My mother's mother's family is VERY hard to find out anything about!
It's almost as though it didn't exist past four generations ago!
Mum always claimed to be related to the British Royal Family, and I can recall how, as a small child, I would often see her holding up a picture of the then Princess Margaret Elizabeth or Princess Margaret or Princess Marina beside her own face in her mirror, "Yees", she would pronounce, with a satisfied smile, "Yeees!"
It was only some two years before her death that she adjudged me old enough to hear the `whole story'.Some of it I somehow knew, having absorbed bits and pieces , I suppose, from countless over-my-head conversations, but the details she finally filled in for me were truly amazing!
I can remember my great-grandparents,her mother's parents, fairly well... and visiting their home in Colac, where we also lived, during the War, with their daughter, my grandmother.
I can remember that the house, just an ordinary Edwardian cottage, had been filled with items whose mysterious richness had always puzzled me.
There was jewellery that made me gasp , and thick carpets, and ornaments I was allowed to handle carefully, lots and lots of them, but other things, locked away in glassfronted cupboards, which I was not allowed to touch. And it was always dark there, the lamps on throughout the day,the windows always heavily draped against the light that might reveal that which they felt they must conceal.
I remember once asking Mum how come her grandparents' name was Hindle if I had the Welsh blood she said I had, but she muttered darkly something about it being "not their real name, of course' and the subject was closed!
Anyway, according to my mother, Great-grandfather had been one of the numerous illegitimate offspring of the then Prince of Wales, notorious womanizer that he was, and his incredible likeness to the Royal brothers had been noted in circles that deemed this a dangerous likeness after the heir to the throne died of typhoid, my grandfather being the next oldest....older than the younger Prince, who married his late brother's fiancee, to eventually make her his Queen Mary. My Great-grandfather, I'm told, was quietly packed off to the colonies with a sizeable sum of money, given the name of Hindle, presumably after the village where he'd been domiciled, and found employment with a coachbuilder who had been in the service of the British Royal Family. Hmmmm!
They raised a large family...TWO large families in fact, because many of the younger children died in the diptheria epidemic, so my greatgrandmother bore a replacement dynasty, giving each new child the name of one of its dead siblings.
By the time my grandmother, Bertha, was born in 1901, all the dead children had been replaced, and she was allowed to be herself, the treasured, doted-upon youngest daughter and sister of a family that had `seen better times' and guarded its particular cupboard skeletons with some pride!Her two older sisters used to carry her around on a silk pillow because she was so `delicate'. It is her engagement ring I am wearing on my right hand at this moment, it being her bequest to my mother on condition it passed to me...and then to my daughter, whose birth she lived to see, in 1963. For two years, she knitted and sewed for this child, fourth-generation removed, if it is all true, from Royalty.
My daughter, now aged 34, phoned me after Diana's cortege had passed through Allthorpe Park's gates, needing, she said to talk about it...about HER reactions, which had taken her by surprise, and about how Diana's death was all somehow tied in with my mother's recent passing, and how interested in it all Mum would have been.
And we talked a bit about the demeanour of the Royal Family outside the Palace gates, that sombre black-clad group, and I pictured the same kind of diagram as I have for the other side of the family, that tree growing firmly in the roots of County Kilkenny soil, with one branch surviving through grafts and transplants to this other, foreign forest.
And I wonder what THEY'D think of us, that dour Germanic family, should they be told they have hybrid descendents from that Hindle cutting flourishing in Antipodean soil, growing tall and free in Australian sunshine, so far removed from the stilted, choked growth of the parent tree in its closeted environment!
Had Mum lived a few months longer, she'd have been absolutely riveted by all this of course, but I doubt that she'd approve. If nothing else, Mum moved with the times...often rather faster than I quite approved of! (but that's another story!)
So to put Elizabeth's face up beside my mother's in a mirror right now might not be a good idea... Mum mightn't like the resemblance any more!
But knowing Mum, she's probably got Diana's ear already, sympathising with her and taking sides with her against her Mother-In-Law!
That would be BEFORE she started in on Mother Theresa, of course, with whom she'll be able to compare notes on `good works' for a very long time!
Must be a funny place, Heaven.
Wonder if they have withdrawal rooms, where you can put up a `Don't Disturb' sign!
Reckon Dodi and Diana are going to need one.....after they get all the passport and transfer stuff sorted out, of course!!
I mean, will she move to his heaven, or will he move to hers?
Or will the sheer logistical difficulties of having them communicating from one Heavenly neighbourhood to another faciliate a Special Dispensation.....a `One Heaven For All' approach from the Powers That Be?
And wouldn't that be the GREATEST POSSIBLE memorial to Diana?
Get working on it, Mum!
You have all the time in the world!
 
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