6 tcf.org.uk COMPASSION | NEWS FROM THE CATHARINE POINTER MEMORIAL LIBRARY For me spring actually lifts my spirits a bit, partly because I hate the long dark evenings and the cold murky days. Also, because my Claire’s birthday is in December, and she died at the end of February, it draws a line under the worst part of my year. Those three winter months starting in the Christmas madness and encompassing the move into yet another New Year she didn’t get to see, are grim. This year will be the 21st since Claire died and, although it’s most definitely a lot easier than it was, it still hurts. One of the things that gets me through the winter is my passion for genealogy and I spend a lot of time diving into my family tree and finding out what my ancestors got up to, some of it pretty scandalous but that’s another story. A big surprise to me, when I started my research, was how many of my family were bereaved parents. The 1911 census is known as ‘the fertility census’ because it asked every woman how many children she’d had, how many were still living and how many had died. It really is quite shocking to look at that census and see how many children had died. Hot on the heels of that census was the first world war, followed by the flu pandemic, and the war records plus the 1921 census show the dreadful toll from those two catastrophes. Even in more recent times there are so many bereaved parents in my family; even an aunt, who I saw at least once a week while I was a child and a young mother myself, had a little daughter who’d died. I never knew that until I found it out for myself quite accidentally while looking at the birth records of the three cousins I did know about. So, this raises the old chestnut, often voiced by people who are not bereaved parents themselves, that, because so many children died, those parents didn’t grieve like we do. There is a strange, to us, custom which can be cited in evidence of this and that’s the way people would give their dead child’s name to another of their children. I found a lot of evidence of this in my family tree and the most surprising thing was that my own father, whose name was William, had had an older brother, also called William but who died when he was a toddler. I have to say I find that weird, but my dad’s dad was William and so was his dad and they obviously felt a need to preserve that name. Again, this older boy, and another little sister who died, were never mentioned but maybe hearing his name spoken often, albeit to a different child, brought some comfort. It’s too late to ask my grandparents now! I still can’t believe those parents didn’t grieve deeply though and that thought ties into the review of ‘Hamnet’ in this magazine. Shakespeare wrote about grief in several of his plays and, in ‘King John’ Lady Constance replies to the French News from the Catharine Pointer Memorial Library by Mary Hartley I’m writing this in the cold depths of January but, by the time you’re reading it, we’ll be approaching Spring, Mother’s Day and Easter, all of which have their own pitfalls.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTM0NTEz