I have to write a 2500 word biographical profile for my uni assignment. I decided to write it to Aunty Jo.
I sent it to Bill Edmondson (Aunty Jo’s son) to correct any errors of fact and for comment. The info he provided is fascinating.
Bill’s comments are italic and indented.
‘Maggy darling,’ my Aunt Jo wheezed over the phone (testament to her Queen’s English, pronouncing my name as Mag-gay), ‘I’ve reached the end of the road.’
It was November 1984 and the last time I spoke to her. Or should I say laughed and cried, for chortles and tears dominated our conversation. She was dying. I grimace to say those words even now, for I strive to think of anyone more alive.
Josephine Brooke-Wright was born in 1924, a year after my mother. Their father then managed Turkey Mill in Maidstone, Kent. Until it closed in 1976, the mill produced high-quality paper for two centuries. J.W.M. Turner used it to create his masterpieces, and Napoleon to record his will. George Washington and Queen Victoria used it for their correspondence. My grandfather and his family lived, by virtue of his position, in a 36-room manor on the Turkey Court estate.
Josephine Sidney or should it have been Sydney as the name of the pub at Penshurst is spelt. I think that the estate was the Hollingbourne estate. Hollingbourne is a village a few miles out of Maidstone towards Ashford. The estate wall goes on for miles surrounding what I presume was the principal mansion house which is called Mote House on a map and was used by a childrens’ charity Cheshire Homes. Turkey Court is in a corner of the walled extent. I never knew the main house but I visited many times the enormous coach house which was the clubhouse of Maidstone Sailing Club which sailed on the lake at Mote Park. Some years ago Mote Park hosted County cricket and the County Show. The river Len was dammed to create the Mote Park lake which was quite large enough to sail on. Mother raced a relatively small single handed cat every Sunday morning all through the winter for a couple of years around 1970. It was quite an operation getting four people off early so Mother could sail at 11 am at Maidstone , and I remember it seemed that Father, Pat and I mostly spent our time watching Mother sail. I did not realise it at the time but Mote Park must have been important to Mother. The mill was fed by water from Mote Park lake, and the Turkey Court lake was I think part of the water control system. The waterfall (which incidentally I am not really very impressed with) is where water comes from Mote Park lake and cascades down the Turkey Court side of the dam (which is so wide you do not appreciate that it is a dam) towards the mill.
Turkey Court was I think very much a secondary house on the estate. Our grandparents lived only in the front of the house. Corridors just disappeared. I now guess that much of the space must have been staff accommodation for the mill although as a child I was unaware of anyone living there. I reckon it would take a good five minutes to walk briskly around Turkey Court. I noticed that it was Kent wedding venue of the year a few years ago. The garden is of course brilliant even if it was a bit familiar after fifty years. An orangery has been built between the house and garden to house the function, although the sitting room is used for the bride or whatever. It has been modernised and would be unrecognisable to you having lost the old furniture and host of Victorian tapestries and drapes. The staircase seems a lot smaller. Most of Turkey Court is let but the owner still had the dining room with its range and double window looking out over the courtyard where I so remember sitting alone interminably at a desk by the window, drawing and peering out into the smog. I suppose they could easily keep an eye on me if I was in the dining room. The owner’s secretary’s desk was I think just in front of where the Major sat at his desk “twiddling his thumbs”-I think that Brooke and Doughie Baker did everything including I suspect not only running the mill but also managing the rest of the estate-and being great with me. I suspect the Major might have been shot to pieces mentally in the first war.
The estate comprised 23 properties when Major Pitt died which must have been sometime in the 70s. I remember as a child seeing a map which was obviously important, and was I recollect an estate map covering what appeared to be an enormous area and which I seem to remember may have shown the estate some years before. Brooke as he was known was one of four directors of the company running the mill when he died. The others were the Major, a chap who I did not know and possibly another member of the Majors’ family( I seem to remember he appears in the material on your mother’s website) , and Doughie Baker who I suspect did most of the work during Brooke’s later years and who was taken on as an employee for two years by the firm of Solicitors dealing with the Major’s estate as the whole thing was so complicated. Doughie Baker genuinely looked after Connie after Brooke died (incidentally with quite a bit of help from Father) and I probably imagined rather wistfully fancied Mother. I last saw him at a party at 13 Joy Lane not that long before Mother died-we collected him from and returned him to Canterbury Station-and then continued to exchange Christmas cards for ages until about twelve years ago. He must have reached an enormous age, and I know he continued to visit Turkey Court until shortly before he died.
Now a business park, better known for hosting weddings and corporate events, the estate was my mother and aunt’s ‘playground’. What a playground it was: a tranquil lake and adjacent boathouse, soaring oaks and beeches, a meandering stream (the River Len) with a crystal waterfall, hedges and bushes neatly manicured, and swathes of green. Photographs attest to their magical upbringing. There were picnics on the lawns, boating on the lake, even pageants where my aunt and mother, dressed in period or exotic costumes, arrived to a gathered throng in a coach or palanquin, attended by butlers.
Jo played ‘second fiddle’ to my mother during their childhood, a perception that rankled her for much of her life.
‘Anne was such a goody-goody,’ Jo once sniffed to me.
Partly, her subordinate role reflected birth order, and partly my grandfather’s loving indulgence of my mother. My mother was the pretty ballerina with golden curls doing everything correctly; Jo was the sullen attendant page boy with satin trousers that ripped at the crotch when she sat cross-legged on a Persian cushion during one special performance.
‘For goodness sake,’ my grandmother insisted, ‘get that poor girl off the stage right now.’
Recollections such as these made my aunt curl with glee, as did another childhood misdemeanour. Jo and my mother were boarders at Ashford School for Girls, a prestigious establishment befitting two young women who named the English poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) among their ancestors. My mother was a prefect; suffice to say Jo was not. One night, Jo was dared to sneak out of the boarders’ house after lights out. Her mission: to shimmy down the vines clinging to the wall after ‘lights out’, punt up the Great Stour stream, collect certain evidence of her escapade, and scramble back without being seen. Of course, she was up for it! Everything went well until Jo encountered the headmistress walking in the rose garden that evening with the vicar.
Anne was head girl and Jo was expelled albeit close to the end of her final term after she had swum into passing Matric, a high standard of exam demanding excellence in all subjects and absolutely not passed by everyone. She always reminded Father that he had failed Matric. Jean said that Jo was initially and for much of the time a day girl.
Jo effervesced. A perpetual twinkle danced in her eyes, with a smile and a chortle never far away. She seemed to sail above what other people thought of her (to me, oblivious of disapproval, not disdainful of it) and hooted at her misfortunes. Jo’s chortle was characteristic: she would snort and suck air in through her teeth before exploding in a belly laugh. This was usually accompanied by some conductor-like waving of arms and the obligatory ‘Heigh ho’.
It rankled my mother intensely that, as a young woman, Jo wore every item of lingerie in my mother’s trousseau – and tossed them back tangled and unwashed. My mother observed, I think with a touch of envy, that Jo’s suitors came in the front door as others left via the back. Exaggeration, of course, but one ‘gets the picture’. Finally, a suave solicitor named David, whom Jo had known since she was a child, told her stop her nonsense and marry him. She did not demur.
The Edmondson Family’s storey is that Brooke had to get out the calendar to sort out a wedding date. They were married on 1st April to obtain a full years’ married man’s income tax allowance. My understanding is that the Brooke Wrights took pity on Jean and had her at Turkey Court. Jean’s horse was taken by rail to Turkey Court which had its own siding. Father appears to have been around for some time before they were married in 1949. Anne has a photograph of a diner party at Turkey Court which Father attended in 1946. Father was always very proud of Mother.
I first met Jo in 1975, arriving at her immaculate two-storey house in the Kentish town of Whitstable on the day of her father-in-law’s funeral. She had, by then, four delightful offspring in their late teens/early twenties. And a black cocker spaniel she adored called Puppykins. Two things immediately struck me: how jolly she was for a mourner, and how much like my mother she was in looks and mannerisms. The similarity was unnerving. Despite 27 years and some 16,460 kilometres separating us to that point, I felt at home.
Mother organised her father-in-law’s funeral. 13 Joy Lane was I think rather jolly; it was certainly open to all day and night. The spaniel was Pupkin.
‘So, you’re Anne’s daughter?’ she said, eyeing me up and down. Her eyes creased with amusement. I realised she was teasing me.
I pulled out a photograph of my parents on the beach at Stradbroke Island. Mum looked like a beachcomber: a battered hat shoved down on windswept hair, ragged shorts, bare feet, a kettle in one hand and a plastic bag in the other.
“This is Anne? Really? I don’t believe it!’ Her laughter was explosive; I felt that I had just shattered an illusion. Her hilarity was followed soon thereafter by ‘Would you like to go sailing?’
Jo was a consummate sailor. As a younger woman, she had sailed competitively, both locally and in Germany (I still enjoy beating the Krauts, she confessed) but now reserved her nautical efforts for offshore sorties from Whitstable.
So, on a suitable day, she took me to sea. I had never sailed, let alone hung out on a trapeze, which is where she positioned me. I gasped for air as the cold North Sea waves smashed over me (I found out later that I was hanging too close to the water). But it was exhilarating. Her catamaran sliced through the choppy water, sails snapping. I can still see her at the wheel: leaning back slightly, hair pared back flat by the brisk wind, face wet and splattered with foam as she screeched with laughter, mostly at my discomfort. She had such irrepressible joy.
It was a helm rather than a wheel.
‘Fancy a spot of cider, Mag-gay?’ she grinned, as she later beached her craft. For an English lady who could present very elegantly, she looked like something pulled out of a washing machine: wet, bedraggled, hair a mess. Her only concession to decorum before entering the Yacht Club was to discard her life jacket, towel herself down and pull something loose over her wet suit. I revelled in the social ripples she created in the club: men adored her and her rascal, tomboy spirit and packed around her like fruit flies; their wives, knees together, backs straight and little fingers curled around bone china cups of English Breakfast, looked askance at their husbands. What a woman, I thought.
Her breast cancer diagnosis reverberated shortly after her fortieth birthday. It did not seem fair: she had already ‘paid her health dues’ as a quarantined tuberculosis patient when younger. The cancer was well advanced; Jo was given six months. Her husband, David, now a successful solicitor with three local practices, enquired solicitously if he could bring her anything in hospital after her radical mastectomy. Jo, having by then dismissed the specialist’s prognosis with ‘Fiddle dee dee, six months is not enough’, informed her devoted (and long-suffering) husband that she would like a red MG. No box of chocolates or bunch of roses for Jo.
It was 1972.
And an MG is what stood in the driveway on her return home: bottle green, not red, and second hand, but an MG nonetheless.
Contrary to the specialist’s edict (I like to think she did it to spite him), Jo lived for another 20 years. She was already a few years into that survival when I met her. Her cancer journey was more often than not a source of mirth. Leastwise, she never let me see the dark side. So typical of the stiff upper lip woman she was. British to her bootstraps, she would trumpet if asked for any self-assessment.
Jo lived for another twelve and a half years which was a long time for a woman with breast cancer at that time. The last few years were pure guts as more and more bits were cut out and Mother endured pretty horrendous treatment. One of the local doctors’ sympathy letter pointed out that mother should not have been alive for the last couple of years.
‘I toss my wig in the washing machine with the whites. Easier and quicker.’ The mind boggles.
Or the tale she told me of her trip to Harrods.
‘There I was, in my Sunday best, checking out the cheese and I noticed my reflection in one of the mirrored columns. This thing dangled down my forehead – it was my wig label!’
Her Britishness did sometimes have an edge some might call snobby, though I did not see it that way. Rather a case of it is what it is. At a party one night, we endured a man’s brash and irritatingly loud commentary. He flashed white teeth, and a surfeit of gold at every turn of his fashionably coiffured head and flapping hands. His clothes and shoes were top drawer. He dazzled a few people. Not Jo.
‘New money, darling,’ she whispered to me, ‘no breeding.’
I laughed out loud.
Her cancer diagnosis had its challenges, though none that Jo found insurmountable. When told she would never sail again, as the surgeon removed too much tissue when excising all her lymph glands, she steadfastly developed muscles in the back of her mutilated upper limb. Stealthily, some months later, she took out the ‘cat’ (as she called it) for a spot of solo sailing, only to capsize it. She swore the coast guard, and everyone else involved in her rescue, to secrecy. The truth came out weeks later when David came in from the garage housing their boat.
You will remember that Mother was covered in burns from radiotherapy and always wore a scarf. The following year (1976) Mother won a European and National Championship on the cat which was by then eight years old and in theory outclassed. It was certainly rather overweight. She went on to win other important races and two northern area cat championships over the next few years never knowing whether she would have another chance which really concentrated the mind. Mother really needed a hulk as crew to launch and recover the boat, cope with any capsize including hauling Mother back on board as she could not pull herself up into a boat, and pull in ropes in a strong wind. Her crew for weekend racing and the almost daily sails during the week was David Feakes who was Virginia Wade’s fitness partner. They played swash non-stop for three hours every day. Virginia Wade lived locally on the other side of Canterbury. Whilst David Feakes was crewing for Mother she won Wimbledon. She was the only British Wimbledon singles champion over a period of half a century, and Mother was really tickled. It was a hell of an achievement for a woman the wrong side of fifty with a massive hysterectomy. Father told me that Mother was asked to join the Tornado Olympic class. Luckily she realised this was ridiculous. I expect the men enjoyed having Mother around.
Mother started sail training at the Yacht Club at a time when sail training did not exist. She is still all these years later very much something of a hero especially with the generation about ten years younger than me, and they all admire her guts. More than one reckon that if she was around today she would be sailing some boat that I and most other people would not touch.
In his cultured English voice, he mused: ‘Jo, a most extraordinary thing. There’s some dry seaweed at the top of the mast.’
Jo loved things like that.
I lived with her on and off for a few months in 1975 in between traipsing around Europe and driving around Scotland and Wales. One day she suggested to me that we take off.
‘Take off? Where?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. We’ll find somewhere.’
Sounded good to me. We cooked for David and those of her children still living at home, sufficient to sustain them for a few days. And then we crammed into the green MG, hood down, scarves knotted tightly to secure our hair and ‘took off’. Up the M1 to London and beyond.
Actually it was the M2 !
We combed the back roads of Essex, relishing the little country cottages, some with thatched roofs; the avenues of trees whose branches interlocked overhead like a green roof; the fields dotted with sheep, white and black, and daisies; and the clear late summer air. I saw my first Morris dancers on this trip.
‘Look, Jo. What on earth …’
Strange men with bells on their shins and straw hats packed with artificial flowers dancing around like idiots on a village green while clapping long wooden poles together. I now know it is an English folk tradition that dates back to the fifteenth century, and that my ridicule was inappropriate, but at the time …
‘Only in England, Mag-gay.’
Our random sortie led, in due course, to Stratford upon Avon. The foundations of the establishment in which we stayed, The White Swan Hotel, were bedded in 1450. We wandered along the narrow corridors on floors that rippled, to a room framed with heavy wooden panelling, roughly cut. Jo claimed the four-poster bed, in which she sat next morning having a cup of tea, reminding me she was ‘born to be a queen’.
‘It’s like medieval England, Jo.’
‘It is medieval England.’
That night (well afternoon, really, for darkness did not fall until the second part of the play), Jo took me to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where we saw a performance of Henry V. I was captivated. During interval, the audience gathered on the theatre’s external terraces, drinking champagne alongside the actors, still in costume. I chatted briefly to ‘young Hal’, kitted out in a short, cropped wig; embroidered doublet; a short-skirted houppelande with long sleeves; and coloured stockings (a different colour on each leg). The River Avon ambled along nearby, its surface polished with the day’s pastel remains, broken only by the drag of gliding swans and the swish of weeping willows. Distant church bells chimed.
Jo had tears in her eyes. ‘It’s just marvellous. I’m so proud to be English.’
I saw these tears of pride again some months later as we watched a packed audience in the Royal Albert Hall, under the baton of conductor Sakari Oramo, singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Last Night of the Proms. The emotion of that moment prickled my skin and snagged my breath. Gone briefly was Jo’s sparkle. In its place a stirring patriotism, fostered, I am sure, by memories of Britain during World War II, then only some thirty years prior. The emotion seemed to well up from within her. I used to see the same emotion in my mother. Jo worked tirelessly as a nurse during World War II, and my mother as an intelligence officer based at the Royal Air Force Station in Binbrook, one of the stations of Bomber Command.
My understanding was that Mother progressed to becoming secretary to a fairly senior medic-she could type really well. She became a landgirl and was really proud to win a ploughing match, no doubt with plenty of help from the blokes.
Living with Jo was a laugh a minute. But she was also warm and compassionate with a character bound by what, I now reflect, was immense grit. Much of her joie de vivre was unselfish: the laughter protected others from her pain. The rawness of her sublimated anxiety flashed only briefly when she returned from medical visits.
‘Be a love, Mag-gay, and give me a cigarette.’ And she would plonk down in a chair with a deep sigh.
I saw this grit when she spoke of living long enough to see her grandchildren, a wish not granted. How proud she would have been to see her youngest son take his place as the youngest doctor in Britain’s National Health Service. And her eldest ably continue his father’s legal practice. The same grit set her face when we said goodbye and I returned to Australia.
Jamie was a little over six months old when Mother died. Bob was the youngest consult surgeon ( and it was in a London teaching hospital ).
I did see Jo once more, though briefly, when she visited Australia to stay with my mother. I like to think I played some small part in her decision to ‘mend fences’. The reconciliation was heartfelt. I could have told them they were two apples from the same tree, but they had to discover that for themselves. My aunt realised my mother was as fun-loving as she was and certainly no ‘goody-goody’, and my mother warmed to Jo’s big, generous heart. Their decades-long estrangement rested on the flimsiest of false perceptions. My mother wept as Jo’s British Airways plane soared into the clouds. She knew what it meant.
Jo’s last few years proved a struggle, battling the cancer that had dogged her for two decades. But, puffy faced with drugs, she decked out in her finery to see her eldest son marry his beloved Mary. She spent her last days in bed, sucking oxygen, with regular visits by her local rector. It was from her bed that she made her last phone call to me in November 1984.
Did her dire circumstances diminish her spirit? Not at all. In fact, it was her courage and feistiness in the face of imminent death that triggered my tears, not my losing her. For in a way, she is always with me.
She recounted with glee, in between deep gasps of oxygen, our trip around Essex.
‘Do you remember, Mag-gay, the night we stayed in old Woody’s house? And how we laughed till we cried? And that silly-looking Morris dancer? I think he took a shine to you.’
Those memories are indelible. As are all those of my Aunt Jo, or Joey as I often called her. Sometimes in life one connects with another in a way that defies explanation.
