Distraught at the loss of the hotel the family went to South Africa where Mum attended Herschel School and became lifelong friends with a girl who was good at tennis. That girl was Virginia Wade winner of Wimbledon and the Australian, French and US Opens in the 1970’s. She remained a close friend of Mum’s to the end.
[Later in life Mum played tennis extensively and I recollect as a child watching a digger create our own tennis court within the gardens of our St Martin’s farm house. Mum ran tennis parties and made cucumber sandwiches and Pimms for refreshment on the hot summer days.]
Mum grew up in a house called Maramba in Claremont, Cape Town which the family bought without realizing that Maramba had a local dialect meaning relating to snakes. The lake in the garden had to be emptied due to the prevalence of these slippery fellows and some 7,000 snakes were removed from the site! Mum had an aversion to snakes all her life – something that I got the rounds of the kitchen for when I dangled a draft excluder fashioned into a snake from the gallery of our Jersey farmhouse “La Clochette” in St Martin.
After South Africa and with the threat of war in Europe having receded by the late 50’s, Mum, Cyril and Phylis returned to London. They lived in a flat at Melton Court facing the South Kensington tube station, a choice perhaps dictated by the rush to underground safety when the air raid sirens of the past sounded.
From there at the age of 19 Mum worked as a nurse at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
She then worked in the Houses of Parliament as a secretary to Lord Tonypandy, a Welsh schoolmaster who became one of the most colourful speakers of the House of Commons.
She married my father Alan at 23 years of age in 1965 and the family lived in Stanhope Gardens in South Kensington nearby the Natural History Museum.
She had three children, Camilla, Melanie who tragically died of cancer at 20 years of age, and myself.
The family moved again back to Jersey in 1972 and we had a wonderful upbringing in a large dressed granite 300 year old farmhouse which was a run down shell that Mum and Dad lovingly developed with such luxuries as full electric lighting and central heating.
It had an enormous granite fireplace where we would go when there were frequent power cuts and Mum would read to us from an illustrated Shakespeare book under the flickering light of a log fire. I used to love power cuts!
Mum, not doing anything by halves, took an open university Rhodec Interior Design course and set about decorating the house in a Laura Ashley style. I’d never seen so many floral curtains.
