Anniversary

My parents were married on Monday 19 August 1946, my mother's thirty-eighth birthday.

And here they are stepping out into the sunshine from the Church of the Most Precious Blood, Sidmouth, Devon.

The bride looks smart in her suit (she would have said 'costume', with the stress on the second syllable) and rather daring hat.

Rationing, my mother's status as a widow and her no-nonsense views on unnecessary expense provide clues, if any are needed, to the absence of a conventional wedding dress.

(The photographer subsequently adapted the print, thoughtfully blanking out the smiling lady who unintentionally causes my mother to look as if she has two heads.)

Marrying at an age when many couples are moving towards grandparenthood, the newlyweds are smilingly unaware of the speed with which they are about to be engulfed by family life.

By the time their fourth wedding anniversary arrived, they were parents to three boys.

My father (born 1900) lived another thirteen years. This November brings the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Today brings the sixty-third anniversary of their marriage - and my late mother's 101st birthday.

Glade tidings

Ah, the fleeting nature of pleasure, ponders Mr Gnome as he recalls his recent all-too-brief visit to Devonshire.

Back in the brou-ha-ha of the workaday world, he struggles to recall his wanderings along the coastal path.

This snap shows him pausing on the long descent, through woodland and meadows, to the secluded beach at Weston Mouth.

It was a perfect June evening: pristine sky, sea-dazzle and this year's rain-soaked greenness of grass and foliage. Birdsong. Breeze off the sea.

In short, a dose of pre-lapsarian bliss.

Now, at moments of stress or discouragement, Mr Gnome and the HB find themselves replaying their mind's eye video of this and other walks.

Instant solace.

Full on

How exciting to be present last week at the east Devon premiere of the musical version of the inimitable 1997 film.

You'd think perhaps that the Sidmouth Musical Comedy Society's production of The Full Monty - The Musical (Broadway and West End) might be a wee bit 'scaled down'.

Wrong! Director, big cast and pit band took book, lyrics and music by the scruff of the neck and gave a magnificently big-hearted, full-on performance.

The standard of singing was tip-top. Casting was equally spot on with the six principals capturing the courage, humour and vulnerability of their characters with skill and panache.

The musical sticks closely to the storyline of the movie, but with the action swapped from Sheffield to Buffalo in upstate New York. The cast rose splendidly to the challenge of American accents.

One sadness. The musical version has cut the key role played in the film by, er, garden gnomes.

Apart from that, ten out of ten. Hurrah!

Birth rites?

While in Sidmouth last week, I strolled several times past Clifton House at the foot of Peak Hill.

It was only on my third or fourth passing of my birthplace that I noticed these items on view in the ground floor window.

Noel Coward plus cheery gnome.

Was the old house sending me a wee greeting?

Hmmm.

Fraternal

It's April 1951 and I am being cuddled protectively by my brother John, while our brother Barrie concentrates on the lens of our mother's box Brownie.

Does the fact that my right arms is flailing somewhat indicate my feeling that this tender embrace (around my neck) has gone on long enough, thank you very much?

The picture below was snapped exactly twelve months later.

Three boys, three tricycles. Hurrah!

What has happened to the tricycle? Way back then, they were standard issue for small children.

We had endless fun on ours, in the narrow, paved garden of our house on Sidmouth's sea wall, and farther afield in the Byes, the park beside the River Sid.


My brothers, I'm told, were tiny trike terorists, careering down slopes, six wheels mashing anything unfortunate enough to be caught in their path.

Enemy action

My parents were married in August 1946 at the Catholic church in Sidmouth, Devon.

I have one of the cards given to them on that day. It's handmade, with the front presenting a delicately painted watercolour image of a pine tree set in a misty landscape. A bird perches on a lower branch with a string in its beak on which two wedding rings hang.

The greeting is 'Congratulation on your wedding from...'

Inside are the signatures of twenty-six German prisoners of war. My father was their supervisor on the road-improvement project on which they were working prior to repatriation.

I'm pleased that they must have liked and respected my father enough to make this gift for him and his bride.

I'd imagine that quite a few of them are still alive, well on in their eighties and nineties.

I remember, I remember...

...the house where I was born.

And here's the view from the house next door.

Connaught House perches on the sea wall at the western end of Sidmouth's Regency promende.

It was our family home from 1953 until 1955. We moved there from neighbouring Clifton House, where I was born.

Privileged? Yes indeed.

The remarkable aspect, to me, is how very little the view from this window has altered in fifty-five years.

I was in Sidmouth last year. I think it would be fair to say that, apart from some minor details, absolutely nothing has changed....

Many people report that a return to the place of birth and childhood can be deeply saddening - the years have changed the once familiar world beyond all recognition.

I'm fortunate to have the opposite experience when I return to Sidmouth: all the landmarks of my earliest years remain as I remember them.

A little disconcerting, but in a different way....
No prizes for guessing that Mr Gnome thinks Sidmouth is heaven on earth....

Mr G is feeling nostalgic

Mr G confesses to a moment of wistful reflection as he browses through his HB's old family photos.

This shot was taken in the early 1950s in Sidmouth, a seaside town in east Devon. A middle-aged man, a latecomer to parenthood, looks fondly at his three small boys.

He's pausing during the construction of what is to become their family home: a fine house perched on the sea wall, overlooking the pebble beach and the English Channel.

Click goes the camera, and on goes life.

The proud father died in 1959.

The boys are now aged 60, 59 and 57.

One of them is a grandfather.

The two older brothers have now outlived their father.