All about My Mum

Dorothy Georgina

Mum was born as the first child and later her brother Douglas came along. When they were growing up their father spent most of the time away in the Royal Navy. Mum used to have a collection of envelopes with postmarks from all around the world. The letters had followed him to each of the places he visited but never caught up with him until he arrived back in England.

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She trained as a hairdresser and when war broke out she was sent to Gloucestershire to work in an ammunitions factory. She often used to talk about the friends she made during this time and the fun they had together. She had several boyfriends from the armed forces, most memorably a married Canadian Air Force officer. On his deathbed in 1977 my grandfather told her that several years earlier this man had returned to England looking for mum. He had spoken to my grandfather who told him that mum was very happily married with a child and wouldn't give him her new name or address. I asked her if he had got in touch and offered to 'take her away from all this' would she have gone? It was one question she never answered. The subject was instantly changed.

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Afterwards she and a friend bought their own salon and mum kept working until she met Sam. They met at a dance in a local hotel and married two years later. Throughout their 49 years of marriage they lived in just one house. When they moved there it had a mud road and fields all around, then it became the main road link to Cornwall using the Tamar Bridge and now it's quiet again because the by-pass has taken the traffic away.

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I don't know too much of her life after she married dad and before I came along but from looking at the photo albums they spent a lot of time with both sets of parents. I do know they spent a long time trying to have children and after years of tests doctors found that they were incompatible. Nowadays something could have been done but in the 1950's little was known about infertility, good job too really because if they had had their own babies they wouldn't have adopted me. Sometimes I wonder who I would have been but then dismiss the idea because I was lucky to end up in a good home.

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Most of mum's time was taken up with caring for people, first it was dad, then me, then her mum and later her dad. She stayed at home and didn't work but she never sat down. She was constantly on the go. Even today I wonder what she did that kept her so busy. I have been a stay at home mother but always found time to sit down in the afternoon. Housework doesn't take all day! She did like to read the odd book though, mainly romantic fiction or a thriller. I used to buy her books that she wouldn't buy for herself. Books on Egyptology and biographies of famous actors.

She didn't enjoy cooking because it took too long and no-one would appreciate it anyway, but she did like gardening. Dad wouldn't let her grow flowers so she grew herbs instead and let them spread over the garden. Thinking back she was totally under dad's thumb but she seemed contented enough. They never had any major arguements although I do recall raised voices a few times. As I grew up mum spent more time complaining to me about dad and several times I told her to leave him but she was of the age that marriage lasted a lifetime. She could not have coped without him and in the end didn't have to.

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