Swedes

The first thing I am inspired to write about is my Swedish relatives. We had largely lost touch and then my cousin Fredrik got in touch via Facebook. He has been completely brilliant putting all of us cousins together and linking us all up with e-mails.

I had already decided that I needed to do something in Mum's memory. I felt absolutely sure that I needed to go to visit Mum's two remaining sisters. One lives in Aberdeen and one in Sweden. I am planning Sweden first and then Aberdeen second.

We are going to Sweden this June in my Mum's memory to visit her sister, because it is the most appropriate way I can think of to honour her on her birthday. While we are there I am planning to meet with some of my cousins. None of us know each other really, but we are starting to get to know each other by e-mail. We have various random memories of each other and of our respective parents. One cousin remembers me when I was one year old and she was 16. I have a horrible feeling that there is a picture of me in a yellow bucket and her being 'Miss Elstead' in the carnival.

The exciting thing about it is that it is about Mum's family and about new relationships and possiblities. She always loved new possiblities and was a person of relationships, but most of all she loved these sisters. She was particularly close to her sisters Barbara, and Betty and also to Jennifer. Betty also lived in Sweden, but she died from Motor Neurone disease. Mum was heart-broken about this and although the three of them had some really good times together in Sweden I know Mum missed her terribly and was devastated by the suffering she endured. Jennifer is in Aberdeen and that is another planned visit.

My Mum came from a family of eight. I never met her parents Lavinia and Robert Swanston, or her brother Bobby who died in a drowning accident aged 14. They had a childhood fragmented by the war. They were Londoners and nearly all evacuated to various places around the country. They would all laugh, I am sure, to think that they are now the subject of the English school curriculum in history lessons about World War II. Initially I think Barbara, Betty and Mum were moved to Brighton together, but were later separated. So they went on some formative journeys together and were closest in age within the family. Large families seem to develop clusters of intimacy within them. Presumably this is because it would be hard to have such close relationships with all eight of you across the age range. Mum's family consisted of Pearl, Irene, Betty, Barbara, June, Bobby, Anne and Jennifer. I understand that Betty, Barbara and June (my Mum) were much older than Jennifer and effectively adopted her and felt responsible for her after their parents died. Jennifer was very young at the time, possibly as young as 15. She and Barbara are now the only survivors.

The reason for all this detail is to explain my motivations for developing the connections with my remaining aunts. Mum always loved her visits to Sweden.She associated them with joy and fun and friendship. She married into the May family. They are a very loud family. Her own family seems to have been somewhat drowned out. My Dad's Mum had 'delusions of grandeur'. She was convinced that Mum was 'not good enough' for the May family. In England at the time, the class system remained highly significant. It still is highly significant but it has become unpopular to talk about it and its powerful impact upon us. People could be persecuted all their lives for their 'background' or 'upbringing'. For reasons known only to herself, my Paternal Grandmother thought she was classy and was a therefore a terrible snob, particularly with regard to Mum and by implication her family. The truth was that Mum came from a poor family in the East End of London. Winifred May only recovered from the shock of her son marrying someone of this background towards the end of her life. But as my Mum was always quick to point out "Darling...there are two different types of East End...there's East End and there is 'East End'...and we were a respectable family".

I think that her Mother-in-Law put further distance between June Swanston and her immediate relatives in addition to the already significant chasm of geographical distance and death. I knew that their bonds were stronger than she admitted. She always knew when one of her relatives was in pain or trouble. This happened on the day that Bobby died. She cried all day on a 'day out' until she drove my Dad crazy and they came home. She couldn't explain her behaviour but kept saying 'something terrible has happened, something terrible'. There were no phones and there was no way of contacting her with the bad news. When they were at home someone called or visited and she simply said 'its Bobby, isn't it? Its Bobby, and he's dead', before they had even opened their mouths to speak.

My point is not that she was psychic, though I think she might have been, it is that she never lost that deep connection to her family. I am not trying to romanticise her family or over-sentimentalise them. This isn't an exercise in sickly-sweet nostalgia. She wasn't close to all of her sisters, it wasn't an idyllic family but my Mother always remembered every single one of her siblings birthdays. She knew the names of all their children and their partners and their children too. She remembered the details of Bobby's death with deep sadness with vivid clarity 'as though it were yesterday'. I don't know whether, in the end, she ever forgave God, because at that time a 'boy' was a very important thing to have in a family comprising so many girls. She thought it was grossly unfair of God to take their only boy. She used to say 'we used to say to each other...why couldn't he take one of us, there are loads of us, it should have been one of us girls'. Even in the last years of her life talking about their collective loss as a family would make her cry. She showed me a picture of my Grandmother (her Mother) shortly before she died. She was deeply disturbed by it and cried even though she was well into her seventies by then. She felt that she had allowed Dad's family to 'take over'. She said that she wished she had made more time for her blood relatives and her parents. She said that she felt very sorry for her Mum and wondered what on earth she must have felt seeing her daughter moving on into a new society trying to impress this new family by giving them everything she had.

She had lists and lists of extended family, and she also traced her ancestry. Being an evacuee has subsequently been extensively researched. That research demonstrates that being wrenched away from home and family to live with strangers in an equally strange geography during wartime certainly had a dramatic impact upon these children. Apart from the practical implications of living miles away from one another and starting new lives apart, it also significantly altered how these children formed as adults. I came to think that her interest in her ancestry and her sister's lives lived out as far apart as Sweden and Australia and her interst in all her extended family stemmed from that sense of dislocation. She kept contact with many of them, some more than others. With her closest sisters in particular there was a bond there which was treasured. I think it would be sad for her and for us if that connection was completely lost. The family she married into has no greater claim on her. Neither did they have a lesser or greater claim on her affections. Her birth family and the shared trauma they endured were very dear to her, even though some of those relationships were more significant than others. She did treasure these relationships and I want to honour that. Even if realistically that honouring only takes the form of sending a Christmas card once a year or chatting on Facebook periodically, it will be 'something', which Mum always said was ...'better than nothing'.

Many of my cousins are a generation older than me and I am nearer in age to my second-cousins, apart from Fredrik who is younger than the others. I get a real buzz from having this contact with them. I intend to make more of an effort to discover the English cousins and what is going on for them.

I hope to compile a family tree developed from her existing list. I know Fredrik is also interested in this, so I will take her work with me when I go to visit them. I don't know all her sister's grandchildren's names. But if you are one of them...she had you on a list, and she knew all about your life. I became acutely aware when we were preparing Mum's funeral of the way in which our relationships vary. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend, I am a Pastor and a cousin and I am also an Aunt. My nieces and nephews are important to me. When we thought about Mum we realised that she was all of these things and a Grandmother and a Mother to many more than just her own children. I thought then about her role as an Aunt and thought of her nephews and nieces, and felt the need to acknowledge the importance some of them held in her life, simply by virtue of being the children of her closest sisters.

Since she died I have been quite alarmed at the long list of relatives as well of friends who seem somehow through distance and time to have become a bit forgotten and their relationships and the nature of them somewhat overlooked.

Hopefully if you are reading this and you are one of these people you will find this consoling. She would have.