Eve’s daughter Tina, or when she sent her a birthday card, my mum wished and wished that Eve could be back with us – how Eve would have loved being a grandmother, and how much Tina must miss her, as we all do still.
We miss all the family that has gone. Late in life, when my mum was feverish, she talked to them as though they were still there. When she was very poorly – and this surprised me – she called, “Mum, mum, mum.” Nanny had then been dead for fifty-three, fifty-four years, and my mum was thinking back, I guess, eighty-five years.
It was my mum’s fate to outlive the rest of her family by many years. She remained rational still, though very frail, and gentle and patient through all her trials. The bright, pretty, sociable girl my dad married was recognisable to the end. Three days before she died, Sue Clarke and I sang her The Lord’s My Shepherd, and she managed a big smile.
Perhaps surprisingly, the big and lively Adkins clan and the tiny family of scholarly and eccentric Holts had a very happy union, and I’m proud to belong to them both.