Undaunted, my great-grandfather hitched it up to a couple of oxen and continued to travel in the style to which he was accustomed. For years it behaved beautifully in the heat and dust, but finally gave up the ghost.
He drove around in a magnificent Bentley that he had had shipped out from England. They returned to India together, where she had two daughters, Vivian, my grandmother, and Frances, but there were complications with the second delivery and Elizabeth died soon after she had given birth. It was on a trip to England that he met and married the beautiful Elizabeth Sabin, who, unusually for those times, was a divorcée, having managed to escape from a terrifyingly brutal husband. He, too, was educated in England, as most colonials were, then became an engineer and built many of the bridges and railways in India. He fought in the Indian Mutiny and the British government rewarded him for his bravery with indigo and sugar plantations, which made him wealthy. His name was Alexander Stuart-Martin and he was also born near Lucknow, in India-in 1870. I never knew my great-grandfather but he sounds splendid. So sad, but Vivian had also been born in India and shipped home to be educated in England, so history was repeating itself. Drysdale, DSO, MC, was in the Indian army, and Vivian, his wife, a rather exotic figure with a penchant for pink gin, visited England and the twins about twice a year. Their father, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander E. They had been born in India but sent to boarding school in England at the age of eight, and in the holidays they stayed with an aunt at Howleigh House.
My mother and her twin brother, John, had spent most of their childhood there.
My parents were living at Howleigh House, near Taunton in Somerset, when I was born. Luckily my mother noticed in the nick of time and rescued him. I don’t remember that episode but I do remember trying to kill him by burying him in the sandpit in the garden. It looked like a miniature baby’s bottle, so I pushed it into his mouth and the poor little thing had burns all over his lips. I am told I also tried to feed him with a petrol capsule-the sort used to fill lighters.
Wonderful tonight pattie boyd crack#
He was a huge baby, and as soon as he could walk he followed me everywhere.Īnother early memory is of holding a stick in my hand and telling Colin to pick up a wasp I could see stuck in the crack between some paving stones and delighting in the howls that followed. He is almost exactly two years younger than I am and I remember examining him when he was a baby and noticing that there was a small difference between us. Shortly after we arrived in Scotland my brother Colin was born.
I was her first child, of six, and she was a young, nervous mother. We lived with them at that time, and my mother remembers the move from Somerset: taking me on a train-in an ordinary carriage, as she puts it-with all our belongings, and the embarrassment of having to feed me during the journey amid a group of soldiers. I was living in Scotland, at a house in West Lothian my grandparents had bought when I was a year old in 1945. But at the age of two I couldn’t get the repellent dark green mess out of my mouth fast enough. In my late teens I became determined to improve the experience, even enjoy it, and today spinach is one of my favorite vegetables-but it has to be right: steamed, chopped, and mixed with double cream, white pepper, and nutmeg. My earliest memory is of sitting in a high chair spitting out spinach-strange for someone who turned into such a passionate foodie.
0 kommentar(er)
