Histories

I think I should start by thanking Antonia and Simon and Sue and the team for rescuing this party in the face of COVID. They have done a fantastic job at very short notice and I invite you to raise your glasses to them all.
Welcome to Mama's 100th birthday. It is a treat to have a party at all. It is wonderful to see how many people have been able to come, especially in this plague-ridden time. Many of you will have been to Mama’s 80th at Middle Chinnock but it is very sad to see all the missing faces from that party, particularly Mum’s old school friends who were all there and lined up for a photograph, as well as Richard and Robert, her brothers, who were seen walking and talking with each other.
It is quite difficult to write about Mum’s life. She has produced a 43 page memoir of her younger days up to her engagement to Papa, which I have just seen. She had a very privileged youth in Essex and Scotland up to the war. Her father was a very wealthy man, a director of Cunard and a ship owner for all his life. Her mother was a second wife, after the death of a predecessor, and considerably younger than my grandfather. She had been an only child, the daughter of a soldier, and she was brought up with the Gibbs family.
She did the season, the last before the war; and she remembers that her mother had a lot of difficulty finding men for her parties who are taller than mum at 6 feet. 
My mother obviously never forgot her time as a Land Girl with Elizabeth Sutherland and Helen Hoare. Such a contrast to the life she had been living. I remember, when I was about 11, we were called down to Berkshire by Richard; as I recall it, his farm workers had demanded more money as harvest started and he had sacked them. He only had a Cirencester students to help and he had acute hay fever which meant he had to be injected frequently. So my parents pitched in and I remember being amazed to watch Mama pitching bales right to the top of the trailer while my Father, a fit 6’ 5” 36 year old was really struggling; all down to her Land Girl training.
She then went off to join the WAAFs which meant she was the lowest of the low till she got a commission; she must have found her fellow trainees complete eye-openers. The memoir spoiled my recollection; I was sure she had told me once that she flew across the Channel with the pilot sitting on her lap (I did meet someone who had done that in Rhodesia). The real story apparently was much duller that she and her colleagues flew back to England sitting on each other's laps.
After the war during which her father and John, her brother, had died and many of her friends as well she. My father was up at Oxford on the 4 term ex-service course and he had rooms in Meadow Quad at Christ Church. They remember sitting on their balcony with glasses that took half a bottle of champagne each so they could jeer at the rowers in Christ Church meadows. 
Anyway they got engaged and my grandfather was too mean to pay the fees of a married undergraduate; they were married at St Margaret’s, Westminster. 
They went up to Scotland on their honeymoon staying at Drumlanrig on the way (my father knew Lord Dalkeith in the Navy and at Christ Church); he was appalled to find that they carved the grouse into 4 as he had a notable appetite. They then went off to Chile to work for Gibbs and Co there. They were there for 3 years and my father set up an office for the company in Osorno in the South of the country. My earliest memory is a flying in an aeroplane in which one could open the windows and play a game involving putting a bit of cotton wool out of one and then it flew back to a window further down.
It was fairly wild down South and Mama made her Nanny get her appendix out before they went.
I recently found out that my Father wanted to stay out there permanently and wrote to my grandfather to suggest it, promising to send George and me (both born out there) to Eton in due course. Mama has the letters in reply which gently persuaded him to come home. I don't really know what Mum thought of the idea although they both love the country and the people.
So we came home just before my 3rd birthday. We settled down in Hertfordshire. We never had much cash and mum had to make do with the help of her cookery courses. I think my father worked a six day week for £500 a year and my mother had to dip into a fairly modest inheritance. It must have been a big change after her upbringing. But she had a big garden which she made really lovely. One major event was a fire which burned down all the outbuildings and just failed to catch the house; the Roydon Fire Brigade consisted of 2 men and a Jeep and a foot pump. And they fought it until the bigger engine came. George and I were evacuated to Briggens, my grandfather’s house, and we sat in the attic rooms watching the blaze with our Villiers cousins.
We put in a swimming pool in the new yard which Mama had to maintain although she almost never swam in it.
We had a piano on which Mama sometimes played some Chopin and my Father played and sang what were called Negro Spirituals. Unfortunately, the sounding board was cracked and it only stayed in tune for about a week.
In 1973, another tragedy hit when my brother, William, aged only 18 died in a car crash. He was something of a prodigy and it was an awful loss.
Mama, like her father, was a martyr to arthritis but now she could do something about it. I remember her blue painkiller box on the table until she went up to Norwich, aged about 48, for one of the early transplants. It was a new lease of life. The new hip lasted for about 32 years.
My father also had a hip done but sadly it did not work so well. He fell on broke his thigh and had to spend some time in hospital; for some reason, it was not noticed that the hip had dislocated and he walked about it with a stick for 2 years; they moved to Somerset and the Yeovil orthopaedic surgeon spotted his problem and sorted it out but very late and I don't think he ever got over it. I am so glad that he saw Jessica before he died, very young, only 62.
And then another blow: Mama had a detached retina and the eye surgeons could not save the eye; soon after, the other followed but this time it was saved but never very well. I have always thought that this was the crushing blow; Mum should have been roaring around in a little Golf, which she always drove rather fast, visiting gardens and nicking likely plants for her own and visiting also her children so that she could harass her daughter-in-law. She always had a strange morality; I suggested that she should sell her car and use the savings so created as a fund for taxis; she hated to ask anyone for favours. She totally refused and could not see the logic of the plan.
After 38 years in Stansted lodge, and 10 years at Rimpton she had moved quite often but always taken some of the things which she had always owned, so that she always had the surroundings which suit her. One picture she has always owned is an oil sketch by Philip de Laszlo when she was about 6 which makes her one of the only two people alive painted by him (the other is the Queen).
Mama epitomises the generation who went through the 2nd World War. They all have an attitude of endurance and refusal to complain. They do not wear their hearts on their sleeves. I remember Mama’s horror when a tenant of hers who had lost her husband was found crying in the street. And she has had enough unhappiness to bear at times. She was always said that she likes to call a spade a spade but I think she has slightly moderated her tone now. So, what an achievement; will you raise your glasses and wish my mother, Mary Aldenham, a very Happy Birthday.