Chapter 4 A Family Tree
A few minutes later a sudden crash overhead followed by a yell tore me from my thoughts. ‘Dad!’, I cried in horror, racing upstairs.
I was relieved to find Dad sitting on the spare room bed, still holding one crutch, apparently unhurt. The cupboard door hung open and he was staring at a mess of papers spilled over the floor from a fallen box.
‘Dad!’ I said severely. ‘What have you been doing? If you wanted something I could have fetched it for you.’
‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’ He looked at me like a naughty puppy. ‘I remembered something.’ He leaned forward and poked at a pile of papers with the crutch.
I bent down and began to gather them up. They looked dull – Gran’s old rent book, some gas bills. ‘What were you looking for?’ I asked, dumping the heap beside him on the bed.
‘I’m not sure.’ He began to go through the pile with feverish haste. ‘It was something your mum said once about when she was a child and Gran not knowing her grandparents or not seeing them or something. I can’t have been listening properly.’
‘Gran didn’t know who her grandparents were?’ I was confused.
‘Yes, when your mum was twelve, she had to make a family tree at school and that’s why she’d been asking. So I thought there might be something interesting in Gran’s papers.’
‘Well let me know if you find anything,’ I said, eyeing the time. That article would not write itself. ‘Give me a shout when you’re ready to go downstairs and I’ll help you.’ I returned to my desk and got on with my article, but at the back of my mind hung questions that needed answering.
Dad must have got himself down, because the next time I looked up from my work, it was five o’clock and outside, daylight had faded.
Quickly I saved my work, replied to a couple of emails – nothing from Kyle yet – then decided I’d stop for the day.
I must take something for dinner out of the freezer.
I checked my phone for messages then went through to the living room.
Dad was watching a quiz programme on the television but turned the sound off when I entered.
‘Lasagne all right tonight?’ I asked brightly, then when Dad agreed, ‘Did you find anything more about Gran?’
‘Nothing interesting. I’m getting better on the stairs, though.’ He grinned. ‘It’s about planting these crutches properly, like the physio showed me, and keeping your balance.’ Dad was a tall man, so I understood that this was vital.
‘Gran was a woman of mystery then,’ I sighed, dropping into a chair.
‘It would seem so. I haven’t been able to put everything away upstairs, I’m afraid.’ He looked at me apologetically and I stood up again.
‘I’ll get it over with then,’ I said, throwing him a smile. I switched on the oven, then went upstairs.
Leafing through the dry administrative details of Gran’s life proved depressing. Most of this should be thrown away, I thought sadly, but I didn’t have the time to sort it now and returned it to its box.
Whilst I was fitting the box back into the cupboard, I noticed the dog-eared corner of Mum’s school project poking out from under the nursing textbook and a thought struck me.
I set down the box then pulled out the scrapbook and turned the pages.
It was mostly, as the title indicated, about life under the Tudors, but there were a couple of sets of stapled pages tucked inside on other subjects and one was the family tree project that Dad had mentioned.
I sat on the bed to look at it. There honestly wasn’t much to it. The photocopied template of a family tree with space for the names of each generation had been filled in when Mum was twelve.
Mum’s entry was at the bottom – ‘Michelle (b. 1965)’ – she’d been an only child.
Above were written Gran and Grandad’s names, Susan and Graham, and their two sets of parents – my great-grandparents – on the longer row above that.
Gran’s parents, I saw, had been called Eric and Betty.
Mum had carefully written in their years of birth: Eric 1900 and Betty 1901.
Since Gran was born in 1938, her entry said, they must have been considered quite old then to be first-time parents, approaching forty.
I’d never met them, but Mum must have done for there were no dates of their deaths in her project.
They’d have been in their late seventies at the time.
In the row above Eric and Betty, my mum had written more names: Eric and Betty’s parents.
Graham’s parents and grandparents were there too.
So what on earth had Gran meant about not knowing her grandparents?
Perhaps Mum hadn’t explained properly to Dad.
It should be easy enough to look up a genealogy website. I’d do that later.
I turned the page and felt a tender pang at seeing a photograph of Mum at twelve.
I’d always thought she looked rather like her father, Graham, with his hazel eyes and a feminine version of his nose and smile.
On the next couple of pages were other photographs.
Gran, wearing her hair tied back as usual, but here it was dark brown rather than the grey of later years. Her expression was fierce even then.
There were hardly any pictures of Grandad Graham’s forebears, but there was a photograph of Gran’s mum, Betty, a mild-looking woman in a headscarf, her coat buttoned up to her chin.
It struck me I knew nothing about them beyond the fact that Eric had worked at a local brewery, and that Gran, like Mum and me, had been an only child.
The Rutherfurds of Farthington House had owned a brewery, I remembered, as I put the stapled pages to one side to show Dad. Perhaps Eric had worked there and that was something to do with Gran referring to the Rutherfurds as ‘high and mighty’. I must try to find out more.
I replaced the scrapbook in the cupboard and shut the door, then picked up the family tree.
As I turned to go, I noticed a fallen envelope on the carpet, half hidden by the bedspread.
I’d missed it when tidying up. I bent to retrieve it.
The folded document inside turned out to be a marriage certificate.
Gran and Grandad’s, I realized, seeing Grandad’s name, Graham Payne, and a date that sounded right – 13th April 1963.
The bride’s name was given as Susan Hayes – she was known as Sue – but I hadn’t seen her middle name before.
Ros or Rose something – the ink was blurred.
I vaguely recalled Hayes as being Gran’s maiden name.
Grandad Graham, I’d hardly known – he’d died when I was three.
Dad put aside the book he was reading and eagerly examined the family tree. ‘I love this photo of your mum,’ he said wistfully. ‘Eric and Betty, your gran’s parents, had both passed by the time I met your mum. Apparently they lived in one of those cottages on the green near your gran and grandad.’
He was as interested as I was to see Gran and Grandad’s marriage certificate. ‘Rose sounds a bit too delicate for your gran.’ He chuckled. ‘It took me a while to get used to calling her Sue. To me, she was “Mrs Payne” until your mum and I married, and I was a bit in awe of her.’
I could imagine Gran insisting on ‘Mrs Payne’. She’d been a stickler for good manners.
‘Did you find her birth certificate?’ I asked him, thinking it might give us more details about Gran’s parents, but he shook his head.
‘No birth certificate, no passport. Of course, I don’t remember her ever needing a passport. Did she ever go abroad?’
I thought for a moment but didn’t recall whether she ever had. They’d had no particular reason to and probably couldn’t afford it. For holidays, Gran had gone to Grandad’s brother and his family up in Yorkshire.
There were hints of mystery about Mum’s family, but solving them was frustrating.
Bluebird jewellery might have been common, but combine two appearances of a blue pendant with my likeness to the girl in the picture at Farthington House and there was surely more than coincidence at work.
I felt there must be something obvious I was missing, some vital bit of information hanging just out of reach.
I sat in the study late that evening looking through free genealogy sites on the internet, but could see nothing unexpected about Gran’s parents or grandparents.
Eric Hayes was confirmed in a post-war census as a ‘brewer’s foreman’ living at the address my father had mentioned, Betty as a housewife. Eventually I gave up and went to bed.