shewhomust (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust) wrote2025-03-03 05:26 pm
shewhomust) wrote2025-03-03 05:26 pm
Among the obituary columns
I do habitually read the obituary pages of The Guardian. I don't think this is morbid: you meet so many interesting people there, and although it is sad to learn that they have died, it is often a joy to learn that they have lived. Random example: Richard Gibson, the architect who persuaded Shetland that the traditional harling not only resulted in drab grey houses, it was also harming the beaches from which its raw materials were extracted, and so introduced brightly painted timber cladding instead (timber! in Shetland!).
But every now and then I stumble across someone who touches me more personally. Ruth Wyner and I were cousins, of a kind. Our mothers were cousins; our grandfathers were brothers: which makes us (I think) second cousins. We weren't close, we didn't know each other as children. Later in their lives, for whatever reason, my mother and her cousin Anna, Ruth's mother, rediscovered each other - as holiday companions, in particular. My mother would have liked me and Ruth to be friends, and engineered a meeting between us, but it was never going to happen - by that time we had our own lives at different ends of the country. It was my loss, of course, and reading her obituary shows me even more reasons why.
Oddly, my other example is someone I do remember from childhood; and although I found him on the obituary pages, it wasn't an actual newspaper column, but a notice placed by the funeral director. It caught my eye because it was so much fuller than the usual brief announcements (the full text on the linked page), and then because I recognised the name 'Thomas Madden', and thought "what an odd coincidence!" before I read the details and realised that it wasn't a coincidence, it was the same person: if I wasn't certain of that immediately, it was because the obituary - and I see how this would happen - had elided his first wife.
Tom and Min Madden were friends of my parents in the 1950s; I don't know how they had met. Their daughter Sue was about my age, and was declared to be my Best Friend, in the way that the children of your parents' friends can be (possibly also influenced by Joyce Lankester Brisley's books, in which Milly-Molly-Mandy has a Little-Friend-Susan); her brother Michael was younger, and had some sort of dietary intolerance which required special bread (this was in the '50s, remember, when such things were almost unknown). Min - did she really say "I used to be Mignon from Florida, but now I am Minnie from Bow," or was that my father's coining? I can hear it in his voice - anyway, she really was American: I remember her parents joining us on a summer holiday once, just before my sister was born, somewhere called Goathorn (it appears to be in Dorset) and introducing us to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. She was a fashion model (here she is, modelling an improbable hat) which may or may not account for the existence of this image, which appears on the cover of John Bull magazine, and whichboybear unearthed. It illustrates the folly of the mother who thinks she can leave the house alone, leaving the children in the care of their father. The rôle of the father is played by Tom Madden, and the boy with the drum is boybear: this much I can say with confidence, relying on family tradition and visual resemblances. Do I remember it happening, or do I just remember remebering it? Pass. Is the screamimg baby my little sister? Could be. Is the returning mother Mignon Madden? Again, could be (checks photo; could be)...
That's all I've got, really. Obituaries: sometimes they make you sad, sometimes they cheer you up, sometimes they lead you a merry dance through memories and things you have forgotten.
But every now and then I stumble across someone who touches me more personally. Ruth Wyner and I were cousins, of a kind. Our mothers were cousins; our grandfathers were brothers: which makes us (I think) second cousins. We weren't close, we didn't know each other as children. Later in their lives, for whatever reason, my mother and her cousin Anna, Ruth's mother, rediscovered each other - as holiday companions, in particular. My mother would have liked me and Ruth to be friends, and engineered a meeting between us, but it was never going to happen - by that time we had our own lives at different ends of the country. It was my loss, of course, and reading her obituary shows me even more reasons why.
Oddly, my other example is someone I do remember from childhood; and although I found him on the obituary pages, it wasn't an actual newspaper column, but a notice placed by the funeral director. It caught my eye because it was so much fuller than the usual brief announcements (the full text on the linked page), and then because I recognised the name 'Thomas Madden', and thought "what an odd coincidence!" before I read the details and realised that it wasn't a coincidence, it was the same person: if I wasn't certain of that immediately, it was because the obituary - and I see how this would happen - had elided his first wife.
Tom and Min Madden were friends of my parents in the 1950s; I don't know how they had met. Their daughter Sue was about my age, and was declared to be my Best Friend, in the way that the children of your parents' friends can be (possibly also influenced by Joyce Lankester Brisley's books, in which Milly-Molly-Mandy has a Little-Friend-Susan); her brother Michael was younger, and had some sort of dietary intolerance which required special bread (this was in the '50s, remember, when such things were almost unknown). Min - did she really say "I used to be Mignon from Florida, but now I am Minnie from Bow," or was that my father's coining? I can hear it in his voice - anyway, she really was American: I remember her parents joining us on a summer holiday once, just before my sister was born, somewhere called Goathorn (it appears to be in Dorset) and introducing us to peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. She was a fashion model (here she is, modelling an improbable hat) which may or may not account for the existence of this image, which appears on the cover of John Bull magazine, and which
boybear unearthed. It illustrates the folly of the mother who thinks she can leave the house alone, leaving the children in the care of their father. The rôle of the father is played by Tom Madden, and the boy with the drum is boybear: this much I can say with confidence, relying on family tradition and visual resemblances. Do I remember it happening, or do I just remember remebering it? Pass. Is the screamimg baby my little sister? Could be. Is the returning mother Mignon Madden? Again, could be (checks photo; could be)...That's all I've got, really. Obituaries: sometimes they make you sad, sometimes they cheer you up, sometimes they lead you a merry dance through memories and things you have forgotten.