Here comes the gallopin' major...

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I don’t know what to tell you about this old photograph. I’m hidden in there somewhere but I can’t see myself.

This is my Gran and Granddad, my Mum’s parents. That baby could be my Mum or any one of her three sisters Kate, Lena or Muriel. Gran had a lot of children, six of them lived to be ‘all growed up’, Charlie and Ted - her two boys.

Ted ran off to Australia and Charlie – Charliieeeee! - taught me to whistle and fly and dream.

I never met Granddad. He was dead long before I was born. All I know is that he was a Welshman from London, family name Roberts, a boxer, a soldier, an invalid; gassed in the Great War, never really recovering. Dead, before I was born, me born in the bed that he died in after that long illness. ‘Gassed in the Great War, gassed.’ I’d whisper late into the night.

Born in the bed that you died in - remember?

My Gran, Katherine - Kate - kept her hair long, pinning it up in the daytime and taking it down at night even in old age. She cooked fresh fish on market day, smoked roll-ups from a 'baccy' tin, wore flowered aprons, made spotted dick, knitted Christmas jumpers / scarves / balaclavas, could make a rug out of rags and a small boy’s shirt out of an old dress. ‘Bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Here comes the gallopin’ major. Bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Ridin’ his Indian charger.’ She’d sing to me, bouncing me on her knee. There was gypsy blood running in her veins somewhere, gypsy blood and gypsy curses.

Gypsy blood in our veins – remember?

I was a teenager when she died. I didn’t cry at the funeral but afterwards took myself off down to the river and sobbed. I see her in the picture - then some thirty years later, no different, the same - bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump. Always old, a hard life - hard lives common back then.

Sometimes I think of their hard lives, my mum, the pretty young teenager in her grammar school tie, cardigan knitted by arthritic hands, Gran's stitches - loose and long to save the wool. So young when her dad died - bumpety, bumpety, bumpety, bump - poor then poorer still. I look at the photograph and remember -
Here comes the gallopin’ major.