2018 – Resonation

5 years ago | Chamberlains Farm, Shevington Moor | 10th April 2018

Five years ago, I found myself on a local history Facebook group, in a conversation with a regular poster who knew a surprising amount about our family history. It led to the sharing of an old family secret that’s now available for anyone to read, for many years to come…

Stan Aspinall was the Facebook poster at the centre of this story. Stan is a retired teacher turned town historian who, it turned out, was in the process of writing a book about the history of Standish. As the former Deputy Head of Standish High School in its early days, he was also very well-acquainted with my grandma, Marjorie Bentham, a leading voice in the campaign to build the school and its first Chair of Governors.

We swapped a couple of stories about her and then it occurred to me that I had a couple of nuggets of information that I was sure would be of interest to Stan. The story I had in mind was a little delicate in nature so I warned Stan that it wasn’t really my story alone, to share so as long as there were no living relatives beyond our family, I was happy for him to include it.

A year or so previously, I’d become interested in genealogy and set up a family tree on Ancestry.com. As a result, I’d discovered all sorts of long-forgotten tales: the fact my Grandad had two older brothers who’d died in infancy (both called James – which is why he wasn’t); the story of Harold Latham who was killed in the First World War just over a month before the Armistice; and the story of Charles Ford Asbrey who left Standish, was called up in Australia and died in France after the War had ended, probably of ‘Spanish Flu’. I’d also begun to take note of several verbal recollections within the family.

And it was one of these whispered recollections that was the story I thought would be of interest to Stan. It concerned Ernie Bentham (1877-1945), my great-grandfather… …and his long-term extra-marital relationship.

In 1924, Ernie opened a Cinema in Standish – ‘The Palace’ – which stood where ‘The Hoot’ bar can be found today. Next door, was the sweet shop, run by a young lady called Hettie Charnock, who was almost twenty years younger than Ernie – and his mistress.

By all accounts, it was an ‘open secret’. In a close-knit village (it seems odd to use that word for Standish today but my Grandma always called it “the village”), everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business and anything as scandalous as adultery was almost impossible to keep secret. So why did the relationship last so long? And why did my great-grandmother, Margaret (1877-1955), appear to tolerate it?

One reason suggested was that Margaret had been left with “a disability” following a cart accident, around the time she was pregnant with my grandad’s younger brother Sydney. The story goes that she was aware of – and perhaps even gave her blessing to – her husband’s need to ‘stray’, as a consequence of it.

Had Miss Charnock gone on to have a family of her own, I don’t think it would have been fair to expose this story – at risk of being accused of besmirching a woman’s name, based on little more than rumour. But two things happened to remove such a concern. First, Stan was already well aware of the ‘affair’ and second, Hettie died, aged 100, in 1996, still known by her maiden name. That she lived for so long and never married suggests that she may have really loved Ernie, even decades after his own death. If I’d known all this, I could have even asked her myself – until the age of 23. That sort of realisation starts to make seemingly ‘ancient’ history suddenly begin to feel very real.

And so, with no reason not to publish, the story found its way into Stan’s book and a copy sits today on my bookshelf, waiting to be unearthed in decades to come by someone else who’d like to know a little more about their forebears. Far from being kept in the shadows out of mis-placed judgement and shame, I’m grateful to Stan for including the story – I found it helpful to my understanding of my ancestors and in a hundred years from now, I’m sure that sense of connection will remain just as strong.

5 years ago | The Great Barrier Reef, off Queensland, AU | 4th January 2018

Five years ago, we snorkelled in the Great Barrier Reef. Let’s just let that just sink in for a moment…

Even as I type those words, part of me can’t quite believe I’m able to. It’s a preposterous thing to be able to say. I grew up in a pretty normal 80s household, watching ‘Russ Abbot’s Madhouse’ and having sliced bananas in milk for ‘afters’ at teatime. Ten year-old me would think it an impossible thing for grown-up me to have even contemplated doing.

The Barrier Reef was the sort of thing we’d see on a David Attenborough programme. Of course we knew this was somewhere on the same planet because, well, it couldn’t not be. But it wasn’t realistically in our orbit. It existed solely “on telly”, in the same way that JR Ewing or Hilda Ogden did – and it might as well have been equally as fictional.

And so, when the opportunity came to see it ‘in real life’, it had to be taken. We were on the third leg of our Australian tour. We’d spent Christmas in Melbourne and New Year in Sydney, with a still-hungover flight up to Cairns on New Year’s Day morning. An hour’s drive north is place called Port Douglas and it was recommended to me by an old business contact from Geelong as the best place to do the ‘Reef.

He wasn’t wrong. It’s a small town by a big beach, surrounded by resort hotels and a tropical rain forest, but with a charming main drag of pubs and restaurants. There’s a look-out point from which to admire the view and a harbour from which to book your Reef adventure.

The parts we’d snorkel in were about twenty miles out to sea and as we skipped over the waves in our 40-foot craft, we were treated to just about the best – and certainly the most Australian – ‘safety announcement’ I think I’ve ever heard:

“If the boat gets into difficulties, we’ll ask you all to put on your lifejackets as we drift aimlessly around. I’ll send our location on the radio and set off a flare – and then we’ll get the tinnies in while we wait for the Channel Nine news-copter to come and find us”

Anyway, before long we got to our intended location, slipped on the jellyfish-proof ’stinger’ wetsuits and jumped in the ocean. Reader, I won’t lie, it was every bit the awesome, “pinch-me”, unbelievable experience that I’d expected it to be.

The bit that was different to billing was the distinct lack of vibrant colour that, thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Attenborough, I’d been led to expect. There was some colour and plenty of exotic species but it wasn’t the rainbow-infused dazzle of colour I’d seen on TV at home. The fact it was more drab, more monochrome, more – dare I say it? – bleached meant the experience was just as profound as I’d wanted, just not in the way I’d thought it would be.

You see, there’s something else that we know exists because how can it not? Something that we tend to see evidence of primarily “on telly”, where fact and fiction are less clearly delineated and, much of the time, the endings are already written. Climate change is that real-life storyline and it occurred to me that this was the first physical evidence I’d seen of it with my own eyes, after decades of being shown it via some other medium.

I know none of this should matter. We can all believe the science, we can all know the issues and we can all understand the choices that climate change forces us to face. It’s simply a question of logic. The problem is that human beings are, to a large extent, not logical. That profound sense of witnessing something I’d only previously experienced second-hand has stayed with me ever since.

What I saw was the future we’ve been warned about “on telly” – in real life. Maybe if everyone had the opportunity to do what I’ve done, the issue would be more in our orbit and we’d be closer to solving this most real-life of problems…