Cousin
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My Cousin free porn video
My cousin, the Amateur Genealogist
It all started about ten years ago when my cousin Bronwen took early
retirement. She found the commute into central London rather trying after
she broke her ankle tripping off the commuter train. Her work was a
longish walk from Waterloo Station and she found that difficult too.
After about six months moping about the house, she decided that she
wanted to do something with her spare time, and her husband Frank took
her to an Open Day at a local Adult Education Centre. Loads of local
clubs and associations had stands there: knitting, basket weaving,
machine knitting, more knitting, allotment gardening, local history, line
dancing - that wasn't a success with her ankle - did I say she tried all
of them? Then there was literary criticism, a writers' guild,
watercolouring, the choir, flower arranging - and last, but not least,
the genealogical society.
It was the genealogical society that stuck, probably because as a
librarian in MI6, she had a mind for the detail, for following leads and
solving puzzles. Gradually, she got more and more obsessed with it, and
took on not just our family ancestry, but took on board the task for all
her friends as well, and that slowed down her progress. Frank was still
at work: he had a largely sedentary job at the local Council Offices,
something to do with administration and collecting local taxes - he
doesn't talk about it much, and when he does it sends me into a catatonic
state with boredom!
As for me, I'm the same age as Bronwen, and we had a lot to do with each
other as children: spent holidays together, kept in touch as penfriends
in termtime, were bridesmaids for each other, had our families at the
same time, and gave each other solace as we watched our children leave
home for University. Then, when the little blighters came home for
various times and various reasons such as failed romances, 'resting'
between jobs, or just to make sizeable withdrawals from the Bank of Mum
and Dad, we spent hours on the phone empathizing.
So, with nobody else to talk to, Bronwen bombarded me with e mails
telling me of the Great Adventure, in putting names and dates to our
ancestors, and when possible, fleshing out their personalities with
details of where they lived, what jobs they had, and their triumphs and
disasters. I'm self-employed, and Bronwen often fixed up for us to go to
see where people had lived, if we could find them.
At first, our field visits took us to places we knew: where our parents
and grandparents had lived. Some of the spice was tracking the changes in
surname as we went back through our female relatives: the male line keeps
its surname generation after generation. As we went back in the same
generational steps we started to find houses that had been bombed during
the war and no longer existed, and others that had simply been
redeveloped. Another side to it was uncovering the skeletons in our
ancestors' closets: she'd found a touch of bigamy, some illegitimacy, a
bit of whoring and more than one spell in the clink. Oddly enough, none
of us seemed to have ever been farmers. We were, in the main, clerks.
Legal clerks, shipping clerks. Clerks for the railways, clerks for the
canals, council clerks. That was the male line, of course, because until
the last couple of generations, the women stayed at home and bred (and
did the odd bit of illicit shagging as well as the legal stuff) or maybe
spent periods as maids or governesses before resigning themselves to
their own domesticity.
Bronwen also used her skills to track done not just Births, Marriages and
Deaths, but also letters, diaries, wills and so on. It was an excited
Bronwen who rang me one day - this was too important for an e mail - to
tell me of our ancestress Mabel who'd been to school with the children of
Charles Dickens. She'd even spent a summer holiday with the Dickens
family in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, in a house that is now a hotel,
while her parents were in India. Bronwen and I took ourselves off there
for a couple of nights, drank too much, and giggled ourselves to sleep as
we had as young teenagers. Bronwen (who always had a fantastic
imagination) said she was sure that Mabel had slept in our bedroom, and
that probably dirty old Dickens had let him in and 'spunked' her - he was
known for his wandering hands, bedroom visits and worse. I said that I
wouldn't mind being a bit descended from Charles Dickens, and wondered if
it might make me a better writer.
It was about a month after that when Bronwen came to visit. This was not
just too important for e mail, too important for a text message: this was
important enough for a personal visit.
"Rachel, this is BIG. It's Mabel's parents. Her mother was adopted, her
father was brought up by his aunt and her husband, who was a blacksmith..."
"Great!" I said, without thinking. "Not another feckin' clerk!"
"You're not listening, Rache," retorted Bronwen. "You need some more
clues? Prison hulks? Convicts? Transportation to Australia?" Her voice
rose an octave: "Great expectations?"
Now that got through my skull into my stupid brain. "Not ...?"
"Yep. We are descended from Pip and Estella!" She grabbed my hands and we
danced around like kids until her ankle pained her, she winced and we
stopped. She showed me the copy documents, and I knew that it wasn't just
a con. They really were the protagonists for Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations.
"Oh My God!" I exclaimed, with my hands to my mouth. "This is
stupendous!"
Bronwen's final revelation was the stunner: "You know why Miss Havisham
was jilted on her wedding day?" I had no answer to that, but she did.
"There wasn't any Miss Havisham! She was a man! A trannie!"
Trisha
- 09.12.2021
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