Family Reactions

Anthony Dolphin, Carol's Nephew (Director of Studies at the Devon School of English, born 1968)

 

With its bifurcated voice and the ridged suture of its text, this book is an uncomfortable read - every shift an abrasion to the familiar flow of memoir –yet I read it in two, long, lamplit sittings. I cannot disentangle myself from its contents and can claim no critical distance in my reaction here. The stories are familiar and those that linger longest are all drawn to horror in its general and particular forms. War. Disease. Poverty. Drowned kittens. Cold mothers. Terrified fathers. The consequences are alarmingly clear. This book is a discomforting read.

 

As a 15 year old talking to my grandfather about the war, I remember a shared, boyish (arrested) excitement surfacing in us both as his humble recollections washed into a grand course of history. The excitement comingled with fear, sadness and anger but not as much as you’d imagine. This was how men talk, I thought, without fuss or sentiment. My grandfather told me things he never told his wife or daughters but he could not tell me about the plague in his head forty years on, caught from a pit of Belsen stink.   

 

The transmission of trauma and loss is the central enquiry of the book. It is how (our) families talk. A discourse of allusion, significant facades, cleared throats, polite screens drawn around the corpse. Nothing is worked out. The greatest events are elided into the mundane. Sublimated (somewhere) until they are lost. It seems very obvious that war causes trauma and loss but to have its diffuse effects and inescapable forward motion charted with such precision still chills a peacetime psyche like mine borne on notions of full agency. The clarity was hard to endure but I admire my aunt’s ability to pick at scabs (here, I channel my mother’s dim view of psychology) and depict the wounds. It is an act of recovery that justifies the book’s form and its labour. Most of us, myself included, are happier to live in a mild realm of self deception with a view that is yielding, where parents are blameless for being imperfect in an impossible job and where the divine is to be alive and well in a world at peace with those loved ones now dead.  

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Jo Hockey, Jenny's daughter (Consultant at the Signet Library Edinburgh)

Mum gave me a copy of the family history she shares with Carol - absolutely incredible, so much in depth and time consuming research into every aspect of the family’s history. It really brought to life so many of the stories I’d heard over the years, putting everything into an historic context. Very lucky to have something like this to pass on to my daughter

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Gareth Hockey, Jenny's son (Change Manager, the Environment Agency)

The book really brings to life a whole part of my family history. I felt mixed emotions as I read the book. Getting to know family members I never met and then understanding the horror they lived through is difficult. 

This feels like a significant connection between lost relatives and my own family and their future lives.

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