(NB. This is what we writers call a first draft. I may change some of it in the future if I can think of something better to say and after I have checked some grammar. I may also add some things, if I can think of anything.)
As far as I am concerned, my family dates back to the middle of the Middle Ages – see the above photograph – or perhaps to the Dark Ages, or even the Bronze Age. It has never been officially established, and it is not like counting the rings on a dead tree. What I know for sure is that we have been around for a long time, and over the years have made an enormous number of enemies. It is very possible that one or more of my ancestors was beheaded by some king or other, and that one of them wrote Shakespeare’s plays – or the decent ones, anyway. But I am not going to go back that far and rake up old controversies. I shall go back as far as my great-grandparents, who almost certainly existed and equally almost as certainly were related to my parents, albeit allegedly.
On my pater’s side, my great-grandfather, Norbert, was by all accounts pretty damned great and also quite grand, and was known locally as one of the finest porters ever to work at Basingstoke railway station, and somewhere there is a photograph of him there, smiling bravely, and struggling with a passenger’s enormous trunk. Quite how come anyone was there in the early years of photography taking photographs of men at work is unknown, and the entire episode may be apocryphal, if not imaginary. The camera can be a very unreliable witness of historical events, as we all know. Look at the Battle of Hastings, for example, which was not actually in Hastings. Norbert’s wife, Janet, worked from home, as many people do today, and took in laundry, and did some dressmaking, as many people do not today, but she would only work for a certain class of snob, and quite rightly looked down on any washerwoman who would wash anything for the hoi polloi. She had standards, and probably not many customers. There is a possibility that before her marriage Janet worked as a domestic in the home of Lady Farthingale-Simpleton in the nearby village of Old Basing, but it is impossible to verify this one way or the other, and frankly I do not think it really matters.
On the maternal side, my great-grandparents were famous locally for their song and dance act, with a bit of magic thrown in for good measure. ‘Fanny and Frank’ were a regular feature at music halls in the Basingstoke and Greater Hampshire area. They once appeared on the same bill as the very famous Mary Lloyd, who was very famous. Fanny and Frank are probably where I get my fantastic creativity from. Legend has it that they were performing when the show had to be suddenly halted so that Fanny could stagger off into the wings and give birth to my grandmother. Whether or not the event was as dramatic as it sounds only history can really know. Fanny and Frank are possibly also where I get my propensity for making things up.
How do we know any of this, I hear you ask? Well, for one thing there are police records and newspapers that are available to anyone prepared to go to the trouble of looking for them, and also the family has a strong oral tradition which is as reliable as all other oral traditions.
Coming a little bit closer to the present day (although not that close) on the paternal side, the history is a bit more fun, with music halls continuing to play a part, although not on the stage but somewhere behind it. My father’s father (Grandpa, as I called him) was what they used to call a stage-door Johnny, and perhaps still do for all I know. But I think that was mainly in his younger days, because when I knew him, when I was a child, and until he popped his clogs, he was the caretaker at a local Methodist church, which is quite a bit different from hanging around theatres waiting to drool over actresses and chorus girls. The conversion from creep to religious convert has never been explained to me, so I cannot explain it here. I do not remember much about him, to be honest, because he went to the great janitor’s cupboard in the sky when I was but a pre-pubic boy, and I knew even less of his wife, my grandmother, because she had already checked out before I checked in. It was her loss, I think. Family tradition has it that she was hard work, and possibly a witch, widely feared in the neighbourhood, and suspected of having eaten several small children, but there is little or no evidence of that being anywhere near the truth. I find most of all that very difficult to believe.
My maternal grandfather (Grandpa, as I called him) on my mother’s side (that is, my Ma’s Pa) did honourable work in the waste disposal industry, which is how we were always told it was to be described. Indeed, there is nothing dishonourable in being a dustbin man for the local council, it is actually very skilled work, especially with a hangover, and the contrast between that and what I do, and the dizzy heights of literary adulation and wealth that I enjoy, goes to show the extent of my not inconsiderable achievements. My Ma’s Pa’s wife, the grandmother I do remember, I remember used to grumble a lot. As a child, I used to wonder whether or not grumbling was actually her job, like a full-time occupation, but as I grew older I came to realize she was just a miserable so-and-so who would moan about anything.
And that is all I can bothered to say about my family who existed before my parents, because they do not really interest me very much. It would have been different had my grandmother actually truly eaten a few children and been convicted and executed accordingly – I could have got an entire novel out of something like that, but Fanny and Frank are the most interesting I could dig up, and I have said all I can think of about them.
Which brings us to my own dear and beloved Ma and Pa. (I must be allowed a little irony occasionally, do you not think?) As for the more than pleasant lifestyle I now enjoy, it is no secret that the money and estate came from my father, who made the family fortune in sugary sweets, at one and the same time destroying a generation of children’s teeth and making oodles of delicious dosh. But I am running out of steam now, and there is a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge that will not wait, so I shall say more about dear and beloved Ma and Pa the next time I can be arsed to carry on with this. It’s a bit of a slog, to be honest, so I hope there’s money in it when I am done.
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James Henderson
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