News
Latest New
In January the club eagerly awaited the results of our second writing competition. This one had been judged by the members of Elgin Writing Club in Scotland. Nigel Harding our associate member who lives in Dorset won first prize and has kindly given his permission for me to put his winning entry on our website.
“Millie”
by Nigel Harding
You never know who you might encounter on the Internet. Most tales of the World Wide Web are of hackers, charlatans or perverts, but many honest folk meet there every day. You just seldom hear about them...
A family history e-mail in my Inbox was always exciting. This one, from ‘Millie’ headed ‘Oldershaw Family’, was more cryptic than usual :
“Hi,
Got your address from Cheshire Surnames website. I’m an Oldershaw too ! Can you connect OLDERSHAW, HARKNESS and YOUNG families ?
Thanks,
Millie Oldershaw”
Millie had found my address on the site where I’d registered my interest in researching my family’s history in
I drew the relevant index cards from my file and replied :
“Hi Millie,
If you’re descended from those families, we must be related too ! Maybe third- or fourth-cousins !
Thomas OLDERSHAW married Mary YOUNG on 27th April 1857 at Nantwich. They had two daughters.
In 1860, Mary died giving birth to their son. Thomas re-married, to Emma HARKNESS on 17th May 1862.
My great-great grandfather, James, was the eldest brother of Thomas. Their father, Thomas OLDERSHAW senior, married Elizabeth BAKER on 13th July 1832, also at Nantwich.
Kind Regards,
Geoff Oldershaw”
Over the next month, we exchanged several more messages and all we knew about our forebears. I was able to take Millie back a further four generations into the 1720s, where the documentation ran out. It emerged that she was the great-great granddaughter of young Thomas and his second wife. She wasn’t as adept as me at working out the relationships, but we were indeed fourth cousins.
You don’t normally reveal information on living people in that sort of chat, but Millie told me she was illegitimate and so was her mother before her. Family historians know which cupboards contain the skeletons, so I had no problems with that. I was just pleased to have been found by a relation. When I chided her for telling me too much, she told me her mother had died young, so it was all right to talk about her.
Genealogical exchanges usually peter out once the common ancestral information has been exhausted. Millie was keen to keep writing however, and we were related after all, so I wasn’t going to stop her. Even though punctuation wasn’t her strong-point, she wrote chatty, yet interesting messages. We got on well despite clear differences in education. We became electronic pen-friends.
We were both single, so it seemed neither of us had made any family history of our own. She was a social worker, aged 34, working with disabled children. There was something special about her writing, though. On closer questioning, she admitted she wrote poetry.
The verse she sent me was very good indeed. She had talent. Ever the schoolmaster, I couldn’t resist interfering. I took a chance. I suggested a possible improvement. I also consulted an old colleague of mine and forwarded his suggestions about where she should submit it. Far from taking offence, she was quick to reply.
“Thanks for comments,” she said. “It is really kind of you to help me like this.”
Some weeks later, I had a jubilant message from her :
“I sent the verse you reviewed to ‘Thingummy Magazine’. If you look on page 43 this month, you’ll see they’ve printed it !” She was effusive in her thanks, but I told her she’d done all the hard work. With her confidence boosted, her writing went from strength to strength. I enjoyed reading several more of her poems and saw two more of them in print.
We’d been pen-friends for about three years, when I had to attend an Open University summer school in
“Can we meet up?,” I asked. I thought she’d have jumped at the chance. I felt I knew her well, so I was astonished at her emphatic refusal.
“No, Geoff. I really like being friends with you and I do hope we’ll stay that way, but meeting would ruin everything.”
The course finished early on the Friday afternoon. I took a bus into the city, just to wander about. I love towns, especially ones with architecture and history. There’s no shortage of either in
I strolled around for an hour, maybe more. Before leaving, I needed some shopping. A sign proclaimed the mall’s automatic main door ‘out of order’. A schoolgirl in a wheelchair was struggling with the side door. I went to the rescue.
“Here, let me help.”
It was easier for me to step through the door and hold it open for her. I realised I’d been mistaken. From the back, I’d assumed the small figure in a black blazer was still at school, but she was clearly an adult. Tiny shoes and little legs in denim jeans hung inert from a more developed upper body. The only feature that was larger than life was the auburn hair that trailed down her back. She smiled her gratitude.
“Thanks. The main door’s broken and this one’s just too heavy. I could have waited for ages.” It was my Aunt Harriet’s winsome smile as well as the same unusual hair colour. It was strange how two so different women could have such similar faces...
No it wasn’t ! As I realised what had happened, I looked at the security badge she was wearing as a pendant, but I knew her name before I read it.
“Excuse me !”, she exclaimed. In my shock, I’d come to a halt right in her way.
“Sorry. You’re Millie ?”
“Yes.” She was puzzled.
“I’m Geoff Oldershaw.” A look of horror crossed her face, but she took my extended hand. She shook it with her own, which was gloved to grip the wheel of her chair.
“You weren’t supposed to meet me !”
“It is just an amazing coincidence. Perhaps we were meant to meet after all. Have you got time for a cup of coffee ?”
She nodded her assent. She sped away across the polished floor of the mall, then paused for me to catch up as if proving a point.
Looking back, I’m not sure how we remained friends after that first meeting. We shared a difficult half-hour of false politeness. Millie was dreadfully withdrawn, not at all the same person I knew from the Web. I was shocked to discover the bright, confident lady who wrote such wonderful poems was really this shy, awkward, girlish slip of a woman with such awful disabilities. She was so unlike my mental picture of her. She had mentioned disabled children, but not that she’d been one herself.
Her message was waiting when I reached home. She was pleading with me not to give up on her because she used a wheelchair. She wanted to stay pen-friends. The Web was the one place she wasn’t judged by appearances, she said.
“That’s why I never told you all about me. You were only supposed to meet Internet Millie. I never intended you to see the real me, wheeling her way through what she can manage of life. Few people know Internet Millie. She can run a mile in five minutes. She’s really beautiful. She goes on photo-shoots in faraway places. She can climb mountains, even trees. I hope you can stay friends with her, even if you don’t like me. You’ll probably think I’m crazy, but I need my dreams to get by.”
They say you can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives. I opted to keep writing, so maybe I did choose Millie. When we felt we were ready, we met again, and then several more times.
It was Millie’s mother who’d started the quest to trace her roots. Once her adoptive parents had given up on her, she’d tracked down her birth mother. Rejection there too had been a severe blow, accelerating the lethal spiral of depression and drugs. The one thing she’d done right was to post the details of her identity to the head of Millie’s residential school before she wrote her suicide note. It seemed she was trying to atone for giving her daughter up.
“There was no way she could have coped with a child with my disabilities on her own.” admitted Millie. “She felt so terribly guilty that she couldn’t help me, though. That was clear from the letter she left. The Coroner was sure it wasn’t an accident, or a cry for help. The local paper reported it in great detail : “Wild Child’s Overdose - Suicide”. I must have been five when she took the tablets.”
“It has been really difficult tracing all the documents to find out my history,” Millie continued. “Record offices aren’t designed with me in mind. It is a lot easier now more is online, but the struggle seems worth it now I’ve found you.”
“Even I’m lucky sometimes, you see. They tell me I won the lottery in ‘The Generation Game’. I was born at the only time when I could survive. A generation earlier, I’d just have died at birth. One later... With a scan to show what a mess I was, few mothers would resist an abortion.”
“Mum might be proud of me, though. I don’t think she’d have dreamt I’d cope the way I do.”
Anchored by some roots at the end of her long quest, Millie’s poetry has changed, but is more popular than ever. She’s now writing her autobiography.
Blood is thicker than water, so they say, but I wonder what old Thomas and Elizabeth would make of it all. They’re about all we have in common - two shared ancestors out of thirty-two.
Nobody can work out the enigma of Millie and me. We don’t ‘live together’, yet we’ve shared our flat for several years now. We’re related, but we’re quite without ‘a relationship’ in its modern usage. As time marches on, it is even questionable who is caring for whom - I’m forty years older than her.
When we’re out together, if people are curious, Millie is polite. If they become inquisitive, however, she becomes tetchy. She exerts her right not to be politically correct.
“I’m just his crippled fourth cousin,” she’ll say with her disarming smile. She’s selling herself short again. I’m immensely proud of her. She’s the beautiful daughter I never had.
(c) Nigel J. Harding 2005
Apart from (minding) this website I also run with my partner a small guest house here in Llandudno. It is always the unexpected which makes the life as a seaside landlady interesting.
It has been a long and dreary winter, I\'m sure you will all agree. One particularly wintery afternoon when the light was fading and a storm arriving on the evening tide, Mungojerrie rang my front doorbell.
T.S.Eliot\'s Mungojerrie. This Mungojerrie was one of the cast playing in CATS at our local theatre. He was looking for a room for his parents who would be attending a first night performance. After he left I searched for my copy of T.S. Eliot\'s Old Possum\'s Book of Practical Cats and read again this collection of poems which I hadn\'t read since my sons were small.
A T.S. Eliot Afternoon
Six o\'clock and the doorbell rings
Along the hallway
And framed in the doorway
Stands a Cat!
\'Mungojerrie,\' he purrs his name.
And asks to see a room.
\'Is it homely?
Is it warm?
Will there be tea and scones, dripping with cream?\'
Firelight attracts his attention
The sheep skin rug wins approval
\'This room will do nicely,\' he croons
And spins on his heel
And walks with a spring
Such a practical sort of a cat.
copyright Janet Haworth
Newsflash ................
Ghostly Encounters, Club\'s First Anthology has gone to print and will be ready for the last weekend in April. You can order a copy from this website
Go to the Anthology page.....
[Home] [Who are we?] [News] [Anthology] [Club Showcases] [Programme] [Contact us]
site by